The Gough Map Revisited: Thomas Butler's The Mape off Ynglonnd, c.1547–1554

Abstract

A map of England has been discovered in Beinecke Library MS 558 (c.1547–1554), a commonplace book that had been owned by ‘Thomas Buttler of Harlow in Essex’ and is comprised of astrological treatises along with business and household notes. The map is shown to be related to, or derived from, the Gough map of Britain (prototype c.1280; extant copy c.1360), which it resembles more closely than does any other known map. Thomas Butler was a provincial merchant who sold woollen cloth, dealt locally in grain, and bought scientific instruments in London. His social and economic situation introduces a new vantage point on the Gough map, whose origins, while acknowledged as ‘wholly unknown’, have usually been associated with ‘official’ governmental interests.

Dr Daniel Birkholz is assistant professor of English, University of Texas at Austin.

Keywords:

• Gough map of Britain
• Beinecke Library (Yale University)
• Thomas Butler
• Thomas Gemini
• George Lily
• Sebastian Münster
• commonplace books
• scientific instruments
• medieval maps
• map use
• road books
• highways
• wool trade
• grain trade
• Merchant Adventurers
• Grocers' Guild

Acknowledgments

I am pleased to thank the University of Texas at Austin, Pomona College (Claremont, California), and the University of Minnesota for the financial support making this essay possible. Also essential were the welcomes I received at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library in New Haven, as well as at the Essex Record Office and the Museum of Harlow. My thanks for their bibliographical or drafting feedback to Samuel Baker, Peter Barber, Catherine Delano‐Smith, Paul Harvey, Julia Mickenberg, William Poole, Pamela Smith, John Threlfall, Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski, Marjorie Curry Woods and Robert Woods; also to Imago Mundi's anonymous readers, to audiences in Austin, Claremont and Madrid, and to the senior common room at Downing College, Cambridge.

Notes

Dr Daniel Birkholz is assistant professor of English, University of Texas at Austin.

1. New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 558. The date c.1547–1554 is derived from internal evidence (the annals and chart of reigns on folios 48v and 49r, which are laid out but incomplete), and confirmed by contemporary treatises.

2. The meteorological and astrological extracts occupy folios 1–5r; 6v–15r; 16v–22r; 62r–63r; and 66r–85v. No printed copy of Lhuyd's Almanack appears to have survived, while the first surviving copy of Digges's Prognostication dates to 1555. For an edition, see R. T. Gunther, Old Ashmolean Reprints III (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1927).

3. Beinecke 558's household and industrial material is worked in around its scientific items and is concentrated toward the back of the book; see especially folios 63v–65v, 85r and 86v–88r.

4. Folios 81r–82v; 73v–74r; 48v–49r; 63v, 42r–v; 47v–48r, respectively.

5. The ‘personal mark’ is a stylized rendition of the initials T.S.B., or ‘Thomas Stallon‐Butler’. The family name is found on folios 4r, 5r, 42r–v, 47v, 48r, 61r and 63v. The chart of ports on folio 4r is taken from Leonard Digges's A Prognostication of Right Good Effect (London, 1555 [1553]); see Gunther, Old Ashmolean Reprints (note 2), 56–57.

6. See David R. Parker, The Commonplace Book in Tudor London (Lanham, Maryland, University Press of America, 1998), esp. 2–3, 159–62.

7. The German astronomer Nikolaus Kratzer, recruited by Henry VIII in 1519, expressed an interest in making a map of the realm, as did John Rastell, another astronomer at court who painted celebratory maps for the king on more than one occasion (Peter Barber, ‘England I: Pageantry, defense, and government: maps at court to 1500’, in Monarchs, Ministers and Maps, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29–30). On the mapping of England in the sixteenth century in general, see Catherine Delano‐Smith and Roger Kain, English Maps: A History (London, British Library, 1999), 49–75.

