Gone Medieval - The Gough Map: One of Britain's Earliest Maps

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Maps. They are an essential part of modern life. But when and how did people in medieval Britain first start mapping their surroundings? The Gough Map was one of their first attempts. Compiled in the fifteenth century, it is the earliest known surviving map of Britain to be drawn on a distinct sheet of parchment.In today’s episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Cat Jarman talks to Nick Millea and Dr Catherine Delano-Smith - two members of a multidisciplinary research project on the Gough Map - about why it is so exceptional, what it reveals about medieval Britain and how new technologies might be able to uncover the shadowy identity of its makers.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob WeinbergIf you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to today's episode of God Medieval from History Head. I'm your host, Dr Kat Jarman. Maps are a pretty normal part of our lives and we use them not just for directions but to work out a place in the wider world. But when did we first get detailed maps of Britain? The Goff map is the earliest known surviving map of Britain drawn on a separate sheet rather than a page in a book. And it probably dates to the late 14th or early 15th century. For its time, the map is exceptional, providing detail unlike anything else we have from Britain. We've known about it for about 250 years, but despite this, many very basic questions like,

who made it, why, and for what purpose have not yet been convincingly answered. But now a multidisciplinary team is grappling with exactly these issues, including with the use of some new state-of-the-art technology. Today I'm very excited to have with me two people on Gone Medieval who are key part of that research. Dr. Catherine Delano-Smith from the Institute of Historical Research, the University of London, and Nick Millie, who is the map curator for the Bodleian libraries at the University of Oxford, which is where the map currently lives. Catherine and Nick, I'm really delighted to have you with me today. So welcome to Gone Medieval. Thanks, Kat. We're really looking forward to this. Yes, we are ready armed. Ready armed with your knowledge. Fantastic. I have to say, I absolutely love this map. I've never studied it professionally at all, but I do have a print of it in my bathroom. So I see it every day, which is very nice. So I can't wait to hear their details. I mean, first of all, so I want to get into some of the new and exciting things that you've been working on in a moment because you're working on a current. research projects about the map, is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. We started the project, which is funded by the Leuverhume Trust, in 2019. And because of the pandemic, it's been extended from three to four years. And there's a team of about 30 of us now working on it, looking at using science to tell us far more about this medieval manuscript, which for people who aren't familiar with it is a map of Britain. It looks strange when you first see it because east is at the top. It's about 115 centimetres long and about 56 centimetres high.

And Scotland is a way to the left, England and Wales to the right. And on it are hundreds and hundreds of place names, rivers and various other geographical features. It's quite colourful, lots of reds, lots of greens, and it is a representation. of the geography of the island of Britain in the late Middle Ages. And it's made on two pieces of parchment, a lamb and a sheep, which have been stitched together somewhere through the north of Scotland. And it's a very curious-looking object. It is, isn't it?

And do we know how old it is? What do we know about the date of the map? Yeah, I mean, generally you say medieval, but people have very odd ideas about medieval. The most important point, I think, to say at this stage, Nick, is that it's a copy of an... earlier map. Now, this may have been suspected in the past, but has never been demonstrated, and our scientists have been able to demonstrate that or help us demonstrate that. So it's been

copied by pricking through places to show where to put them on the new map. So we don't know what the beginning was. And the beginning might be, as much as a century earlier, it might be just a few months earlier. Nobody knows exactly. So we haven't decided. on a current date. But we have been saying the copy is round about 1,400. But where is it now, actually, Nick? Because you're the one looking after it really at the moment, aren't you? So can you tell us where it is? And how did it get to you? It's in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. And it's been there since 1809. It was bequeathed to the library by the antiquary Richard Goff, hence the map's name.

So Goff gave the map to the library, and it's been in the library ever since. It did have one brief foray when it went to Chicago for an exhibition about 12 years ago, I believe, but otherwise it's not left Oxford. Goff acquired the Mapper to sail in 1774, but we don't know where it was before then. And it was absolutely brand new and stunning when it emerged. I see. So it was kept in for so many hundred years. He was clearly looked after and kept in really good condition then.

