I. Thank you very much, Nick.
And it's a pleasure to be here. Now choreographic contacts can mean either the.
Mapping of Britain that underlay the maps in the Shodan Tapestry maps, or it can relate to display maps,
which, after all, is exactly what they were, they were meant to impress.
Now, in the time available, I'm only going to be able to talk about the larger display maps.
But Hillary return, and we'll be saying a certain amount about the culture graphic background in terms of text and in the mapping of England.
Well, let's begin now with a modern map.
Utilitarian electronic. Used and then you move on to the next one.
And before that, you got the eighties ads and similarly, you used it.
And you wouldn't have ever thought of sort of preserving it as a sort of work of art.
But even today, there are display mats in the most unlikely places while this beautiful places pens outstation.
And there is a map. And there it is in detail.
And what it shares in common with the maps I'm going to talk about is this is not purely geographical because if we look in detail,
it commemorates the Cornish pasty. It commemorates the ice cream, and it commemorates the theatre in Birkenau, which is a cultural side.
So these maps are encyclopaedic and it's worth bearing in mind.
They also go back an awfully long way to Babylon and probably earlier this.
You may not recognise as a map, but it shows the layout of a palace garden in Babylon, and you can see the water channels and so on and underneath.
Equally importantly, perhaps more importantly, you've got a military display, so we'll ready.
The map is used to provide the context for an image of power when we go to Imperial Rome.
This tendency increases, and here you get an extract from the Hereford MAPPA Mundi.
Recalling the episode in the Bible, where Caesar, who's represented as a pope on the left, orders the surveying of the world.
And this image of 10 25 is probably a distant echo of the map that was commissioned and was prepared by Augustus, his son in law, Agrippa.
For display as a problem is a stern relief.
In the Roman forum, where it would have impressed, but it was not only world maps that the Romans specialised in.
If you well, you may know this image, which comes from a long, long row depicting the Roman Empire.
It's usually called an itinerary map because it is based around itineraries, but it's recently been suggested that though the form may be distorted.
It was intended to be a map of the civilised world.
Just to give you some idea, this is Britain here and sort of this is France and down here is the Mediterranean.
The latest theory is that it was intended for display and it would have been centred on Rome,
which you can see here with Austria underneath, and that it was intended, as I say, to represent just the civilised part of the world.
Shown here, OK, with the Mediterranean. And already you can see that it's sort of slightly stretched.
And the theory goes, and it seems to me quite convincing that it was intended for display in a room like this.
This is in split, but you can almost see the emperor sitting at the end.
And the final the display itself would have consisted of the map here as a civilised part of the world.
And underneath it marked by the lines, the different other, the other different zones of the world.
So you would have had the emperor as quite literally at the centre of the world.
With Rome at the centre. But this is not only confined to, as I say, world maps, the Romans also specialised in more local mapping.
This is an extract of an enormous stone plan of Rome, of which only, well, hundreds of fragments survive, but nothing like the original.
Originally, there were a hundred and twelve enormous slabs showing containing a detailed map of Rome.
And this is roughly what the layout of the original slabs would have been.
You can see the Tiber running through the middle, and amazingly, this is the wall on which it was displayed.
You can still see the holes that were made to support the individual panels.
This is now a church in Rome, and this is a fairly good recreation.
Of what it would have looked like originally,
it would have been a monument to Roman civilisation and the fact that people couldn't get close up to look at it didn't really matter.
It was the overall image that counted. And this is true of many of these display maps.
But the stone panels weren't confined to Roman cities.
We know that images were also created of parts of the Roman countryside,
and particularly those parts of the Roman countryside that was settled by recharge.
Roman soldiers like this is a part of an enormous map of the neighbourhood of what's now a in France, in France.
And it was not only in stone and in plaster that the Romans commemorated.
Well, used maps for political purposes.
There is a record, which I think is not generally known of the fact that at one point a tapestry map of the world was presented to a Roman emperor.
So even there, the Romans got in first. But this is quite an important other aspect of it later on in the Roman Empire.
We begin getting maps of provinces. We know of a map of Sardinia, for instance.
And this is a map of Jerusalem of Palestine. Rather that was actually put onto the floor of a church.
And this particular shot, I think. Gives you an idea of of the floor.
So these commemorative maps didn't only weren't only created for walls, they were also created for floors, and this continued into the Middle Ages.
When you get the enormous mediaeval mappa mundi.
And we know that the son in law, the sorry, the daughter, the daughter of William the Conqueror, is said to have had an enormous.
World's map on the floor of her audience chamber in in in Russia.
