The Date of the Gough Map

ABSTRACT

The date commonly given for the Gough map of Britain, about 1360, is, in the author's opinion, wrong. Arguments that have been offered to support such a dating are invalid. The best indication of the date of the map is the writing on it, which is essentially in a hand of about 1400, a dating endorsed by expert palaeographical opinion. Indeed, a few exceptional features of the handwriting may suggest a slightly later date. A few specific non-palaeographical features of the map confirm a date of production close to, or a little after, 1400. Comparison with other late medieval maps of large inland areas from any part of Europe shows how precocious or advanced the Gough Map is, even for the beginning of the fifteenth century. Arguments suggesting that the map had an earlier ‘prototype’, reflecting the affairs of King Edward I, are also found to be without merit.

La date communément avancée pour la carte de Grande Bretagne connue sous le nom de ‘Gough map’, aux environs de 1360, est fausse d'après l'avis de l'auteur. Les arguments mis en avant pour étayer une telle datation sont invalides. L'indicateur de datation le plus sûr, c'est le style d'écriture manuscrite qu'elle porte, qui remonte pour l'essentiel aux alentours de 1400, une datation confirmée par une expertise paléographique. En fait, un petit nombre de caractères exceptionnels de cette écriture manuscrite peut suggérer une date légèrement plus tardive. Un petit nombre de caractères non-paléographiques de la carte, très spécifiques, confirme une date de production très proche, ou de peu postérieure à 1400. La comparaison avec d'autres cartes tardives du Moyen Age représentant de larges aires territoriales de quelque partie de l'Europe montre combien la ‘Gough map’ est précoce ou avancée, même pour le début du XVe siècle. Les arguments suggérant que la carte est basée sur un prototype antérieur reflétant les affaires du roi Edouard 1^er sont considérés sans valeur.

Die Datierung um 1360, die normaler Weise für die Gough-Karte von Britannien angegeben wird, ist nach der Meinung des Autors falsch; die Gründe, die zu ihrer Untermauerung angeführt wurden, sind nicht stichhaltig. Der beste Hinweis für die zeitliche Einordnung ist die Schrift auf der Karte, die im Wesentlichen einer Hand um 1400 zugeordnet werden kann, eine Datierung, die durch paläographische Expertenmeinung bestätigt wird. Einige ungewöhnliche Elemente der Handschrift könnten sogar ein etwas späteres Datum nahelegen. Darüber hinaus bestätigen einige wenige spezielle, nicht-paläographische, Einzelheiten der Karte ein Herstellungsdatum um 1400 oder wenig später. Der Vergleich mit anderen spätmittelalterlichen Karten größerer Gebiete im Landesinneren beliebiger Regionen Europas zeigt, wie hoch entwickelt oder sogar richtungsweisend die Gough-Karte ist — selbst bei einer Datierung in das frühe fünfzehnte Jahrhundert. Argumente, die Karte basiere auf einem älteren Prototyp mit Hinweisen auf die Zeit König Eduard I., sind nach Ansicht des Autors nicht überzeugend.

La cronología con la que normalmente se fecha el mapa de Gough de Bretaña, hacia 1360, es, en opinión del autor, errónea. Los argumentos empleados en la defensa de esa cronología no son válidos. El mejor indicio de la fecha del mapa es el texto que aparece en él, realizado con una grafía de hacia 1400, fecha avalada por la opinión de un experto paleógrafo. De hecho, algunas características excepcionales de la escritura pueden sugerir una cronología algo más tardía. Algunas características del mapa muy específicas no paleográficas confirman una fecha de realización próxima, o algo posterior a 1400. La comparación con otros mapas bajomedievales de amplias áreas interiores de cualquier parte de Europa demuestra que el mapa de Gough es precoz, incluso para los inicios del siglo XV. Los argumentos que sugieren que el mapa tuvo un ‘prototipo’ temprano que reflejaba los asuntos del Rey Eduardo I se consideran carentes de interés.