8. For George Lily's map (which was reprinted in 1555), with reference to Humphrey Lhuyd's, see Edward Lynam, The Map of the British Isles of 1546 (Jenkintown, PA, The George H. Beans Library, 1934), esp. 2, 7. Despite its late date vis‐à‐vis Butler, Lhuyd's map, which was to supersede Lily's, deserves mention due to the extracts from Lhuyd's Almanack that appear in Butler's commonplace book (as noted above) and due to the fact that Lhuyd served as a retainer beginning in 1553 (that is, as far back as Butler's day) to Henry Fitzallan, Earl of Arundel and a founder of the Merchant‐Adventurers Company; see Robert W. Karrow, Jr., Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps: Bio‐Bibliographies of the Cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 (Chicago, Speculum Orbis Press, 1993), 344. See below for Merchant Adventurers and the relationship between mapping and the woollen industry.

9. The extracts Butler copied concerned astronomy and meteorology, but Lhuyd, Digges and Gemini were also actively involved in the new cartography. On the title page of the 1562 edition of Digges's Prognostication, Gemini advertised his readiness ‘to make all the Instruments appertaining to thes booke’ (Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (see note 8 ), 253–54).

10. See, for example, Ralph Hanna III, ‘The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn’: An Edition Based on the Bodleian Library MS Douce 324 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1974). For the poem's place‐names, see Susan Kelly, ‘Place‐Names in The Awntyrs off Arthure,’ Literary Onomastics Studies 6 (1979): 162–99.

11. P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Medieval maps to 1500’, in Historians' Guide to Early British Maps, ed. Helen Wallis (London, Royal Historical Society, 1994), 13–14.

12. Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (see note 7), 47–48. For similar comments, see P. D. A. Harvey, Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map (London, Hereford Cathedral and the British Library, 1996), 36, 38, and idem, Medieval Maps (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991), 78. For a facsimile and description of the Gough map, see E. J. S. Parsons, The Map of Great Britain circa ad 1360 Known as the Gough Map (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 1958). The likelihood is that the map was ‘originally compiled in about 1280, the extant copy being a later revision’ (B. P. Hindle, Maps for Local History (London, B.T. Batsford, 1988), 13). These dates for the map have been espoused by various authorities including R. A. Pelham, ‘Early maps of Great Britain, II: the Gough map’, Geographical Journal 81 (1933), 34–39; G. R. Crone, Maps and Their Makers (London, Hutchinson's University Library, 1953), 7; Frank Stenton, ‘Roads of the Gough map’, in Parsons, The Map of Great Britain, 17–18; and Parsons himself, 6–7 and 2. For interpretive implications see Daniel Birkholz, The King's Two Maps: Cartography and Culture in Thirteenth‐Century England (New York, Routledge Press, 2004), esp. 67, 185n3, 113–48.

13. For the outline of the coast of eastern England, see Peter M. Barber and Michelle P. Brown, ‘The Aslake world map’, Imago Mundi 44 (1992), 24–44.

14. The tendency has been to refer to the lines as roads and the map as a road map. Delano‐Smith and Kain, however, English Maps (see note 7), 48, point to the incompleteness of the network and suggest that the lines with the accompanying distance figures indicate selected routes. Recently, Catherine Delano‐Smith has settled on referring to the lines simply as ‘distance lines’, pointing out that to an early traveller the selection of a track on the ground had to come after the selection of a route (‘Milieus of mobility: itineraries, route maps, and road maps’, in James R. Akerman, Maps on the Move: Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press for The Newberry Library, in press)). I am grateful to her for sight of her essay prior to publication. Stenton (‘Roads of the Gough map’ (see note 12), 16, noted that the compiler apparently chose to inscribe a ‘line by which he represented a road’ only when he ‘believed himself to know the distance from point to point along it’. B. P. Hindle (‘The road network of medieval England and Wales’, Journal of Historical Geography 2 (1976), 207–221, at 211), was equivocal, saying first that the lines represented tracks ‘which made and maintained themselves’ and then that they could be ‘at worst, simply directions on the map to guide the traveller across open country’. See also B. P. Hindle, ‘The towns and roads of the Gough map’, The Manchester Geographer 1 (1980), 35–40.

15. For the Gough map's ‘possible companions’ in medieval times and afterward, see Parsons, Map of Great Britain (note 12), 2, 15, who suggests versions may have been ‘kept at London and other centres with local details added’; see also B. P. Hindle, ‘Roads and tracks’, in The English Medieval Landscape, ed. L. Cantor (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 196; G. R. Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles AD 1000–AD 1559 (London, Royal Geographical Society, 1961), 9, 17; and P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Local and regional cartography in medieval Europe’, in The History of Cartography, Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), 496.

