Saxton's Maps of England and Wales: The Accuracy of Anglia and Britannia and Their Relationship to Each Other and to the County Maps
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 63; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03085694.2011.568704
ISSN1479-7801
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies of British Isles
ResumoABSTRACT From measurements of the graticules on Saxton's two general maps of England and Wales—the atlas map Anglia and the wall map Britannia—together with other evidence, it is argued that neither map was drawn according to any specific projection, but that both were effectively produced as ‘flat-earth’ maps with the graticules superimposed afterwards. Digital versions of Saxton's maps and of a modern map, the 1:1 million Ordnance Survey transport map, are used in a number of comparisons by means of the computer program MapAnalyst. These comparisons allow the scales of the two Saxton maps to be determined. They also show that the maps are of almost the same accuracy in terms of the positioning of settlements, typically within about 4.6 kilometres, in spite of a difference in scale of a factor of about 3.6. This fact and the direct comparison of the two Saxton maps in MapAnalyst show that they are basically the same map, and it is concluded that a version of the wall map was the first to be drawn and that Anglia is a reduced copy prepared for the atlas. The lengths of Saxton's miles as used on the two maps are calculated and compared with other determinations. The relationship between the two general maps and the county maps is briefly considered, and it is provisionally concluded that the relationship is a close one. En se fondant sur des mesures des graticules présents sur les deux cartes générales d'Angleterre et du Pays de Galles de Saxton—la carte d'atlas intitulée Anglia et la carte murale Britannia—ainsi que sur d'autres preuves, on soutient que ni l'une ni l'autre n'a été dressée conformément à une projection particulière, mais qu'elles furent toutes deux produites comme des ‘cartes plates', sur lesquelles les graticules ont été ajoutés ultérieurement. Les versions numériques des cartes de Saxton et d'une carte moderne (la carte des transports au 1:1 000 000 de l'Ordnance Survey) ont été utilisées pour effectuer un certain nombre de comparaisons par le moyen du logiciel MapAnalyst. Ces comparaisons permettent de déterminer les échelles des deux cartes de Saxton. Elles montrent aussi que ces cartes sont presque de la même précision en termes de positionnement de localités, de l'ordre de 4,6 kilomètres, en dépit d'une différence d’échelle d'un facteur 3,6 environ. Ce fait ainsi que la comparaison directe des deux cartes grâce à MapAnalyst montrent qu'elles sont fondamentalement la même carte, et l'on conclut que la version murale de la carte fut la première à être dessinée et que l'Anglia est une copie en réduction réalisée pour l'atlas. Les longueurs des milles qu'utilise Saxton sur les deux cartes ont été calculés et comparés à d'autres déterminations. La relation entre les deux cartes générales et les cartes des comtés est brièvement analysée, et l'on conclut provisoirement que les liens sont étroits. Aufgrund von Messungen an den Gradnetzen von Saxtons Generalkarten von England und Wales—der Atlaskarte Anglia und der Wandkarte Britannia— sowie anderen Hinweisen kann geschlossen werden, dass keine dieser Karten auf der Grundlage einer spezifischen Projektion konstruiert wurde. Zunächst als Abbildungen einer ‘ebenen’ Erdoberfläche gezeichnet, wurden die Gradnetze nachträglich darüber gelegt. Digitale Versionen der Saxton-Karten und einer modernen Karte (der Ordnance Survey transport map im Maßstab von 1:1 Mio.) wurden für eine Reihe von Vergleichen mit dem Computerprogramm MapAnalyst herangezogen. Die Untersuchungen ermöglichten die Bestimmung der Maßstäbe beider Karten Saxtons und ergaben, dass diese praktisch dieselbe Genauigkeit in Bezug auf die Position der Siedlungen aufweisen. Trotz einer Maßstabsdifferenz mit einem Faktor von 3,6 liegen die Abweichungen zumeist innerhalb von ca. 4,6 Kilometern. Diese Feststellung und der direkte Vergleich der Saxton-Karten in MapAnalyst zeigen, dass es sich im Grunde um die gleiche Karte handelt, dass zuerst eine Version der Wandkarte gezeichnet und danach Anglia für den Atlas verkleinert wurde. Die Längen der Meilen, die Saxton auf beiden Karten verwendet, werden bestimmt und mit anderen Meilenmaßen verglichen. Darüber hinaus führt eine kurze Betrachtung des Verhältnisses zwischen beiden Übersichtskarten und den Karten der Grafschaften (county maps) zum vorläufigen Schluss einer engen Beziehung der Saxton-Karten zu diesen. A partir de las mediciones de las cuadrículas en los dos mapas generales de Inglaterra y Gales de Saxton —el mapa del atlas de Anglia y el mapa mural de Britannia—junto con otras evidencias, se argumenta que ninguno de los mapas se realizaron según una proyección concreta, sino que ambos fueron realmente