What does that tell us about where it's been in that meantime? Well, not good condition. I mean, rolled up. And Nick, do you want to take over? It's rolled. There's been an awful lot of conservation work done to stabilise the map. It's interestingly, the conservators working on it at the Bodleon have been able to assess the quality of the parchment on which it was made.

And their impression is that this is on very low quality parchment. So it wasn't made to last, which is the bizarre thing. And yet here we are 600 years plus afterwards. And it's still going strong. It's not in the best of help. But it's not bad. It's not too bad at all. Well, that's good to hear.

That's reassuring. But actually, it is pretty unique, isn't it? Because we really don't have a lot of maps from this time period. I mean, what can you tell us about that? If we go back to 14,000, assuming that that 1,400 dates is correct for now, how many maps do we have from that period? How common are they of Britain? Britain has featured on maps in codexes in books for a long time before.

And on the big world maps, of course, Britain was tucked away in a corner, usually bottom left corner of the world. So it's not really the first time that it's been represented in some recognisable form. I mean, very often the maps just have a blob for various parts of the world, very generalized outlines. But even the big map, like the map that's in the Hereford Cathedral now, has an elongated representation of Britain with about 20 places marked on it. But by the 13th, 14th century, Britain is a very highly centralized government at the time, administration, perhaps one should say. and there's an enormous amount of information about Britain. People knew where places were in the abstract.

They knew the distances between places when they wanted to travel. They had an idea of the shape of Britain because Julius Caesar, when he arrived on Britain, worked out that it's rather triangular. He did think Scotland had reached halfway to Novosibirsk, I think, but that's another detail. So, yes, it is the first survival. or the earliest surviving map in a large format, nearly a yard or a meter long. That's the novelty.

You could see Britain, you could see 661 places now, not just 20, as on the Hereford Mapamundi, and you could see the rivers and so on. So it's a build-up of a whole lot of ideas and thinking that was going on, the roots of which can be traced back to Ptolemy, who I think was the first who suggested doing a regional map of the world, as opposed to a map of the whole world. And this is a regional map. This is how it would be cataloged in a modern library. And that is the first map of that kind of Britain. And how much of an accurate representation is it of Britain?

I mean, obviously, it's got quite detailed coastline, it's got rivers. How accurate would you say it is? I think accuracy is a challenging word. It's a challenging phrase for a medieval map. But if you were to look at Scotland and the outline of Scotland, you would say this is not accurate. Scotland is simply a long extension to the left of the map. It doesn't resemble Scotland particularly.

Wales likewise could be better. Things like Cardigan Bay are missing. But England looks like England. Devon and Cormor are a little extended. But I think what we need to bear in mind is that the 600 plus places, they tend to be where you would expect them to be. And in relation to their neighbours, in the right direction, the relative displacement of all these settlements is recognisable and acceptable by today. So if we could equate things that you mentioned the phrase accuracy, let's say, is the London Tube Map accurate? Well, it's accurate in an extent that the places are in the right order, but geographically it isn't,

and it can't be to portray that sort of information. So, yes, the settlements are relative to each other where we would expect to find them. And it is not a scale map, that is the point again. Nothing is mathematically scaled. It's what the mathematicians call a topological map, yes. So the representation then is the sort of relationships more than accuracy that we of us, perhaps because we're obviously used to that sort of thing. That's really, really fascinating. But the other thing I was wondering was, you've already mentioned that it's not made of high

quality materials, possibly not made to last for a really long time. But do we know anything, or can we sort of interpret anything about who it was made for? I mean, I know he doesn't have any names. He doesn't have any, this is owned by or made by, but can we say anything from just looking at it? Who commissioned it, who made it, who owned it, who used it? The short answer is no. But what we can say, it was not made for presentation. It's not only the material that's poor, but the treatment of it was poor. It's been badly scraped. The membrane that you're meant to write on is being scraped off in parts.

And also we're told by the paleographers that it's not the best handwriting. This is not top-class people. It's obviously costly to produce in the parchment, which was expensive. is two large pieces. And the scribes obviously had to be paid and the pigments had to be paid for and so on. But there was no single map maker. It's wrong to talk about a cartographer.

