54 • Mapmaking in England, ca. 1470 –1650 Peter Barber The English Heritage to vey, eds., Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford: 1525 Clarendon Press, 1986); Mapmaker’s Art for Edward Lyman, The Map- world maps maker’s Art: Essays on the History of Maps (London: Batchworth Press, 1953); Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps for David Buisseret, ed., Mon- archs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool There is little evidence of a significant cartographic pres- of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chi- ence in late fifteenth-century England in terms of most cago Press, 1992); Rural Images for David Buisseret, ed., Rural Images: modern indices, such as an extensive familiarity with and Estate Maps in the Old and New Worlds (Chicago: University of Chi- use of maps on the part of its citizenry, a widespread use cago Press, 1996); Tales from the Map Room for Peter Barber and of maps for administration and in the transaction of busi- Christopher Board, eds., Tales from the Map Room: Fact and Fiction about Maps and Their Makers (London: BBC Books, 1993); and TNA ness, the domestic production of printed maps, and an ac- for The National Archives of the UK, Kew (formerly the Public Record 1 tive market in them. Although the first map to be printed Office). in England, a T-O map illustrating William Caxton’s 1. This notion is challenged in Catherine Delano-Smith and R. J. P. Myrrour of the Worlde of 1481, appeared at a relatively Kain, English Maps: A History (London: British Library, 1999), 28–29, early date, no further map, other than one illustrating a who state that “certainly by the late fourteenth century, or at the latest by the early fifteenth century, the practical use of maps was diffusing 1489 reprint of Caxton’s text, was to be printed for sev- into society at large,” but the scarcity of surviving maps of any descrip- 2 eral decades. tion or of written evidence of their use makes this statement problem- Yet England was far from being a land without maps atic. Harvey’s statement that “in the England of 1500 maps were little or mapping. In the thirteenth-century Anglo-French map- understood or used” (P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England [Lon- makers had created numerous ornate world maps, the don: Public Record Office and the British Library, 1993], 7), however, rests on an excessively restrictive definition of a map and a tendency to outstanding survivor of which is the late thirteenth- regard sophisticated maps drawn to scale and with conventional signs 3 century Hereford map. Although the creative impulse as the only true maps. had slackened after 1300, traditional world maps contin- 2. Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472–1500 (London: ued to be created as text illustrations, notably to certain British Library, 1987), 98–99. The maps were only partially printed, the copies of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon.4 As the Aslake geographical information being inserted in manuscript. 3. Scott D. Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Trans- and particularly the Evesham maps demonstrate, large lation of the Legends with Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); world maps were also produced for didactic and repre- Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm sentational purposes and as aids to devotion into the early (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2001); and P. D. A. Harvey, fifteenth century and probably beyond, although no late Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map, rev. ed. (Hereford: Hereford fifteenth-century examples have yet come to light.5 As late Cathedral, 2002). There is a vast and ever-growing literature. 4. The BL has an example of a roughly drawn sketchlike traditional as the 1540s Henry VIII possessed “a mappa mundi in world map drawn as late as 1466 (Harleian MS. 3673, fol. 84) (illus- parcheament” in “The Removing Guarderobe... atten- trated in David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in HC 1:286 – daunt at the Courte uppon the kinges most Roiall per- 370, esp. 352). The numerous printed versions of Higden did not con- sonne where the same for the tyme shall happen to be,” 6 tain maps. suggesting that such maps continued to be used in me- 5. Figure 2.8 in this volume; Peter Barber and Michelle P. Brown, “The Aslake World Map,” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 24 – 44; Peter Bar- dieval fashion into the middle of the sixteenth century as ber, “The Evesham World Map: A Late Medieval English View of God iconic backdrops, evocative of knowledge, power, and di- and the World,” Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 13–33; and Delano-Smith vine right, when the king appeared in public in the course and Kain, English Maps, 22, for a mappamundi purchased for the li- of his progresses.7 brary at New College, Oxford, for the considerable sum of £5 in 