producidos como mapas de ‘tierra plana’ sobre los que se superpuso la retícula con posterioridad. Las versiones digitales de los mapas de Saxton y de un mapa moderno (el mapa de la Ordenanza de Inspección de transporte de 1:1.000.000) se utilizan en una serie de comparaciones por medio del programa de ordenador MapAnalyst. Estas comparaciones permiten determinar las escalas de los dos mapas de Saxton. También muestran que los mapas tienen casi la misma precisión en cuanto a la colocación de los asentamientos, generalmente dentro del margen de 4,6 kilómetros, frente a una diferencia en la escala de cerca de 3,6. Este hecho y la comparación directa de los dos mapas de Saxton en MapAnalyst muestran que son básicamente el mismo mapa, concluyendo que primero se elaboró una versión del mapa mural y que Anglia es una copia reducida preparada para el atlas. Se calculan las longitudes de las millas de Saxton tal como se utilizan en los dos mapas y se comparan con otras determinaciones. La relación entre los dos mapas generales y los mapas de condados es considerada con brevedad, y se concluye provisionalmente que la relación es muy estrecha. KEYWORDS: Christopher Saxton Anglia Britannia atlas mapwall mapplanimetric accuracygraticulescalesEnglish mile Acknowledgements I should like to thank Peter Barber for interesting comments about Britannia’s purpose and the circumstances attending its publication, and an anonymous referee and the editor for pointing out ways in which the original version of the article could be improved. Notes NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. The first line on the wall map reads ‘BRITANNIA INSULARUM IN OCEANO MAXIMA A CAIO Julio Caesare primum Romanis ostenta, suis et alienis cladibus postea magnu est adepta virtutis precconiu’ [Britannia, the largest of the islands situated in the Ocean, first shown to the Romans by Caius Julius Caesar, later received great praise for its virtue through its own defeats and those of others]. 2. Ifor M. Evans and Heather Lawrence have discussed this question in their book Christopher Saxton, Elizabethan Map-maker (Wakefield, Wakefield Historical Publications; London, Holland Press, 1979), 34, 41. 3. An Atlas of England and Wales. The Maps of Christopher Saxton, Engraved 1574–1579, Introduction by Edward W. O'F. Lynam (London, British Museum, 1936, revised 1939); Christopher Saxton's 16th Century Maps, The Counties of England & Wales, with an Introduction by William Ravenhill (Shrewsbury, Airlife Publishing Ltd, under the imprint Chatsworth Library, with permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees, 1992). (The term ‘Chatsworth Library’ was used for a project in the early 1990s to reproduce several books from the collection at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire.) For locations of exemplars, see Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton (note 2), Appendix 10. 4. The wall map Britannia in Birmingham City Library is on permanent display on floor 6 of the Central Library; the British Library's exemplar is Maps C.7.d.7. 5. R. A. Skelton, Saxton's Survey of England and Wales with a Facsimile of Saxton's Wall-map of 1583; Imago Mundi Supplement No. 6 (Amsterdam, Nico Israel, 1974). 6. The two maps can be readily compared with the earlier versions mentioned, and others including later versions, in Rodney W. Shirley, Early Printed Maps of the British Isles 1477–1650 (rev. ed., East Grinstead, England, Antique Atlas Publications, 1991). The improvements in the outline are commented upon by Skelton, Saxton's Survey of England and Wales (see note 5), 11. Skelton also describes the subsequent history of the printing plates for the wall map and some of its direct derivatives. 7. Uta Lindgren, ‘Land surveys, instruments, and practitioners in the Renaissance’, in The History of Cartography, vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1: 477–508, at 505. 8. William Ravenhill, ‘As to its position in respect to the heavens’, Imago Mundi 28 (1976): 79–93. 9. See Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton (note 2), Appendix 10, for a list of extant copies of the Atlas with an indication of the corresponding states of Anglia. 10. The distances of the intercepts of meridian lines were measured from the left on the top and bottom edges of each sheet of Skelton's reproduction of Britannia and similarly the distances of the intercepts of the parallels were measured from the top of the sheets on the left and right margins. Using the dimensions and scale factors for each sheet (see main text), all intercept positions were then adjusted to be measured from the left or bottom of the map, and the values for adjacent sheets were averaged. Finally, all meridian line intercepts and all parallel line intercepts were plotted. Best fit lines were then drawn in order to find the intercept positions at the borders of the composite map, from which the separations could be found. 