KEYWORDS:

• Gough map
• medieval cartography
• early maps of England
• palaeographic dating
• Totius Britanniae
• Edward I
• Welsh castles

Notes

Notes and References

1. Nick Millea, The Gough Map: the Earliest Road Map of Great Britain? (Oxford, The Bodleian Library, 2007), 13.

2. E. J. S. Parsons, The Map of Great Britain circa A.D. 1360 Known as the Gough Map (Oxford, The Bodleian Library, 1958).

3. Keith D. Lilley, Christopher D. Lloyd and Bruce M.S.Campbell, ‘Mapping the realm: a new look at the Gough Map of Britain (c.1360)’, Imago Mundi 61:1 (2009): 1–28, at 2.

4. The only exceptions to this assertion in names that are at all legible seem to be that the last letter of both mereshey (Mersea) and Motland (Looe Island) slip into the sea.

5. The struggle that the scribe had to fit the name of nearby Rochester into the space available around the sign, breaking it into two lines, might have deterred him from trying to insert a word like quenburgh (its minimum length) into the space available for it: the two lines of Rowch/ester have greater vertical spread than the space would have allowed.

6. On the well-documented question of the building of the castle and town of Queenborough, see H. M. Colvin and R. A. Brown, The History of the King's Works, volumes 1 and 2, The Middle Ages (London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1963), 2: 793–804, particularly 796–98, 800 and 802–3.

7. Ibid., 803: ‘the town . . . does not appear to have been in any way fortified’. Considering its location and intended role, the mapmakers might well have guessed, without first-hand information, that it would be fortified. The prominence of the domestic buildings in the Sheppey town sign is made more noticeable by the fact that the ‘twin’ castle of Hadleigh, on the opposite side of the Thames, is not shown as having any domestic buildings.

8. Parsons, Map of Great Britain (see note 2), 2.

9. Millea, Gough Map (see note 1), 43.

10. See Gillian Hutchinson, Medieval Ships and Shipping (London, Leicester University Press, 1994), 28.

11. On the seals one ship is a ‘hulk’ and the other a ‘hulk hybrid’. In a hulk the strakes (side planking) curve up to the sheerline before reaching the stem and stern posts; in a cog, they cluster at each end post. In a hybrid the clustering occurs at just one end. The ship on the Gough map is essentially a hulk, but with partial clustering of the strakes at the prow. This does not prove that it was drawn as late as the dates of the two seals, but it does suggest that it might have been drawn only a little earlier. As far as we know, during the later fourteenth century and in the early fifteenth hulks became more common and cogs less the norm in English waters.

12. Parsons, Map of Great Britain (see note 2), 2. See also F. M. Stenton, ‘The road system of medieval England’, Economic History Review 7:1 (1936): 1–21 at 7.

13. Alun D'Orley, The Humber Ferries (Knaresborough, Nidd Valley Narrow Gauge Railways, 1968), 48. D'Orley notes that the crossing had a paddle-steamer and ‘was much used by cattle-drovers, for it was on the route along which they brought their beasts south from the Vale of York’ (ibid., 34).

14. Some indication of a claim of sovereignty could easily have been added. Contemporary portolan charts, for example, commonly marked territories with banners or shields of arms to show who held or claimed sovereignty over them. Edward III's courtiers and loyal subjects would certainly have taken his claims over much of France for granted: after the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), the fleurs de lis continued to feature on his shield. Even with the coast of France shown as it is on the map, places inland of such importance to Edward as Guines (an actual possession), Crécy and Rouen could easily have been included. It may be relevant that after Edward III's death, throughout the reign of Richard II (1377–1399) and through most of Henry IV's (1399–1413), the claim to the French throne and ideas of military glory in France were of relatively little interest.

15. For the role of Calais in English affairs in the early fifteenth century, see E. F. Jacob, The Oxford History of England. The Fifteenth Century 1399–1485 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961), 106, from which the quotation is taken. Calais held the Staple or monopoly for exporting wool and other commodities to the continent, intermittently up to 1392 and continuously thereafter.

16. The total includes all words on the map, except for about seventy repetitions of the formula fl for flumen. On the question of the legibility of the script in modern reproductions, see note 23 below.

