Old Map of Gloucestershire in 1611 by John Speed - Bristol, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Kingswood, Filton
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Compiled for John Speed's 1611 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, the first printed atlas devoted entirely to England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the Gloucestershire sheet stands out even within that project for its decoration: the upper-left corner carries Speed's own plan of Gloucester itself, keyed to twenty-six numbered churches, gates and streets, with an adjoining panel on the city's government and parish divisions. Speed built his county maps on the earlier surveys of Christopher Saxton and John Norden but added two features of his own, dividing each county into its administrative hundreds and setting decorative town plans into the corners of the plates. The engraving was cut in copper by Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam and printed with English letterpress text on the reverse adapted from Camden's Britannia, with the imprint at the foot of the cartouche naming John Sudbury and George Humble of Pope's Head Alley, the London partnership that published Speed's atlas from 1611 until around 1618.
The sheet covers the county from the Cotswold escarpment down to the Bristol Channel, taking in Bristol, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Kingswood and Filton along the way, together with the market towns, rivers and hundreds tabulated on the sheet's verso. Gloucester itself is picked out in unusual detail thanks to Speed's inset town plan, which keys its churches, gates and principal streets to a numbered list beside the panel on the city's own government and parish divisions, a level of civic detail few other sheets in the atlas match.
Reproduced here as an unframed print, this sheet gives Gloucestershire a place alongside the Speed county maps already in this collection, distinguished from them by its inset town plan of Gloucester and its coverage of the Bristol approaches, a corner of the country that Speed's Berkshire and Surrey sheets never reach. It makes a fitting gift for anyone with Gloucestershire roots, a Cotswolds connection, or a collector building out a run of Speed's county sheets one plate at a time, and is available unframed across our full range of sizes.