1462, that was probably though not certainly a map. 6. BL, Harley MS. 1419, fol. 414v. Abbreviations used in this chapter include: English Map-Making for 7. See the following articles in HKW: Howard Montagu Colvin, Sarah Tyacke, ed., English Map-Making, 1500 –1650: Historical Essays “Henry III, 1216 –1272,” 1:93–159, esp. 1:127, idem, “Westminster (London: British Library, 1983); HKW for Howard Montagu Colvin Palace,” 1:491–552, esp. 1:497, 504 –5, and R. Allen Brown and et al., The History of the King’s Works, 6 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Howard Montagu Colvin, “The Royal Castles, 1066 –1485,” 2:554 – Stationery Office, 1963–82); LMP for R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Har- 894, esp. 2:859 and 861; Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of 1589 1590 State Contexts of Renaissance Mapping Another mappamundi was described in 1547 as being quaries, 1986), 43– 44; Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 339; in the Long Gallery at Hampton Court. This was the Peter Barber, “Visual Encyclopaedias: The Hereford and Other Mappae Mundi,” Map Collector 48 (1989): 2–8, esp. 4 –5; idem, “Evesham gallery leading to the royal chapel from the king’s private World Map,” 21 and 29 (for a discussion of intermediate-sized map- apartments. All the other pictures hanging in the gallery, paemundi); and Marcia A. Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps: Embedded without exception, judging from the description in the Images, Interpretive Frames,” Word & Image 10 (1994): 262–88, 1547/49 inventories of the king’s goods, had religious esp. 267–68, 271, and 276 –80. themes, suggesting that the “rownde mappaemundi” 8 8. BL, Harley MS. 1419, fol. 246. 9. It is now generally accepted that because of their encyclopedic na- was placed there for the purpose, or at least the appear- ture, mappaemundi could be teaching aids in numerous nonecclesiasti- ance, of providing religious instruction and edification for cal spaces (for example, Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 264 –65 and the king and his suite prior to their arrival in the chapel.9 270 –71, and Schulz, “View of Venice,” 446 – 47 and 452–54). Larger traditional mappaemundi always included refer- 10. Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 326, 328, and 330, sum- ences to and illustrations of biblical episodes, particularly marizing an extensive modern literature on the subject. 10 11. Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 272–73 and 275–76, reviews from the Old Testament, in the appropriate locations, the surviving physical evidence for the location of mappaemundi inside so they would have fitted in well between the figurative churches and within monastic complexes but she has also percipiently pictures. The placing of one of Henry’s mappaemundi in noted (p. 276) that “façades at the boundary between the church and this transitional location between the secular and the ec- the world were preferred sites for the display of distant marvels located clesiastical may reflect a standard medieval practice of on mappaemundi . and of rotae with which the terrestrial realm was symbolically assimilated.” In view of repeated assertions in the past that which modern scholars have been unaware because of the mappaemundi were used as altarpieces, it is worthy of note that no map- relative paucity of such locational information in early paemundi or maps are listed among the contents of any of the chapels records.11 in Henry’s palaces. For a convincing rebuttal of these assertions, see From the late fifteenth century it is quite possible that Marcia A. Kupfer, “The Lost Mappamundi at Chalivoy-Milon,” Specu- in certain more cosmopolitan English homes, including lum 66 (1991): 540 –71, and idem, “Medieval World Maps,” 273 and 275–76. For the assertions, see, for example, Anna-Dorothee von den some that were not so wealthy, these manuscript map- Brincken, “Mappa mundi und Chronographia: Studien zur Imago paemundi (a term that by the late 1540s was increasingly Mundi des abendländischen Mittelalters,” Deutsches Archiv für die Er- being used to differentiate medieval world maps from forschung des Mittelalters 24 (1968): 118–86, esp. 128. modern “maps of the whole world”) 12 were being sup- 12. See Peter Barber, “Cartography, Topography and History Paint- plemented or replaced by single or multisheet printed ings,” in The Inventories of Henry VIII (London: Society of Antiquar- ies, forthcoming), and idem, “The Maps, Town-Views and Historical maps like those acquired in the course of his travels by Prints in the Columbus Inventory,” in The Print Collection of Ferdinand Christopher Columbus’s second son, Ferdinand. These Columbus (1488–1539), 2 vols., ed. Mark McDonald (London: British maps combined traditional representations of the oiku- Museum Press, 2004), 1:246 –62. mene, of varying degrees of elaboration, with depictions 13. See Barber, “Maps, Town-Views,” 1:251 and 2:517 (no.