17. A brief account of the varieties of cursive anglicana script between the 13th and 15th centuries is found in Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500 (London, The British Library, 2005), 161. For ‘text’ or textualis / textura hands, see 140–41. The terminology used in what follows here is generally that of Julian Brown.

18. The term ‘ductus’ is not easily defined and is not used consistently by all palaeographers. In this article it describes a scribe's particular shaping of letters, personal or following changing fashion, which is only incidental to the essential structure of a letter-form. Whereas different letter-forms are usually easily recognized and described, variations of ductus are more subtle and tend to be described impressionistically. The ductus of a hand is usually understood to be something shared by a succession of words, and not just characteristic of a single word; when shared widely enough, and assessed in sufficiently general terms, it merges into the ‘aspect’ or ‘style’ of the hand.

19. The signs used to mark the towns and other settlements have survived far better than the names, not only in their dabs of red ink but also in their black ink outlines. Even where the name has mostly or wholly disappeared the sign is often still clear. This raises questions that can hardly be answered here. Parsons in 1958 claimed that the signs of certain towns had been re-inked, but even with the towns that he named in this respect there seems little if any evidence of this. The darkest-inked sign on the map seems to be that of St Helier on Jersey, but even that shows no duplication of lines such as would surely have occurred at some point if a botcher chose to re-ink it.

20. For an account of the introduction and development of Secretary cursive script in England, see M. B. Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands 1250–1500 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969), xix–xx. Examples of its early use are reproduced in plates 9 and 10. See also Roberts, Guide to Scripts (note 17), 211.

21. Our understanding of the early use of Secretary hand in literary or libraria texts in England may be distorted by our knowledge of one precocious example, a treatise in Latin (Rolle's De Emendatione Vitae) in British Library MS Additional 34,763 (item 2). This is indeed in an essentially Secretary hand, dated by scripsit 1384. The date has to be accepted, with the reservation that we do not seem to have any other non-documentary or non-archival manuscript text from England in a Secretary hand that can be confidently dated within the next twenty years.

22. Probably the earliest such text to survive is the copy of Hoccleve's The Regement of Princes found in British Library MS Arundel 38, datable 1411 or 1412; see Andrew G. Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c.700–1600 in the Department of Manuscripts, The British Library, 2 vols. (London, The British Library, 1979), 1: 88 and 2: plate 329. The ductus is thoroughly Secretary, the letter-forms about 80 per cent so.

23. Place-names are here transcribed with abbreviations silently expanded. Parsons's 1958 transcriptions were always consulted, although he does mistranscribe a few names in slight respects, including Schaftisbry among the words just cited. My readings have been taken in the first place from the two-sheet facsimile issued by the Bodleian Library in conjunction with Parsons's 1958 monograph, and the Library's 1996 poster-form reprinting of the same facsimile. The initial readings have been corroborated by use of a high resolution scan of the map, the excellent detail of which unfortunately emphasizes the deterioration of the script of the map since the 1950s; in some respects the clarity of some readings in the 1958 photocopies may never be regained. The photocopies reproduce the script of the map rather more clearly than most of the facsimiles in Millea, Gough Map (see note 1). The reproduction of the map placed online by the team at Queen's University, Belfast (http://143.117.30.60/website/Gough Map/viewer. htm) is of little help in showing the script of the place-names. No doubt partly, again, because of the continuing deterioration of the original, the black-ink script in this reproduction is too pale and fragmented to be legible without foreknowledge in the case of many words that are fully legible in the earlier photocopies.

24. A rather different form of w is found in many textualis rotunda or fere-textura manuscript texts in England over the same period. This does not have the anti-clockwise sweeps of the cursive letter, but a slight and stiff approach stroke from the left on the first down-stroke. It cannot, however, be mistaken for the Secretary w, being an essentially non-cursive form and having the double back-loop against the second down-stroke characteristic of textualis as well as anglicana cursiva hands.

25. See Thomas Hoccleve, A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts, ed. J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), passim. The same is true of Hoccleve's earlier surviving autograph texts.

