Category Archives: maps

Reading the Hereford Mappa Mundi

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Richard of Haldingham, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Apparently there are more than 500 images on the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Scott Westrem’s book published in 2001 provides a transcription explaining the legends on the map as well as a guide to all the primary sources where the information can be discovered.

To the medieval mind the east was the oldest part of the world. It was, after all, where the Garden of Eden could be found. In the medieval mind, humanity moved westwards – placing Britain, at that period on the edge of the map and making it the newest part of civilisation. As well as Noah’s ark sitting in the mountains of Armenia. The map also depicts the city of Nineveh and Mesopotamia. We learn that Babylon was founded by a giant named Nimrod.

There are also a plethora of strange and mythical people and animals. Apparently those who live near the source of the Ganges live only on the scent of apples and if they smell something unpleasant that die – immediately. It was also believed that there were a people in India who had only one leg but who were none the less very fast (now I know where C.S. Lewis got some of his ideas). Manticores were also believed to be indigenous to India – not a pleasant creature it had a human face, a lion’s body and a scorpion’s tale.

Study the map more closely and you can find giants, people who drink from the skulls of their enemies, griffins, minotaurs, lynx that can see through solid walls, a marsok which is an animal that can change shape, pelicans that suck the blood of their parents, fauns, dragons, phoenixes, mandrakes, salamanders, basilisks and people who have no heads but have faces in their torsos. There’s an elephant with a tower on its back as well as a unicorn and a rhinoceros. There is, just in case you wanted to know, also a tiger which was believed to be very vain.

Everyone who looked at the map was invited, if they could read, to hear its message. Presumably the author of the script was thinking of the illustration of Sodom and Gomorrah, not to mention the Judgement at the top of the map. No surprise that the snake is sitting nearby the Garden of Eden.

The question is what do the 43 or so animals and birds that populate the rest of the known world have to say – aside from stealing clear of the more deadly ones? They all have some moral or spiritual significance whatever their origins. The bestiaries that were so popular during the medieval period underline this point from the pelican who sacrifices itself for its young and a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice would have been widely recognised, appearing as it does in imagery throughout the Middle Ages. Wondering about the lynx that can see through solid walls? That’s not what it’s on the map for. It was also thought to urinate black healing stones, except rather than share the benefit the lynx always buries what it produces, so that its no help to anyone.

And let’s not forget the bonnacon which had the head of a bull but which is able to escape its pursuers with what can only be described as deadly expulsions from its rear end. I have no idea how Pliny managed to turn a bison into a creature that could literally leave scorched earth behind it. It had no moral message to impart. It was a medieval joke…something to make the viewers of the Mappa Mundi laugh, presumably just before they realised that they needed to mend their ways or face eternal damnation.

Westrem, Scott. The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Terrarum Orbis, 1)

Parish Maps from charters to community projects.

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Thomas Elmham’s map of Thanet accessed from https://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2017/03/wantsum-thanet-island-maps.html

It’s thought that long established parishes are based on pre-Conquest manors. Some of them may even have had their boundaries established as early as the Iron Age. After the Conquest the manor became the basis of the feudal system, so that by the twelfth century the parish system extended across England. Over time larger manor and parishes were broken down to smaller units while others merged together. Even so, until the Reformation the parish was the basic administrative unit not only for the local lord but also for the Church.

In 1086 the Domesday book recorded manors but by 1188 it was parishes that formed the basis of Henry II’s Saladin Tithe which required the payment of a tax of 10% on all movable property and income – the only exception to this was that men in holy orders were not required to pay a tax on their books, vestments and horses. Rather than the local sheriff doing the job of assessing the amount t to be tax it fell to the local priest or bishop. If you decided to join the crusade to win back Jerusalem you were not required to pay the tithe. Oh yes and if you failed to pay you could be imprisoned or excommunicated which came with the threat of eternal damnation. Ultimately Henry II never went on crusade, it was his son Richard who joined the Third Crusade.

Aside from taxing folk, the manor/parish was also the smallest area for justice to be applied, often by the lord of the manor, at the manor court. By the sixteenth century the parish was an essential component in the relief of poverty not to mention the maintenance of roads.

