The King's Two Maps

Cartography & Culture in Thirteenth-Century England

Daniel Birkholz

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415803427
• eBook ISBN: 9781135884956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

While a culture may have a dominant way of "mapping, " its geography is always plural, and there is always competition among conceptions of space. Beginning with this understanding, this book traces the map's early development into an emblem of the state, and charts the social and cultural implications of this phenomenon. This book chronicles the specific technologies, both material and epistemological, by which the map shows itself capable of accessing, organizing, and reorienting a tremendous range of information.

Chapter One
Painted Chamber Compilatio Henry III and the Cartography of Kingship

THIS CHAPTER PICKS UP WHERE THE PROLOGUE LEFT OFF BY EXAMINING King Henry III's lost Westminster Palace mappamundi—commis-sioned in 1236 as apparent centerpiece, I argue, of an evolving mural program for the Painted Chamber—in the context, first, of contemporary politics: specifically, Henry's attempts to consolidate his power as king against the encroachments of his baronage. Perhaps more importantly, the chapter reads Henry's map—or more precisely, it proposes outlines for a necessarily speculative reading of this ghost of a document—in the context of the visual and discursive conventions (sometimes equally ghostly) that appear to have governed (underlain, constituted, framed, informed) the cartographic practice of the day. Compared with other eras less tolerant of deviation from an accepted standard of cartographic authority, England in the thirteenth century possessed a carto graphic culture that was still establishing itself in many respects. Mapping dwelt, that is, in a state of uncertainty, of technical and hermeneutic flux, even if aspects of some generic traditions (as reported in the prologue) were reasonably well-fixed, by the standards of manuscript culture. One result of this situation is that the various formal and conceptual elements that went into making maps (as well as making sense of them) were highly susceptible to ad hoc realignment, to reconfiguration along new and potentially revolutionary epistemological lines. Given such a climate—in which maps remain in the process of developing tangible conventions, and of accruing unto themselves associations, effects, and meanings appropriate to their increasingly settled yet only recently constituted forms—it becomes crucial to ensure that there is critical intercourse with realms beyond the strictly cartographic. In order to determine the structural underpinnings or interpretive valence of any given medieval map-text, that is, we must do more than read maps primarily in the context of one another, as is still often the case whether comparisons range horizontally (across a given era) or vertical-ly (along lines of teleological development). Certainly, such perspectives are indispensable to any cultural reading of cartography; the trick must be to strike an effective balance between the practice of comparative cartography and other modes of historicism, geographical and otherwise.

The map-image lying at the heart of this chapter is one that appears to have been available for viewing for a period of just over a quarter of a century—three-quarters of a millennium ago—but was then destroyed or replaced, leaving behind no fully authoritative copy, no detailed textual description, and no direct archaeological trace. Given the unconventionality (not to say inconvenience) of having such a gaping absence at its center, my foray into cartographic analysis in this chapter will have more need than usual to balance close reading of maps (and of contextual documentary information) with creative use of various other orders of evidence. To read an “artifact” so long lost we shall be obliged to ask exactly how a thirteenth-century world map draws the discrete elements of its form and meaning from that wider pool of images and concepts comprising medieval culture.

The risks here are considerable, yet it may be that an interpretive virtue can be fashioned of this methodological necessity. In any case we shall push aggressively outward from consideration of maps alone and in themselves to treat such disparate subjects as early heraldic and seal-making practice; the illumination of medieval Psalters and other books; and finally a number of implicitly geographical written texts, such as a medieval copy of a Late Roman “flowchart” of imperial administrative precedence. Each of these topics will amount to a way-station in our movement toward reconstructing the likely form, features, and display-setting of the king's Westminster mappamundi. Yet in our attempt to execute such an act of visual and social archeology, two extant medieval images will take on special importance, on grounds that they constitute potential witnesses to King Henry's lost Painted Chamber mural. These “star witnesses” of mine are the sibling miniature Psalter Maps, whose execution (by different hands but back to back upon a single manuscript leaf) has been localized to the vicinity of London/Westminster, c. 1260–65. In other words they were produced at some point just before or after the kings Westminster mappamundi was destroyed or painted over. Despite certain problems associated (unavoidably) with their use, these images shall inform (if not direct) major portions of our reconstructive undertaking, insofar as together they provide a working model of Henry's map—if admittedly a hypothetical model, and one complicated further by the Psalter Maps' tiny size, as well as by the seemingly contradictory testimony the two images appear to offer. Still, from a position thus textualized (or visualized), we shall have basis to speculate—on the subjects especially of this postulated production's overall thematic nature and apparent political inflection.

Considering a key shift taking place during the thirteenth century in conceptions of English kingship, the chapter argues, ultimately, that the Painted Chamber world map, by combining geographical data of a Christian sacred as well as of an imperial secular nature, spoke to a newly developing and decidedly composite (or dually based) mode of medieval kingship. The kings Westminster mappamundi described a particular kind of royal authority: one that derived its justification at once from the realm of the sacramental and from the realm of the administrative. What is more, taking cues from the layout and content of written codices as well as from painted and illuminated image cycles, Henry's mural map performed this act of political compilation in a strikingly hybrid formal mode, drawing upon constructions of geography which were themselves alternately visual and textual—and then recasting them as simultaneously so.

A WORLD MAP AT WESTMINSTER

How to begin the cultural analysis of a wall painting lost more than seven centuries ago?

Given its destruction (and on top of this the unfortunate disappearance of Matthew Paris's ordinal copy), it would seem that our immediate and most important question must be: What will Henry's Painted Chamber mappamundi have looked like, exactly? (Or rather—acknowledging this as an act of critical projection—what might we responsibly imagine “the Lord Kings map of the world” to have looked like?) Yet never mind, for the moment, the specific features of this Westminster map. A better question to begin with, in its being more precisely answerable, is: What will any given map of the world have looked like—have meant—at Westminster?