26. It might seem that the earliest known English non-archival text using a clear Secretary w is the copy of Nassington's Mirror of Life reproduced in Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts (see note 22), 2: plate 351, under the date ‘1418’. However, Watson acknowledges that the dating is uncertain (ibid., 1: 156), and it was not accepted by the British Library cataloguers who considered that the writing was ‘probably of the middle of XV cent’: see G. F. Warner and J. P. Gilson, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King's Collections, 4 vols. (London, The British Museum, 1921), 2: 241.

27. For example, the 2-shaped r is used after i in wircyster (Worcester, in Fig. 6) and witchirch (Whitchurch, Hampshire, in Fig. 4), after t and u in petreburgh (Peterborough) after g in grenested (East Grinstead), after a in ware and after e in bery (Bury St Edmunds), berkwey (Barkway), hertford, Tilberi (Tilbury), cheryng (Charing), derbi (Derby) and elsewhere. It is particularly striking that it is used as an initial in redyng (Reading, in Fig. 4).

28. See also tetford and, as less extreme examples, abyngton (Abingdon) (in Fig. 4), caxton, Northamton, tortey (Turvey) (in Fig. 5), and brydlyngton (Bridlington).

29. Other examples are seen in Arderne (Arden), lyndese (Lindsey), yorkwold (Yorkshire Wolds) and kendale.

30. The sharp angles or ‘points of breaking’, where the strokes that make up these lobes and cells meet, are only rarely drawn out into the ‘horns’ that are a feature of some Secretary-influenced cursive hands from the second decade of the 15th century onwards. The clearest example of this is seen in the a of Cantebrege (in Fig. 5).

31. I am most grateful to Pamela Robinson of the University of London for permission to quote from private correspondence. Her assessment was made after consultation with other expert palaeographers who saw sample facsimiles.

32. Parsons, Map of Great Britain (see note 2), 3.

33. Ibid., 3: ‘Users leaning over the map would rub this part with their sleeves’. This assumption is corroborated by recent publication of 15th-century evidence from an Oxford college of the fixing of a map to a mensa (normally a ‘table’), which implies a fairly horizontal structure that one could lean over: Rodney Thomson, ‘Medieval maps at Merton College, Oxford’, Imago Mundi 61:1 (2009): 84–90, at 88, no. 7, s.a. 1461: ‘pro mensa deseruiente mappam . . . ad disponendam mensam pro mappa . . . ad figendam pellem ad mensam . . .’ The nail-holes around the edge of the Gough map show that it was at some time fixed to a frame. The pallor of the western and northern parts of the map could also be ascribed to uneven exposure to light over a long period.

34. There seems to be no reason in any case to suspect Thomas Martin, a fairly scholarly antiquarian, of wanting to practise his scribal skills on an ancient document that he obviously valued. There is even less reason to suspect the presumed previous owner, Peter le Neve, or the known following owner, Richard Gough, of doing the same thing.

35. A good reproduction of the Duchy of Cornwall mappamundi fragment is found in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London, The British Library, 2006), 20. A particularly useful monochrome reproduction of a substantial part of the Aslake mappamundi fragment is found in P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London, The British Library, 1991), 36. See also Peter M. Barber and Michelle P. Brown, ‘The Aslake world map’, Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 22–44. All the script in the monochrome reproduction just cited is transcribed at 36–38 in that article.

36. In the Duchy of Cornwall fragment, see, for examples of freakish darkening of occasional letters, the first line (Orientalis plaga) and the ninth (meridiana pars) of the spandrel of marginal text. Examples in the Aslake fragment are too obvious and numerous to need suggesting.

37. J. Beverley Smith, ‘The foundation of the borough’, in Aberystwyth 1277–1977, ed. Ieuan Gwynedd Jones (Llandysul, Gomer Press, 1977), 14–27, at 18.

38. The Calendar of Patent Rolls (London, 1901—) is a long and incomplete series of volumes containing the record of royal grants and administrative decisions as issued in letters patent. Variously edited, it is arranged under the reigns of monarchs, those here concerned running from Edward I to Henry IV.

39. Annales Cambriae, ed. John Williams ab Ithel, Rolls Series (London, 1860), 105, 106, 108 and 109. See also, for example, Thomae Walsingham . . . Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series (London, 1863), 18 (Rex . . . in Occidentali Wallia apud Lampader Vaur . . . castrum construxit insigne), and 21.