16. For the Gough map as ‘an official map of Great Britain’, see Parsons, Map of Great Britain (note 12), 2, 15. For royal links, with the suggestion of such a map being ‘kept at Westminster for reference purposes’, see Pelham, ‘Early maps of Great Britain’ (note 12), 39. The phrase ‘official compilation’ occurs in Parsons, Map of Great Britain (see note 12), 15, as well as Hindle, ‘Roads and tracks’ (see note 15), 196; see also Harvey, ‘Local and regional cartography’ (note 15), 493.

17. Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (see note 7), 48. See also Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles (note 15), 17, and Parsons, Map of Great Britain (note 12), 14.

18. Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles (see note 15), 24, 17; also R. A. Skelton, ‘A medieval map of Britain’, Geographical Journal 125 (1959), 237–39. For a more recent comment, see Peter Barber, ‘The Evesham world map: a late medieval English view of God and the world’, Imago Mundi 47 (1995), 25.

19. London, British Library, Harley MS 1808, fol. 9v. One of three illustrations to a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, this map is sometimes described as a late medieval copy of the Gough map. See Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles (note 15), 19, and Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (note 7), 21–22.

20. London, B.L. MS Cotton Augustus I.i.9 (64×47 cm). Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles (see note 15), 17, 22–23 (no. 12), finds Angliae figura ‘the finest map of the British Isles … drawn in the first half of the 16th c.’ For reproductions, see P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (London, Public Record Office and the British Library, 1993), Fig. 2; and Peter Barber, ‘The British Isles’, in The Mercator Atlas of Europe: Facsimile of the Maps by Gerardus Mercator Contained in the Atlas of Europe circa 1570–1572, ed. Marcel Watelet (Pleasant Hill, OR, Walking Tree Press, 1998), first published as Gerardi Mercatoris: Atlas Europae (Antwerp, Fonds Mercator, 1994), 43–77, esp. 50 (both in colour); and Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (note 7), 62.

21. The map is reproduced in Rodney Shirley, Early Printed Maps of the British Isles: A Bibliography 1477–1650, rev. ed. (London, Holland Press, 1980), Plate 9.

22. Shirley, Early Printed Maps (see note 21), 27, no. 26. For additional references to lost maps deriving from Gough or its prototype, see Peter Barber, ‘The maps, town‐views and historical prints in the Columbus inventory’, in The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus 1488–1539, ed. Mark R. McDonald (London, British Museum Press, 2004), 1: 255, 261, and Barber, ‘The British Isles’ (note 20), 43, 53, 63.

23. Shirley, Early Printed Maps (see note 21), 28, no. 28, and Plate 10. Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles (see note 15), 24, notes that although Münster's map incorporates much that could be derived from Gough, ‘it is clear that Münster was not copying directly from the Gough Map as we have it today’.

24. Shirley, Early Printed Maps (see note 21), 31–32. For the relationship between the Lily and Gough maps see Lynam, Map of the British Isles (note 8), 3, 5–6, where he says that ‘it is clear that more than one copy of the Bodleian [Gough] map must have existed in Lily's time, or else that a map very like it, but now lost, was known to him’. Lynam also asserts that Lily's map ‘reveals study’ of Münster's map; Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles (see note 15), 24–25, is more cautious, qualifying it with ‘perhaps to some extent’ (no. 14). For Lily's links with English mapping in the 1550s, see Barber, ‘The British Isles’ (note 20), 69–70, and Peter Barber, ‘The Copperplate map in context’, in Tudor London: A Map and a View, ed. Ann Saunders and John Schofield (London, London Topographical Society, 2001), 22, 30.

25. For a review of criticism regarding Gough as ahead of its time, see Daniel Birkholz, ‘The vernacular map: re‐charting English literary history’, New Medieval Literatures 6 (2004): 11–77, at 25–28. Regarding centralization and a ‘national road system’, see especially Hindle, ‘Roads and tracks’ (note 15), 194, 196–97, and Stenton, ‘Roads of Gough’ (note 12), 16; also Hindle, ‘Road network’ (note 14), 211; and Hindle, ‘Towns and roads’ (note 14). For discussion of the Gough map and wayfaring, see Birkholz, The King's Two Maps (note 12), 83–84, 113–23.