We don't like the word cartography anyway at this period. It's been about and worked on over about, probably at a guess, a hundred years or so at least. People have picked it up and added a bit and used it and reused it and added another bit and so on. I would say it's a working map. I privately called it a office map. Not sure anybody else will accept that.

But it's that sort of informal document. And if you want to check on the presentation aspect, you could look at another map of Italy that was made later than this copy, in other words, early 15th century that's in the British Library. And you see a presentation map there. It's got writing on it. It's got the whole history of Italy, which is what it was about. It's addressing a patron, if you like, quite different, quite obvious.

This is something in-house. But what the house was is what we're really interested in. That's the key bit. Such an interesting question. So you've touched up on this little bit already, Catherine, as part of your new project and the work you're doing. And I wanted to ask you to sort of add a bit more detail on that. The pinfriks on how you've been able to discover that it was a version of an earlier map,

because I think that's a really, really fascinating thing. So can you say a little bit about what sort of methods you've been used? using to find out about this and how you work that out? Yeah, the pinprick story really began about 2015 before our projects got going. And we had a week in the Bodleian in early 2015 when we invited a whole range of scientists from all around the world actually to come and work on the map. And an organisation called Facta Mater, who are based in Madrid and create facsimiles of works of art, 3D facsimiles, do all sorts of wonderful things. We were aware that they had done

a 3D scan of the Hereford Map of Monday and we thought, well, might it be worth them coming to Oxford to have a go at the Goff Map? And they agreed to come. And they scanned the map, both front and back. It was a very, very long process. It probably took a couple of days to do that. and they produced a three-dimensional scan. Now, to look at at first, this was not a particularly interesting file of information. It looked like a block of concrete. But once you started to look at it and interpret it, the realisation came that the front of the map was dotted with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pinholes.

But the reverse of the map wasn't. those pinholes hadn't penetrated through the parchment. So this was a really key piece of information for us because that brought about the realisation that the Goff map in the Bodleian Library is a copy. And there was a map which existed before the Goff map, which would have been used, and that map would have been pricked through

and various dots put onto the parchment. In effect, these dots were then joined by the map, to create what we now know as the Goff map. So this was the great start, and we've been able to map all of this by using geographical information systems to show the distribution of all these pinpricks. We've also been working again very closely with Factor Mate during the course of 2022, and they've produced another souped up 3D scam, which we're still working on, using completely new techniques compared to what they did in 2015, which is far more sophisticated.

So we're in a very good place in terms of conducting that research. So that is definitely how the 3D scanning and the pinpricks have worked together. And this has been an illuminating discovery as far as we're concerned. One or two pinholes had been noticed early in the 20th century, but nobody knew what to make of them. And certainly no researchers have followed that lead up at all until we started looking, as you say, more closely. And they come out as tiny, tiny black dots when you eyeball it until the 3D came along and helped see a three-dimensional picture, as it were. Fantastic. I mean, there's such brilliant use of new technology. For a map that we've had and known about and studied for 250 years, it's quite extraordinary. And are there

any other methods that you can use now in terms of imagery and different types of light? What else have you been looking at, or is there anything else you've been able to do? Yeah, we've used Raman spectroscopy to try and work on the pigments, which has been incredibly helpful. So largely the reds and the greens. If you look at the map, you say, oh, that's red. But I think we've found six different red pigments on the map by doing a chemical analysis of all the different types of red, so to speak, likewise the green and finding different levels of copper content in the green. So we've done Raman spectroscopy, we've done hyperspectral imaging and multispectral imaging. And what these do allow us to see the map using methodology which the human eye is unable

to detect, which is very, very exciting. So that's bringing more information out. We're able to see certain bits of text perhaps or erasures, which you might not necessarily see with the naked eye, but you can now see by using these techniques. is really exciting, and we're working with colleagues in the United States on this. The GoffMap research team, our job is to ask the questions and to direct scientists and say, look, what have you got here? And they have various different combinations of imagery, which they can overlay to pull out all sorts of different things. So you can look at the same part of the map and see completely

