The Use of Maps in County History 1576-1779

The Use of Maps in County History 1576-1779
Jan Broadway
The county made its debut as a subject for both printed maps and histories in the same
decade with the publication of Christopher Saxton’s series of county maps between 1574
and 1578 and of William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent in 1576. I have argued
elsewhere that the appearance of county maps was an important stimulus to the growth
of interest in local history amongst the gentry and specifically encouraged the
development of county history.1 Today I want to look at how county historians used maps
in their published works and how this developed over two centuries. I will also consider
why some county histories appeared without maps. By way of introduction I should say
that when faced with a copy of an early county history containing a map, it is sometimes
difficult to be sure that all copies sold would have contained a map and, if they did, whether
it would have been the same map. Early modern books were not the pre-bound, precisely
defined items we buy today. Illustrations increased the price and, where they were printed
on separate sheets, might be omitted by the cost-conscious customer. Equally a
purchaser might add an illustration bought separately into their copy of a work when it was
being bound.2 A bookseller, keeping separate stocks of the text and illustrations, might
sell out of one and substitute another in its place. Consequently, it can be dangerous to
make statements about the illustrations in books, if you have not studied multiple copies.
And this is before we consider the particular vulnerability of the folded map, inserted before
the flyleaf in a frequently consulted book.
So, bearing this in mind, I say with some trepidation that there is no map of Kent in the
first edition of Lambarde’s Perambulation. This is hardly surprising, since Saxton’s
combined map of Middlesex, Surrey, Sussex and Kent had only appeared the previous
year. Although there was at least one manuscript map of the county available, which
Lambarde referred to as a ‘Carde of this shyre’ in a manuscript dating from 15703, the cost
of having a map especially engraved for a book with an unproven market would have been
prohibitive. The book did include a map, but this was of the Saxon heptarchy. A perhaps
surprising choice to illustrate a history of Kent, until you realise that it was based on the
woodcut map of the Saxon kingdoms that appeared in Lambarde’s Archaionomia of 1568.
The map was subsequently engraved on copper for use in a book by Alexander Neville in
1575 and it is this copperplate version that appears in the Perambulation. The use and
reuse of engravings across publications was a characteristic of publishing practice in the
period. The standard size of an edition was a thousand to fifteen hundred copies, but a
copperplate could produce around five thousand prints.4 Copperplate engravings were
expensive to produce initially, but comparatively cost effective to recut and alter. This
ability to reuse copperplates enabled authors to include illustrations, which the sales of
their work alone would not sustain. At the same time it encouraged reuse rather than
Jan Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’ (2006), pp. 209-14.
The copy of Ashmole, Elias. The antiquities of Berkshire (1719), 3 vols. in Eighteenth Century
Collections Online, for example, includes a map by Emanuel Bowen that dates from after 1745.
3
Edward G. Box, ‘Lambarde’s ‘Carde of this shyre’’, Archaeologia Cantianum (38) (1926), pp. 8995.
4 D. Woolf, Reading History in early modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 207-8; A. Robinson,
‘Map making and map printing’ in D. Woodward ed., Five Centuries of Map Printing (1975), 1-23.
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innovation and often left the author at the mercy of the bookseller who owned the
copperplates when it came to the choice of illustrations.
In the 1590s John Norden published county studies of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, which
were intended to form part of a larger project that would eventually cover the entire
country. These works were much slighter than Lambarde’s account of Kent, but they each
included a map of the county and Middlesex also incorporated separate plans of London
and Westminster. Norden was a surveyor and a topographer rather than a local historian
and maps were central to his county studies.