Unfortunately rather than using maps in medieval England charters relied upon descriptions to detail tenure and grants. This means that Thomas Elham’s map of Thanet in his Historia Monasterii S Augustini Cantuariensis dating to about 1414 is sometimes described as the oldest surviving parish map. He used the map to illustrate the foundation myth of Minster in Thanet, a stretch of land given as wergild to Domne Eafe after the murder of her brothers by their cousin King Ecgberht of Kent. An article by D.W. Rollason explores the accuracy of the parish boundary with Elham’s map which also contains illustrations of the churches on Thanet at the time.

Of course once the sixteenth century arrived estate owners became much more proactive in the commissioning of estate maps. One reason is that the parish system which had been in place for so many years was disrupted by the Dissolution of the Monasteries and by various enclosure acts. Estate maps were created for their ease of use in legal and administrative use. Wealthy landowners were better able to overview their estates than they might have done through a chartulary which included charters and terriers, although a notable exception is the Boarstall Cartulary map dating to the fifteenth century which is the earliest known map depicting a village. Like Elmham’s map, the Boarstall Cartulary map also enshrines the semi-mythical origins of the landowner on its vellum.

And of course a map enable the landowner to enjoy sight of his, or occasionally her, domains at a glance.

Throughout the history of Christian England, from Anglo Saxon times onwards parishes were required to pay tithes to the church – one tenth of a parish’s produce was paid to the vicar, curate or abbey who owned the rights to the church. After the dissolution these tithes were sometimes paid to private landlords. Unsurprisingly people increasingly resented paying these tithes. In 1836 an act was passed allowing parishioners to pay cash rather than goods and an accurate series of maps were drawn up to identify all the land in a parish so that tithes could be calculated accurately. And, it was the landowners who were required to pay for the survey of their land. These maps are now in the National Archives at Kew.

Today parish maps are often created by local communities to identify the things that are valued and to celebrate what makes the community from its wildlife and history to its people and buildings. They are about a sense of place rather than created for legal or administrative reasons. Somewhat ironically they often share more in common with medieval maps than modern cartography in that there is often no scale, bird’s eye illustrations of rivers, roads and bridges and used and houses are often pictorial rather than represented by symbols.

Edwinstowe Parish Mao completed 1991

A selection of modern parish maps can be found here: https://www.commonground.org.uk/parish-maps/

Pounds, N.J.G. A History of the English Parish: The Culture of Religion from Augustine to Victoria.

Sir John Hardyng – soldier, diplomat, map maker, spy

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File:Bodleian Libraries, Central Scotland.jpg
Bodleian Library MS. Arch. Send. B. 10, for. 184r Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hardyng was born in Northumberland and, at the age of 12, was at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 in service to Hotspur. Having survived the battle, he entered service to Sir Robert Umfraville who was closely associated with the Percy family. Hardyng found himself taking part in Anglo-Scottish hostilities as well as the Hundred Years War under the command of Henry V. In between making war on the Scots, Umfraville was also sent north of the border on diplomatic missions. Later, when he wrote his chronicles, Hardny would describe Umfraville as the perfect knight.

In 1418, Henry V sent Hardyng to Scotland to complete a topological survey and to find evidence of English overlordship of Scotland. Hardyng remained there for three and a half years making his map – designed to assist with an English invasion as well as unearthing (writing them himself) documents evidencing English claims to political overlordship of the Scots. Unfortunately he had to wait until the 1440s for his reward due to Henry V’s death. Little wonder that his chronicle makes much of the fact that he personally retrieved, at great personal risk, the all important documents from Scotland. He even claimed that James I of Scotland would have given 1000 marks of gold for the documents. Among the documents to survive is a forged letter granting him safe conduct to enter James I’s presence whenever he was in Scotland and to stay in the country for 40 days with six servants and horses – so no imagining a solitary spy surveying the landscape.

Having been granted the manor of Geddington in Northamptonshire and a pension of £10, Hardyng retired to the Augustinian priory at Kyme in Liincolnshire where he began to write his history of England. This was presented to Henry VI on 1457 together with his map of Scotland and those largely forged documents pertaining to overlordship. Hardying sought to promote political unity within his own country by allying English political factions against the Scots – working on the premise that war across the border would bring about peace at home. His forged documents provided a watertight rationale and he handily provided a map that detailed distances between military objectives, castles and rivers. While not to scale, and the drawings of the fortifications more akin to fantasy than reality, the map was both an itinerary for invasion and a visual encouragement for the English. On this occasion he received an additional annual pension from the Crown of £20.

