Edward Chamberlayne

Edward Chamberlayne (13 December 1616 – May 1703) was an English writer, known as the author of The Present State of England.

He was first educated at Gloucester, then entered St Edmund Hall, Oxford, at Michaelmas 1634.

[1] When the First English Civil War broke out he began a long continental tour, visiting France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, Sweden, and the Low Countries.

[1] His best-known work is a handbook to the social and political condition of England, with lists of public officers and statistics, entitled Angliæ Notitia, or The Present State of England; the publication was an adaptation of L'Estat Nouveau de la France (Paris, 1661).

Thomas Hearne states that Andrew Allam made major contributions, to the sixteenth edition (1689), and that his information was inserted by Chamberlayne without acknowledgment.

The twenty-first edition (1708) bears the new title Magnæ Britanniæ Notitia, or the Present State of Great Britain.

[1] Charles Henry Hull in his scholarly article 'Petty's Place in the History of Economic Theory' (1900) complained that Present State of England "seldom receives nowadays the attention that it deserves".

In 1658 Chamberlayne married Susannah, daughter of Richard Clifford, by whom he had nine children.