Maps - English Maps - Lands of William The Conqueror

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1086 - Lands of William the Conqueror

THE DOMESDAY COLLECTION OF MAPS

In 1980, the cartographer John Garnons Williams set out to portray the counties of England as they had been in 1086, five hundred years before they were first mapped. Using nearly 10,000 of the spellings recorded in Domesday Book and inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry (which was made in England not France) he drew 50 exquisite maps over the next ten years. The American cartographic review Mapline praised the result as "a delightful series of maps.... which really repay close study..... They really demonstrate how much William the Conqueror missed in being unable to translate his material into graphic form."

DOMESDAY BOOK
At Christmas time 1085, two years before his death, William the Bastard, Duke William II of Normandy, King William I of England, or more familiarly, William the Conqueror, held court at Gloucester and "had much thought and very deep discussion with his council about his country - how it was occupied and with what sort of people". The result was Domesday Book, "A description made of all England.... covering the lands of every shire and the property of every magnate in fields, manors and men ... in ploughteams, services and rent." It was a document unrivalled in its thoroughness in any country until our own century and is William's most durable gift to the historian.

THE MAPS WILLIAM WOULD HAVE DRAWN
By any standards the Domesday survey was a remarkable undertaking. The King's commissioners who quartered the Kingdom left a vivid picture of town and rural life 900 years ago. Yet for all the Domesday Book's scope (over 13,000 place-names were listed) it has one great weakness: no maps accompany it. To the modern mind such an omission is almost unbelievable - most people assume that William must have produced a set of Domesday Maps - but the reason is simple enough. The expertise just wasn't available at the time and indeed was not to become so for another 500 years.

ENGLISH COUNTY MAPS
England has been wonderfully well served by its map makers in the past, but few people realise how comparatively recent their work is. It was not until 1579 that the art of surveying developed sufficiently for Christopher Saxton to create the first Atlas of English county maps. And by then, "only" 400 years ago, Domesday was just a folk memory and the Domesday spellings long forgotten. A glance at a "Saxton" or a "Speed" will reveal that most English place-names had assumed their modern form.

ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING SERIES OF COUNTY MAPS EVER DRAWN
In the "Domesday Collection", John Garnons Williams has, for the very first time in a series of maps, shown a large majority of the Domesday Names in their original form. Forgotten names, Eurvicscire for Yorkshire, Grantebrige for Cambridge, even Snotingham for Nottingham, live again after nine centuries. To make the maps fully accessible and enjoyable to everyone, a translation "Key Map" is supplied with every map, as is a wealth of historical and linguistic information. Even before publication, individual hand-coloured Limited Edition maps had been ordered by collectors in over 15 countries who appreciated the potential value of the first hand-drawn series of English maps to be created since 1840. Since publication, complete sets have been bought by university libraries throughout the English Speaking World. Soon after completing the series, John Garnons Williams was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.