40. See The St. Albans Chronicle 1406–1420, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1937), 22–27. The indenture in question describes Prince Henry, having besieged the castle for more than a year without success, parleying with the rebels as equals and obviously prepared to swallow his pride on the question of nomenclature.

41. A bridge is marked near Camelford in Cornwall, probably at Wadebridge.

42. R. H. Britnell, ‘Rochester Bridge 1381–1530’, in Traffic and Politics: The Construction and Management of Rochester Bridge, AD 43–1993, ed. Nigel Yates and James M. Gibson (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1994), 43–106, particularly 43–50. For background information, see Colin Flight, The Earliest Recorded Bridge at Rochester (Oxford, Tempus Reparatum, 1997).

43. The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–2; Eulogium Historiarum vel Temporis, ed. F. S. Hayden, 3 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1863), 3: 351 and 367; The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), 36–37; and Galbraith, St. Albans Chronicle (see note 40), 22. The enthusiastic description of the new bridge just quoted is from this last chronicle. The author, Thomas Walsingham, virtually repeated his reference to the bridge (though not the sumptuosissimum) in his Ypodigma Neustriae. Two of these chronicles mention the bridge in reference to the death in 1407 of Sir Robert Knolles, one of its two main benefactors.

44. Rotuli Parliamentorum, Petitiones & Placita in Parliamento, 7 vols. (London, 1767–1832), 3: 289–90 and 354. Under the 1397 entry: ore le dit Pount est fait de novel de pere & en un meillour & pluis seure lieu q'il estoit devant (Now the said bridge is made anew in stone and in a better and more secure place than it was before).

45. Positional accuracy is indicated by different regression procedures. See Lilley and Lloyd, ‘Mapping the realm’ (note 3), 18 and 19.

46. Respectively, Peter M. Barber, King Henry's Map of the British Isles: BL Cotton MS Augustus I.i.9 (London, The Folio Society, 2009), passim; Daniel Birkholz, ‘The Gough map revisited: Thomas Butler's The Mape off Ynglonnd, c.1547–1554’, Imago Mundi 58:1 (2006), 23–47; Peter M. Barber, ‘The British Isles’, in The Mercator Atlas of Europe. Facsimile of the Maps by Gerardus Mercator contained in the Atlas of Europe, c. 1570–1572, ed. Marcel Watelet (Pleasant Hill, Oregon, Walking Tree Press, 1998), 43–77, and Peter M. Barber, ‘Mapmaking in England, c.1470–1650’, in The History of Cartography, Vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward; 2 vols. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007), Bk 2: 1589–669, esp. 1620–1622. For the last three maps, see also Millea, Gough Map (note 1), 50–57.

47. Stenton, ‘Road system of medieval England’ (see note 12), 13–14.

48. Ibid., 14.

49. For some medieval examples, see Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (London, The British Library, 1999), 148–53.

50. For reproductions of two of the four versions, see Harvey, The Hereford World Map (note 35), 74–75. See also P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Matthew Paris's maps of Britain’, in Thirteenth Century England IV. Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference 1991, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1992), 109–21.

51. Four large and detailed maps of Italy dating from the first half of the fifteenth century (and three from later in the century) are discussed by Marica Milanesi, ‘Antico e moderno nella cartografia umanistica: le grandi carte d'Italia nel Quatrocento’, Geographia Antiqua 16–17 (2007–2008): 153–76 and plates. In relation to the two earliest maps (Archivio di Stato, Florence, and British Library MS, Cotton Roll xiii.44), Milanesi notes that these show Italy as a single unit, from the Alps to Calabria, despite a millennium of political fragmentation, and that the primary objective appears to have been to ‘supply the correct location of modern inhabited places’ (p. 161). While these maps are later than the Gough map, it is clear that we are only just beginning to learn about the production and use of large-area topographical maps in the early 15th century. I am indebted to Peter Barber for this information and comment.

