Old Map of the British Isles in 1562 by George Lily - Bertelli and Lafreri Edition, England, Scotland, Ireland

Long before the Ordnance Survey, and even before Christopher Saxton's county atlas, an English exile living in Rome produced one of the first reasonably accurate printed maps of the whole of Britain and Ireland. George Lily, a Catholic scholar who had left England during the Reformation, published his map of the British Isles in 1546, and it was quickly recognized on the Continent as a significant improvement over earlier, cruder depictions of the islands. The version offered here is the 1562 edition engraved by Ferrando Bertelli, working within the Italian Lafreri school of map publishers in Venice, who reissued and adapted Lily's original plate for a European audience hungry for geographical knowledge of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The map shows England and Scotland in reasonably faithful outline for the period, along with Ireland, the Orkney Islands, and the Hebrides, set within a broader sweep of northern European coastline. Latin place names and the Italian engraving style reflect its origins as a product of the Roman and Venetian print trade rather than an English one, a reminder that some of the earliest accurate images of Britain were produced by continental publishers working from exile scholarship rather than domestic surveyors. Coastal detail along the English Channel and North Sea is notably more refined than the treatment of Ireland's interior, which still carries some of the schematic simplification typical of maps from this period.

This is a map for collectors and students of the earliest era of British cartography, predating by decades the familiar county atlases of Saxton and Speed that followed later in the century. Reproduced at high resolution from a well-preserved example, it is available in a range of sizes, allowing its intricate sixteenth-century engraving to be appreciated whether displayed at a modest or a more substantial scale.