Old Map of Monmouthshire, Wales in 1611 by John Speed - Abergavenny, Caldicot, Chepstow, Monmouth, Magor

For close to four centuries, officials and antiquarians disagreed over whether Monmouthshire properly belonged to Wales or to England, an argument that began when the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 created the county and then, in the second act, left it off the official list of Welsh shires. John Speed's map, engraved by Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam and published in 1611 as part of the Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, sidesteps the dispute by including Monmouthshire among the Welsh counties, complete with the hundred divisions and decorative town plan inset that were a hallmark of Speed's atlas.

The county Speed surveyed was already thick with castles built to guard the Welsh border: Chepstow, one of the oldest surviving stone castles in Britain, stands above the Wye near the county's southern tip, while Monmouth itself, birthplace of Henry V, sits where the Monnow meets the Wye further upstream. Abergavenny appears with its own castle, site of a notorious killing of Welsh noblemen by the Anglo-Norman lord William de Braose in 1175, and Caldicot and Magor are both marked in the low-lying country near the Severn estuary, an area of ancient drained wetland known locally as the Caldicot Levels.

Speed's early placement of Monmouthshire among the Welsh counties, decades before the dispute over its status was even settled by law in 1972, gives this print its own small historical footnote, and makes it a conversation-starting gift for anyone with Monmouthshire or border-country roots. It is available unframed across our full range of sizes.