different things, depending on which bits of data you throw at the map. So this is incredibly exciting and we don't have the expertise to understand the scientific side in terms of which combinations of imagery will produce which type of data, but the scientists do. And it's a really fascinating partnership, getting the two teams to work together and to see all these exciting new things coming out on screen and we're still working on this. And the point about the pigments is that this is indicating, helping us to see how the map was compiled. It's a compilation over a period of time, and the pigments help us pick up phase by phase what was done at what episode, no dating in that, of course. For example, just to take one,

if I may, there's a broad green band around the coastline, emphasizing the coastline. The sea is painted green anyway, but there's a big broad green band, but that only extends from about Newcastle South. In other words, it is England that's picked out. Maybe it goes around to Wales soon. There's a story about the side of Wales, which we can come to, very warm there. But we can see there a change of interest from the whole of Britain to England. And that the historians will now sit and examine and consider the context. So this is how the history and the pigments work together. And the pigments and the historians work together, as Nick has said. Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast American History Hit.

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One thing that I've always been quite fascinated by is up in the top left corner corner, there is a quite a faint shipwreck, really, and various sea creatures and fish and things. Tell me the story of those and whether you've found out anything new about. Why on earth that's up there in the corner? I wish you didn't ask. Oh, sorry. Again, it's another one. We don't yet know. I'm not sure we ever will. There's been all sorts of interpretations about what this shipwreck might represent. Nick will fill in details, but maybe the Queen Margaret, isn't she? shipwrecked on her way to Scotland. Well, she wasn't, or she wasn't ill. She was quite happily

buried wherever she was meant to be buried. But this is where the pigments help, because we're again in the middle of this, trying to work out with the sequence of application of green, can we work out when that shipwreck sign? There's a shipwreck with a person lying, in effect a man in medieval dress. People said it was a woman, but the dress is medieval for a man as well. and then there's a chap in a boat who might be hauling out fish or nobody quite sure. They're incomplete. They're not finished drawings, but the question is, when were they added? They're not pricked through, so were they added right at the beginning on the first copy, or were they added at some stage later?

And what we haven't discovered on the science side is any underdrawing. It's very difficult to see if there are any preparatory lines. And as far as the shipwreck goes, it could almost be said that the shape of the ship, the person doing the green painting could see a faint outline of what he was painting around. But the person who was doing the black outlines didn't complete the job. So you get quite a bit of black outlining on the ship, but none on the boatman next to it, for instance. So the answer from that is we don't know what it represents. Now, the interesting thing about the ship is that the mast has been cut, deliberately cut, sliced.

And this, we gather from the specialist in ship history, was something that had to be done if you thought your ship was about to sink for some reason in a storm or running a ground. You demasted the ship to save yourself. There's, again, a host of questions to that. Was this a reminder of this is what you should be doing? But no seaman is looking at this map, so what's it matter? But there are legal aspects to that, again, you know, because if the ship is wrecked, if it's wrecked at sea, one law applies to maritime water, saltwater.

A different law applies to a ship that's had an accident in river water. And when you look at the estuaries, you can see that there is a difference between the estuarine coloring that's coming up from the sea, as it were, and the river water. And whether that's intentional to send a message that reminds of the legal distinction implied in that is an open question. The only thing I would possibly add is that the recent multispectral imaging did reveal the face of the boatman looking absolutely terrified, which we hadn't been able to pick up with the naked eye. So that was very, very different. This look of complete fear on the character by the ship. That aside, nothing else to add. Well, I thought it was a fisherman hauling out

masses of fish. Perhaps he was looking astonished at fish he was pulling out. I didn't know that. That's very recent development. Fantastic. Well, I love the fact that it's giving up these new secrets all the time. It's fantastic. But I thought that was really interesting, though. I know you can't answer this, but I wonder if that sort of thing does give us an idea. of the context of how it was being used. Is it looking at these sort of legal regions or, you know, is that why this map is coming out rather than just an interest in the world? Is it likely to have that sort of administrative reason for existing? Well, it certainly comes from an administrative context. It does not come from the church. The church had nothing to do with it except that,

the people who were literate around 1400 would have been educated in the universities that were just beginning. But of course, again, it's all ecclesiastical training. So they would have had a monastic kind of education. Their learning would have come from the monasteries, as it were, and the burgeoning universities. But these are people who are interested in everything. And if they wanted to colour the sea differently from the rivers, they would add that, I think, as an intellectual distinction. Whether it was useful or not, doesn't much matter. So we're looking at a group of clerics, I think, pulling this together, but not under an instruction to do something for something other than to display the places in Britain.