52. See Lilley and Lloyd, ‘Mapping the realm’ (note 3), 15–17. On the availability of co-ordinates for latitude, and more rarely, longitude, by the early 15th century, see Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps (note 49), 43, and related n. 108.

53. Barber, King Henry's Map (see note 46), 30.

54. Totius Britanniae is reproduced in full in colour in Barber, King Henry's Map (see note 46), 31, and in black and white in Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps (see note 49), 21.

55. For example, Northampton and Daventry are placed near to the Lancashire coast, roughly north of Conwy and Caernarfon. Within a London–Huntingdon–Worcester–London triangle, which on the Gough Map would enclose about 25 towns, the Harley map has only one, named Stafford.

56. Certain areas on the Gough map, even within England, cannot have been mapped from first-hand observation and for these its makers must have relied on secondary sources, with some misinformation. The topography of the fenlands around the isles of Ely and Axholme would have been little known to outsiders and anyway difficult to map. Their knowledge of the mountainous parts of Wales was evidently slight.

57. I am grateful to Peter Barber for valuable discussion and suggestions on this topic.

58. Comparison may be made with the text of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Despite the survival of 16 manuscript copies spread in date over a century from the time of its composition, the mid-1380s, the textual tradition and the relative authority of the different versions are still in various respects unknowable.

59. Millea, Gough Map (see note 1), 13. See also Daniel Birkholz, The King's Two Maps (New York and London, Routledge, 2004), 67.

60. Millea, Gough Map (see note 1), 13.

61. Millea, Gough Map (see note 1), 14–15 and 41–43; and Birkholz, King's Two Maps (see note 59), 94–98 and 113–48, particularly 115–17, 121 and 134–41.

62. Beverley Smith, ‘The foundation of the borough’ (see note 37), 18.

63. F. M. Powicke, The Oxford History of England. The Thirteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1953), 411.

64. In that case, the large unnamed castle sign immediately to the northeast of the river name would represent Radnor, not Presteigne, and the small settlement between Builth (as here assumed) and Llandovery, its name ‘obliterated’ according to Parsons, would be Llanwyrtyd. Almost all the names on this part of the map seem now to be much less legible than they were to Parsons in 1958.

65. This is not, pace Parsons, Llanfihangel Castell Gwalter, but the settlement still prominent enough in the 16th century to be marked by Saxton as Llanyhangle ycrothen.

66. Parsons's reading is supported by the corresponding wetheryn on the Angliae figura map; see Barber, King Henry's Map (note 46).

67. From its location, the place should be Caergwrle (Hope), but the name on the map almost certainly ends with the letters werk, perhaps suggesting Basingwerk, the location of a small 12th-century castle as well as the well-known monastery, but which is in fact on the coast.

68. Gerald of Wales: the Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, trans. and ed. Lewis Thorpe (London, Penguin Books, 1978), 32 and 35–36. In just seven or eight days, Gerald and his aged archiepiscopal companion not only covered about a hundred and sixty kilometres of the route, but spent a day on Anglesey, and held a number of church services. They rode from Bangor to Rhuddlan, about forty-eight kilometres, in a single day.

69. The link with Chester and its region is reflected in arrangements made for the maintenance of the castles in north Wales, which were supervised from Chester: H. J. Hewitt, Cheshire under the Three Edwards (Chester, Cheshire Community Council, 1967), 50; and J. T. Driver, Cheshire in the Later Middle Ages (Chester, Cheshire Community Council, 1971), 55–56. Slate, lead and cattle were among the goods regularly sent from Wales into Cheshire. All ports along the north Wales coast, as far as Beaumaris, also served the Anglo-Irish traffic.

70. Henry IV travelled from Hereford to Hay, Talgarth and the upper Usk, stopping for a day on the way out at Defynnog near Llywel. The return journey was presumably along the same route and without the rest day: J. E. Lloyd, Owen Glendower: Owen Glyn Dwr (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1931), 73–75. This was, in the words of a more recent historian of the rebellion, ‘the familiar route from Hereford to Brecon and thence to Carmarthen’: R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1995), 238. Henry had already used the route from Hereford at least as far as the upper Tywi, in October 1401: Ian Mortimer, The Fears of Henry IV (London, Vintage Books, 2008), 242, especially n.41.