Undeterred by the decade’s hostilities, not to mention the change from the House of Lancaster to the House of York on the throne in 1461, Hardying continued to polish his histories, happily explaining Edward IV’s pedigree as a way of winning the new monarch’s approval. The end result was two historical chronicles in rhyming couplets – I am truly thankful I don’t have to blog in rhyme- and a colourful history of a man who as well as being all the things in the title was also something of an antiquarian he was also the first chronicler to detail a quest for the Holy Grail and would provide Sir Thomas Malory with a source for his story about King Arthur.

Armstrong, Jackson, W. England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Society in the Fifteenth Century Scottish Marches. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Palgrave, Francis, Sir. Documents and Records illustrating the History of Scotland and the Transactions Between the Crowns of Scotland and England. Volume I (Great Britain Record Commission: London, 1837)

Roman maps in Britain

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A plan of Rome showing fragments of the Forma Urbis, drawn by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and published in Le Antichità Romane (‘Roman Antiquities’) in c. 1756. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Evidence of Imperial Rome’s charting of Britain comes in the form of the Peutinger Table, the Antonine itineraries and the Ravenna Cosmography. They are copies taken from earlier maps, tables and itineraries. The truth is that there is currently no, known, example in existence of a Roman map made in England unless you include the Rudge Cup which is thought to depict Hadrian’s Wall. However, Roman engineers and surveyors must have been present in relatively large numbers to lay out roads, forts and settlements.

Medieval copies – complete with errors of transcription are what remains and fragments of maps discovered elsewhere in the empire – and of course it’s always good if the aforementioned map is etched on stone as the materials tends to survive better than papyrus or parchment. There’s a fragment of a stone map in marble depicting the suburbs of Rome The Forma Urbis Romae, or Severan Marble Plan of Rome was originally 18 X 13 m when it was carved in the third century and placed in the Temple of Peace on the orders of Septimus Severus. Today it’s a jigsaw of more than 1,000 pieces with most of it missing. What the plan was used for is another matter entirely!

And while we’re on the subject of those military engineers it’s worth recalling that the Vatican hs a copy of a Roman document from the Corpus Agrimensorum which is a set of documents about surveying, some of them even include bird’s eye view maps which give an approximation of the landscape as well as planning for things such as allocation of land to military veterans.

Clearly there were maps and plans and as one of Rome’s 44 or so provinces, Britannia – or at least parts of it- will have been similarly recorded. But aside from the medieval copies historians and archaeologists initially had to rely on reconstructions made by men like William Stukeley in the eighteenth century. His interest in the past led him to create a series of detailed plans and drawings – unfortunately he was not applying modern archeological rigour to his work and so his plans of camps and towns are not always accurate. One of the places he mapped, Little Chester in Derby, or Derventio, still retained a wall above ground level at the time he mapped it. Today York Archeology have used Stukeley’s map – and modern LiDAR to gain a clearer understanding of what the fort once looked like and to decide where an archeological dig might best be located.

York Archeology

Barber, Peter. (ed.) The Map Book

Parker, Philip, History of Britain in Maps

The Tabula Peutingeriana

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Known as Peutinger’s Tabula or the Peutinger Table it shows the layout of the Roman Empire’s Road network.  Stretching across Europe, North Africa, India, Asia, and parts of the Middle East it very sadly does not include Britain which suggests that a section of the map did not either did not survive antiquity or the early Middle Ages. The version that exists today dates from about 1200 and is a copy of an early scroll, made by a monk in Colmar, which seems to date to about AD400 and which in turn was a copy of an early map. It can today be found in the Austrian National Library in Vienna but is too delicate to be put on display.

Rather than looking like a modern road map it bears a greater resemblance to the London Underground map because of its schematic nature. The map was designed to be used with Roman ‘itineraries’ which identified locations and the distances between therm in typically efficient manner. The most important of the Empire’s cities – Rome, Constantinople and Antioch are decorated so that they are easy to find and then journeys can be calculated from and to these locations. In total there are 555 cities on the map as well as more than 3,000 other place names. These correspond with elements of the Antonine Itinerary.

