55 Colonial Cartography in a European Setting: The Case of ... · • Colonial Cartography in a European Setting: The Case of Tudor Ireland J. H. Andrews 1670 state of rebellion

Many continental European mapmakers of the sixteenthcentury found it expedient to enclose what they called the“British Isles” within a single border, as Ptolemy was re-puted to have done. When English contemporariesadopted the same format, it was more in observance ofinternational custom than to express their own (not yetvery vigorous) colonial ambitions.1 There is admittedlymuch to be seen on sixteenth-century maps of Ireland thata modern historian can recognize as essentially colonialin character and origin, but a Tudor Englishman wasmore likely to see Ireland as a law unto itself than as anykind of political stereotype; and if he was a cartographerhe would probably choose to wrestle with its peculiaritieson a separate sheet. They were certainly unlike the para-meters he was familiar with at home. In the first place,there was no ready-made Irish source deserving the re-spect paid to the Gough map of fourteenth-century En-gland.2 For the Anglo-Norman conquerors in Ireland, theinstitutions of feudalism had made a map-using bureau-cracy superfluous; then feudalism gave way to anarchy,and anarchy needs no maps. Meanwhile the native Irishfor their part had always known their homeland by per-sonal acquaintance as well as they wished to know it; andoutside the ambit of officialdom both communities hadmanaged their agriculture without estate plans and theirtrade without charts throughout the Middle Ages. Me-dieval Ireland was a cartographic desert.3

Under the early Tudors the main hope for better mapsof Ireland lay with the “old English” inhabitants of theregion in and around Dublin known as the Pale. ThePalesmen took a rueful interest in Ireland’s history and incertain aspects of its geography (though some of themimagined it to be shaped like an egg)4 but no ThomasSeckford, Humphrey Lhuyd, or John Norden seemedlikely to emerge from their meager ranks. Small though itwas, the country still proved more than a match for car-tographic private enterprise. Its physiography and hy-drography were frustratingly complicated. Its climate wasunfriendly to field work. Its roads held little comfort forthe traveler, and much of the north and west were with-out urban amenities. The native language was impenetra-ble to visitors, and many of those who spoke it were in a

55 • Colonial Cartography in a European Setting: The Case of Tudor Ireland

J. H. Andrews

1670

state of rebellion. In such circumstances no foreign car-tographer could be blamed for making do with second-hand information, however bad.

The best-known secondhand source was Ptolemy,whose fifty-odd Irish place-names and other inscriptionscould still make a brave show on a small scale despite be-ing incomprehensible to all sixteenth-century readers, in-cluding classical scholars and Irishmen.5 Among medievalauthorities the most popular was Giraldus Cambrensis,who had accompanied the earliest Anglo-Norman con-querors to Ireland. Maps are lacking in most manuscriptsof Giraldus’s “Topographia Hiberniae,” but several of his written geographical statements and mis-statementscould have been expressed in diagrammatic form.6 Fi-

Abbreviations used in this chapter include: TNA for The NationalArchives of the UK, Kew.

1. The Tudor kings and queens of England were lords of Ireland, and,after 1541, kings or queens of Ireland. They governed the country, orattempted to do so, through the medium of an executive, judiciary, andlegislature based in Dublin.

2. For the influence of the Gough map on sixteenth-century cartogra-phers, see Sarah Tyacke and John Huddy, Christopher Saxton and Tu-dor Map-Making (London: British Library Reference Division, 1980), 7.

3. This also appears to be the opinion of P. D. A. Harvey in The His-tory of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London:Thames and Hudson, 1980), 86.

4. Edmund Campion, A Historie of Ireland Written in the Yeare1571, reprinted in Ancient Irish Histories: The Works of Spencer, Cam-pion, Hanmer, and Marleburrough, 2 vols., ed. James Ware (Dublin: Hi-bernia Press, 1809), 1:1.

5. Goddard H. Orpen, “Ptolemy’s Map of Ireland,” Journal of theRoyal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 24 (1894): 115–28, and EoinMacNeill, “Ireland According to Ptolemy and Other Non-Irish Au-thorities,” New Ireland Review 26 (1906): 6 –15. Hardly any ofPtolemy’s names are recognizable in modern Irish geographical nomen-clature.

6. Certain manuscripts of Giraldus’s “Topographia” include a map ofthe British Isles (Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Con-quest of Ireland, ed. and trans. A. Brian Scott and F. X. Martin [Dublin:Royal Irish Academy, 1978], lv). It is devoid of interior detail and wasdescribed by an eighteenth-century writer as “those two blots which Gi-raldus Cambrensis calls England and Ireland” (Gwyn Walters, “RichardGough’s Map Collecting for the British Topography, 1780,” Map Col-lector 2 [1978]: 26 –29, esp. 27). The manuscript of the “Topographia”in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin (MS. 700), includes a map ofwestern Europe, reproduced in John J. O’Meara, trans., The First Ver-

Colonial Cartography in a European Setting: The Case of Tudor Ireland 1671

nally, and spanning both late-medieval and postmedievalperiods, there were the portolan charts, which collectivelyyield another 150 or so names of Irish ports and harborsand a fairly plausible coastline, but which left the hinter-land empty and showed no sign of keeping up withsixteenth-century developments.7

The Political Background

To blanket the interior of Ireland with reliable informa-tion required the full power of a modern state. Whatbrought that power into being was the English politi-cians’ abandonment of feudal devolution. What broughtit into use were the physical and mental barriers thatseparated Ireland from a foreign government fully con-scious of its geographical ignorance and anxious to learnmore. The one fact about Ireland that no administra-tor needed reminding of was its disunity. Outside theshrunken east-coast enclave of the Pale there were dozensof regional chiefs or “captains” (whether of Gaelic orAnglo-Norman origin no longer made much difference)who waged limited but almost continuous war againstone another and against the English authorities. The gov-ernment’s program for these territorial interests was es-sentially opportunist, different policies alternating withno attempt at short-term consistency and very little long-term success. An Irish leader might be left to himself inreturn for keeping quiet. He might be brought into somekind of neofeudal relation with the crown. He might bemade to accept a new pattern of local government com-prising English-style sheriffs and shire towns. The moreradical the policy, the harder it was to enforce withoutfirst deploying troops, establishing forts and garrisons,and even trying to anglicize country and people throughan infusion of new settlers. By 1600 there were more gen-uine Englishmen in Ireland than in 1500, and most of thecountry had been divided into shires. But many of theEnglishmen were soldiers, and many of the shires had noreality except on paper. The most that could be claimedafter a hundred years of anxiety was that Ireland had es-caped successful invasion from Catholic Europe, just asmost of it had also escaped the attention of continentalsurveyors. Only in the opening years of the seventeenthcentury were the last citadels of native power broughtprecariously under government control.