26. Münster's map is short on content and is riddled with errors in toponymy. It has been described as the product of someone working ‘from a poor copy of an older map’: Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles (see note 15), 23–24 (no. 13). See also Parsons, Map of Great Britain (note 12), 14.

27. For collation of Butler's itineraries with those on the Gough map, compare the Appendix here with Parsons, ‘Roads and Distances’, in his The Map of Great Britain (see note 12), 36–37 (itineraries proceed in reverse order). For diagrams that transpose Gough's routes onto modern maps of Britain see Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (note 7), 47, and Hindle, ‘Road network’ (note 14).

28. The fourth route on Butler's table (as on other mid‐century road‐books) runs from Yarmouth to London, not through Harlow, but along the Roman road that passed through such Essex towns as Colchester, Chelmsford and Brentwood. His fifth route included the usual course from Dover via Rochester to ‘Dartford, & so to London’—a major route left absent on Gough though one ‘obviously familiar to the compiler’: Stenton, ‘Roads of the Gough map’ (see note 12), 16.

29. The first printed almanac with itineraries was compiled by John Judson and published in 1542, followed by William Middleton's A chronycle of yeares from the beynnynge of the worlde (London, 1544), but no almanac or road book contained a map until the last quarter of the seventeenth century: see Delano‐Smith, ‘Milieus of mobility’ (note 14), who also acknowledges Donald Hodson, ‘The Early Printed Road Books and Itineraries of England and Wales’ (doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2000). Butler listed his itineraries in a different order and with more efficient formatting than the printed road‐books, which extend across four or more printed pages; see H. G. Fordham, ‘The earliest tables of the highways of England and Wales, 1541–61’, The Library: A Quarterly Review of Bibliography, 4th ser., 8 (1928): 349–54, at 350.

30. The nail holes around the edges of the parchment mark where the Gough map was fixed to some surface, presumably for display.

31. Lynam, Map of the British Isles (see note 8), 3, suggested that ‘the unnatural South‐to‐North perpendicularity of England on Lily's map seems to have been copied from Münster’, but the fact that Butler's map has the same rigid layout reinforces the likelihood of a lost Gough derivative. See also Skelton, ‘A medieval map of Britain’ (note 18), 237–39, and Barber, ‘Maps, town‐views and historical prints in the Columbus inventory’ (note 22), 43, 53, 63.

32. For Calais on the Gough map see Birkholz, The King's Two Maps (note 12), 133. The continental coasts, from Norway to France, are entirely notional.

33. Lily's map shows the estuary of the Seine and the ports of Honfleur and Le Havre on either side, and devotes more space to northern France and Flanders than does the Butler or the Gough maps. Münster excluded Flanders.

34. The rivers on the Gough map have been described as ‘fundamental’ to the map, in contrast to which ‘the road pattern almost appears as an afterthought’ (Parsons, Map of Great Britain (see note 12), 8, 32–35. In pre‐modern times, navigable rivers and roads formed an integral transport system; see J. F. Edwards and B. P. Hindle, ‘The transportation system of medieval England and Wales’, Journal of Historical Geography 17:2 (1991): 123–34.

35. Both maps represent Snowdonia by a large scalloped hill sign. Peak Cavern in Derbyshire is referred to as ‘Puteus Pek’ on the Gough map and ‘Pat's Peke’ on Butler's map and is indicated on both maps by two concentric circles. This feature does not appear on Münster's map, though it is found on Lily's, where the sign is similar to but less symmetrical than that on the Gough and Butler maps.

36. For the Gough map's town signs, see Parsons, Map of Great Britain (note 12), 9; Hindle, Maps for Local History (note 12), 17; and for discussion, Birkholz, The King's Two Maps (note 12), 131–33, 208.