Figure 1: Norden's Map of Hertfordshire
He completed several more of these, which remained in manuscript.5 Although the
majority of his studies were not published, six of his county maps appeared in the 1607
edition of Camden’s Britannia and five were utilized by John Speed in his Theatre of the
Empire of Great Britaine (1611). Norden’s maps introduced the marking of roads and
administrative divisions, a grid reference system, and the use of a table to explain the
symbols used. For Norden, working at a time when county maps were new, their role in a
county study was to provide as much detailed information as possible. Market towns,
parishes and hamlets or villages were distinguished by different symbols, as were the
houses belonging to the queen, the nobility and knights or gentlemen. The sites of castles
and forts, monasteries or religious houses, bishop’s sees, hospitals, battlefields, decayed
places, lodges in forests and chases and mills were all included. In his map of
Hertfordshire battlefields are marked by images of the clashing armies, although for
5
Accounts of Northamptonshire, Surrey, Essex, Sussex, Hampshire, Cornwall, the Isle of Wight,
Jersey and Guernsey were completed.
2
Middlesex he used a more prosaic Maltese cross. This variation may have been due to
the engraver rather than Norden himself, since the engraver could have a considerable
influence on the final appearance of a map. Alternatively, the change may have been due
to space considerations. More than a century after Norden’s death his accounts of
Cornwall and Northamptonshire were published.6 The county map of Cornwall was given
an eighteenth-century gloss by the engraver, but it remains an essentially Jacobean map.
This work included separate maps of the hundreds, which were not substantially updated
and continued to name the gentry seats according to their owners in Norden’s day. His
account of Northamptonshire was taken from a manuscript that lacked the maps and the
publisher decided not to make up for this deficit. For a text that was so closely bound to
the map and included a section entitled ‘Things to be considered in the Use of this Booke,
and the Mappe thereunto belonging’, this seems a strange decision.
Figure 2: Norden's Map of Cornwall updated
For Norden the maps were integral to his undertaking and they provided him with an
opportunity to provide more detail about the topography of a county than was appropriate
in a general atlas. William Burton by contrast did not take the opportunity of introducing
more detail into the county map he included in his Description of Leicestershire (1622).
He explained in his preface To the Reader that the map was based on his own amended
version of Saxton’s map of Leicestershire, which had been engraved in Amsterdam in
1602 and had formed the basis of Speed’s map of Leicestershire. The main difference
between Burton’s map and Speed’s is that Burton’s has more detail on the surrounding
counties, which was appropriate when the map stood alone rather than within a series of
county maps. It is probable that two decades after his map was first published, Burton was
able to obtain the use of the copperplates for his own work. It may well be that he was not
able to amend them. Richard Carew by contrast apparently lacked access to a map of
Cornwall that he could include in his 1602 Survey of the county. I assume the failure to
6
In 1728 and 1720 respectively.
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include a map was due to a lack of access rather than a belief that no map was needed,
since by 1606 he was hoping to locate Norden and obtain the use of his map for a
proposed second edition.7 It is of course possible that Carew was actually reacting to
critical comment on the absence of a map from his first edition. Either way, if the second
edition had ever materialised, it seems likely it would have included a map – either one
provided by Norden or that engraved by William Kip for Camden’s Britannia. As it was, the
first edition was reissued twice in the eighteenth century, but no maps of the county were
included.
Figure 3: Map of the Kentish Beacons
A second edition of Lambarde’s Perambulation did appear in 1596, illustrated by a map of
the county. This was not, however, a general map, but one showing the location of the 52
beacons in the county. The creation of the map had been ordered by Lord Cobham, the
Lord Lieutenant, when he discovered that on the firing of the beacons ‘not only the
common sort, but even men of place and honour were ignorant, which way to direct their
course’.8 Presumably copies of the map were printed for distribution to justices of the
peace and others in Kent, before it was incorporated into Lambarde’s book. It did not start
a fashion for the inclusion of such specialised maps in county histories. John Harris reused
the map of the beacons in the first (and only) volume of his own History of Kent in 1719
and in 1754 William Borlase provided his readers with a map locating the finds of Roman
coins and the routes of Roman roads in his Observations on the antiquities historical and
monumental of the county of Cornwall. On the whole, however, county histories displayed
a preference for the general over the specialised map.