The agents of English rule were a small official class inDublin, headed by the lord deputy or lord lieutenant andlater assisted by subordinate establishments for the prov-inces of Munster and Connaught. Much of our evidencefor Tudor cartography in Ireland comes from the flow ofinformation, explanation, and recrimination that keptthese hard-pressed public servants in touch with the PrivyCouncil in London. A modern reader of their correspon-

dence will find an obvious role for maps in assessing po-litical and military danger, in planning diplomatic ini-tiatives, in directing the movement of troops and thelocation of garrisons, in regulating the seizure and reallot-ment of confiscated land, and in justifying expenditure onfortifications and public works. But this does not meanthat the relevant maps were always commissioned, letalone supplied. Throughout the period, the incidence ofcartographic sophistication among the ruling class con-tinued to depend on personal psychology and life history,and there were always administrators who preferred toget their geography from written descriptions or the nar-ratives of official journeys. As experience accumulated,however, and especially after about 1540, there was ageneral intensification of map-consciousness—fastest, wemay suspect, among Anglo-Irishmen with direct experi-ence of Europe or the New World.

Maps and the Administrator

Cartographically, as with the rest of their administra-tion, Ireland’s governors spent most of the sixteenth cen-tury living from hand to mouth. The results are abun-dantly represented in contemporary state papers. Yet evenamong men with no pretensions to geographical scholar-ship official maps were often seen to have a value beyondthe immediate circumstances of their time. Many mapswere therefore withdrawn from the archival mainstreamto form separate collections—not necessarily improvingtheir chances of preservation, and sometimes deprivingfuture historians of important contextual knowledge.8

sion of the Topography of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis (Dundalk:Dundalgan Press, 1951); this map includes eight Irish names, which areonly a fraction of the number mentioned in Giraldus’s text. See ThomasO’Loughlin, “An Early Thirteenth-Century Map in Dublin: A Windowinto the World of Giraldus Cambrensis,” Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 24 –38.

7. Thomas Johnson Westropp, “Early Italian Maps of Ireland from1300 to 1600, with Notes on Foreign Settlers and Trade,” Proceedingsof the Royal Irish Academy 30, sec. C (1912–13): 361– 428, andMichael C. Andrews, “The Map of Ireland: A.D. 1300–1700,” Pro-ceedings and Reports of the Belfast Natural History and PhilosophicalSociety for the Session 1922–23 (1924): 9–33, esp. 16 –23.

8. The best guide to English maps of Ireland at this period is stillRobert Dunlop, “Sixteenth-Century Maps of Ireland,” English Histor-ical Review 20 (1905): 309–37, which strictly observes its terminal dateof 1600. For more detailed studies of individual collections, see p. 1672,notes 10 and 11. Two important collections have come to light sinceDunlop wrote: the Bowlby maps in the National Library of Ireland,Dublin (p. 1682, note 44); and the Dartmouth maps in the National Mar-itime Museum, London (p. 1681, notes 38 and 41), of which the onlyprinted description is Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books, ImportantManuscript Maps, Autograph Letters, Historical Documents, Etc. . . .Which Will be Sold by Auction by Messrs. Sotheby and Co. on Mon-day, the 8th March, 1948, and Two Following Days (London: Sotheby,1948). The most striking deficiencies are the lack of any royal collection

1672 State Contexts of Renaissance Mapping

The general impression from extant maps and referencesto maps is that on the Irish side few lord deputies tookthe cartographic initiative. They had no permanent staffof mapmakers indoors or outdoors. (The functions of theIrish surveyor-general, first appointed in 1548, were asyet almost entirely inquisitorial.)9 Nor did they generallykeep their own copies of maps dispatched to London: pre-sumably the deputy and his staff were content with thekind of “anecdotal” geography obtainable by word ofmouth in Dublin.

The English map archives seem to have been equally ne-glected, at least as regards Ireland, until Sir William Cecil,later Lord Burghley, began his forty-year stint as QueenElizabeth’s most trusted counselor. Cecil was the onlybegetter of many an Irish map. From his own statements,from those of his cross-channel correspondents, and fromhis own personally annotated maps, a whole cartographicphilosophy can be elicited—if philosophy is the rightword for an attitude that any present-day historian mustfind disappointingly pragmatic and unpremeditated.10

Broadly speaking, an Irish map drawn for the queen’s sec-retary was expected to show the location of some particu-lar crisis (typically a rebellion or dynastic quarrel) and tobe supplied without delay by an author personally famil-iar with that location. As Cecil soon came to realize, thisemphasis on first-hand knowledge eliminated virtually theentire output of even the most famous continental mappublishers. More importantly, and more regrettably, hisinsistence on quick results gave no guarantee that the nextmap would be any better than the last. It was doubtless forthis reason that he often chose to hedge his bets by exam-ining old as well as new maps of each recurrent troublespot. In the same spirit of impartiality, he preferred not toanticipate the modern historian’s view of “the” map as anorganism that responds to successive geographical stimulithrough the medium of editorial synthesis. Cecil’s collec-tion was the raw material for a finished product that hehimself did nothing to bring into existence; and to judgefrom another set of Irish maps assembled by Sir GeorgeCarew,11 Cecil was by no means the only empiricist amongthe government’s map users.

