Somerset Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Somerset 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 Somerset plate — titled "Somerset-Shire Described and into Hundreds devided, with the plott of the famous and most wholsom waters and citie of the Bathe" — carries a set of features that belong to it alone.

Somerset was, in Speed's day, one of the most administratively fragmented counties in England, parcelled out into several dozen hundreds rather than the ten or twelve found in most shires, and the map divides the county accordingly, with hundreds such as Bath Forum, Wells Forum, Taunton and Taunton Dean, Frome, Kilmersdon, Somerton, Whitstone and Horethorne picked out across the sheet. The county's rivers are drawn in similar detail, with the Parrett, the Avon, the Brue, the Axe and the Tone threading through the lowlands and the Somerset Levels toward the Bristol Channel.

Set into the map is an inset plan of Bath, one of the earliest printed plans of the city 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. True to the map's title, it foregrounds Bath's "wholsom waters" — the natural hot springs that had drawn visitors since Roman times and that, according to a much-repeated legend, were first discovered when the leprous prince Bladud watched his diseased pigs cured after wallowing in the warm mud, long before he supposedly founded the city.

Like most of Speed's county sheets, the Somerset plate is decorated with coats of arms belonging to local families, set around the map's borders and cartouches. Somerset also gave its name to one of the great disputed titles of the age: the dukedom of Somerset, created for the Beaufort family in the fifteenth century and revived for Edward Seymour, Lord Protector to the young Edward VI, before his execution in 1552 saw it forfeited. The title was still dormant when Speed's plate was engraved around 1610 — the very year in which the young William Seymour, heir to the disgraced Seymour line, secretly married Lady Arbella Stuart and was thrown into the Tower for it, half a century before the dukedom was finally restored to his family in 1660.

Later seventeenth-century editions of the atlas, issued under publishers including George Humble and later Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell, reused this plate largely unaltered, so surviving hand-coloured impressions still carry the same hundreds, Bath inset and heraldic embellishments that marked the Somerset sheet out from the moment it was first engraved.