11. Peter Barber, ‘Mapmaking in England, ca 1470–1650’, in Woodward, Cartography in the European Renaissance (see note 7), 2: 1628, has suggested that while state 1 of Anglia did not have a graticule, by the time the wall map was published it was accepted that the absence of such information was unlikely to prove an obstacle to an invader. 12. William Ravenhill, ‘Projections for the large general maps of Britain’, Imago Mundi 33 (1981): 21–32. 13. William Ravenhill ‘Christopher Saxton's surveying: an enigma’, in English Map Making 1500–1650, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London, British Library, 1983), 112–19. 14. Waldo R. Tobler, ‘Bidimensional regression’, Geographical Analysis 26:3 (1994): 187–212. 15. Keith D. Lilley and Christopher D. Lloyd, ‘Mapping the realm: a new look at the Gough Map of Britain (c.1360)’, Imago Mundi 61:1 (2009): 1–28. 16. A. Symington et al., ‘Using bidimensional regression to explore map lineage’ Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 26 (2002): 201–18. A number of references are given in this article to others that use bidimensional regression to study early maps. 17. Bernhard Jenny and Adrian Weber (2005–2010), Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich (http://mapanalyst.cartography.ch/); Bernhard Jenny, Adrian Weber and Lorenz Hurni, ‘Visualizing the planimetric accuracy of historical maps with MapAnalyst’, Cartographica, 42 (2007): 89–94. 18. The measurements described below do not take into account all the possible shape distortions of Skelton's reproduction of Britannia. As a check on the complete rectification of the reproduction sheets, 24 measurements of graticule intersections were made on the seven original sheets and their reproductions. The standard deviation of the displacements of the intersections from their correct positions in the reproduction sheets was found to be less than 1 mm. Similar measurements were not made for Anglia, but the presence of any significant errors would mean that the original Anglia was an even closer copy of Britannia than suggested by the present data. 19. The original is in the University of Leeds, Special Collections, Whitaker Collection, no press mark; the facsimile, Special Collections, Case H-10 SAX; this is an exemplar of Lynam's facsimile referred to at note 3 above. 20. The quantity σ represents the standard deviation for either the horizontal or vertical components (x or y) of the displacements considered separately (assuming that these are equal). Because r 2 = x 2 + y 2 the mean square value of r 2 is 2σ 2. 21. See, for example, J. Brian Harley, Ordnance Survey Maps: A Descriptive Manual (Southampton, Ordnance Survey, 1975). 22. Tony Campbell wrote a short comment about the discovery of a copper plate that bears the engraving for what appears to be a single sheet of a version of Britannia. This wall map would have been at the same scale as the extant version but would have comprised only twelve sheets rather than twenty. His tentative conclusion was that this represents part of an earlier attempt to produce the wall map and that various features imply that it and the extant map were both copied from a common manuscript prototype. A detailed examination of the single larger sheet with the corresponding sections of Britannia along the lines of the present comparison of Britannia with Anglia might throw further light on the origins of this sheet. See Tony Campbell, ‘A false start on Christopher Saxton's wall-map of 1583?’ Map Collector 8 (1979): 27–29. 23. Catherine Delano Smith, ‘Map ownership in sixteenth-century Cambridge: the evidence of probate inventories’, Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 67–93, has pointed out just what a luxury item the wall map was and how few people seem to have owned a copy, even in Cambridge. Peter Barber (personal communication, March 2010), has suggested an additional possible reason for delay in publishing the wall map, the interests of national security, but also suggests that by 1583 these concerns were outweighed by the need for a map that went beyond the borders of the county maps and gave an overview of the country, and particularly the coastline. (See also note 11 above.) 24. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1990), 180. A translation of Scheiner's description is given by William Wallace, ‘Account of the invention of the pantograph …’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 13 (1836): 418–39. Kim H. Veltman, Understanding New Media; Augmented Knowledge and Culture, vol. 1: Sources of Perspective (Calgary, University of Calgary Press, c.2006), ch. 5, says that in 1571 Hans Lencker described a prototype pantograph involving rulers and compasses in his Perspectiva (Chicago, Newberry Library, John M. Wing Foundation, MS.B.128). Many authors claim that Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) used a pantograph for copying drawings, but I have not been able to find any direct proof of this. 25. No engraver's name is on Britannia. The evidence for Ryther as the engraver is discussed by Skelton, Saxton's Survey (see note 5), 11. It rests largely on the fact that Ryther engraved Anglia and on style, which includes the use of a particular form of dividers over the scale bar. Similar dividers are present on Anglia and also on all but one of Saxton's county maps that are signed by Ryther, but not on others. 