Ireland’s Cartographic Personality

Most of the cartographers represented in Cecil’s andCarew’s Irish collections were soldiers or other public em-ployees who happened to be in Ireland when a demand formaps arose. Their abilities and antecedents varied widely.But to make a map at all they almost certainly had to bemen of “new English” background, with no deep roots inIreland and probably no desire to stay there; hence the lackof any recognizably Irish “school” among Tudor map-makers. To a Dublin cartographer of this period, Englandwas probably a more familiar sight on maps than Ireland.

Stylistic novelties, like the scripts and symbols inspired byAbraham Ortelius and Christopher Saxton, were quick tocross the Irish Sea. The only sign of a Dublin idiosyncrasyreadily attributable to imitation (rather than to a sharedstate of ignorance and amateurism) was the habit ofputting east at the bottom of a map, and this orientationmust have come so naturally to Englishmen studying Ire-land that they may not have needed an exemplar.12 Othertraits are even more clearly related to environmental con-ditions. The absence of latitude and longitude and otherscientific refinements from almost all official maps ofIreland was consistent with Cecil’s cartographic anti-academicism, and a general roughness of execution be-trays the embattled mapmaker’s need for haste, as well asa chronic shortage of good instruments and good copyiststhat was inevitable in an undeveloped country.

As for subject matter, Ireland’s political fragmentationand the English response to it explain the comparativerarity of official maps showing the whole country, just asthe superficiality of the shiring process stands revealed ina notable dearth of Irish county maps.13 The most com-

of Irish maps from this period and of any collection known to have beenformed in Ireland.

9. J. H. Andrews, Plantation Acres: An Historical Study of the IrishLand Surveyor and His Maps (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation,1985), 19–21.

10. R. A. Skelton and John Newenham Summerson, A Description ofMaps and Architectural Drawings in the Collection Made by WilliamCecil, First Baron Burghley, Now at Hatfield House (Oxford: Rox-burghe Club, 1971), 25–28.

11. Sir George Carew was master-general of the ordnance in Irelandfrom 1588 to 1592 and lord president of Munster from 1600 to 1603.He is known to have collected more than a hundred maps and atlasesof Ireland or parts of Ireland, but most of these were not acquired untilafter his retirement from full-time office, when his motives as a collec-tor had become historiographical rather than practical. Some of his ac-quisitions were original maps obtained from existing repositories, somewere copies made especially for Carew himself, and some were associ-ated with official inquiries into Irish affairs on which he was briefly em-ployed in 1611 and 1625. Like Cecil, Carew made no serious attemptto use his collection as a source for new synthetic maps. See WilliamO’Sullivan, “George Carew’s Irish Maps,” Long Room (Bulletin of theFriends of the Library, Trinity College, Dublin) 26 –27 (1983): 15–25,and J. H. Andrews, “The Irish Maps of Lord Carew: An Exhibition inthe Library of Trinity College, Dublin,” unpublished typescript, n.d.[1983], Department of Manuscripts, Trinity College, Dublin.

12. With east at the bottom, Dublin, the Englishman’s point of entryto Ireland, is the point on the map nearest him. Of ninety-five maps ofIreland or parts of Ireland from the period 1520–1605, forty-nine havewest at the top, thirty-one north, nine south, five east, and one south-west. This reckoning excludes duplicates and close copies, maps of ar-eas larger than Ireland, town plans, and fort plans. Sets of provincialmaps are counted as single maps.

13. The local government divisions of Tudor Ireland formed a nestedseries comprising (from smallest to largest) parishes, baronies, shires orcounties, and provinces. The Irish provinces were descended from pre-Norman kingdoms: only two of them had separate organs of govern-ment in the Tudor period—Connaught (from 1569) and Munster (from1571).


mon units of geographical discourse were the fourprovinces of Munster, Ulster, Leinster, and Connaught (inthat order; see table 55.1), and within them the numerous“countries” of native tradition. The best surveyors notedmajor tactical features, such as hills, forests, rivers, lakes,and bogs, together with the “passes” that led throughthese barriers (elsewhere, as in Elizabethan England,roads were evidently considered too commonplace toneed mapping), and defensible buildings like stone castlesand churches invariably took precedence over the flimsythatch-roofed cabins of the populace. Most expressiveof Irish preoccupations was the care lavished on territor-ial divisions and dominant families. The latter were espe-cially puzzling to non-Irish copyists of Irish maps, whowould sometimes invent the towns that they thoughtmust have been denoted by such names as “O’Neill” and“Magennis.” Despite the government’s intentions, thelandscape thus portrayed was curiously static; its un-changing appearance, coupled with defective captioningin maps that were never meant to be published, makesthe work of many Anglo-Irish cartographers difficult todate even in terms of whole decades. One more general-ization about English maps of Ireland seems not incon-sistent with the hypothesis of official skepticism and in-souciance proposed above, although admittedly leadingin a different direction. Some recent writers have castdoubt on the theory that “as civilization improves somap-making also progresses.”14 In sixteenth-century Ire-land this theory was half true: while civilization failedto improve, mapmaking did progress, and a cartographerof 1500 would surely have preferred the maps of 1600 tohis own.

The Earliest Official Maps

The first phase begins in 1526 with the earliest known useof maps by an Anglo-Irish administrator. The official inquestion complained that the English Pale had shrunk toa mere four counties, “as by the platt may appear,” com-pared with seven turbulent counties abutting on to it.15

The plat in question can no longer be identified, but mostof the same counties appear on an undated sketch from theCotton collection in which three river basins and their as-sociated towns, all in the east and southeast, are made tofill nearly the whole of an egg-shaped Ireland (fig. 55.1).So low a standard of accuracy seems almost by itself to dis-prove the existence of any earlier Anglo-Irish cartographictradition, unless that tradition included a habit of grosslychanging scales within the same map.

