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Mediaeval merchants and traders may have had maps
but if they did none have survived and before the
advent of printing in England from the 1470s all maps
were hand drawn, which very fact imposes a massive
limit to their availability and durability.
The literacy required to read a map has been around
for even less time.
Until about six generations ago,
that’s back to the time of your great grandmother’s
grandmother in the 1840s, very few people in this
country were routinely taught to read and write.
So imagine for a moment that it is anytime during the
Middle Ages (or mediaeval period) that stretch of
1000 years after the Romans left in the 400s through
to the start of the Tudor dynasty in the 1400s and you
need to make a journey. Putting aside questions such
as how you shall travel, where you might stay, what
it might cost and how you’ll avoid being attacked and
robbed on the way let’s look at just one rather
fundamental aspect of your plans. How the heck will
you know which way to go if you can’t read or write
and you don't have a map?
Telling Stories
Place-names may have been sufficiently and
deliberately descriptive so as to enable a
narrative
cartography
in which the place names themselves act
as route markers and that legends, stories and songs
were created to help people remember the sequence
of places in the correct order for any given journey.
One supporter of this theory is Bob Trubshaw who
Been around very long. Maps are a very recent
introduction in the very long history of mankind.
When we take a look back at the business of knowing
where you are and understanding where you’re going
before there were maps we find that the
female skills
of observation and memory were the important ones.
The Map as Big as a Telephone Box
The Gough Map
made during the reign of Edward III
is the earliest surviving route map of Britain depicting
a topographical representation of Britain with a
recognizable coastline. London and York are picked
out in gold letters to emphasise their importance.
Painstaking research has revealed that the map was
made in the years between 1355 and 1366 as it shows
a wall around the City of Coventry built for the first
time in the earlier year and it names Queenborough on
the Isle of Sheppey, which name did not exist prior to
the later year.
Although this is the first map we have that shows the
road network it’s no Ordinance Survey and wouldn’t
have done much beyond pointing the traveller in the
right direction. Also it’s just one map with no known
copies, it’s the size of a telephone box and, being
made from stiff vellum, it would be even harder to
fold than the average map. The Gough Map is kept at
The Bodleian Library in Oxford but isn’t currently on
show. Happily though it is now available in digital
form at
here you can have great
fun searching for place names local to you
The Gough Map showing London