This is at least recorded by a chronicler at the time. And even if the world map didn't exist and there's some dispute as to whether or not it did.
Clearly, contemporaries wouldn't have been surprised had it existed.
In this, I think, is the important point.
These mediaeval world maps reach their most deficient in about thirteen hundred, but they can be divided into two distinct groups.
One of them, I would call the wrong world maps, which very much emphasised the importance of God is the creator and the dominator.
And this is typified in these two images of well,
from the soul to from a soul to atlas in the from a soldier in the British Library created in about twelve fifty.
And on two sides of a piece of available on the one side.
On the left, you see the clearest image of God dominating the world.
But perhaps more interesting is the image on the versa of the world effectively being held by God or in the greatest example of a mediaeval world map.
The original got destroyed in 1943, but this is a recreation based on photography.
Here you can see God. Oh, you see the world as quite literally the embodiment of God.
And I've circled the heads, the arms and the feeds.
And if you want to get an idea of how this would have worked.
This is how it would have worked.
This is an image from an exhibition that I put on the British Library nine years ago, but you can see the absolute world map and in front of it,
a bench and that bench would have represented if you like the throne or the seat of the king.
So the king would have appeared as God's God's representative on us.
And I think the message was made ultra clear by the imagery behind and on the right of its.
You get a contemporary depiction of the sort of setting in which this would have been shown.
But there's also another strand, and this is the if you like little spiritual strand where God is not shown as dominating the world.
Instead, the emphasis is on the transience of the human world.
It's typified in the Hereford MAPPA Mundi, which is here in the well and in hard stripped production by the Folio Society.
But the bottom writes, you can see a scene which really sort of sums it all up.
You've got the Horseman Walk, you know, riding away from the world, but looking back wistfully at the world.
And his page tells him to march on.
And if you look carefully, you'll see that the world is held to the backdrop by a song with an here and are at the end when in fact the.
For other. Songs holding the world to the backdrop and collectively.
They read malls or death. So very, very different from these images of world power.
And at the top of the map, you have the last judgement with God at the top.
The blast on the left. And the dams on the roads.
So this is tradition of using maps for two to transmit really very, very powerful non geographical messages.
And here you've got a sort of context in which it would have been shown.
If you go to Hereford Cathedral, you will see the tomb of St. Thomas Cantaloupe, which has recently been redone in this frankly rather gaudy way.
And at the top, you have a little depiction of the Hereford Martha Mundi,
which isn't isn't entirely out of place because the records would suggest that at one point,
the Hereford MAPPA Mundi was displayed close to the shrine as part of the campaign to get Thomas Cantaloupe canonised.
So. You've got the. You've got the again, the propaganda workings of this sort of mob.
This tradition continued into the into the renaissance, particularly in its sort of memory of trials and processions in which soldiers
carried banners containing pictorial maps or even actual maps of victories.
This is a depiction of a detail from the famous painting by Muncher Neal, which is now in Windsor Castle.
But the same idea continues in this German prince of 15:15.
And we know for a fact that this sort of use of maps was to be found.
For instance, in the case of Henry, the second of France who, when he entered bullhorn in 15:52,
is known to have had exactly this sort of map as an accompaniment borne by his soldiers as he made his triumphal entry.
But in the Renaissance in particular, the universalist claims continue to be made by rulers.
This is a tapestry of a Portuguese tapestry showing.
Jupiter and Juno, but actually the king of Portugal and the Queen of Portugal holding the world with the king.
If you look carefully pointing at Portugal, it's sort of the message does come over.
You get magnificent maps also on display. But this map is really very interesting because it's a world map, obviously.
It appears to be associated with the pope, and in a sense, it is,
but it was actually a gift made by Charles office to the Pope at a time when he was
trying to get people's support for his interpretation of the Treaty of Two Disciplines,
which divided the world in half.
And he was particularly keen that the line of toward the serious should include what we now call Indonesia as part of the Spanish dominions and there.
Is the mark showing the line of to Celia?
So on the one hand, this is a map that is still on display in the papal galleries as a sort of reflection of papal claims to global supremacy,
on the other hand. It's a cunning piece of propaganda by Charles office.
But if you want global aspirations, how about this?
This is the entrance hall of a palace owned by an Italian cardinal called them loans under a foreign who hopes to be elected pope.
And I think. This is anything it's an absolute dream for a Putin or a Hitler or Stalin.
But of course, there were territorial states, too, who didn't primarily focus on the world but focussed on their particular neck of the woods.
And as early as the 15th century, Venice was commissioning its envoys to present maps to foreign courts.
Representing its view, the world and particularly its supremacy in Europe initially, rather.
