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Robert Morden’s County Palatine of Lancaster, engraved for Camden’s Britannia, offers a crisply engraved image of Lancashire.
Bounded by the Irish Sea, Yorkshire and Cheshire, the county is shown divided into its hundreds, the detached northern territory of Furness and Cartmell inset at upper left. Market towns, villages, parish churches and gentlemen’s seats are plotted in dense but legible script; rivers, mosses and the hilly Pennine edge are suggested with fluttering reed symbols and mole-hill relief.
A baroque cartouche, typical of Morden’s series, frames the title, while a simple scale of statute miles sits opposite. These county maps were celebrated in their day for incorporating the latest postal and turnpike routes gleaned from local surveyors.
Robert Morden (d. 1703) was a British map and globe maker. Little is known about his early life, although he was most likely apprenticed to Joseph Moxon. By 1671, Morden was working from the sign of the Atlas on Cornhill, the same address out of which Moxon had previously worked. Most famous for his English county maps, his geography texts, and his wall maps, Morden entered into many partnerships during his career, usually to finance larger publishing projects.
![River Thames Sheet I From the Kentish Knock and the West Swin [with] River Thames Sheet II from Ramsgate to the Nore](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/91946.jpg)
