Devon Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Devon appeared in his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, first published in 1611-12 — though, unusually for the atlas, this particular plate does not carry Jodocus Hondius's signature, leading some cataloguers to credit its engraving to Renold Elstracke instead. Whatever hand cut the copper, the finished sheet is generally reckoned one of the finest of all Speed's county maps, rich in local names and decorative detail.

Set into the lower right corner is an inset plan of Exeter, showing its streets, walls, gates, churches and the quays along the River Exe — one of the earliest detailed town plans of the city in print, though, unlike Speed's own survey of Winchester, this Exeter plan was adapted from an existing continental source, Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg's great city atlas published in Cologne in the 1580s.

Down the side of the map run two rows of heraldic shields for families associated with the titles of Devon and Exeter, among them Beaufort, Courtenay, Stafford and Cecil. The Courtenay name dominates that history: the earldom of Devon had first been created for Baldwin de Redvers in the twelfth century, passed to the Courtenay family by marriage in 1335, and was held by them, with interruptions caused by forfeiture during the Wars of the Roses, for generations afterwards at their seat of Powderham; Humphrey Stafford held the title only briefly in 1469 before his execution, and in the years immediately before Speed's atlas was published the earldom had been revived twice more in short order, for Charles Blount in 1603 and William Cavendish in 1606, making the Devon earldom one of the most frequently re-created titles in the English peerage.

The map's geography is built around Devon's rivers and its great moors, with the Tamar marking the county's western boundary against Cornwall. A well-documented quirk of the plate is an engraving error that places part of Mount Edgcumbe, close to Plymouth, on the Cornish side of the Tamar rather than the Devon side where it properly belongs — an error Speed's own Cornwall map does not repeat, suggesting the Devon plate was prepared first and the mistake caught only afterwards.

The county's principal towns, Exeter, Plymouth, Barnstaple, Totnes and Dartmouth among them, are all marked across the sheet, and the map's reverse carried Speed's own historical account of Devonshire, covering its ancient name, its commerce and its antiquities. Later seventeenth-century editions of the atlas, issued under publishers including George Humble, reused the plate with little change, so hand-coloured impressions still carry the same Exeter plan and armorial border that made the Devon sheet one of the atlas's most admired county maps.