Of course, the one thing we haven't talked about yet, which I know we do have to mention, that's the red lines that exist on this map, because it's got quite specific, very straight red lines that connect different places. Sorry, they are red, aren't they? They are red, and there is a network of red lines which we find south of the wall, largely radiating out of London, but with fairly concentrated networks in Lincolnshire and around the Humber Estuary and between Humberside and New York. These lines, I think traditionally have been seen as roads. They're not roads, but they're associated with numbers in Roman numerals.

and the red lines give value, shall we say, to the numbers. Otherwise, you'd have numbers dotted around the landscape, which would mean nothing. And these numbers are distances, and the red line shows the distances between which two places. So you think about some of the principal roads that we know existed in and around 1400, they don't feature on the goth map at all. So, for example, road going from London down to Dover, not there at all. So it's an interesting mix of why some of these red lines are there and why other places have no red lines at all.

I think certainly they are a way of identifying distances and giving value to the numbers on the man. One of our colleagues has an additional suggestion that, in a way, linking places, many of which you know by, not used to seeing them on a map perhaps, except they would always know where Scotland is in relation to Cornwall and Wales and so on. But the lines help structure the map in your mind. It gives shape, it pulls it together. It's a kind of framework, if you like, a hidden framework, a visual aid is what we would call it, to just orientating yourself on the map. If anybody's

reading Nick's book about the map, please get them to read the question mark at the end of the subtitle. The question mark follows the word roads. And so many people read his book and talk about roads and have never noticed the question mark. You know, we can discuss them, but they are definitely not roads. That was Richard Goff who set that little goose running. And roads are not systematically shown on the map until the 16th century. You didn't need roads. You used an itinerary, a list of places from here to to there, usually with a distance. So this is why we call these distant lines, as Nick has explained. So is there anything else that those lines can tell us about the use of the map or the context of

the map, or are we still scrambling around for any explanation? Well, they underline, if you like the ad hoc nature, I would call it of compilation. They're not key to the existence of the map. I don't think they're necessarily key to the function of the map. Somebody was interested in, apart from this general, perhaps visual aid of pulling places together, drawing attention that, oh, that's where so-and-so is and that's where that place is. Apart from that general aspect, I think I'm inclined to say no, they're utterly irrelevant. That brings me back to what you were calling it earlier, Catherine, a sort of office map. And you can sort of imagine that you would have now in opposite pinned up, and there's lots of people that have different reasons for adding different things. And I guess that's perhaps what you're looking at them.

What is fascinating about that is that we have very good reason for thinking of it, also, as you say, people around it looking at it. Because when you look at it, apart from the damage all along the English Channel, which comes from the way the map was rolled and stored all these centuries. But if when you look at the west side of the map, it's very worn. It's the kind of where that comes when a map is laid out on a table that this has to be, if you're going to look at it. and you're leaning over it to read it, and your coat brushes against it. And there's a lovely 17th century, 18th century painting by a chap called Duck, which shows some people looking at a map, doing exactly that. The map's laid on the table, part of it is dropping down the edge of the table,

and somebody has been leaning over it, rubbing off the paint. So again, that strengthens the notion. of how it was used to look at, to be referred to, if you look at an Northern survey, Land Ranger map, it says here the all-purpose map. And that, I think, is what the Goff map was or came to be. Apart from where places are, you use it as you wish to use it. Read from it what you need to read from it. Fantastic. I love that. And I love the idea of thinking of all these people over the hundreds of years pouring over this map or whatever. reasons. I mean, could it be in a sort of, what's like a university context, a training context,

any sort of teaching? Administration at court, I think, is what. I mean, the government was called, so it's not really crowned. I don't think the king was involved. But the central administration, that's what you'd call it, I think, certainly not monastic. So what would you love to see? From their project that you're part of now, from all these new scientific techniques, what other things do you think we might be able to learn from it? Or what are you most sort of hopeful that we could possibly discover in the future? Would discover is one thing. I'll leave that to Nick,

but I would dearly like to work out, and our historians are working on this. This is where they want the scientific information to help them, especially in terms of dating when this was added or that was added. I would dearly like to know who or what was the catalyst.

The idea of a regional map was around, and it was around in Europe, and there were input from the Islamic side, ideas coming into Britain, through North Africa, into Europe, through Sicily or Spain, into France, French universities, French places of learning, into England, again, the contacts through learning. So there is a very strong intellectual input here. But somebody in that line, in that context of learning, had the idea of displaying British places, all the ones they knew about from Doomsday on, all the ones they could find out about by asking local sheriffs to supply

a list of their local places, perhaps in a hierarchy, we can come back to that, onto one big piece of parchment. But who was that? The feeling is that it was somebody probably in London connected with the clerical side or with central administration. But who that catalyst was, who that person was, when is what I would like to know. And what about you, Nick? Well, I think Catherine's is the big question. We really do need to know the origin story of this map. I would just like to see the scientific side of things confirm or rule out various

options in terms of what was actually placed on the map in terms of its physical makeup, the chemical content, shall we say, of the pigments, from that we can work out, at what rough date range as to when they may have been added because of what was actually in part of the pigment mix. And certain chemicals would not have been possible at certain dates. So that's going to be a useful way of looking at things. just narrow things down or expand things, whatever. We just need some sort of clarification as to how that all pieces together. Because we've already hinted at this earlier in the conversation,

this isn't a map that was just made on the spot straight away. It's been added to it's the office map. And it would be great to have confirmation simply by the physical components on the map, which can help us there. And that could almost bring us to handwriting too. the scripts, can they tell us, can the scientists help us work out which place names were written in which kind of ink, early or late or something? And then the paleographers can work out if this is an early writing of the name. Many of the names, incidentally, does seem that places were

pricked through, but somebody had to write a name to it. Well, it wasn't always clear to whoever was writing the name first time round, what name goes with what prick. And sometimes we'll fighting and saying, no, that name doesn't belong to that place. It should be the next place along. And then, of course, there are all the variations of spelling and the names that we use. I mean, there's an enormous amount there for the paleographers and the place name experts to pull out and get interested in. Fantastic. Well, I love the fact that we are able to do so much of this now and that's so much new potential and promise for something that's been with us for centuries. So that's fantastic. I can't wait to see what else you come up with. But if people want to

find out more about your project, about the map. What can they do? Where can they go? Can they go online? What can they do? I think the best place to go first is the website, which is www.gothmap.org, which is still very much a work in progress. But that is the definitive Goffmap website. We're still working on it. We're still trying to improve it. But at least they'll get to see what the map looks like. They can zoom in on it. They can interrogate it. Well worth a look. The ultimate aim of our project is to produce a fairly meaty book, which will describe all our findings and the full GoffMap story as we know it. And that is already well underway in terms of contributions coming in, whether it be based on regions of Britain and historians looking at that or whether it be involving the science or whether it's talking about Richard Goff himself. We're trying to bring all the different strands together.

And that's something which hopefully will see the light of day. I'm guessing two or three years down the road. Otherwise, there are occasional things on YouTube with people talking about the map. There are publications available online, which come from the historical angle, and also come from the scientific angle as well. So there's an awful lot out there. The trouble with anything that you or I have written is that no sooner have we written, it, it's out of date already. I have learned, do not write on works in progress because you can't

keep up. But so long as readers realize this is not the last word, nothing ever is, and we do say this is work in progress, but we mean it. Fantastic. Well, so I think absolutely encourage people to go and have a look, but also go on that website, which is fascinating because you can really, I love zooming in and looking at all the different illustrations. So Catherine and Nick, thank you both so much for taking the time to share all of the with us today. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much, Kat. It's been an absolute delight. That's right. We love talking about it.

And that brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. I'm going to be with you again next Tuesday. And in the meantime, you can catch up with my co-host, Matt Lewis, on Saturday. But if you need more information, crucial information about the medieval world before then, don't forget to subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes wherever you find this podcast. Hope to have you join us again very soon.