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This is one of the earliest widely circulated modern maps of England and Wales, engraved for Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and dated 1573 in the cartouche. It was based on a manuscript by the Welsh antiquary and scholar Humphrey Llwyd of Denbigh, who in turn relied heavily on Gerard Mercator's wall map of 1564. Llwyd died in 1568, but before that he had been a close colleague and collaborator of Ortelius's, the two having worked together in Antwerp at one point.
Llwyd’s map was a crucial step in moving English cartography away from medieval convention and into the realm of early modern science. Llwyd corrected major errors in the coastal configuration of England, particularly along the southwest and the estuaries of the Thames, Humber, and Severn, and introduced a denser inland topography than had previously been available to continental audiences. Although the map was soon superseded by Christopher Saxton’s large-scale surveys (1575–79), it remained the principal image of England in continental atlases into the early 17th century.
The engraving, probably by Frans Hogenberg, is an exceptional example of the full Northern Mannerist style of Ortelius’s earliest atlas work. The title cartouche at upper left is flanked by nude female figures holding olive branches or palm fronds, and surmounted by the royal arms of England quartered with France, alluding to the Tudor claim to the French crown. At upper right is an elaborate scale cartouche with a grotesque mascaron and the inscription “Scala miliarium Anglicorum.”
Ortelius introduced this map in the Additamentum of 1573 and retained it in later editions of the Theatrum. The map remained in the Theatrum right through the 1602 Spanish and German editions. In 1603 Ortelius’s heirs, under Johan Baptist Vrients, introduced an updated map based on Saxton, yet the 1606 English edition of the atlas sometimes included both versions.
Text throughout the map is in Latin, and while it includes hundreds of towns and rivers, there is no latitude-longitude grid, nor a compass rose; orientation is guided solely by the border directional labels. The absence of a standard compass rose can be seen to reflect Ortelius's typographic rather than navigational priorities.
The geopolitical context is worth underscoring: the map circulated in Antwerp at a time of rising maritime rivalry between England and Spain and served to place England, visually and intellectually, on the map of Renaissance Europe. Its role in shaping foreign perceptions of English space was substantial, and its long publishing history within Ortelius’s atlas testifies to both its utility and enduring authority.
Abraham Ortelius is perhaps the best known and most frequently collected of all sixteenth-century mapmakers. Ortelius started his career as a map colorist. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp guild of St Luke as afsetter van Karten. His early career was as a business man, and most of his journeys before 1560, were for commercial purposes. In 1560, while traveling with Gerard Mercator to Trier, Lorraine, and Poitiers, he seems to have been attracted, largely by Mercator’s influence, towards a career as a scientific geographer. From that point forward, he devoted himself to the compilation of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), which would become the first modern atlas.
In 1564 he completed his “mappemonde", an eight-sheet map of the world. The only extant copy of this great map is in the library of the University of Basel. Ortelius also published a map of Egypt in 1565, a plan of Brittenburg Castle on the coast of the Netherlands, and a map of Asia, prior to 1570.
On May 20, 1570, Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum first appeared in an edition of 70 maps. By the time of his death in 1598, a total of 25 editions were published including editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Dutch. Later editions would also be issued in Spanish and English by Ortelius’ successors, Vrients and Plantin, the former adding a number of maps to the atlas, the final edition of which was issued in 1612. Most of the maps in Ortelius' Theatrum were drawn from the works of a number of other mapmakers from around the world; a list of 87 authors is given by Ortelius himself
In 1573, Ortelius published seventeen supplementary maps under the title of Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum. In 1575 he was appointed geographer to the king of Spain, Philip II, on the recommendation of Arias Montanus, who vouched for his orthodoxy (his family, as early as 1535, had fallen under suspicion of Protestantism). In 1578 he laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography with his Synonymia geographica (issued by the Plantin press at Antwerp and republished as Thesaurus geographicus in 1596). In 1584 he issued his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). Late in life, he also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table (1598).
![[Suite of 6 zinc plate lithograph views of parish churches in Berkshire, England, including St. Giles's in Stoke, inspiration of Gray's Elegy; and St. Michaels in Bray, of Vicar of Bray fame]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/113350.jpg)