7
See Richard Carew, Cornwall (1723), p. xvii.
Lambarde, Perambulation (1596), p. 68; see H.T. White, ‘The Beacon System in Kent’,
Archaeologia Cantiana 56, pp. 77-96.
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4
The opportunistic reuse of existing maps in county histories is amply demonstrated by the
two works dealing with Cheshire published in the second half of the seventeenth century:
Daniel King’s Vale Royal (1656) and Sir Peter Leycester’s Historical Antiquities (1673).
Leycester simply used the engraving of Speed’s map of the county, which was then being
sold by the London bookseller Roger Rea. King’s map of the county was based on one
produced by the herald William Smith in the 1580s for his own proposed county history,
which was one of the texts used by King.9 A second map of the county appears as a inset
on a page that contains a plan and view of Chester. This was engraved by Wencelaus
Hollar and was presumably originally designed for a context where it was necessary to
show where Chester lay within Cheshire and then reused in King’s book. The earlier
version of the map is known from a later copy, but its original context has been lost.10
Figure 4: William Smith's Map of Cheshire
A similar dependence on the efforts of Elizabethan cartographers over the next century
can be seen in Kent. In 1659 Richard Kilburne described as the ‘best Map thereof extant’
that produced by Philip Symondson of Rochester in 1596. Kilburne did not include a map
in his own work, referring his readers instead at various points to ‘any Map of the County’.11
Symondson’s map did appear in Thomas Philipot’s Villare Cantianum, which was also
published in 1659. Some copies of the book have the Symondson map in its original form,
Jan Broadway, ‘A convenient fiction? The county community and county history in the 1650s’, in
J. Eales & A. Hopper eds., The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales
(2012).
10 R. Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wencelaus Hollar (2002), pp.
159-60.
11 R. Kilburne, Survey of Kent (1659), pp. 303, 305, 307, 310, 313.
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but most have an updated version with two inset views of Rye and Dover. Even when
John Harris prepared a new map of the county half a century later, it was still heavily based
on Symondson’s map.
Figure 5: William Dugdale's Map of Warwickshire
Cartographically the maps that appeared in William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire
in 1656 broke no new ground. However, they were innovative in three ways. Firstly, the
map of the county and separate maps of the four hundreds were all produced specifically
for this volume and engraved by the same artist, which gave them a visual coherence.
This may have been modelled on Norden’s work, which Dugdale knew in manuscript, but
was the first appearance of such a coherent set of maps in a printed county history. Then
Dugdale had approached the local gentry to contribute to the financing of all the many
engravings in his book. The sponsors of the maps were acknowledged by the
incorporation of their coat of arms into the furniture. This model was subsequently followed
by Robert Thoroton in his Antiquities of Nottinghamshire, which was directly influenced by
Dugdale. It is a recurrent, although not invariable feature, of maps in county histories over
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the next century.12 As well as acting as sponsors, the local gentry could also contribute to
improvements in the maps themselves. Although Dugdale wrote in the Antiquitities of
Warwickshire that ‘I have drawn exact Schemes of the severall Hundreds’, we know that
at least one local gentleman and probably several helped him with the detail on the maps.
Such a joint effort would help to explain the differences that are apparent on close
inspection. Finally Dugdale was innnovative in the way he utilised the maps within his text.
Following the model of Lambarde in his Perambulation of Kent and Camden in Britannia,
the Antiquities of Warwickshire was written as a journey around each of the hundreds in
turn, navigating by means of the rivers and streams. The hundred maps helped the reader
to navigate on this journey and throughout Dugdale referred to the maps to clarify his text.
Figure 6: Robert Plot's Map of Oxfordshire
The use of maps to aid a reader’s navigation through the text did not catch on, since an
alphabetical approach to the ordering of places within a county was to become dominant.