Like many of its Irish successors, the Cotton map hasmuch to say about proprietorship, and a number of thecastles shown on it were stated to belong to the semi-independent Earl of Kildare. It was the defeat of this pow-erful magnate in 1534 that faced the English governmentwith its first major postmedieval challenge. Over a periodof several years the king’s deputy made long journeysthrough Leinster, Munster, and southeast Ulster strivingto impose a new political equilibrium, assisted, as weremost subsequent deputies, by a growing number of officersimported from England. Among the latter was a new mas-ter of the ordnance, John Travers. Gunnery and mapmak-ing have often been connected, and it may be no accidentthat in 1540 King Henry VIII began referring to maps ofIreland not long after a visit from Travers,16 especially asthe latter is thought to have drawn a map of Irish ports andharbors three years later.17 None of Travers’s work ap-pears to survive, but presumably the government’s hard-won knowledge had reduced the image of the Pale to bet-ter proportions; it may also have brought a new familiaritywith the River Shannon, and a discrediting of the “egg”analogy among practical men if not among scholars.These improvements can be found on a manuscript sketchof Ireland that TNA dates to ca. 155818 and on another

14. Michael J. Blakemore and J. B. Harley, Concepts in the Historyof Cartography: A Review and Perspective, Monograph 26, Carto-graphica 17, no. 4 (1980): 17–23.

15. In Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of HenryVIII, 2d ed., 21 vols. in 37, ed. J. S. Brewer et al. (Reprinted Vaduz:Kraus, 1965), 4:1077.

16. Henry VIII to the Earl of Ormond, 26 September 1540, in Let-ters and Papers, 16:23, and Council in Ireland to Lord ThomasCromwell, 14 March 1540, and Henry VIII to Sir Anthony St. Leger,26 September 1540, both in State Papers, Published under the Author-ity of His Majesty’s Commission: King Henry the Eighth, 11 vols. (Lon-don, 1830–52), 3:192 and 245.

17. Lord deputy and council to Henry VIII, 15 May 1543, in StatePapers, 3:458–59.

18. TNA, MPF 72. Dunlop, “Sixteenth-Century Maps,” 310, mis-takenly describes this map as a copy of the Ireland by Sebastiano di Re

Table 55.1. Tudor and Early Stuart Maps of Irelandand Parts of Ireland

Number of Extant Maps

Compilation Munster Ulster Leinster Con- IrelandDate naught

Before 1560 0 0 0 0 21560–69 1 6 4 0 81570–79 2 2 2 1 31580–89 33 12 8 10 21590–99 20 25 5 6 61600–1609 31 30 5 4 6

Note: Charts, national and regional maps, and plans of towns, forts,and battles are included, but not maps of the British Isles or any largerarea. Printed maps are included once each, omitting small-scale re-ductions that add no information to a larger original by the same au-thor. Manuscript versions of a common original are included if theydiffer in content, however slightly. A few maps of uncertain date ordoubtful authenticity have been omitted, as have all maps associatedwith the Ulster plantation of 1609–10.

fig. 55.1. IRELAND IN THE 1520s OR 1530s. Apparentlythe earliest surviving map of Ireland drawn wholly frompostmedieval sources, depicting a geopolitical situation thatwas still essentially medieval, with Leinster and East Munsterperceived as covering almost the whole island and the king’s

power challenged by territorial magnates like the Earl of Kil-dare. Shown here with north at the top.Size of the original: ca. 70 � 48 cm. Photograph courtesy ofthe BL (Cotton MS. Aug. I.ii.21).


map, now lost, which left traces in several continentalpublications, including Gerardus Mercator’s Europe of1554.19

Traveling and war-making continued to absorb the en-ergy of lord deputies before and after the accession ofQueen Elizabeth I, with cartographic results that seemimplicit in two independent references, of 1552 and1561, to groups of widely separated geographical features(different in each case) that were each said to lie on astraight line.20 Such precision would have been impossi-ble without maps—better maps than any that survivefrom this period; among them, no doubt, the map of Ire-land known to have been presented to the queen by oneof the most cartographically minded deputies of her reign, the Earl of Sussex.21 Politically, Sussex faced newthreats from the O’Neills of Ulster and, behind them,from the clansmen of western Scotland. Cartographically,his deputyship was a time of convergent advance. Hith-erto, maps of interior Ireland had looked remarkably het-erogeneous, each seeming to draw on the travels, memo-ries, and conjectures (never very extensive) of a differentauthor. Among foreign maps this dissension lasted untillate in the century. Nearer home, a family resemblancewas now beginning to show itself.

An Early Elizabethan Consensus

The maps exhibiting the new trend were those of Lau-rence Nowell (ca. 1564),22 Gerardus Mercator (1564),23

and John Goghe (1567). All give hundreds of nameswhere previous maps had been content with dozens. Insoutheastern Ireland they are as good as any map at ascale of approximately 1:1,000,000 could hope to bewithout a measured survey. Elsewhere they diverge sig-nificantly from the truth, with several common errors, asin the shapes of Lough Erne and Lough Neagh, that aretoo similar to be unrelated. Mercator’s map, Angliae Sco-tiae & Hibernie noua descriptio (Duisburg, 1564), wassaid to have come from a friend in England but includesmany exogenous (and erroneous) additions that no con-temporary Englishman would have been capable of 24—that is if we can judge from Nowell, who makes only oneeditorial mistake of the same oversophisticated kind(fig. 55.2). Goghe makes none. Startlingly mature in bothdesign and workmanship, his map breaks all the Irishrules. It is signed, dated, scaled in degrees of latitude andlongitude, and formally titled in Latin as if for an inter-national readership (fig. 55.3). Yet it is virtually free fromcombinatorial and copyist’s errors, and its names, al-though sparser than Mercator’s and Nowell’s, are chosenwith unerring discrimination. No sixteenth-century mapof Ireland derives so manifestly from inside knowledge;and sure enough, a John Gough is known to have lived in

contemporary Dublin, although there is nothing else tolink him with cartography.25

Goghe’s low-profile career can hardly have lasted verylong, but on any interpretation there is room for him tohave drawn at least one other map, for although his Ire-land is less obviously derivative than Nowell’s and Merca-tor’s it seems to stand at a slight distance from some com-mon archetype for which no more probable author can besuggested. Our only other glimpse of this joint ancestrycomes from Sussex’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Sidney, aone-time government emissary to Spain who became lorddeputy of Ireland in 1565. Although he achieved little, Sid-ney was a vigorous advocate of conquest and colonizationwho shared Cecil’s belief in maps.26 In particular, he is thefirst Irish deputy known to have tested a map in the fieldand to have made sure that his illustrious English corre-spondent had her own copy of it. This happened in 1566,

in Britanniae insulae quae nunc Angliae et Scotiae regna continet cumHibernia adiacente nova descriptio.