The scroll was rediscovered in a library in Worms in 1494 and was bequeathed to Konrad Peutinger in 1508, although its not entirely certain whether the scroll was acquired by legitimate means. The map was first published in 1598 but rather distressingly Peutinger took pains to hide where the map originated when his friend Conrad Celtes ‘acquired’ it. It sounds like a novel waiting to happen if you ask me!

Today Peutinger’s Table can be explored online:

https://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/space/tpeut.htm

Barber, Peter. (ed.). The Map Book.(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

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Matthew Paris – mapmaker

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Matthew Paris (c.1200-1259). Photograph by the British Library., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A new seven week Zoom class will be starting on Monday 29 September, 2025 – on the topic of a history of Britain in maps. I’ve started planning the classes in readiness to advertise them by the end of next week and have side tracked myself with Matthew Paris, the thirteenth century monk from St Albans, who I usually write about in terms of his chronicles of English history – the Chronica Majora and Historia Anglorum. I

Paris, who seems to have done his own illustrations, included a self portrait in the Historia Anglorum and for the purposes of the forthcoming class – a map that located more than 250 places. He also showed rivers, Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall. It’s thought that the monk may have used an earlier Roman map as an example. He also created a map to guide pilgrims from England to the Holy Land. Inevitably the journey started in London which was drawn with the Tower of London and St Paul’s Cathedral as well as London Bridge.

The map of Britain, dating from about 1250, can be found at the British Library but there’s a rather wonderful online annotated version that provides additional information. Now all I have to do is to decide what I should include in the seven weeks – obviously the Hereford Mappa Mundi and the Gough Map of Britain, John Stow, Henry VIII’s coastal defence map, inevitably Gerald of Wales gets in on the act and then there’re John Ogilby’s road maps – actually I think strip maps of the kind that Ogilby made will be one session in their own right – Matthew Paris will appear alongside Ogilby, The Antonine Itinerary and Matthew Simons guidance for travellers dating to 1635.

Autumn’s class should be live for booking by the beginning of next week. There will also be a solitary Christmas class on Monday 1 December – A Bronte Christmas which I am rather excited about.

Matthew Paris Annotated Map

Derby 1745 – a view across the Derwent.

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An East Prospect of Derby – Derby Museum

Samuel and Nathantial Buck’s engraving of Derby shows the town dominated by the tower of All Saints Church which was constructed at the turn of the sixteenth century and in the middle by Exeter House, owned by the Earl and Countess of Exeter. Exeter was not at home when Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived on 4 December 1745.

But who was the Earl of Exeter and why did he have a house in Derby? Brownlow Cecil, Lord Burghley had only recently succeeded his father, similarly named, as the 9th Earl of Exeter. It turns out that Brownlow’s mother, Hannah Chambers, was from Derby. Her father Thomas Chambers who ran his business from London was a merchant in copper and lead – which immediately provides the Derbyshire connection as well as a reason for the marriage of the younger son of an earl with the younger daughter of a ‘gent’. In short they were very wealthy. The 8th Earl’s elder brother died within two years of Hannah’s marriage and she became a countess.

Hannah’s grandfather is buried in All Saints. By then the family extended their home in Derby with the pleasure grounds depicted on the near side of the river to the viewer but it doesn’t seem that the earl and his countess spent much time in their Derby residence.

Having provided accommodation for the Jacobites it was sold in 1758 to the then Mayor of Derby.

Incidentally, the long narrow plots of land are the footprints of the Anglo-Saxon burgage plots – what’s not to love? A burgage consists of a long narrow plot with a house fronting on to the street – usually burgage plots were rented for cash rather than service although the latter was possible. Tenantry of a burgage plot also often accrued voting rights. Obviously Exeter House involved the purchase and amalgamation of two burgage plots because of the width of the house when the area became fashionable.

Lost Houses – Exeter House, Derby

The Peasants’ Crusade

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Map showing the People’s Crusade – not sure about language. The People’s Crusade went through the Rhineland, by-passed Bohemia, received permission to travel through Hungary and from there into the Byzantine Empire – (Serbia and Bulgaria – ish!)

