Forget sat-nav, this stunning map is about to fetch £1m
by ROBERT HARDMAN
1st March 2007
Even from a distance, the shape is instantly recognisable. Closer up, the county lines are spot on.
This would be a pretty accurate map of England right up until the 1970s, when the Heath government tore up old counties such as Denbighshire and created some new counties such as Humberside instead.
True, the size of some conurbations looks odd. Manchester and 'Liverpole' appear no bigger than villages, whereas 'Welles' and 'Hartford' look like enormous cities.
This map was produced almost 500 years ago - when the Earth was still thought to be flat. It shows the counties of England and Wales. Both were then united as one country (as they are now) although Scotland wasn't yet a part of the Union in those days so it was mostly left out.
And one or two places, such as the relatively new towns of Sunderland or Milton Keynes, do not appear to exist, according to this map.
Nor should they. Because this spectacular work of genius comes from the first printed atlas of England and Wales and it was published nearly half a millennium ago.
Behold, the Tudor answer to sat-nav. This was an age when many believed that the earth was flat.
Sixty years later, Galileo would be imprisoned for suggesting that the earth moved around the sun. Longitude would not be established for another two centuries. Nor would the Ordnance Survey.
Most of the existing maps had established a vaguely consistent outline of Britain - a pointy bit around Cornwall, a fat lump around East Anglia and so on - but they were hardly reliable tools of navigation.
And yet, in 1573, a brilliant Yorkshireman called Christopher Saxton began producing extraordinary maps such as this.
In just six years, he had covered the whole of England (Scotland was another country in those days). No wonder much of his work was kept secret until after the Spanish Armada had been defeated.
These maps - printed on copperplate and colour-painted by hand - would have been invaluable intelligence to any invader.
And no wonder that Saxton's atlas is expected to fetch somewhere close to the £1million mark when it comes up for auction at Sotheby's later this month.
"Saxton has, understandably, been described as the father of cartography and you can see why," says Richard Fattorini, books specialist at Sotheby's.
The London auctioneer is selling the book on behalf of the Earl of Macclesfield, whose ancestors built up one of the finest private libraries in existence.
If Saxton's portrait of England is impressive, the detail of his county maps is quite extraordinary.
Despite the lack of roads, he has managed to judge the contours of the English and Welsh coast with incredible accuracy and to mark every town, more or less, in its correct place.
So how on earth did he do it?
There seem to be two explanations. First, Saxton had some formidable backers.
Born near Wakefield, he was apprenticed to the vicar of Dewsbury, John Rudd, a well-known map-maker of his day. After Cambridge University, Saxton was introduced to some powerful patrons, chief among them Thomas Seckford, the man with the splendid title of Master of the Queen's Requests.
Maps had become a vital military tool and Seckford commissioned Saxton to map the whole of England, county by county. To assist him, he was given a letter from the Queen herself ordering all her subjects to help Saxton wherever possible.
This, no doubt, brought him huge local knowledge. "Given the speed of his work, he almost certainly amended and double-checked a lot of existing work," says Peter Barber, the British Library's head of map collections.
Although records do not exist, he is certain that Saxton would also have used a form of triangulation - using angles and trigonometry to work out distances.
If you know the distance between two given points and measure the angle of a third point, you can work out the distances between all three points. In other words, Saxton used maths instead of guesswork and the naked eye.
What adds to the value of this atlas is that it also includes five charts chronicling Sir Francis Drake's 1585 voyage to America.
These were engraved by Giovanni Boazio, the Italian cartographer, who actually accompanied Drake on the trip.
Crucially, they include the first printed map of anywhere in America - St Augustine, Florida - and the first printed image of any North American wildlife, a dorado fish.
Bound together in this beautiful volume, the combined talents of Saxton and Boazio represent the remarkable extent of Tudor knowledge.
They are also a reminder of travel at a time when roads were nothing more than dirt tracks and the only road sign might be a carving in a rock.