19. Maps derived from this source include Hibernia Insula non longeá Brita[n]nia in oceano sita est attributed to Paolo Forlani (Venice:Bolognino Zaltieri, 1566) and a map reproduced in Roberto Almagià,Monumenta cartographica Vaticana, 4 vols. (Vatican City: BibliotecaApostolica Vaticana, 1944 –55), vol. 4, pl. 1.

20. TNA, SP 61/4/13 (Sir James Croft, 1552), and BL, Cotton MS.Titus B. xii. 153 (Earl of Sussex, 1561).

21. TNA, SP 63/4/37 (19 August 1561).22. BL, Cotton MS. Domitian xviii. 101, 103. See Peter Barber, “A

Tudor Mystery: Laurence Nowell’s Map of England and Ireland,” MapCollector 22 (1983): 16 –21, and Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writ-ing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Houndmills, Eng.:Palgrave, 2001), 114 –17. For further speculative comment on Nowell’scontribution to Irish cartography, see J. H. Andrews and Rolf Loeber,“An Elizabethan Map of Leix and Offaly: Cartography, Topographyand Architecture,” in Offaly: History & Society, ed. William Nolan andTimothy P. O’Neill (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1998), 243–85.

23. Gerardus Mercator, Angliae, Scotiae & Hibernie noua descriptio(Duisburg, 1564). Walter Reinhard, Zur Entwickelung des Kartenbildesder Britischen Inseln bis auf Merkators Karte vom Jahre 1564(Zschopau: Druck von F. A. Raschke, 1909).

24. For Mercator’s English connections, see E. G. R. Taylor, TudorGeography, 1485–1583 (London: Methuen, 1930), 85–86; GerardusMercator, Correspondance Mercatorienne, ed. Maurice van Durme(Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1959), 35–36; R. A. Skelton,“Mercator and English Geography in the 16th Century,” in GerhardMercator, 1512–1594: Festschrift zum 450. Geburtstag, DuisburgerForschungen 6 (Duisburg-Ruhrort: Verlag für Wirtschaft und Kultur W.Renckhoff, 1962), 158–70, esp. 167; and Peter Barber, “The BritishIsles,” in The Mercator Atlas of Europe: Facsimile of the Maps by Ge-rardus Mercator Contained in the Atlas of Europe, circa 1570–1572,ed. Marcel Watelet (Pleasant Hill, Ore.: Walking Tree Press, 1998), 43–77. Fictitious elements in Mercator’s map of Ireland include the namesLampreston, Lough Antre, and Pontoy, which hardly ever appear on En-glish maps.

25. Dunlop, “Sixteenth-Century Maps,” 311.26. A modern assessment of Sidney is Nicholas P. Canny, The Eliza-

bethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–76 (Has-socks: Harvester Press, 1976).


when from the wilds of central Ulster he wrote of“Omagh, in your highness’ cart called Castle Thomye”and of “the old castle broken asunder mentioned as wesuppose in your majesty’s map of Ireland.”27 Omagh andOldcastle were named by Mercator and not by Goghe, butit would be acting out of national and professionalcharacter for Sidney to depend on Mercator: more prob-ably the queen’s map was a fourth version that has sincedisappeared.

In fact none of these maps was good enough for themore vigorous policy that Sidney hoped to introduce. Thefirst of his comments quoted above suggests some dissat-isfaction on the score of nomenclature; the second impliesa map content too selective to be easily matched with ex-perience. Similar reservations were evidently being felt in

London, for in 1567 the Privy Council admitted that oneof its recent locational decisions for Ulster had been gov-erned rather by “consideration of the plat of Ireland thanby any knowledge that we have of the aptness of theplace.”28 It was probably during this long Ulster crisisthat what is now the only surviving contemporary copyof Goghe’s map acquired a crop of adventitious northernplace-names, many of them written by Cecil. A few suchannotations are a tribute to a map. More than a few, andit is time for the cartographers to try again.

27. TNA, SP 63/19/43 (12 November 1566).28. TNA, SP 63/20/83 (12 May 1568).

fig. 55.2. ABRAHAM ORTELIUS, IRELAND, 1573. Basedon Gerardus Mercator’s Angliae, Scotiae & Hibernie nouadescriptio (1564), with corrections in the vicinity of BelfastLough and woods copied from a map related to those of Lau-rence Nowell. The most influential map of Ireland before thatof Robert Lythe, although in many areas inferior to those of

Laurence Nowell and John Goghe.Size of the original: 42 � 54.5 cm. Eryn, Hiberniae, Britanni-cae Insvlæ, in Theatrum orbis terrarum, by Abraham Ortelius(Antwerp: Apud A. C. Diesth, 1573), fol. 10. Photographcourtesy of the Geography and Map Division, Library of Con-gress, Washington, D.C.


The First Measured Survey

The new start was organized by Sidney almost at once.What Ireland needed now was not another compiler, how-ever adroit, but someone “skilful in the description ofcountries by measure according to the rules of cosmogra-phy”;29 and not just for the arena of proposed coloniza-tion in Ulster but also for the rest of the country, whichhad recently been brought into the news by Sidney’s planfor separate provincial administrations. His surveyor wasRobert Lythe, who spent a total of just over four years inIreland between September 1567 and November 1571.30

Compared with the Sussex era these years are well docu-mented—well enough to prove, among other things, thatnot all Lythe’s maps have survived. However, coverage at

1:500,000 or more is available for the whole extent of hisfieldwork, most of it in the midlands and south (fig. 55.4).North of a line from Killary Harbour to Strangford Loughhe was defeated by forest, lakes and bogs, and doubtlessby the hostility of the local population. For this no-go areaLythe adopted a model from the Nowell-Mercator-Goghefamily, probably preserved by Sidney for just such anoccasion.

