Old Map of Hertfordshire in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - St Albans, Watford, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage, Hitchin

By 1844, Samuel Lewis's A Topographical Dictionary of England had run through several editions, and the county map bound into each volume gave readers a visual companion to his parish-by-parish entries on population, churches, and local trade. Hertfordshire's map plots a county already reshaped by its nearness to London, its market towns strung along old coaching roads and its farmland increasingly given over to feeding the capital.

St Albans anchors the southern part of the sheet, built up around the abbey Offa of Mercia is said to have founded in 793 and the market that Abbot Ulsinus established outside its gates some sixty years later, itself laid over the ruins of Roman Verulamium. Watford appears astride the routes northwest out of London, a coaching and mill town given new importance by the Grand Junction Canal and the London and Birmingham Railway that had reached it only a few years before this map was drawn. Hemel Hempstead sits where the Gade meets the Bulbourne, a corn market town since Henry VIII granted its charter in 1539. Stevenage, chartered as a market by Edward I in 1281, is marked on the Great North Road, while Hitchin appears amid the lavender fields the Perks family had begun cultivating commercially two decades before Lewis compiled his dictionary.

Genealogists, local historians, and anyone tracing family roots through Hertfordshire's parish records will find this map a useful companion to the kind of records Lewis himself catalogued, and a thoughtful gift for a milestone birthday or house move. We reproduce it at high resolution from an original mid-nineteenth-century edition, unframed and offered across our full range of sizes.