Durham Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Durham 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 dated 1610 on the sheet itself. That publishing history is common to all of Speed's county maps, but Durham's plate describes a county unlike any other in England — one ruled not by a sheriff answering to an earl, but by a bishop with the powers of a king.

The map's title, "The Bishoprick and Citie of Durham," announces this at once. From the eleventh century onward, the Bishops of Durham held palatine authority over the county: they could raise their own army, run their own courts and exchequer, appoint their own judges and even mint their own coinage, privileges that survived largely intact right up to Speed's day — William James was bishop from 1606 to 1617, spanning the map's engraving and first publication. The bishops' arms traditionally combined the mitre and crozier of their spiritual office with a coronet and sword, a visible reminder that the office carried temporal as well as ecclesiastical power; several coats of arms appear worked into the borders of Speed's plate, in keeping with this dual identity, alongside the compass rose and decorative strapwork typical of his county sheets.

Durham is shown divided not into hundreds but into its four ancient wards — Chester(-le-Street), Darlington, Easington and Stockton — a division already in place by the thirteenth century, each ward historically having its own coroner and its own three-weekly court in place of the hundred courts found across most of England.

Set into the map is a plan of the city of Durham itself, one of the roughly fifty English and Welsh town plans Speed's atlas introduced into print for the first time, showing the cathedral and castle standing together on their promontory within the loop of the River Wear.

The county's defining medieval battle, though not depicted as a vignette on Speed's plate in the way Herefordshire's Mortimer's Cross is, lay only half a mile from the city: at Neville's Cross in 1346, an English force under Ralph Neville routed an invading Scottish army and captured King David II himself, a victory credited at the time to the intercession of St Cuthbert, whose shrine in Durham Cathedral had long made the bishopric a "haliwerfolc," a people under the saint's own protection.

Later 17th-century editions of the atlas, issued under publishers including Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell, reused the plate largely unaltered, so surviving impressions of the Durham sheet still carry the same ward divisions and palatine heraldry that marked out England's one true prince-bishopric.