Since the number of Lythe’s Irish place-names runs toseveral thousands (no other Elizabethan surveyor reachedfour figures) his visit must—on grounds of quantity

29. TNA, SP 63/24/29 (? May 1567).30. J. H. Andrews, “The Irish Surveys of Robert Lythe,” Imago

Mundi 19 (1965): 22–31.

fig. 55.3. JOHN GOGHE, “HIBERNIA: INSULA NONPROCUL AB ANGLIA VULGARE HIRLANDIA VOCATA,”1567. A geopolitical view of early Elizabethan Ireland basedon first-hand knowledge but not on instrumental survey. De-tail is sparse but well chosen, with special emphasis on physi-cal features and the names of dominant families. Annotations,

some by Lord Burghley, are mainly in the northeast. “B.W.”denotes the Blackwater fort, built in 1575 to command the ap-proach to the still-unconquered heartland of Ulster.Size of the original: 40.6 � 53.3 cm. Photograph courtesy ofTNA (MPF 1/68).


alone—be accounted the most important event in the car-tographic history of sixteenth-century Ireland. In much ofwest Munster he mapped the coastline from a boat, nec-essarily using instrumental methods. Elsewhere he wasgenerally accompanied by guides, perhaps sometimespicking their brains for data currently inaccessible to di-rect observation.31 The whole enterprise showed nicejudgment in adapting standards of accuracy to the exi-gencies of time and place. Only now and then within thesurvey area, notably among the mountains and sea-loughsof Connaught, did Lythe revert to earlier levels of sketch-iness. More often he stands comparison (allowing for dif-ferences of scale) with his English opposite numberChristopher Saxton. Both men chose much the same topo-graphical subject matter—coasts, rivers, hills, forests, set-tlement—except that in rural Ireland the focal points ofthe settlements were castles rather than parish churches.Lythe went further with a characteristically Irish empha-sis on territorial and family names. He also introduced hisown thematic strains. One of these, in anticipation of Eliz-abethan naval warfare, was a series of notes on the capac-

ity of Ireland’s major harbors. Other notes described its economic infrastructure, a service to the new kind of colonial entrepreneur who might also soon be readingSir Thomas Smith’s pamphlet (illustrated by a regionalmap) on a proposed plantation in County Down.32 In all these preoccupations Lythe and Sidney were at one: itwas appropriate, although coincidental, that master andservant should have left Ireland at about the same time,in 1571.

Mapping Ireland had left Lythe tired but not perma-nently unfit. He is known to have practiced later in En-gland, although the theory that he taught Saxton how tomake a national map appears to have no adherents. Helacked Saxton’s gift for finding himself in the limelight:economic and military considerations alike made anylarge-scale map of Ireland unpublishable at this time, andit may not have been until after 1585 that Lythe’s mapswere transcribed and eventually printed, always with nu-merous editorial errors and with never a mention of thereal author.33 By that time Lythe himself was either deador in retirement, or simply averse to seeing any more ofIreland. Sidney’s second deputyship of 1575–78 yields noreference to him; or, surprisingly, to Irish maps in general.Perhaps no one was on hand to make them; and indeedthe main question raised by Lythe’s unfinished master-piece was how soon would Anglo-Irish society be able tosupport its own cartographers. The trouble was that aresident cartographer prefers a quiet life, whereas afterSidney’s departure the districts that most needed mappingwere those of conflict and violence, a bias best symbolizedby the absence from all present-day archives of any re-gional map of the English Pale. The seats of disturbancecomprised almost everything beyond the Pale, althoughConnaught and Munster enjoyed some spells of peace inwhich a fast-moving surveyor might hope to produce acreditable map in time for the next outbreak.

Provincial Cartography: The West and South

The first cartographer with the ambition to make hishome in Ireland was apparently John Browne (d. 1589),who became sheriff of Mayo in 1583 and drew his earli-est maps in the same year. As the only Englishman in liv-ing memory to settle this Irish fastness it was precocious

31. J. H. Andrews, “Robert Lythe’s Petitions, 1571,” Analecta Hi-bernica 24 (1967): 232– 41.

32. BL, Harl. MS. 5938 (129). For Smith, see David B. Quinn, “SirThomas Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings of English ColonialTheory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89 (1945):543–60.

33. J. H. Andrews, “An Elizabethan Surveyor and His CartographicProgeny,” Imago Mundi 26 (1972): 45. Maps of Ireland based mainlyon Lythe include those of Jodocus Hondius (1591 and 1592), PetrusPlancius (1592), and Gerardus Mercator (1595).

fig. 55.4. ROBERT LYTHE, DETAIL FROM MAP OF CEN-TRAL AND SOUTHERN IRELAND, 1571. The whole mapshows the exact area that Lythe is known to have surveyedhimself and appears to be in his own hand. The tinted brokenlines are county boundaries. This region was not surveyedagain until the middle of the seventeenth century.Size of the entire original: 81 � 112 cm. Photograph courtesyof Lord Egremont and the West Sussex Record Office, Chi-chester (PHA 9581).


of Browne to introduce the English notion of the countymap in northwest Ireland, and after he had been killed ina local rebellion there was no sustained attempt at fol-lowing suit. Instead, Browne’s nephew, also called JohnBrowne, made a somewhat less detailed map of all Con-naught, which was delivered to the provincial governor in1591.34 The governor, Sir Richard Bingham, was a toughmilitary commander, proud of his own cartographic ex-pertise, who wrote knowledgeably about the number of“stations” that would have to be “taken” in surveying anarea of a given size.35 Browne’s thoroughly modern-look-ing Connaught was certainly accurate enough to haveneeded a good many stations, but unfortunately it disap-peared into Carew’s collection before any later cartogra-

pher had the chance to digest it (fig. 55.5). Like many anable amateur, the Brownes were left outside the evolu-tionary stream.

34. Martin J. Blake, “A Map of Part of the County of Mayo in 1584:With Notes Thereon, and an Account of Its Author and His Descen-dants,” Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 5(1907–8): 145–58, and J. H. Andrews, “Sir Richard Bingham and theMapping of Western Ireland,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy103 (2003): 61–95.

