Monmouthshire Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Monmouthshire appeared in his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, first published in 1611-12, with the individual plate engraved in Amsterdam by Jodocus Hondius and generally dated 1610 on the sheet itself. That publishing history is common to all of Speed's county maps, but the Monmouthshire plate carries a set of features and a story that belong to it alone.

Monmouthshire was, in cartographic terms, a comparatively new county when Speed drew it: created out of the old Marcher lordships by the Laws in Wales Act of 1535 and formally divided into six hundreds — Abergavenny, Caldicot, Raglan, Skenfrith, Usk and Wentloog — by 1542, less than seventy years before this plate was engraved. Speed's map shows that division clearly, with the shire's rivers, the Wye, the Usk and the Monnow, marking its boundaries with Herefordshire and Gloucestershire as they drain toward the Severn estuary.

Set into the map is an inset plan of Monmouth itself, one of the earliest printed plans of the town and part of a set of roughly fifty English and Welsh town plans that Speed's atlas put into print for the first time anywhere. Beside it Speed placed a medallion portrait of Henry V, styled in older sources "Henry the Great," to mark the town's proudest association: Henry was born in the tower above the gatehouse of Monmouth Castle on 16 September 1386, and was known throughout his life as Henry of Monmouth. The future victor of Agincourt in 1415 was, in effect, the county town's most famous son, and Speed built that connection directly into the map rather than leaving it to the accompanying text.

As on most of Speed's county sheets, the plate is further decorated with coats of arms and strapwork ornament around its borders and title cartouche, in keeping with the engraving style Hondius brought to the whole atlas.

Later seventeenth-century editions of the atlas, issued under publishers including George Humble and, from 1676, Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell, reused this plate largely unaltered, so surviving hand-coloured impressions still carry the same Monmouth inset and Henry V medallion that made the sheet distinctive from the moment it was first engraved.