Hereford Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Herefordshire 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 Herefordshire plate carries a set of features and a story that belong to it alone.

The map is framed by an elaborate strapwork title cartouche flanked by two figures, a decorative convention Speed used to dress up what was, underneath, a working document of local administration: Herefordshire is shown divided into its eleven historic hundreds — Broxash, Ewyas Lacy, Greytree, Grimsworth, Huntington, Radlow, Stretford, Webtree, Wigmore, Wolphy and Wormelow — each picked out in a different colour wash so a reader could see at a glance how the shire's government and justice were parcelled out on the ground. The county's river system is drawn in close detail too, with the Wye threading through the middle of the sheet and its tributaries, the Lugg, the Frome and the Monnow, marking out the fertile lowlands and the Welsh border to the west.

Set into the corner of the map is an inset plan of Hereford itself, one of the earliest printed views 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. It shows the walled city clustered around its cathedral and castle, with the crossing of the Wye that had made Hereford a strategic and commercial centre since Saxon times.

Around the map's borders sit six shields of arms belonging to the men who had held the earldom of Hereford — a title first created for William FitzOsbern after the Norman Conquest, and held for over a century afterwards by the de Bohun family, until the last de Bohun heiress, Mary, married the future Henry IV and the earldom was absorbed into the crown. Speed set out that whole line of succession in miniature, turning the map's margin into a short heraldic history of the county's ruling family.

The map's single most arresting decoration, though, is its vignette of the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, fought only a few miles from Hereford on 2 February 1461. Before the fighting began, the Yorkist commander Edward, Earl of March, is said to have seen three suns appear together in the morning sky — a parhelion, caused by ice crystals refracting sunlight — and rather than let it unsettle his men, he told them it stood for the Holy Trinity and promised victory. His army went on to rout a Lancastrian force that included Owen Tudor, and Edward later adopted the "sun in splendour" as one of his personal badges once he became Edward IV. The battle's aftermath played out in Hereford itself: Owen Tudor was captured and beheaded in the city's market place two days later, his head displayed on the market cross. He was the grandfather of Henry VII, so the events Speed chose to illustrate on this one county map connect directly to the founding of the Tudor dynasty — and to the very town shown in the map's own inset plan.

Later 17th-century editions of the atlas, issued under publishers including George Humble, reused these plates largely unaltered, so surviving hand-coloured impressions still carry the same cartouche, arms and battle scene that made the Herefordshire sheet distinctive from the moment it was first engraved.