37. Essex Record Office (hereafter ERO), D/AMR 1/55. Notes on Butler's date of birth, 31 January 1500, and other family matters are on fol. 63v of Beinecke MS 558. For an abstract of Butler's will see F. G. Emmison, Essex Wills (England) Vol. 1: 1558–1565 (Washington, DC, National Genealogical Society, 1982), 310 (no. 1002). For a fuller version and other family wills, and supporting documentation (for example, manor court rolls), see John B. Threlfall, The Ancestry of the Children of John Brooks Threlfall (Madison, WI, The Author, 1970), entry numbers 15208 (for Thomas and Elizabeth,) 7604 (for Thomas II), 3802 (Thomas III). I am indebted to Mr Threlfall for supplying this material. For reproduction of Beinecke 558's horoscopes (fols. 42r–v), see Birkholz, ‘Vernacular map’ (note 25), 54.

38. Elizabeth Stallon‐Butler died in 1559, the younger Thomas in 1590. See Emmison, Essex Wills (note 37), 275–76 (no. 890), for Elizabeth (ERO, D/AMR 2); and Threlfall, Ancestry (note 37), no. 7604 (ERO, D/A BW 35/67), for Thomas the younger.

39. Much of Latton parish (with Bromleys) has been overtaken by the post‐Second World War creation of the new town of Harlow. Thomas Butler's Harlow is now Old Harlow, on the eastern fringe of the new town.

40. Textile workers in Flanders had begun ‘to work according to the sounds of mechanical clocks’ in these years (Pamela O. Long, Technology, Society and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300–1600 (Washington, DC, The Society for the History of Technology and the American Historical Association, 2000), 45–46). As chamber clocks became status symbols, interest in their cosmographical implications increased, in part because those who made clocks also manufactured astronomical instruments. Although Thomas Butler the younger bequeathed ‘my largest clock’ to one son and ‘my lesser clock’ to another, both of these (unlike his father's) appear to be chamber clocks, since they are grouped not among shop items but with articles of formal clothing and domestic furniture respectively (Threlfall, Ancestry (see note 37), no. 7604).

41. For the will of ‘Thomas Stallion alias Butler of Latton’ (d. 1619), see Threlfall, Ancestry (note 37), no. 3802. Thomas III, who settled at Bromleys, styled himself ‘carpenter’ in his will, but also dealt in grain, making disposition, for example, of ‘all the corn of wheat & barley growing in the common field at Mets Cross upon my ground there’. ‘Emmanuel Stallon of London Haberdasher’ appears in Harlow Manor Court Rolls in 1604/1607; Threlfall, Ancestry (see note 37), no. 7604.

42. Thomas the younger prospered enough to have had ‘a black horse worth 46s.8d.’ allegedly stolen from the close of his Latton household in 1565 (Thomas Tagell of Harlow, glover, is found not guilty): Threlfall, Ancestry (see note 37), no. 7604; Calendar of Assize Records, Essex Indictments: Elizabeth I, ed. J. S. Cockburn (London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1978), 40 (no. 225).

43. Emmison, Essex Wills (see note 37),‘Preface’, speculates that ‘amometer’ may be a variant of ‘anemometer, an instrument for measuring wind‐velocity, but not recorded in the OED until nearly two centuries later’; see also John F. Mills, Encyclopedia of Antique Scientific Instruments (New York, Facts on File Publications, 1983), 51–52. Building on Emmison's suggestion, Threlfall, Ancestry (see note 37), no. 15208, suggests that Butler may have had an earlier career as a navigator, but his commonplace book exhibits little interest in nautical matters.

44. Emmison, Essex Wills (see note 37), xix, states that books (not to mention scientific instruments), rarely appear in wills of this class, region and period. On book use by merchants generally, see Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1962), 155–63, 248–49.

45. For New Haven, Yale Medical Library, MS 26 (1551–1554), see W. H. Bond and C. U. Faye, Supplement to the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, (New York, The Bibliographical Society of America, 1962), 59. Yale Medical MS 26 features four anatomical diagrams and a page for each of the twelve zodiacal signs. See Birkholz, ‘Vernacular map’ (note 25), 30, 36, for items shared and its relationship with Beinecke 558. The appearance of similar treatise extracts in other manuscript compendia suggests that astrological booklets may have circulated in 1550s London; see New Haven, Yale Medical Library MS 45 (Bond and Faye, Supplement, 62, 59), which appears to have been written by the same hand as fols. 68r–85v of Butler's commonplace book (the rest of which is in his own hand).

