Slide Sets

Christopher Saxon was born in Yorkshire in the early 1540s, and seems during the 1500s to have worked and traveled with John Rudd, the map-making vicar of Dewsbury. The young Yorkshireman must have shown remarkable qualities, for by 1573 he had been commissioned to begin his great survey of the counties of England and Wales.

This early period of his life remains obscure, but it appears that Saxton’s own patron, Thomas Seckford, acted on behalf of the mighty Lord Burghley, who for military and fiscal considerations needed an accurate map of the realm. As the maps were drawn, they were engraved, printed (with a copy to Lord Burghley), and published in separate sheets, beginning with the counties of Norfolk and Oxfordshire in 1574.

During 1575, Saxton worked on Suffolk, where his patron Seckford had his county seat, and then proceeded westwards, first mapping the counties around London and then progressively those to the west, completing Cornwall the following year. With the vulnerable south coast covered, he turned back towards the Midlands and north, finally mapping Wales in 1578. With the counties thus finished, it was natural next to assemble them all in a general map of England, and to publish the whole collection in 1579. Equally logical was the next development, a great wall map of England which appeared in 1583.

The county maps have their weaknesses and inaccuracies; even where they cover the same territory, their rendering is often significantly different. But it was a marvelous achievement, to map so large an area in so short a time, and scholars have ever since been arguing about how it was done. Saxton probably relied to some extent on earlier surveys, he may well have used some form of triangulation, and he perhaps combined these with the use of the plane table.

In fact, he was an accomplished estate surveyor, but so far no maps on a large scale by him have been found dating before 1574, at the start of his great national task. When it was over, from the 1580s onwards, many such maps from his pen are known, and he continued to work on these local surveys until at least 1608, no doubt dying shortly after that year.

During the past half century much new evidence concerning Saxton has been accumulating. Whereas in 1927 only six of his manuscript maps were known, by 1972 scholars had identified twenty-two of them, and this figure has since risen to twenty-five. From this material much recent work has emerged, allowing us to know more about the cartographer who formed the English image of their counties for about two hundred years.

The slides in this set were made from the copy in the Newberry Library’s general collection (Case +G1045.78).

This was one of the first maps to be completed, in 1575. The Newberry copy is rather anemically colored, but it is possible to pick out the large towns of Newmarket (in the west), Bury (St. Edmonds: in the center), and Ipswich (in the southeast). Ipswich lies on the river Orwell, and on the next river north, the Deben, may be seen “Woodbridge” and, just to the west of that, “Seckford,” the home of Saxton’s patron.

The map has no coordinates and bears, below Seckford’s arms in the lower right, his early motto of “pestis patriae pigricies” (“sloth is the bane of the country”).

The Latin title gives “Southamtoniæ comitatus” for Hampshire, with a scale on which are perched swans (?). The Isle of Wight is very grossly delineated, but there is a serious attempt to show woods, in particular the New Forest, in the southwest of the county. Southampton and Portsmouth are clearly shown; the former had long been an important commercial harbor, and the latter was soon to rise to prominence as a naval base.

This elegant and well-balanced map shows the county immediately to the west of Hampshire. Chesil Beach and the “island” of Portland may be seen in the center at the bottom of the map; Poole harbor is away to the east. The sea is enlivened with sailing-ships, and it is easy to imagine Burghley anxiously scrutinizing his copy of the map, as the Spanish Armada menacingly proceeded eastwards up the Channel in 1588.

This map dates from 1576, and represents the last in the series of counties along the south coast. The two cartouches are exceptionally—and even excessively—prominent and exuberant, and the map gives a reasonable impression of this westernmost county, except that the north coast of the Land’s End peninsula is shown as running due east and west. It ought to run from northeast to southwest, but Saxton initiated an error which would be persistent.

This map comes from a later group of counties, and was published in 1577, when Seckford’s motto had been changed to “industria naturam ornate”: “hard work enhances nature.” This copy has been delicately tinted to bring out not only the sea and the county boundary, but also the hills around the Yorkshire border and up in Cumberland. It has to be added, though, that this delineation is very crude.

This is the general map of England and Wales, drawn in 1579 when all the constituent county maps were complete. The Newberry copy is the first state, before latitude and longitude figures had been added to the margins. Looking at the north of England, it is easy to see why the county of Yorkshire required two sheets. It would be an interesting exercise to superimpose on the general map the scaled-down outlines of the county maps, so as to discern where Saxton ran into discrepancies.

Evans, I.M. & Lawrence, H. Christopher Saxton, Elizabethan Map-Maker. London: Wakefield, 1979.

Morgan, V. “The Cartographic Image of ‘the County’ in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Soc., fifth series, 29 [1979] 129-154.

Sebock, L. Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales, M.A. Thesis, Carlton University, 1975.

Skelton, R.A. Introduction to Saxton’s Survey of England and Wales, with a Facsimile of the Wall-map of 1583. Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1974 (Imago Mundi supplement no. 6).

Tyacke, S. & Huddy, J. Christopher Saxton and Tudor Map-making. London: British Libary, 1980.