And this is one of those maps, it's very, very early. We know that it was on display in Whitehall at the time of Henry VIII.
It was almost certainly much earlier, and recent research has suggested that apart from being a Venetian map,
the text very much pushes the line that Venice is the first state in the city.
And north of the Alps to the early 16th century, you began people, you began to get rulers who commissioned the mapping of the dominions.
Often this mapping was kept confidential. But in the case of Bavaria, it resulted in the printed map.
This is the copperplate version of 15 79, but that was in fact it was preceded by a woodcut version.
Of which I will now show you an extract.
And you can see just how beautifully coloured it was and how impressive and here, by the way, particularly in these in these times of Brexit,
I want to just point out that this is 10 years before Christopher Saxon is a national survey, so we were there first.
But we were there fairly early, and this map was almost certainly intended.
Well, it was almost certainly presented to Henry, the eighth in 15 37.
And it was again almost certainly displayed in Whitehall Palace.
And the imagery is interesting because you'll see that Ireland and Scotland are painted in the same colours,
but the English had a direct and obvious claim to Ireland, which they were occupying.
The colouring implies a similar claim to Scotland. So it's propaganda.
But in Henry, the eighth school, too, we had. Pictorial maps like this, I think rather magnificent view of colour adorning the walls.
But Henry, they couldn't possibly hope to rival the papacy.
This. Apart from being an absolutely magnificent gallery, is a piece of painful propaganda.
Reinforcing people claims to sovereignty initially.
So all of the maps show parts of Italy and the ceiling.
Builds on this to make the case that there's a biblical claim as well to supremacy in Italy and this is one of them ups.
I mean, there are absolutely magnificent. But they also make a political point.
And this also makes a political point. This is as close as you're going to get in my lecture to a map by Saxton.
It shows Elizabeth. Standing on the map and acts as a sort of counterpoint to.
Ralph Sheldon standing in Western Hall surrounded by his maps of the counties of England.
It's sort of the same mentality. And it was a European wide phenomenon.
This is a gallery in New Fitzy.
Which was made for receptions by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in the fifth belt from the 50 nations, and you can see that.
There are maps of his dominions in Tuscany surrounding a gallery from which the view would have a view of Florence and I mean.
It would have been a real knockout, I think.
But as well as representing claims to Dominion, maps were used in the Renaissance, also to enhance the personal virtues of the monarch.
Here, for instance. We see the triumphal arch of Maximillian, this was never built,
but its purpose in the book was to emphasise the role of Maximilian, the first who died in 5:19 as a successful warrior.
And here on on the right, you can see a detail showing these sorts of pictorial maps of his conquests and of his successes.
Some of them are successes, incidentally, which?
Henry Gates claimed as his victories like the battle of the Spurs, but the point is that this is how they were used.
And Charles, the fifth in a much grander way with a series of tough histories, commemorated his conquests in Tunis and 15:35.
And one of the first mapping the first tapestry in the series shows this map
showing some half of Spain in the western Mediterranean viewed from the north.
And Henry, the eighth two participated in this.
We know in Whitehall that she had images of his victories, and this particular image here has only relatively recently come to light,
which shows the last stages of his successful siege of Berlin in 15 44.
The preceding images had been known for a long time, but not this one, which, as I say, was discovered fairly recently in the British Library.
And victories could also be commemorated even if they weren't won by monarchs but were won by rebels against the monarchs.
This is a tapestry commemorating the successful.
Protection of Harden from a siege by the Spanish it's brought out,
it was brought up by the Protestant Northerns northern provinces of the Netherlands to commemorate the salvation.
And it is pretty much contemporaneous with the Shelden tapestries, which only goes to show that other people elsewhere were thinking of tapestry maps.
But when we're thinking of raw valour,
perhaps the outstanding example of the cast of graphic commemoration is this relatively little known gallery in Fontainebleau.
It's the Gothic if it actually commemorates Henry, the force of France as a Huntsman.
And you can see he would have come in from his hunting.
Through into this larger that which is lined with images of the hunting grounds of the French royal families.
But it wasn't only valour that distinguished their innocence, Rula,
it was also the idea that they were knowledgeable about the world and indeed about everything else.
And this is sort of exemplified by this room in the Palazzo Vecchio again in Florence, where.
The world knowledge of the Dukes is commemorated side by side with the territorial power which we saw earlier on.
And the papacy to share in this, and there's this gallery in the Vatican, which isn't all that well known,
but actually I did notice features quite recently in the documentary on the Vatican.
You may have seen snatches of it. But again, this is a gallery consisting of maps of the world with a world map.