12
The map of Nottinghamshire includes the arms of Sir Robert Southwell, the Irish born clerk of
the Privy Council to Charles II and diplomat, whose family traced their origins to the county. Other
examples of the dedication of county maps include Plot’s Oxfordshire (John Fell, Bishop of
Oxford) and Stafforshire (Charles, Earl of Shrewsbury); Aubrey’s Surrey (Sir John Fellowes);
Borlase, Cornwall (Jonathan Rashleigh MP); Morant’s Essex (William, Earl of Essex); Morton,
Northamptonshire (Charles, Earl of Peterborough). In contrast Lord Sherard paid for the county
map in Wright’s Rutland, but there is no dedication.
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However, with Dugdale we see the gentry emerging as a dominant force in the
development of the illustration of county studies. This is seen very forcibly in relation to
the maps included by Robert Plot in his Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677) and of
Staffordshire (1686). In his texts Plot concentrated on natural history, eschewing the
county historian’s traditional interest in genealogy and pedigrees and feeling the inclusion
of a chapter on Antiquities was a digression from his main purpose, which required
explanation.13 Yet the traditional concern of county histories with the gentry and genealogy
does appear on the maps, which are surrounded by the arms of the local gentry keyed to
the location of their houses on the map. Stan Mendyk suggested that the importance of
the gentry houses on Plot’s maps was compensation for the disdain for mere genealogy
in his texts. Plot himself offered two justifications, the first – ‘That the Gentry hereby will
be somwhat influenced to keep their Seats, together with their Arms, least their Posterity
hereafter, not without reflexions, see what their Ancestors have parted with’ - was in the
tradition of antiquarian family piety. The second – that ‘Vagabonds [would be] deterr’d
from making counterfeit Passes, by puting false names and Seals to them’ – rather more
original. I would suggest the more prosaic reason that the maps were designed to be sold
separately to the local gentry and it was the heraldry and the emphasis on gentry houses
that would ensure their commercial success. In his preface to the Natural History of
Oxfordshire Plot mentioned correcting and enlarging the map of Oxfordshire, so that it
could be ‘hung up in Frames’, while his 1681 propectus for Staffordshire suggested the
map alone would sell for sixpence, although by the time it was published the price had
doubled. The maps were intended not only for the local gentry, but also for strangers and
foreigners, to enable them to locate houses and identify their owners. In accordance with
the post-Restoration enthusiasm for practical science Plot’s maps also demonstrated a
concern with mathematical accuracy, the correct use of bearings and the plotting of
latitude, according to the new measurements that had been made for Oxford and Stafford.
Plot also acknowledged the existence of three different sorts of ‘reputed miles’ in the two
counties and specified that his maps used the middle sort.14
By the early eighteenth century developments in cartography were beginning to find their
way into the maps that accompanied county histories. It was no longer sufficient to
reproduce Speed’s map of a county. There was an increased emphasis on modernity and
on scientific accuracy, at least in the description of the maps. In reality in many counties
there was no new full-scale survey available and the new maps were as dependent on the
efforts of Christopher Saxton as their predecessors had been. Thus, while in 1712 Sir
Robert Atkyns’ The Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire was illustrated by ‘a new
correct Map’ and John Morton’s Natural History of Northamptonshire by one that was
‘Newly delineated with many Additions and Improvements’, neither county had been
resurveyed. The inclusion of latitude and longitude was now well-established and helped
to make a map look new and more accurate. The variability of the mile, acknowledged by
Plot, continued to present a problem. John Harris, who drew and engraved the map of
Northamptonshire for Morton included scales for great, middle and small miles to cover all
the bases. The Atkyns map declared that in Great Britain there were 60 miles to a degree,
rather than the more common estimate of 69 miles. The coats of arms surrounding the
map of Northamptonshire strongly suggest its importance to subscribers. It is likely that
the map was also sold as a separate print. In Atkyns’ work the map was of secondary
13
R. Plot, Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677), p. 308; Natural History of Staffordshire, p. 392;
see S. Mendyk, ‘Robert Plot: Britain’s ‘Genial Father of County Natural Histories’, Notes and
Records of the Royal Society of London 39 (2), (1985), pp. 159-77.
