MAKING THE MAP OF ENGLAND

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 111, 12 May 1934, Page 19

MAKING THE MAP OF ENGLAND

The- map of England and Wales, a red triangle on. a blue background, is such a familiar sight to every child that it is hard to realise that there was once a time when the English people knew nothing of the shape of tlieir country, says the "Children's Newspaper."

It was not until tho sixteenth century that the first map was made, and a strange map it was. It can be seen at the British Museum, which has lately published coloured reproductions of it and other maps of .the period.

, The sixteenth century was' a timo of exploration and discovory, and while such men as Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus were sailing the high seas and establishing contact with the new world of America and the West Indies, people at home travelled the high roads of their own country and plotted for tho first time tho boundaries of their own homeland.

This first map of England arid Wales dates from about 1535 and is the work of some anonymous pioneer. Within the next thirty years two more maps had been published: one engraved by George Lily and the other (a map of tho British Isles) .by the great geographer Mercator.'.

Then in 15GS Thomas Seekford, a Suffolk grontlemau and one of the Queen's Masters of Bequests, under-

todk to have all th© counties of England and Wales surveyed and mapped at his expense. Ho was particularly interested in having accurate maps of Britain's coastline.

For this costly and difficult work Seekford employed a Yorkshireman, Christopher Saxton, who worked tirelessly, and single-handed for ten years, travelling from county to county.

In 1579 his atlas was published; it contained a general map and 34 maps of counties, coloured by hand. Its success seems ■to have been immediate. The maps were a novel and important contribution to national consciousness, and within the next 32 years they had been widely copied and used.

Saxton's survey was the only survey made of the whole country until the Ordnance Survey over 200 years later, though most of the counties were surveyed individually during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His maps were the first scientific maps made in England, and their appearance I marks the beginning of regular mapi making in this country. . "■■.'."

As Elizabethan documents they have artistic as well as historical interest. Their quaint ornamentation is that of a day which had not yet entirely forgotten the Middle Ages, while their place-names and topography are those which Shakespeare knew.