Worcestershire Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Worcestershire 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 Worcestershire plate — titled "Worcestershire Described" — carries a set of features that belong to it alone.

Worcestershire's ancient hundreds were unusually numerous and irregular even by the standards of English local government, the product of estates carved out for the cathedral priory of Worcester and neighbouring religious houses over many centuries; Speed's map shows the shire divided accordingly, with hundreds including Oswaldslow — named for St Oswald and centred on the city itself — alongside Doddingtree, Halfshire, Blackenhurst and Pershore. The River Severn runs the length of the sheet from north to south, joined by the Avon and the Teme, marking out the fertile, orchard-rich lowlands for which the county was already known in Speed's day.

Set into the map is a large inset plan of Worcester, one of the earliest printed plans of the cathedral 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. It shows the city clustered along the Severn around its cathedral, a site of worship since Anglo-Saxon times and the burial place of King John.

The plate carries multiple coats of arms around its borders, in keeping with Speed's practice of dressing up his working maps with the heraldry of locally connected noble families. The earldom of Worcester itself had been created five times over the centuries, passing through the Beaumont, Percy, Beauchamp and Tiptoft families before settling in 1514 on Charles Somerset, whose descendants held the title — and went on to become Marquesses of Worcester and Dukes of Beaufort — for generations afterward; the shields on Speed's plate are generally taken to allude to this succession.

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 hundreds, Worcester inset and heraldic embellishments that made the Worcestershire sheet distinctive from the moment it was first engraved.