Maps of Oxfordshire to 1800
The early history of printed maps of England is largely the history of county atlases. Most maps were published in atlases, and atlases of the country were divided by county. Some of the best known maps of Oxfordshire are shown here to illustrate the development of county mapping over the centuries.
Christopher Saxton started things off with the publication in 1579 of his atlas of England and Wales. This generally had one county per page, and this pattern was followed for many years.
Saxton’s maps were essentially a national survey, produced with support and endorsement (though not funding) from the Crown. Oxfordshire is one of the counties that shared a map, appearing on the same sheet with Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. The maps have fairly basic information, showing towns, hills, rivers, forests and boundaries; roads are not included. But they were an enormous step forward; by far the most detailed, systematic survey of the country ever then made. They are beautiful, with decorative borders, cartouches and coats of arms.
Maps were printed from copper plates, and the plates themselves often had long and complex histories, changing hands many times with amendments, updates and changes to the publisher’s name. Saxton’s plates were reused for nearly 150 years, with the last recorded printing being made in the 1740s.
This is Saxton's map of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire taken from an atlas of around 1590. You can see a higher resolution image here
Meanwhile, another major county atlas of the country was published by John Speed in 1612, The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine. Speed was a historian as well as a cartographer, and many of his well-designed maps feature pictures of antiquities and historical events. His map of Oxfordshire (now on a sheet of its own) has a formal design with coats of arms of Oxford colleges in the borders, academics in grand, fur trimmed gowns measuring the earth, and a small but accurate plan of the city. He was open about the fact that both maps and accompanying commentary were often borrowed from other sources; in the case of Oxfordshire, the mapping was derived largely from Saxton. Roads are still not included.
You can see a higher resolution image of Speed's map of Oxfordshire here .
In the 1650s the Dutch cartographer Jan Janssen produced this beautiful map of the county as part of his Novus Atlas. The map was largely copied from Speed. It shows lovely (if rather exaggerated) Cotswold and Chiltern hills, charming cherubs frolicking around the college coats of arms, and academics in gowns and caps with surveying equipment (assisted by another cherub).
Cherubs also feature on Dr Robert Plot’s map of the county, published in 1677 to accompany his highly-regarded work, The natural history of Oxfordshire. Plot intended to publish a series of volumes covering the counties of England, but only managed Oxfordshire and Staffordshire. The map shows features of historical interest; roads are shown only if they are historically significant, such as Akeman Street, an ancient Roman road. Major earthworks such as Grim’s Ditch in South Oxfordshire are included. Settlements (with tiny drawings of houses or churches) hills, forests, hunting parks and rivers are all shown. Many of the gentry whose coats of arms appear in the borders have their houses shown on the map. The map was engraved by Michael Burghers.
The grand plan to publish a series of works covering every county is a recurring theme in county mapping, although such schemes often foundered for lack of time or funds after the first two or three had been produced. Such had been the case a century earlier when John Norden planned to map all the counties of Britain, but only a few were published, mainly for the counties around London and sadly not reaching Oxfordshire.
The big development in late seventeenth century mapping was the addition of roads. Strange as it may seem to us now, the idea of including roads on maps, or using maps for route planning, is a relatively recent one. In 1675 John Ogilby published his Britannia, a brilliantly innovative work that showed the routes between major towns as strip maps; this enabled him to show roads in considerable detail without wasting space on the areas between them. Ogilby did not base his maps around the county unit; his focus was travel based and practical. It is possible to extrapolate from this to the modern road atlas which we use for journey planning (or did before we had Satnav). The landscape began to be portrayed as a whole to travel through rather than a succession of discrete units.
Extract from John Ogilby's Britannia, 1675
The extract above shows part of the road from London to Aberystwyth as it passes through Oxford. Ogilby’s maps were unsurprisingly popular, and were shamelessly plagiarized by many others, and later versions of his work abound, sometimes reduced to a more portable format . County maps now started to include roads amongst the other information.
John Seller's Map of Oxfordshire with the roads, seen here, was published in 1680.
By the eighteenth century, there is further evidence of new surveys being carried out. This map was published by Philip Overton and Thomas Bowles in 1715, probably based on surveys by John Oliver for an atlas that was never completed; the map continued to be reprinted as a separate sheet for decades. It includes illustrations of some of the architectural wonders of the county, including what are now parts of the Bodleian Library and a mosaic pavement near Woodstock.
Increasing numbers of maps were also published in periodicals such as the London Magazine. Often it was possible for subscribers to amass a complete set for the whole country. Although less detailed, they raised geographical knowledge and widened access to maps amongst the general population.
By the late 18th century county maps had moved to a new phase. Maps of many counties were produced at much larger scales. This was partly due to an incentive offered by the Royal Society of Arts, who offered a prize for county maps at a scale of over one inch to a mile (1:63,360).
A beautiful map of Oxfordshire on 16 sheets (with a reduction to use as a guide to the sheet layout) was produced by the highly esteemed cartographer Richard Davis of Lewknor. The map was published in London by John Cary in 1797 and showed Oxfordshire in unprecedented detail, at a scale of around 1:31,680 or 2 inches to a mile.
This is the reduced sheet, which could be used as an index to the full map.
The sheet shown here, taken from the Davis map, illustrates an interesting feature of many English counties. Counties had detached portions – enclaves within other counties – which had been separate for centuries, generally for reasons relating to land ownership. In this case we see a small part of Oxfordshire within Gloucestershire. These were rationalized in the mid-nineteenth century.
This extract shows how much detail was portrayed, including the layouts of villages and fields.
The eagle-eyed may already have spotted that Oxfordshire was smaller in the past than it is now; the county now extends to the south of the River Thames, covering parts of what was historically Berkshire, and has done since 1974. As towns spread it was often necessary to rationalize county boundaries; parts of Oxford quite close to the city centre were actually in Berkshire until then. Meanwhile Caversham, originally a separate village but now absorbed as a suburb of Reading, was in Oxfordshire. It is now part of Berkshire along with the rest of Reading, which makes more sense even though it is on the other side of the river from Reading centre.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ordnance Survey had begun its systematic survey of the country, starting at the south coast and moving north. Mapping on a rationalised sheet system rather than county by county, they reached Oxfordshire by the mid-1830s. Although county maps and atlases continued to be produced, the emphasis gradually shifted away from them as mapping became more practical, though perhaps less beautiful.