As with the previous post this is not an exhaustive piece on the Peasant’s Crusade or the People’s Crusade as it is also known – it’s an introduction.

Pope Urban II preached crusade at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. The idea was that the crusaders would set off the following summer. However, before the various military leaders could get themselves organised an army of about 50,000 peasants marched in the direction of Constantinople.

The peasants were led by Peter the Hermit. He had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem but was prevented from entering the city by the Seljuk Turks. It is possible that he was one of the inspirations for Urban II’s sermon but more factually we know that he preached crusade in France and then began gathering his army under the authority of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. His licence to preach included England.

For the people who joined Peter the Hermit there was the religious element of the crusade to consider but also the fact that it enabled peasants to leave the land which many of them were tied to by the feudal structure. However, as the vast majority of them were not wealthy there came the problems of having to take entire families and living off the land.

By spring 1096 Peter was in the Rhineland where preaching crusade led to a massacre of Jews. This killing spread with the crusade. At Mainz the Bishop hid numbers of Jews in his palace but they were still murdered. In part it was religious intolerance – torah scrolls were destroyed. The Jewish population was targeted and murdered. Another element was the opportunity to acquire money and goods.

At Cologne, Peter had to stop to resupply but here, initially at least, the Jewish community was largely saved by their gentile neighbours who hid them in their own homes. Unfortunately the crusaders sought them out when they moved into hiding in nearby villages -and killed them anyway. None of it makes happy reading.

At this time, whilst Peter halted, a party of impatient crusaders led by Walter the Penniless contained on their journey. As this army led journeyed south stealing and living off the land there were confrontations between the crusaders and the local Christian populations.. At Semlin about 4,000 Hungarians were killed and a number of crusaders took refuge in a chapel where they were burned to death. The rest of the crusaders continued on their way setting Belgrade on fire. They were attacked on the way to Sofia resulting in the loss of many of their untrained soldiers. Peter travelling after Walter’s group came to Semlin to find the town wall hung with things taken from Walter’s crusaders.

Peter and his army eventually arrived in Constantinople in July 1096. They were not what the Emperor Alexios wanted not least because he was now expected to care for an untrained army that included impoverished men, women and children – think rabble rather than army. There are questions as to whether Alexios sent Peter and his People’s Crusade off across the Bosphorus without guides in order to get rid of them or whether they continued into Turkish territory despite having been told to wait but that is a matter for debate.

At Dracon, in Turkish held territory Peter and his army were attacked and fought the Battle of Civetot. It was a disaster for the People’s Crusade. Most of them were killed or enslaved.

Duncalf notes that the chroniclers of the period did not write much about the People’s Crusade not least because they did not assist the main or Princes’ Crusade although Peter the Hermit turns up on other occasions in the story of the First Crusade because he joined with the army of Godfrey of Bouillon. There other narrative accounts which are contemporary including that of Anna Komnina the daughter of Emperor Alexios.

I am sorry if there are any really terrible spelling mistakes – this version of WordPress changes spellings to what it thinks they should be, based on the pattern the misspelling makes and I cannot always see where changes have happened even reading the post through before hitting the publish button.

For a more extended account of the People’s Crusade follow this link: https://www.historynet.com/first-crusade-peoples-crusade.htm

Duncalf, Frederic (1921) The American Historical Review, Volume 26, Issue 3, April 1921, Pages 440–453, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/26.3.440

Kostick, Conor (2008), The Social Structure of the First Crusade. Brill

Katherine Swynford locations

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It’s inevitable that many of these locations feature as castles belonging to John of Gaunt: Tutbury, Leicester, Herefored and Hertford to name a few.  I’ve also included a few places associated with Mary de Bohun whose household Katherine is listed in during some of the period when she and Gaunt went their separate ways.

 

 

Double click on the pointer to open up a box with a snippet of information about each of these locations. If nothing else it is possible to see how widely travelled John of Gaunt was within England. It is possible to see the lines of Roman roads as well as the marches between England and Wales as you look at the locations, a reminder that in the past boundaries determine fortifications and that key transport networks made it possible for the great and the good to administer their estates.