Oxfordshire Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Oxfordshire 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. That background is shared with every county sheet in the atlas, but the Oxfordshire plate stands apart from the rest of the volume, since much of its decoration is given over not to a noble family but to a university.

The map's own title makes the emphasis explicit: "Oxfordshire Described with the Citie and the Armes of the Colledges of the Famous University." A large inset plan of Oxford occupies one corner of the sheet, one of the earliest printed street plans of the city, keyed to its principal buildings; at the foot of the map two robed scholars stand either side of a globe, an allegorical pairing of learning and geography that appears on no other county plate in the atlas.

Down both side borders of the sheet run the shields of the Oxford colleges, some eighteen in number and coloured according to Speed's standard heraldic scheme, so that a reader could tell azure from gules on an uncoloured impression without ever seeing the original paint. Together they amount to a small printed roll-call of the university's constituent colleges as they stood in the early 1600s, from medieval foundations such as Balliol and Corpus Christi to the newer, Elizabethan college of Trinity.

The county itself is divided, as on every sheet in the atlas, into its historic hundreds — among them Bampton, Banbury, Binfield, Bloxham, Bullingdon, Chadlington, Dorchester, Ewelme, Langtree, Lewknor, Ploughley, Pyrton, Thame and Wootton — each picked out in its own colour wash so the pattern of local jurisdiction across the shire could be read at a glance. The Thames, known locally around Oxford as the Isis, and its tributary the Cherwell are drawn threading between them, meeting at the city the inset plan sets out in such detail.

A further coat of arms is set in the upper corner of the sheet, in keeping with Speed's habit of opening each county plate with an emblem of authority above the working map beneath it, and the whole is drawn together with the strapwork cartouche and decorative border typical of the atlas as a whole.

Later editions of the atlas, produced under Sudbury and Humble and, later in the century, under Bassett and Chiswell, reprinted the plate with its college arms and Oxford inset intact, so that surviving hand-coloured impressions from throughout the 1600s still preserve this one county map's distinctive tribute to the university at its centre.