If you look carefully at the end again, reflection, reflecting the wisdom and knowledge of the ruler.
And I tried to capture this. In my exhibition, this is the sort of gallery.
Or an evocation of the sort of glory that monarchs throughout Europe had in the 16th and 17th century where they would display maps,
not necessarily their end of it and dominions just to show that they were afraid with what's happening in the world.
And in fact, in this particular image, you can see that there's this famous detailed map of of Venice of 1500.
So in these galleries, you would have shown maps of any sorts of countries.
And we know that one of the maps that was particularly popular, particularly popular with monarchs,
was this map by Sebastian Cabot of the world, dating from 15 44.
Henry, the eighth had the original manuscript marked, this one is printed and it's printed because.
It came within the purses of a merchants and the merchants, too participated in display maps.
This map of South America is the first map devoted purely to the Americas, there any.
It's one of two surviving examples, but we know that this map from from inventories or decorated the homes of rich merchants throughout Europe.
Another thing that decorated. The homes of merchants with town views like this rather magnificent view.
Of Augsburg dating from 15 21, it's one of the first views created or maps created to scale.
North of the Alps, and again, there's all sorts of propaganda which can be read into the details.
But this display came as of Friday, so I had to include this map because, of course, it's the earliest printed map of Oxford,
but its condition also says a lot about what happens when you display the map in public and why so few of these really large display maps now survive.
And the same is probably true of the tapestries to. And this is, again, a map that we know was very popular with English merchants and aristocrats,
it's a map not only of England and Wales and Ireland, but it's also a celebration of the new Stuart Dynasty.
And incidentally, commemorates Britain's protection from invasion over a thousand years.
So if you wanted to prove, prove your patriotic credentials.
This was the map you really have to show. But now we move from if you like the merchants, we dealt with royalty, we've dealt with merchants.
We now move to the aristocracy and the gentry who have their own maps.
Right from the start, and, you know, it made it explicit in sixteen fifty three is the fact, as you can see in the text here,
that these maps were not only meant for land management, they were also meant to adorn the homes of land.
None of landowners said that they could actually glory in their ownership of their estates,
but perhaps more important, impress all the people with the fact that they did own estates.
And now we're getting close to the shovels.
We're talking about this sort of magnificent map, which is really, really large, which has the owner's coat of arms.
All sorts of pretty pictures, which we can now analyse till the cows come home.
But they were meant to impress, and this was meant to impress the guests of Philip Parker in his home in Suffolk.
And I don't need to say very much more about this map, which you can see just around the corner.
But that, too, was primarily made to impress the maps that were actually used to administer the estate would have been the draughts.
And maps were not only of the states. This map shows a whole hundreds and hundreds of Osawa, and it was commissioned for the Duke of York,
for the Earl of Northumberland, who basically owned the whole of Osawa in 16:35.
This map still survives, and amazingly, it is still on display and probably on display in its original setting, which is fantastic.
And it's here in a gallery which contains portraits of great men portraits of the dynasty.
If you look carefully on this map, you will see that on the other wall.
Sorry. On the other wall, there is actually a depiction of the House where the map is displayed and on the right,
we see the genealogy of the odds of Northumberland. So you've got images of ferns, images of land.
And images of family and together. I think they make the point now,
Lord Burley was also aware of the power of maps and a visitor to his palace in the nineties remarked that in a hall is depicted the King of England,
Kingdom of England with all its cities, towns and villages, mountains and rivers,
as also the moral bearings and domains of every squire, Lord Knight and Noble who possesses lands and retainers to whatever extent.
In other words, the map was intended to intimidate it,
told all of his visitors that nobody knew exactly where they were and that they couldn't get up to any tricks.
And it provides a counterpart to look to the Shodan maps, which is Hillary will explain later.
In a way, it provided a hint that the Sheldon's two had powerful friends, and if the government got to offer it.
They have friends and influences who could take countermeasures.
And the Sheldon's weren't unique. This is an image of the old West Midlands.
The image was created in 1862 at a time when he was seeking to get favours from the newly restored Charles and second.
But what is interesting is that he depicts himself not as he was in 1862.
But as it was in 60 and 46 when he was a leading cavalier.
And if you look carefully, he's standing in front of a map. And there is that map.
And that's not entirely clear from this image. You can still read the place names and rather like Sheldon, has been very selective.
In the choice of place names, almost all of them. Refer to powerful friends and allies and the network of power in the East and Midlands.
And the clear message is. That if Charles, a second doesn't do what the all of us wanted.
As the map demonstrates. Charles, a second would suffer for it.
Thank you very much.