14 Plot, Oxfordshire, ‘To the Reader’; Plot, Staffordshire, ‘Preface to the Reader’; M.W.
Greenslade, ‘Robert Plot’, Staffordshire Historians (1982), chapter 5.
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importance in this respect, compared to Johannes Kip’s views of noble and gentry houses
from the county. How far the illustrations were dependent on Atkyns is uncertain, since he
died a year before his book was published and its final form was presumably largely
dependent on the publisher. Since the map is explicitly dated 1712, we may assume that
Atkyns did not see it in its final form.
When we examine the features recorded on the maps in eighteenth-century county
histories, the increased importance of roads is apparent. Morton’s map of
Northamptonshire differentiated between ‘Mr Ogilby’s Roads’, that is the cross-country
routes mapped by John Ogilby in 1675, and the ‘Roads from Market to Market Town’. The
Roman roads continued to be significant and named. The marking of battlefields had
understandably fallen out of favour in the mid-seventeenth century, when civil war was no
longer safely confined to the past, and had not regained its former popularity. Churches,
parks, great houses and religious sites remained the staples of the maps in county
histories, while ancient sites became increasingly important as the eighteenth century
progressed.
The decision to include a map in a county history remained largely an issue of cost. In the
second decade of the eighteenth century the eclectic bookseller Edmund Curll published
county studies from the seventeenth century that remained in manuscript by Sampson
Erdeswicke, Tristram Risdon, Elias Ashmole and John Aubrey. Only Aubrey’s work was
published with a map, although both Risdon and Ashmole’s were illustrated. Presumably
Curll had no appropriate maps of Staffordshire, Devon or Berkshire available, but did have
access to a map of Surrey. As commercial ventures these books would not have merited
the cost of producing maps. The antiquarian clergyman Nathaniel Salmon included a map
of the county in his History of Hertfordshire (1728), but not in his Antiquities of Surrey
(1736) for which he offered the following explanation:
‘That I have no Map will be excused by those who have the new one of Mr. Senex
by them. The Variations I should have made in the antient Limits would not have
rendred it of present Use, and consequently not answering the Expence of it’.15
Significantly, John Senex’s 1729 map of Surrey was based on a new survey and reflected
modern standards in cartography. Presumably this rendered the reuse of an earlier map
unacceptable, while using Senex’s own map as a basis would have been prohibitively
expensive. Having included a map for locating the Roman finds in his Observations in
1754, William Borlase supplemented this with a more general and more detailed map of
Cornwall in his Natural History four years later, explaining:
‘I have added a Map, not to travel by, or with an intent to correct the Maps already
published, (of which Martin’s has been of most use to me) this must be done by
better hands; but purely for the service of those who will read the Antiquities and
Natural History of Cornwall’.16
For such works a map was clearly regarded as desirable, but it was not an essential
element of a county history.
15
16
Nathaniel Salmon, Surrey (1736), Preface.
William Borlase, The Natural History of Cornwall, p. xi
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Figure 7: William Borlase's Map of Cornwall
A significant exception to the ancilliary role of maps in county history remained William
Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, which was published in a new, updated edition in
1730. The county and hundred maps of the first edition were replaced by new versions
based on a contemporary detailed survey of the county by Henry Beighton. In 1722
Beighton had published his Proposals for Publishing by Subscription, a New, Large and
Correct Map of Warwickshire, Performed after a new Method by an actual Survey with the
Seats of the Nobility and Gentry, and their Coats of Arms around the Map in Dr Plot’s
Method’.17 Beighton undertook to print no more maps than he obtained subscriptions for,
thus offering exclusivity to the subscribers to his large map. This did not, however, prevent
him repurposing his four-sheet one inch to a mile map as a county and four hundred maps
for use in the Antiquities of Warwickshire. The extent to which the hundred maps were
repurposed was, however, limited. The gentry houses continued to be marked by
numbers, which in the original would have led the viewer to the relevant coat of arms
around the border, as in Plot’s maps of Oxfordshire and Staffordshire. The numbers
remain, but the context is lost. Beighton’s hundred maps are far more crowded than those
in the first edition. Different typefaces are used to convey information about towns and
parishes, while churches and gentry houses are differentiated by style and in four sizes.