35. Sir R. Bingham to [Burghley], 6 March 1591–92, in Calendar ofthe State Papers, Relating to Ireland, of the Reigns of Henry VIII., Ed-ward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, 11 vols., ed. Hans Claude Hamilton,Ernest G. Atkinson, and Robert Pentland Mahaffy (London: Longman,Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860–1912), 4:469.

fig. 55.5. JOHN BROWNE, DETAIL FROM MAP OF CON-NAUGHT AND THOMOND, 1591. This is the best six-teenth-century map of any Irish province. Hills topped withcircles are believed to be triangulation points. Additions byLord Burghley include a genealogical diagram. Despite its ac-

curacy in depicting the Mullet, Blacksod Bay, and many otherfeatures, this map had no influence on its successors.Size of the entire original: 99 � 76 cm. Photograph courtesyThe Board of Trinity College Dublin (MS. 1209/68).

fig. 55.6. FRANCIS JOBSON, “MAIOR COMITATVSLIMERICE,” CA. 1587. Territories are classified by tenurialstatus in the context of the government’s scheme for settlingEnglish colonists in various parts of the province of Munster.

Jobson showed originality by combining scattered local surveysinto a county map, an unusual genre in Elizabethan Ireland.Size of the original: 58.4 � 62.5 cm. Photograph courtesy ofTNA (MPF 97).


Francis Jobson did more to ensure that his maps sur-vived than either of the Brownes did, and Munster was akindlier environment than Connaught. In 1584 not evenBingham had dreamed of actually measuring the estatesinvolved in a province-wide tax assessment known as thecomposition of Connaught. Two years later, in the wakeof a Munster rebellion, Jobson and three other English sur-veyors were trying to do just that on 500,000 acres of landnewly forfeited to the crown in the counties of Kerry,

Cork, Limerick, and Waterford.36 Although the colonialfunction of such surveys would have been plain enough toany Munstermen who witnessed them, in conception theywere no different from the kind of estate maps becomingfashionable in Elizabethan England. Their chief “frontier”

36. Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: EnglishMigration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1986), 56 –63. The 500,000 acres is a contemporary estimate.


characteristic was a man-land ratio far below the opti-mum. Of the four surveyors only Jobson stayed the fullcourse. He doubtless hoped to continue as a freelance, likeSaxton in his later years, surveying the kind of modern pri-vate estate that the Munster settlement had been designedto encourage, but as it turned out there were too fewcolonists to sustain such a position, and most of Jobson’slater maps were politico-military exercises in the mannerof Lythe and Browne.

Jobson’s most unusual trait was the enthusiasm withwhich he sought out cartographic opportunities at variouslevels on the hierarchy of scales. An early example was amap of County Limerick (fig. 55.6), in which a scatter ofconfiscated parcels was, in his own words, “measured andplotted first by a scale of 40 perches to the inch [1:7920]and after divers reducements lastly reduced into this smallproportion by a scale of 320 perches in the half inch [1:126,720] . . . all the which I did as I travelled throughthe said county to survey and measure her majesty’slands”37—the same technique being used afterward for aneven smaller-scale map of all Munster.38 He also showedunusual zeal in presenting duplicates to likely patrons: noone was going to deprive posterity of a Jobson map by“borrowing” the only copy. Other features of his complexcartographic persona were more distinctly Irish, such ashis deceptively slapdash-looking style and his apparent ig-norance of earlier Anglo-Irish cartography. In this latterrespect he resembled the Brownes, except that they lostnothing by starting afresh in Connaught whereas in Mun-ster Jobson could have done better by consulting Lythe.

Provincial Cartography: The North

In most of Ulster, as in most of Connaught, there were nomaps worth consulting until Jobson was brought north bythe current lord deputy to meet a new request from Cecilin 1590. Two Ulster counties, Donegal and Fermanagh,were still unsafe for strangers, but Jobson now mapped theother seven, as well as Lythe would have mapped themand in much the same style, at a scale of approximately 1:240,000.39 But it was not long before almost all northernIreland had slid once more into rebellion, and it must havebeen in some safer place that Jobson’s last extant map wasdrawn to accompany a proposal for pacifying Ulster witha garrison of 12,000 troops distributed among eightforts.40 In the increasingly warlike atmosphere of 1598such figures were far from ridiculous. The queen’s army inIreland was now being rapidly augmented, and so in con-sequence was the number of English cartographers andtheir output. Much of their time was occupied in survey-ing forts and battlefields, an activity that culminated whenSpanish forces took and held Kinsale in 1601; and al-though there were a number of new regional sketches(fig. 55.7), these added little to previous maps, the main

exception from the 1590s being a belated acceptance thatIreland had not one Lough Erne but two, separated by afordable river.41

In the last great Irish upheaval of the Tudor age, car-tography mirrored the course of events. The crisis was met

37. Quoted from an inscription in the cartouche. Jobson used the En-glish statute perch of 16.5 feet, not the 21-foot perch that became cur-rent in Ireland after 1600. In both systems of measurement there were320 perches in one mile.

38. Different versions of this map are National Maritime Museum,London, MS. P.49 (18, 19, 20, 22, and 27); Trinity College, Dublin, MS.1209 (36 and 37); and National Library of Ireland, Dublin, 16.B.13.

39. Trinity College, Dublin, MS. 1209 (15).40. TNA, MPF 312 (2).41. John Thomas, map of Lough Erne, 1594, National Maritime Mu-

seum, London, MS. P49 (21). For Thomas, see J. H. Andrews, “Mapsand Mapmakers,” in The Shaping of Ireland: The Geographical Per-spective, ed. William Nolan (Cork: Mercier Press, 1986), 99–110,esp. 100–102.

fig. 55.7. DINISH ISLAND AND VICINITY, BANTRY BAY,WEST CORK. A typical Irish campaign map, showing themovement of English troops from Bear Island toward the rebelstronghold of Dunboy, June 1602. North is to the right. Thewestern approach to the castle is shown on a companion map.Size of the original: 37.5 � 30 cm. From Thomas Stafford,Pacata Hibernia, Ireland Appeased and Reduced: or, An His-torie of the Late Warres of Ireland (London, 1633), map 11.Photograph courtesy of the John J. Burns Library, BostonCollege.