46. On Tudor commonplace books in general, see Parker, Commonplace Book (note 6), 4–6, 38–39, 16, who notes a not‐surprising tendency for these to be highly personal compilations, if not plainly idiosyncratic. For an assessment of Butler's book in the wider context, see Birkholz, ‘Vernacular map’ (note 25), 49–59.

47. See, similarly, from ‘Stoflers Judgment upon the 28 Mansions of the mone’ (fol. 7r): ‘if thou wilt go spedely in thy journey …’ For the concern with travel that is evident in many of Beinecke 558's items, see Birkholz, ‘Vernacular map’ (note 25), 59–70. Other shop‐orientated items in the book include multiplication tables, a set of mathematical story problems on mercantile themes (fol. 43v), and a ‘rewll for dayly expenses’ (fol. 65v).

48. ERO, D/AMR 1/55. For abstracts see Threlfall, Ancestry (note 37), no. 15208, and Emmison, Essex Wills (note 37), 310 (no. 1002).

49. Emmison describes ‘the appalling state of both major and minor roads’ in Tudor Essex, much of which is clay country. According to the Highways Act of 1555, every parish in the nation had ‘to elect two surveyors of the highways, and all parish householders had themselves to work on repairing the roads, or to send labourers, on four appointed days of the year’ (Emmison, Essex Wills (see note 37), xviii; A. C. Edwards, A History of Essex (Chichester, Phillimore and Co., 1978), 50–51.

50. Beinecke MS 558, fol. 63v. See Threlfall, Ancestry (note 37), nos. 15208, 7604, and 3802 for tenement and field references in Stallon‐Butler family wills.

51. See Threlfall, Ancestry (note 37), nos. 15208, 7604, and 3802, for family origins (Stalham, Norfolk, via Foxearth, Essex) and dispersal, ultimately to New England.

52. Sumner's name appears on many local wills as well as jury lists (Emmison, Essex Wills (see note 37), 352), and Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records (see note 42), index). For the Manor of Harlowbury, see L. H. Bateman, History of Harlow (Harlow, Harlow Development Corporation, 1969), 38–39 and, especially, W. R. Powell, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Essex, 8: Chafford and Harlow Hundreds (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), 133–43, 147 (hereafter VCH Essex). On cartographical activity in Tudor Essex, see Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (note 7), 118, Fig. 4.3, which ‘shows the intensity of surveying and mapping activity’ by county, 1470–1640.

53. Bateman, History of Harlow (see note 52), 103; see VCH Essex (note 52), 8: 131–33, for a count of 117 houses in 1670.

54. Butler's paternal great‐grandfather William Howe bore the same name as Harlow's 1550s vicar, whose residence lay at the northeast corner of Churchgate Street (VCH Essex (see note 52), 8: 143). The elderly priest William Butler, who was granted a license in 1548 to continue in residence at the Chantry House at the southern end of Churchgate Street, not only shared the surname Butler, but also may have been linked to the Thomas Butler of the present article in other ways. For example, the endowment William Butler occupied, the ‘Stanton [Staunton] Chantry’, seems to have the same etymological origins as our Butler's alternative name, ‘Stallon’, which in turn came from Stalham, Norfolk: see Threlfall, Ancestry (note 37), no. 15208. For William Butler and the Stanton Chantry, see VCH Essex (note 52), 8: 133, 143–44, 147, and Bateman, History of Harlow (note 52), 120, 103; also 60, 84 for Bromleys, 70 for Wm. Howe.

55. By 1582 the neighbourhood of St Sepulchre's was teeming with doctors and other men of science, one of whom was the mathematician Thomas Digges, son of Leonard Digges. For the 1541 and 1582 assessments, and comments thereon, see R. G. Lang, Two Tudor Subsidy Assessments for the City of London (London, London Record Office, 1993).

56. Gerard L'E. Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument Making (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), 15, 96, 286, 11. For biographies of Thomas Gemini see Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (note 8), 250–54, and Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (this note), 12–20, 33–37. Turner also discusses Gemini in several articles reprinted in Renaissance Astrolabes and Their Makers (Aldershot, Ashgate / Variorum Reprints, 2003), including ‘Later medieval and Renaissance instruments’, 1: 241–42.