The precise administrative function and social meaning of Westminster in the thirteenth century appears to have changed somewhat, decade to decade and even year to year, depending especially on fluctuations in the relative power of royal and baronial parties. But one constant, upon which commentators seem to agree, is that the thirteenth century saw an increasing “concentration of ultimate political and governmental power at Westminster.” While it would be some time before a London/Westminster grouping came to assert an unassailable cultural and administrative hegemony, and while Rodney Hilton, for one, sees thirteenth-century England as “an inevitably decentralized state,” a number of scholars have sounded variations on a theme to the effect that “government and commerce were increasingly centered on London” during the period. With help from the Annalist of Waverly, Maurice Powicke provides anecdotal evidence, in telling how, after having spent Christmas together at Winchester in 1279, King Edward “went off to hunt” while his Chancellor Robert Burnell “returned to London ‘as to the fixed place where those who seek writs and pur-sue their rights might have the appropriate remedy’” The relocation of the royal treasuries in the course of the century, from Winchester to various sites in London and Westminster, bears further witness to precisely this administrative change.¹

Expertise of all kinds centered on the king's court, but the royal household in particular, an “essential adjunct to kingship” in Chris Given-Wilson's view, stood at “the political heart of the kingdom.” Given-Wilson notes that the king's “affinity” or body of servants and followers is “best envisaged as a series of concentric circles,” moving outward from the domus, or permanent royal household, to the more expansive familia regis, of less fixed membership, and ultimately to a wider grouping of officials and parttime retainers. That the kingdoms political geography centered (most unequivocally) on the person of the king himself was given legal reality in the concept of the “verge,” a floating territory of special jurisdiction that extended outward in a radius of twelve miles from the sovereign, wherever he might be.²

The royal court, of course, had no single fixed location: king and domus were rather “almost permanently itinerant.” Yet the kings inevitable removal after a few weeks or months, from one favored residence to a next, ought not to be interpreted as constituting a kind of exile for the monarch from the physical and institutional focal point of the realm, as in the modern sense of a nationstate's capital. Perceived along the lines of the military or juridical circuit, ultimately medieval royal perambulation does not undercut so much as reinforce, arguably, the concept of a political and social center. An official metropolitan presence, that is, whether embodied in royal couriers, commissioners, and tax collectors or by sweep of the king and his court itself, does not make the periphery less peripheral. Rather, such agents of the political center reinforce the notion that executive power extends here, into each regional locale, though its proper home lie elsewhere.³

In stressing that it was the realms “political hub” as well as “the first and most important extension of the kings will,” Given-Wilson has characterized the royal household as “both centrifugal and centripetal” in its workings. This spatial model is one we will have occasion to return to later, but for the time being it may be useful to visualize a time-elapsed figuration of the courts perennial radiation between core and periphery. For while the kings court seems to have been importantly and not just incidentally peripatetic, modern accounts and diagrams that reconstruct thirteenth-century royal itineraries describe a decided Westminster center of gravity for this body's orbit. Moreover, although the movements of early Angevin rulers were near frenetic, later English kings peregrinated at a declined rate and across a narrower field, so that by the midfourteenth century only seldom did king and household remove themselves more than a day's ride from London, and even in these cases it was “usually for some specific purpose.”⁴

As noted in the prologue, a production on the general (portable) order of Edward I's pannus ad modum mappe mundi—a tapestry or oversized manuscript, a painted cloth or folding panel—might be the map format most appropriate to the itinerant lifestyle of any medieval English king. Still, a map fixed at Westminster in the mid-thirteenth century (especially one enjoying prominent display) was arguably an icon, on the other hand, which would have been understood as standing at or near the accepted “center” of a coherent social and physical body known as “England”—an extra-feudal entity coming increasingly to be conceived in centralized political terms, if not yet in fully territorial and state bureaucratic ones.

Consideration of the particular role of the Painted Chamber within a larger Westminster complex provides another approach to Henry III's lost map—whatever its own formal details. After the Great and Lesser Halls, the Painted Chamber (fig. 1.1) seems to have been the next most important room in the palace. Much of this importance may derive from its having served, until the reign of Edward II (1307–27), as the royal bedroom. Although it was slept in, the Westminster Great Bed—like the later French Lit de Justice—functioned primarily as “a piece of state furniture.” Within a decorative, canopied enclosure it comprised not just the monarchs “inner bed” (for sitting and lying on), but an “outer bed” as well, making the whole a kind of “chamber within a chamber.” Because access to the king's person meant access to power, the royal bed and larger Painted Chamber thus served, in both social and symbolic terms, as a primary focal point for court activity. They stood, as it were, at the heart of the heart of the realm.⁵

The Painted Chamber had functions beyond its role as the kings bedchamber. From perhaps as early as 1244–59, it was used as one of the meeting places of Parliament, and from the first half of the fourteenth century at least, for state feasting. What is more, it served periodically in the thirteenth century as the site of “major state events” including Alexander of Scotland's homage to Edward I in 1279. Perhaps to lend some coherence to its variety of functions, Henry and Edw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Series Editor Foreword
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PROLOGUE An Interest in Maps
• CHAPTER ONE Painted Chamber Compilatio: Henry III and the Cartography of Kingship
• CHAPTER TWO Figuring Britain: Regnal Maps and Matthew Paris
• CHAPTER THREE Of Sea Monsters, Salt, and Sovereignty: Edward I and the Gough Map of Britain
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX