Sarah Tyacke is Assistant Keeper in the Map Library. She is author and editor of several works, among them 'London Map-Sellers 1660-1720' (Map Collector Publications Ltd., 1978), and has organised various exhibitions including 'Christopher Saxton and Tudor Map-making' in 1980. The catalogue of this remains available.

IT IS SOMETIMES difficult to appreciate that most of the maps which we may regard in an antiquarian light as old, rare or curious were produced, sold and bought as current maps. The themes which they implicity or explicitly illustrate reflect contemporaries' views and preoccupations as well as topographical reality. While the map collector of today may be interested in maps of a particular period, place or type the earlier map user often had other ends in view. These past tastes are well represented in the map collections of the British Library, Map Library: the collection includes military, maritime, political and social, astronomical, historical and literary mapping as well as the general and topographical mapping of the world and the British Isles.

The maps offered for sale from the sixteenth century to the present day given an indication of the range of interests for which maps catered. In the seventeenth century, for example, the English Civil War, the Dutch Wars and the Glorious Revolution of 1689, as well as the campaigns of Louis XIV on the continent, enabled the English map sellers to cash-in by publishing topical military maps. Thus Saxton's wall-map of 1583 came out of mothballs and was renamed the 'Quartermaster's map' in 1644 for service in the Civil War. Similarly map sellers such as James Moxon, John Overton, Robert Morden, and Philip Lea explained graphically through their maps how the French or the allies were progressing on the continent. A typical publication of the time is a small volume entitled Military Geography by James Moxon (1691) which includes A new mapp of Flanders and Artois - the yello' shews how much is possest by the French'[1]. This was presumably published to enable customers to follow the war as reported in the London Gazette.

Both popular and professional uses of war maps are represented in the collections. Probably the most famous military map is William Roy's manuscript survey of Scotland (1747-55) on thirty-eight sheets which was drawn to assist in the pacification of the Highlands after the rebellion of 1745[2]. Roy, later to become the effective founder of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, writing in 1785, referred to the map of Scotland as 'rather … a magnificent military sketch than a very accurate map of a country'. Its artistic and topographic merit, however, have long been admired in spite of its author's dismissive view. Of less artistic but still of historical interest are the earliest English lithographic military maps in the collections, which are to be found in two large volumes deposited by the War Office[3]. The earliest of them, lithographed in May 1808, is a map of Bantry Bay[4], where Napoleon's forces were expected to land. This is followed by a succession of battle plans from the Peninsular War lithographed between 1808 and 1815. Lithography in this context was used like today's electrostatic copying - as a means of speedily (and cheaply) conveying multiple copies of maps for immediate use. In the First World War the military necessity for surveys was met by a series of maps commonly known as the 'Trench maps'[5]; these covered all aspects of trench warfare. Colonel Winterbotham, who had been a surveyor in the War, recorded in 1919 that 32 million such maps had been printed and sent to France[6]. On the fronts themselves each Field Survey Battalion was given two printing machines capable of turning out 700 copies or so per hour - to record successive advances and retreats. These maps, which show the course of the War, are held in the Map Library. Although not collectors' items at present they have begun to arouse interest for their great historical value.

The first printed charts or sea atlases did not appear until a good half century after the first printed land maps, which date from the late fifteenth century. Sailors were used to steering by their instruments, note books and manuscript charts - a tradition which continued into the eighteenth century. The printed tradition is represented in the collection by the Dutch atlases produced by Lucas Waghenaer (c. 1533-1606), Willem Blaeu (1571-1638), Jan Janszoon (1588-1664) and others whose products monopolised the English market until the eighteenth century. The English maritime bookseller Richard Mount (1677-1722) illustrated this to his valued customer Samuel Pepys in the course of conversation in 1695: 'Ye Dutch have such a vent for all their Books of navigation & coasting that besides those ones of their Lighting Column etc. which are ordinarily sent over hither & sold here they have printed sevll other books of navigation … in English …'[7]. The earliest attempt at an English maritime atlas was Joseph Moxon's A Book of Sea Platts (1657)[8] which was followed by more ambitious enterprises carried out by John Seller. These first challenges to the Dutch are represented in the Map Library collections, notably by a number of the editions of Seller's English Pilot[9] including the partial edition, apparently never completed, of his English Pilot, Third Book. Oriental Navigation, 1677[10] or later. A similar, but later, project was Charles Price's A Compleat Sea Atlas'[11] covering the whole world which he proposed to publish by subscription on a weekly basis in 1727. By 1731 he was in debt and finally found himself in the Fleet Prison on Christmas Day.

Where Dutch and English printed charts were not available or of insufficient detail, the manuscript tradition prevailed. In some cases this was also the result of a desire for secrecy on the part of the country concerned. A particularly interesting example of this is the recently acquired revision of what was to become the sixth volume of Gerard van Keulen's Die Nieuwe Groote Lichtende Zee-Fakkel first printed in 1753[12]. Before that date, sets of printed and manuscript charts covering the oriental navigation were compiled by Van Keulen, successors to the Blaeu firm, for use by the Dutch East India Company. The present volume retains the Blaeu firm's symbol of an armillary sphere on the binding and is thought to have been put together about 1722. In particular it includes two very unusual manuscript charts, drawn on a printed rhumb-line base, of the southern coast of Java: versions of these were subsequently issued in the sixth volume of the Zee-Fakkel in 1753. The collections of Dutch and English charting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are matched by equally interesting French examples, such as editions of Le Neptune François, (1693) and the counterfeit Dutch edition. The collections are equally strong for the nineteenth century - in particular the copyright deposit collection of British Admiralty charts covering the world from 1800 onwards.

If wars and the sea were an abiding professional and popular interest, political and social mapping with its element of analysis became widespread in the nineteenth century. Before that political or administrative boundaries, the locations of, for example, market towns, bishoprics or other jurisdictions were sometimes included on general or topographical maps. Christopher Saxton included such information in his atlas of England and Wales of 1579. Occasionally maps were designed to show only one or a few elements of interest; these, and the later statistical maps, are variously defined but often called thematic maps. One early example is an ecclesiastical 'thematic' atlas published in 1721 by Friar Joannes Baptista Cassini[13]. This shows the establishments of the Capuchin order in Europe and in parts of Asia and Africa.

The small volume of Military Geography by James Moxon (1691) is one example of a cheap publication produced to meet popular demand. Moxon's twelve maps allowed the reader to follow the course of the war in Europe between the English allies and the French (Maps C.24.a.25.).


Paul Sandby's 'View near Loch Tannoch' (1749) shows a group of surveyors at work on the military survey of Scotland, which was masterminded by William Roy between 1747 and 1755. The finished manuscript survey covered thirty-eight sheets and was intended to provide information for the pacification of the Highlands after the 1745 Rebellion (K.Top.L.83-2.).