57. For Gemini's astrolabes, see Turner, ‘Later medieval and Renaissance instruments’ (note 56), 1: 242; idem, ‘Three astrolabes of Gerard Mercator’, in Renaissance Astrolabes (note 56), 8: 347; and G. L'E. Turner and K. van Cleempoel, ‘A Tudor astrolabe by Thomas Gemini and its relationship to an astrological disc by Gerard Mercator of 1551’, in Renaissance Astrolabes (note 56), 9: 403, 407.

58. The London printer of Gemini's work was Ioanni Hertfordie; see Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (note 8), 251–52. Gemini published the English‐language edition of the work as A Compendious Anatomy in 1553.

59. On Gemini's search for patronage, see Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (note 56), 16–18. Turner, 13, observes that conclusions regarding Gemini's profession tend ‘to reflect the calling of those who write about him’.

60. Gemini's map of Spain, Nova descriptio Hispaniae, was used by Abraham Ortelius for the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570): see Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (note 8), 252–53, and, for Lhuyd's role as intermediary between Gemini and Ortelius, 344–48. Cock's version had been taken from a woodcut map by Vincenzo Paletino (1551).

61. Lynam, Map of the British Isles (see note 8), 6–7; Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (see note 8), 253; Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (see note 7), 61–63; Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (see note 56), 34–35. For Gemini's links with Lily (including possibility of the latter's involvement in the 1555 reissue), see Barber, ‘The British Isles’ (note 20), 69–70.

62. Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (see note 8), 250; Turner and van Cleempoel, ‘A Tudor astrolabe by Thomas Gemini’ (see note 57), 403; Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (see note 56), 33; Turner, ‘Three astrolabes of Gerard Mercator’ (see note 57), 347–48.

63. Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (see note 56), 96, 7; idem, ‘Three astrolabes of Gerard Mercator’ (see note 57), 347–48; Turner and van Cleempoel, ‘A Tudor astrolabe by Thomas Gemini’ (see note 57), 408.

64. Gemini's network included those whose work he had pirated as well as published, such as Digges, Lhuyd, Vesalius, Mercator and Lily, but also extended to other leading figures in disciplines adjacent to scientific geography, including John Dee, Abraham Ortelius and Gemma Frisius; see Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (see note 8), 254, and Turner, Renaissance Astrolabes (see note 56), 8: 347–48, 9: 407–8.

65. Instruments purchased by men of relatively modest means need not have cost as much as the finest available, such as those presented or supplied to royalty. Practising surveyors often used wooden rather than expensive metal instruments (Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (see note 56), 12).

66. When in 1325 Robert of Nottingham, who had been dispatched on behalf of the king to requisition wheat in the vicinity of the River Trent, recorded the distances between stations on his itinerary, his mileages were the same as those on the later Gough map. This argues an acquaintance with ‘an early edition of the Gough Map’, or at least elements of its route network data; see Hindle, ‘Roads and tracks’ (note 15), 198.

67. Peter Barber, ‘The Copperplate map in context’ (see note 24), 20–24. For Augustine Ryther, see Turner, Renaissance Astrolabes (note 56) 1: 241, 11: 396–97, and Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (note 56), 27–29. For Grocers and wool, see Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers' Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995), 561, 566.

68. E. M. Carus‐Wilson and Olive Coleman, England's Export Trade 1275–1547 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1963), 1.

69. T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), 144.

70. Ibid., 154.

71. Ibid., 144–92 (chapter title).

72. Carus‐Wilson and Coleman, England's Export Trade (see note 68), 9.

73. For the Gough map's ‘east Yorkshire–Lincolnshire network’, see Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (note 7), 48; Parsons, Map of Great Britain (note 12), 11, 37; and Hindle, ‘Road network’ (note 14), 211. Four of Butler's nine routes traverse East Anglia.

74. For the export trade in general, see George D. Ramsay, The City of London in International Politics at the Accession of Elizabeth Tudor (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1975), and T. H. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1982).

75. For the effect of the new regulations on London, including the attraction of a variety of new businesses to the city, see Ramsay, City of London (note 74), 37–39, 65–70, and Douglas Bisson, The Merchant Adventurers of England: The Company and the Crown (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1993), ix, 39–42.

76. Long, Technology, Society and Culture (see note 40), 19.

77. The name of ‘Wylam Dyar’ (an illegitimate son?) heads a list of Stallon‐Butler family birth notes in Beinecke MS 558 (fol. 63v). This placement suggests a familial relationship between William and the book's compiler Thomas Butler, and one wonders if the surname reflected his or his parent's occupation.

