Warwickshire Map - Further information

John Speed's map of Warwickshire 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 publishing history is common to every sheet in the atlas, but the plate itself is titled, in Speed's own wording, "The Counti of Warwick the Shire Towne and Citie of Coventre Described" — a title that already announces two features unique to this particular county map.

By the early seventeenth century Warwickshire's older pattern of ten Domesday-period hundreds had long since been consolidated into four, and it is these four divisions — Barlichway, Hemlingford, Kineton (also called Kington) and Knightlow — that the map lays out across the shire in Speed's usual colour wash, the device he used on every county sheet to show how local government and justice were parcelled out on the ground. The county is further divided by geography as much as administration: the wooded Forest of Arden fills the north-western half of the sheet, while the open, sheep-grazed Feldon country lies to the south-east across the River Avon.

Unusually for Speed, this one plate carries two town insets rather than the more usual single plan. Warwick is shown with its castle, its Chipping Market and the circuit of its town walls, at a scale close to 1:10,500 and thought to derive from a survey Speed himself carried out in the county around 1607; Coventry, named alongside Warwick in the map's own title, appears as the shire's principal market town, a reflection of its long-standing status as a city and county in its own right, separate from the shrievalty of Warwickshire proper.

The sheet is finished in the strapwork and fretwork cartouches, costumed figures and decorative scale bars typical of the atlas, and the coats of arms ranged around its border belong to the Earls of Warwick, the county's leading noble family since soon after the Conquest — Speed's usual way of tying a shire's map to the aristocratic house most associated with it.

Warwickshire's best-known legend, that of the giant-slaying knight Guy of Warwick, was closely bound up with the county and its earls in the chronicles and antiquarian writing of Speed's own time, and readers of the period would have known the tale well. Surviving descriptions of the engraved plate, however, do not confirm a pictorial scene of Guy anywhere on the map itself, so it is safest to treat the legend as part of the county's wider literary reputation in this period rather than as a confirmed image on this particular sheet.

Later seventeenth-century editions of the atlas, issued under publishers including John Sudbury and George Humble, reused the Warwickshire plate largely unaltered, so hand-coloured impressions produced across the century still carry the same twin town plans and armorial border that made the sheet distinctive from the moment it was first engraved.