by two campaigns against the queen’s most determined en-emy, Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone. The Earl of Essex’s ill-judged maneuverings found an appropriate parallel in thefirst separate map of Ireland with an English publisher, aflamboyant and needlessly anachronistic copy of Lythe’ssurvey by Baptista Boazio in 1599.42 Next, under a newdeputy, Lord Mountjoy, came a three-pronged assault onO’Neill from the Pale, from Belfast Lough, and fromLough Foyle. All three forces had some cartographic sup-port, including in the north a warship whose surveyorsbrought the Donegal coastline up to the same standard asthe rest of Ulster.43 In his approach from the Pale, Mount-joy was accompanied by Richard Bartlett, ablest of all thequeen’s Anglo-Irish cartographers. To the standard reper-tory of the 1590s Bartlett added the skills of landscapeartist and topographical draftsman. His fort plans showedthe circumjacent countryside almost as minutely as thefort itself,44 and in his regional maps of Ulster and its bor-derlands the same spirit of realism was cleverly adjusted toa smaller scale.45 One of these maps depicts a traverse sur-vey of the deputy’s campaign trail (plate 70); another, ofthe whole province in 1602, was perhaps the most suc-cessful compilation from diverse materials yet to beachieved in Ireland. Bartlett’s careful handiwork conveysa sense of finality, as if announcing that the country had atlast been subjugated. And so it had: in March 1603O’Neill surrendered just six days after the death of QueenElizabeth.

The Empire of Great Britain

Ireland now witnessed a period of unprecedentedly pur-poseful government action, including a reform of local ad-ministration, the founding of numerous borough towns,a revival of the Munster colony, and an ambitious newAnglo-Scottish plantation scheme for Ulster. These mea-sures generated a number of minor cartographic spin-offs,but it was a mark of Jacobean confidence that no fresh sur-vey of Ireland seemed necessary after 1603: a definitivecompilation from existing sources was now accepted assufficient, and even this effort owed more to the privatesector than to the government. The chief compilers, reviv-ing an art neglected in metropolitan England since Lau-rence Nowell’s time, were John Norden in 1608 and JohnSpeed in 1610. Although Norden’s maps were intended forthe secretary of state they took little from governmentsources, their main authority being Boazio’s unsatisfac-tory Irelande, and their post-1599 improvements notquite justifying Norden’s famous reference to the tediumof “conferring . . . many disagreeing plots together.”46

Norden suffered from choosing too small a scale, a prob-lem that Speed dealt with by giving each Irish province alarge map of its own. In the midlands and south Speed also

followed Lythe, but at least it was a fuller and more au-thentic version of Lythe than anyone else had yet pub-lished. In central and eastern Ulster his model was Jobson,and for the coast of Donegal he shared a common sourcewith Bartlett. By publishing the result between hard cov-ers Speed stamped a new image of Ireland on the Europeanconsciousness (fig. 55.8), not to be erased until Sir WilliamPetty’s outline became current at the end of the seven-teenth century. Whatever his attitude toward empires andempire-building, Speed saw no reason why Ireland shouldbe bracketed with Virginia or Bermuda. Instead he put itin the first British atlas of the British Isles, ranking inprominence above Scotland, although well below Englandand Wales.47

As London-based geographers neither Norden norSpeed really knew enough about Ireland to make the bestpossible map of it. What they did know about—if any-thing, too well—was the kind of engraver’s and atlas-maker’s cartography that made every landscape lookalike. The best man to make a realistic all-Ireland compi-lation for King James I (r. 1603–25) would have beenBartlett. But Bartlett was no longer available. In the clos-ing stages of the war he had been beheaded by the in-habitants of Donegal “because they would not have theircountry discovered.”48 It was a death charged with sym-bolism. In cartography, as in other ways, the end of theTudor dynasty deserves recognition as a major historicallandmark, but neither soldiers, politicians, nor mapmak-ers had solved the Irish problem.

42. J. H. Andrews, “Baptista Boazio’s Map of Ireland,” Long Room(Bulletin of the Friends of the Library, Trinity College, Dublin) 1(1970): 29–36. In the north of Ireland Boazio added a few details notshown by Lythe, but none of these can be regarded as improvements.

43. Captain Charles Plessington to Sir Robert Cecil, 17 July 1601, inCalendar of the State Papers, 10:436 –37; and Trinity College, Dublin,MS. 1209 (14).

44. National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS. 2656, reproduced inGerard Anthony Hayes-McCoy, ed., Ulster and Other Irish Maps, c.1600 (Dublin: Stationery Office for the Irish Manuscripts Commission,1964), esp. pls. 1–12, known to be the work of Bartlett.

45. TNA, MPF 35–37, published in facsimile by the Ordnance Sur-vey, Maps of the Escheated Counties in Ireland, 1609 (Southampton:Ordnance Survey Office, 1861).

46. TNA, MPF 117. One of Norden’s manuscript maps of Ireland isin the same collection, MPF 67; another, apparently of slightly earlierdate, is in Trinity College, Dublin, MS. 1209 (1). See J. H. Andrews,“John Norden’s Maps of Ireland,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Acad-emy 100, sec. C (2000): 159–206.

47. John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine: Pre-senting an Exact Geography of the Kingdomes of England, Scotland,Ireland . . . (London: Iohn Sudbury and Georg Humble, 1611).

48. Sir John Davies to Salisbury, 28 August 1609, in Calendar of theState Papers, Relating to Ireland, of the Reign of James I, 5 vols., ed.Charles William Russell and John Patrick Prendergast (London: Long-man, 1872–80; reprinted Nendeln: Kraus, 1974), 3:280.


fig. 55.8. JOHN SPEED, THE KINGDOME OF IRLAND,1610. The definitive map of Tudor Ireland, amplified in thesame author’s four maps of the individual provinces andcopied by most later cartographers until William Petty’s sur-veys (1655–59) became widely known toward the end of the

seventeenth century.Size of the original: 43 � 55.5 cm. From John Speed, The The-atre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611). Photo-graph courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Libraryof Congress, Washington, D.C.