If a man with little more than a quill and a horse could produce works like this, then what's our excuse the next time we get lost in the car?
dailymail.co.uk
by ROBERT HARDMAN
1st March 2007
Even from a distance, the shape is instantly recognisable. Closer up, the county lines are spot on.
This would be a pretty accurate map of England right up until the 1970s, when the Heath government tore up old counties such as Denbighshire and created some new counties such as Humberside instead.
True, the size of some conurbations looks odd. Manchester and 'Liverpole' appear no bigger than villages, whereas 'Welles' and 'Hartford' look like enormous cities.
This map was produced almost 500 years ago - when the Earth was still thought to be flat. It shows the counties of England and Wales. Both were then united as one country (as they are now) although Scotland wasn't yet a part of the Union in those days so it was mostly left out.
And one or two places, such as the relatively new towns of Sunderland or Milton Keynes, do not appear to exist, according to this map.
Nor should they. Because this spectacular work of genius comes from the first printed atlas of England and Wales and it was published nearly half a millennium ago.
Behold, the Tudor answer to sat-nav. This was an age when many believed that the earth was flat.
Sixty years later, Galileo would be imprisoned for suggesting that the earth moved around the sun. Longitude would not be established for another two centuries. Nor would the Ordnance Survey.
Most of the existing maps had established a vaguely consistent outline of Britain - a pointy bit around Cornwall, a fat lump around East Anglia and so on - but they were hardly reliable tools of navigation.
And yet, in 1573, a brilliant Yorkshireman called Christopher Saxton began producing extraordinary maps such as this.
In just six years, he had covered the whole of England (Scotland was another country in those days). No wonder much of his work was kept secret until after the Spanish Armada had been defeated.
These maps - printed on copperplate and colour-painted by hand - would have been invaluable intelligence to any invader.
And no wonder that Saxton's atlas is expected to fetch somewhere close to the £1million mark when it comes up for auction at Sotheby's later this month.
"Saxton has, understandably, been described as the father of cartography and you can see why," says Richard Fattorini, books specialist at Sotheby's.
The London auctioneer is selling the book on behalf of the Earl of Macclesfield, whose ancestors built up one of the finest private libraries in existence.
If Saxton's portrait of England is impressive, the detail of his county maps is quite extraordinary.
Despite the lack of roads, he has managed to judge the contours of the English and Welsh coast with incredible accuracy and to mark every town, more or less, in its correct place.
So how on earth did he do it?
There seem to be two explanations. First, Saxton had some formidable backers.
Born near Wakefield, he was apprenticed to the vicar of Dewsbury, John Rudd, a well-known map-maker of his day. After Cambridge University, Saxton was introduced to some powerful patrons, chief among them Thomas Seckford, the man with the splendid title of Master of the Queen's Requests.
Maps had become a vital military tool and Seckford commissioned Saxton to map the whole of England, county by county. To assist him, he was given a letter from the Queen herself ordering all her subjects to help Saxton wherever possible.
This, no doubt, brought him huge local knowledge. "Given the speed of his work, he almost certainly amended and double-checked a lot of existing work," says Peter Barber, the British Library's head of map collections.
Although records do not exist, he is certain that Saxton would also have used a form of triangulation - using angles and trigonometry to work out distances.
If you know the distance between two given points and measure the angle of a third point, you can work out the distances between all three points. In other words, Saxton used maths instead of guesswork and the naked eye.
What adds to the value of this atlas is that it also includes five charts chronicling Sir Francis Drake's 1585 voyage to America.
These were engraved by Giovanni Boazio, the Italian cartographer, who actually accompanied Drake on the trip.
Crucially, they include the first printed map of anywhere in America - St Augustine, Florida - and the first printed image of any North American wildlife, a dorado fish.
Bound together in this beautiful volume, the combined talents of Saxton and Boazio represent the remarkable extent of Tudor knowledge.
They are also a reminder of travel at a time when roads were nothing more than dirt tracks and the only road sign might be a carving in a rock.
If a man with little more than a quill and a horse could produce works like this, then what's our excuse the next time we get lost in the car?
dailymail.co.uk