Monastic sites are not only marked, but the associated order is indicated. The battlefields
and garrisons of the Civil War have become after nearly a century a subject for
cartographic representation with symbols that differentiate between the king and
Beighton’s maps for the Antiquities of Warwickshire date the survey to 1725 and the maps to
1729. The first version of his large county map, which did not mark the borders of the hundreds,
was published in 1727-8; a revised version with the hundred borders appeared in 1728-9.
17
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parliament. The updated text, however, remains largely silent about the conflict and its
aftermath. Depopulated places, ruins and Roman remains are all recorded in more detail
than before. In contrast to these antiquarian concerns, there is a new interest in navigable
rivers and their locks. On the roads the distances between places are shown. Coal mines,
mineral deposits and medicinal waters are all recorded. All this detail is fascinating, but
whether the maps work for their original purpose of guiding the reader through the text is
open to question.
Figure 8: Detail from Beighton's Map of Warwickshire
As the eighteenth century progressed increasing numbers of new county surveys were
undertaken. The incorporation of these into the maps of county histories, however,
proceeded slowly. Thomas Martyn’s map of Cornwall, originally published in 1749 and
mentioned by Borlase in his Natural History in 1758, was finally included in the second
edition of his Observations in 1769. The map was a reduced reproduction of that published
in 1749 and bore the same dedication. Borlase was a founder member in 1754 of the
Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which from 1759
offered annual premiums for the best county maps at one inch to a mile. One unsuccessful
competitor for this premium was Isaac Taylor, who surveyed several counties. Taylor’s
last published county map was of Gloucestershire, which appeared in 1777. Two years
later Samuel Rudder published A New History of Gloucestershire, an updating of Atkyns’
work including as he described it ‘a correct map of the county’.18 Rudder seems not to
have been aware of Taylor’s work, although he did refer to Benjamin Donn’s 1769 circular
map of the area around Bristol. The map of Gloucestershire is described as ‘accurately
laid down’, but it was ultimately based on a survey that was undertaken when William
Lambarde was writing the first county history two centuries before. The most modern
aspect of Rudder’s map is the inset drawing of the Cotham stone, which decorates it.
What then in conclusion does an examination of the maps in printed county histories tell
us ? Overwhelmingly it is that their expense was a constraining factor. A publisher would
prefer to reuse existing maps, which would reduce costs, or rely on the reader having
access to a separate map. Those with grander cartographical ambitions had to seek some
source of funding additional to the expected sales of the book. John Norden pinned his
hopes on official support, while William Dugdale turned to the local gentry. The
18
Samuel Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (1779), p. vii.
11
subscription route proved the more successful and was followed by various successors.
The disadvantage of this was that the expectations of the subscribers shaped the resultant
map. The dominance of country houses and coats of arms on Plot’s maps of Oxfordshire
and Staffordshire for his Natural Histories are the most obvious manifestations of this. It
was also market forces that led to a slow introduction of newly surveyed maps into county
histories in the eighteenth century. As a result the maps in county histories were for a long
time guided in Hoskins’ phrase by the dead hands not only of the seventeenth-century
squire but also of the sixteenth-century surveyor.19
Figure 9: Samuel Rudder's Map of Gloucestershire
19
W.G. Hoskins, Local History in England (1984), p. 30
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