1625            NORDEN, John

 

Surprising as it may seem to us today, roads were not usually included on early maps. It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that maps become commonly used as travel aids. Previously, ‘travailers’ venturing beyond their home territory would have hired local guides, asked for directions, or followed written itineraries which listed the places through which they needed to pass.

The first county map identified to include roads was by John Norden himself on that of Middlesex, 1593. The system of a graticule was also a first and that of London in the same work bears a scale of distance, the first English map to do so. It is interesting to note that in that same year the statute mile was set in law at 1760 yards. Although it was initially only adopted around London. A bigger problem for travellers was that there was little or no information on how far it was to get from place to place. These tables addressed that within each county, but still calculation across counties was not readily available.[1]

John Norden (c1547-1625) was a peripatetic cartographer and antiquary whose most significant work was his Speculum Britanniae. The first volume of this chorography of Britain was published in 1593, beginning with a description of Middlesex. In his lifetime the only other county descriptions to be published were those of Essex, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Wight, Guernsey and Jersey. The maps of London and Westminster in the Speculum form the best representations of the metropolis under the Tudors. From 1600, Norden worked as a surveyor of crown lands, and his final publication was ‘England, an intended guide for English travellers’.[2]

 

England: An Intended Guyde, For English Travailers. Shewing in generall, how far one Citie, & many Shire-Townes in England are distant from other ... Invented & Collected, By John Norden. London 1625. (BL).

 

Illustrations courtesy of C A Burden Ltd.

A complete set of Norden triangle tables arranged in counties. Devonshire and Cornwall as examples of an individual county.[3]

 

 

 Illustrations courtesy of C A Burden Ltd (above) and Folger Shakespeare Library (below).

 

 

Norden’s work contains 40 tables comprising 37 single page counties, Yorkshire, England, and Wales all on folding leaves. His design presented a triangular table with the list of towns repeated along a horizontal row and a vertical side, the distances between the two towns being shown at the co-ordinates. These were straight line measurements; no record was made of the actual road distance. The regular counties each contained twenty-seven locations, the folding leaves contained more.

The work was published by Edward All-de son of John Allde (Edward Alday) printer,

According to C A Burden, of the known examples only 4 are complete copies (and five further substantially complete ones). The only known complete copies are 1 – British Library (G.15961), 2 – British Library (577.h.27.(1)), 3 – National Archives, Kew (Rare Books 50), 4 – C. E. Kenney Collection, sold Sotheby’s, 1965 (P).

 

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[1] Taken from the catalogue of C A Burden.

[2] Daniel Crouch in their auction catalogue.

[3] Illustrations taken from the website of the Folger Shakespeare Library and  catalogue of C A Burden.