71. See J. E. Morris, The Welsh Wars of Edward I (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1901), 208–12.

72. The mid-14th century chronicler Ranulph Higden claimed that one of the four principal roads (regales vias) of Britain (which he called Rikenildstrete) ran for its first part from St David's to Worcester. It may be inferred, from his text, that this road did not go round by the south coast of Wales, to which he allocated another of his four ‘royal’ roads: Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, Monachi Cestrensis, ed. Churchill Babington and J. R. Lumby, 9 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1865–1886), 2: 46.

73. Millea, Gough Map (see note 1), 14.

74. Henry Gough, Itinerary of King Edward the First throughout His Reign, 2 vols. (Paisley, Alexander Gardner, 1900), 2: 130.

75. The direct route between Llywel and Llangadog, which is shown on the Gough map and which has been claimed by Millea (Gough Map (see note 1), 14) to reflect particular knowledge of a campaign of Edward I, was a well-attested track between what is now Trecastle, about a mile from modern Llywel, and Llangadog. (Stenton, ‘ Road system of medieval England’ (see note 12), 9, n.3, points out that Trecastle is in the parish of Llywel; the name Trecastle does not seem to have been widely used before the 16th century.) Eighteenth- and early 19th-century maps show a substantial road on this line: see, for example, John Rocque's map of ‘Carmarthenshire with Glamorganshire’ of 1753, and the map of south Wales published by Henry Teesdale in 1829, both reproduced in John Booth, Antique Maps of Wales (Westbury, Cambridge House Books, 1978), 81 and 107.

76. The persistence of the English kings’ assumption of their right to the overlordship of Scotland is reflected in the Angliae figura map (late 1530s) on which the colouring of Scotland (as of Ireland) and the closed crown over the title cartouche ‘implictly symbolised Henry VIII's “imperial” sovereignty over the whole of the British Isles’: Barber, King Henry's Map (see note 46), 48.

77. Millea, Gough Map (see note 1), 14 and accompanying n.24.

78. Douglas was always a particular thorn in Henry IV's side, and George Dunbar, Earl of March, after a long and complicated involvement in Henry's dealings with Scotland, turned traitor to him before the end of the reign.

79. Although the earldom of Buchan had lapsed in the early fourteenth century, it was revived twice, first about 1382 for Alexander Stewart (‘The Wolf of Badenoch’) and then again in 1406 for his kinsman John.

80. Richard Barber, King Arthur in Legend and History (London, Sphere Books, 1973; Ipswich, Boydell Press, 1974), 47–48.

81. Helaine Newstead, ‘Arthurian legends’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. J. Burke Severs and Albert E. Hartung (New Haven, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967–, in progress), 1:38–79, esp. 61–66. All three of these romances seem to have been written after 1400; we probably have no literary record of Inglewood Forest or the Tarn Wathelan before that date.

82. These romances, it should be said, were as likely to be about Tristan and Isolde as Uther and Igerne.

83. In Henry IV's attempt in 1401 to assert his overlordship of Scotland, ‘the English recited the time-honoured rigmarole beginning with Brutus the Trojan’: Ranald Nicholson, Scotland, the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1973), 219–20.

84. The first chronicle was written in a predominantly Secretary hand in which there is the occasional Secretary minuscule g capped with the distinctive horizontal bar. The second chronicle is in an angular anglicana hand, impossible to date narrowly, but proved by its reference to the death of Henry IV to be no earlier than 1413.

85. The physical arrangement of the codex is difficult to discover without unbinding.

86. The page is reproduced in black and white in Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps (see note 49), 180.

87. See Stenton, ‘Road system of medieval England’ (note 12), 13 and 20.

88. Ibid.

89. The towns are not located accurately on the map, but that simply reflects the style of the map as a whole.

90. Parsons's gazetteer, in his Map of Great Britain (see note 2) has a note, under Cardiganshire, referring to ‘a drawing of a range of mountains, scarcely visible’, southeast of Plynlimon, but he makes no mention of a name. No particular mountain exists in that vicinity, although the surviving district name Elan might be related.