78. J. Aubrey Rees, The Worshipful Company of Grocers: An Historical Retrospect, 1345–1923 (London, Chapman and Dodd, 1923), 58, 95, 129 (21 for the term ‘grossers’); see also Joseph Ward, Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. 101.

79. See Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community (note 67), 561–66, regarding the involvement of Pepperers (forerunners to the Grocers) in the wool trade.

80. Rees, Worshipful Company of Grocers (see note 78), 154–55. Nightingale observes that the Grocers were ‘more ready than other merchants to obey the king's wishes’ and played ‘a prominent part [in] relations with the Crown’ concerning wool. Attempts to win the Crown's favour were ongoing, as royal intervention was one of the prime forces which threatened company interests (Medieval Mercantile Community (see note 67), 558–570, at 564, 566. Rees, 155, similarly asserts that ‘through the centuries the Grocers' Company have been conspicuous for their attachment to the Throne’.

81. The expansion of the Grocers' Company has been seen as an example of how mercantile development can depend on ‘royal initiative and organization’ (Ward, Metropolitan Communities (see note 78), 66).

82. Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers (see note 56), 11, 8, and idem, ‘Later medieval and Renaissance instruments’ (see note 56), 1: 243; Delano‐Smith and Kain, English Maps (see note 7), 60. See also Joyce Brown, Mathematical Instrument‐Makers in the Grocers' Company 1688–1800 (London, Science Museum, 1979).

83. William Ravenhill, A Short Account of the Company of Grocers (1689), quoted in P. H. Ditchfield, The Story of the City Companies (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 86–87; Ward, Metropolitan Communities (see note 78), 120, discusses tensions between Grocers affiliated with rival ‘overseas trading companies’. Delano‐Smith and Kane (English Maps (see note 7), 118, propose ties between map making and ‘agricultural improvement’, particularly in ‘the capitalist, corn‐growing villages of East Anglia’. Another link between mercantile guilds and early domestic mapping may lie, as noted above in note 8, in Humphrey Lhuyd's service as retainer to Henry Fitzallan, Earl of Arundel (Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (see note 8), 344).

84. For the implications of Essex ‘being a maritime county, with a long, deeply indented coastline’, see Emmison, Essex Wills (note 37), xxii. On the correlation between urban growth and access to navigable water, see Edwards and Hindle, ‘Transportation system of medieval England and Wales’ (note 34), 129. The parishes of Latton and Harlow lay on the south bank of the River Stort, a tributary of the Lea, but this waterway was not then fully navigable.

85. There is no mention of the book in Butler's will, although silence in this respect is not significant, for it was unusual in the period to mention personal possessions of this nature. Butler's son, Thomas Stallon of Latton (d.1590), however, mentions in his will a certain ‘joined cupboard with four locks’ kept at the woollen shop, containing ‘my will and testament, with the lease also of Brumleas with other writings therein lying’ (my emphasis). On the general omission of references to personal writings in wills, see Parker, Commonplace Book (note 6), 6, and Emmison, Essex Wills (note 37), xix. Pierre Jeannin, Merchants of the Sixteenth Century, transl. Paul Fittingoff (New York, Harper and Row, 1972), 86, notes the ‘proliferation of books written for the education of merchants’ but adds that ‘merchants themselves almost never spoke of them’.

86. The will of Butler's wife Elizabeth gives instructions about how the contents of her ‘woollen shop’ and her stocks in corn were to be distributed among her heirs (Threlfall, Ancestry (see note 37), no. 15208; Essex County Probate, D/AMR 2).

87. New Haven, Yale Medical Library MS 26, fol. 24r. Neither Butler (born 31 January 1500) nor any of his children (John, Thomas and Alice) were Pisces; see Beinecke 558, fols. 63v, 42r–v. No birth data appears for Elizabeth, but consider the astrological sketch for a woman born under Aries: ‘her second husband shalbe a byer and a seller, and by hym she shall have 3 children’ (MS 26, fol. 18v).

88. In 1325 Robert of Nottingham used a version of the Gough map on a journey to procure wheat in the Midlands (see note 66).