26. I have looked at reproductions of only one exemplar of each of the general maps. As for Anglia, according to Lawrence and Evans, Christopher Saxton (see note 2), just over a quarter of the known extant copies of the Atlas have state 1, whereas I have used a reproduction of state 2. I have not, however, seen any suggestion that the two states differ in any way other than by the presence or absence of indications of latitude and longitude. 27. Peter Barber, ‘Mapmaking in England’ (see note 11), 1628, has suggested that the wall map shows improvements over Anglia in the coastlines of northeast England and south Wales, but Plate 9 shows no evidence of any significant differences between Britannia and Anglia in these regions. 28. See note 17. 29. See Shirley, Early Printed Maps of the British Isles (note 6), and Skelton, Saxton's Survey (note 5). Peter Barber, King Henry's Map of the British Isles (London, The Folio Society, 2009), 105, points out that because of their improved coastlines and internal detail ‘Saxton's maps were to set the image of England and Wales for the next two centuries’. 30. Lilley and Lloyd, ‘Mapping the realm’ (see note 15). 31. William Bourne, An Almanacke and prognostication for three yeares … nowe newlye added unto my late Rules of Navigation (London, 1571), and A Regiment for the Sea (London 1574). These books were transcribed and edited by Eva G. R. Taylor in Hakluyt Society, Second series No. 121 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963). When these two transcriptions and the original version of A Regiment (1574) are compared, there are discrepancies or obvious errors for four towns: London, (West)chester, Lincoln and Plymouth. The most likely values for the first three towns are found in the transcription of the Almanacke. The latitude for Plymouth is given in all three as 19 degrees 7 minutes, and it is most likely that this should be 16 degrees 7 minutes (an inverted 6?). I have converted the latitudes and longitudes to Ordnance Survey National Grid coordinates (after subtracting the value given for the longitude of London from all the longitudes) and compared the result with the 1:1 million map, using MapAnalyst. The result shows England and Wales tilted through about 10 degrees to the east (clockwise). See Ravenhill, ‘As to its position in respect to the heavens’ (note 8), 81. On page 82 of his article, Ravenhill shows a direct plot of Bourne's coordinates compared with a modern outline map of England and Wales, but this does not distinguish between systematic and random components in Bourne's data. 32. Philip Grierson, English Linear Measures—An Essay in Origins, The Stenton Lecture, 1971 (Reading, University of Reading, 1972). The origins and lengths of the various miles are discussed from page 25 onwards. See also Robert D. Connor The Weights and Measures of England (London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1987), ch. 5, 68–78. 33. Ifor M. Evans, ‘A cartographic evaluation of the old English mile’, Geographical Journal 141 (1975): 259–64; Sir Charles Close, ‘The old English mile’, Geographical Journal 76 (1930): 338–42; Heawood, quoted by Close, ‘The old English mile’, without reference; Sir Flinders Petrie, ‘The old English mile’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 12 (1883–1884): 254–66; Skelton, Saxton's Survey (see note 5), 11. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid I. Bower David Bower writes: In my article on ‘Saxton Manuscripts and Surveys Not Described by Evans and Lawrence’ (Imago Mundi 62:2, (2010) 191–204), I described Saxton's map of the parish of Slaidburn, Yorkshire, as having been first reported in 2005 in the Slaidburn Conservation Area Appraisal. Mr Ben Edwards, in the course of his excavations in the area, had recognized the general similarity of form of the caption and the handwriting to those on Saxton's map of Hunsworth and East Bierley, which led him to say that the Slaidburn map was also by Christopher Saxton. At the time I was preparing my article, he was, however, unable to supply an earlier instance in print of the identification of the map. I am pleased to be able to report that he has recently written to say that that was in Mary C. Higham, ‘Shay Names—A Need for Reappraisal\?’, Nomina 12 (1988–1989): 89–104, reprinted in Of Names and Places: Selected Writings of Mary Higham, ed. Alan G. Crosby (Nottingham, English Place Name Society and Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland, 2007), 27–38, where it appears on page 33, note 9. A small section of the map is reproduced on page 34.
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