CHAPTER 1

Local Space, Edges, and Contents

Chorography and Late Medieval English Maps

It is difficult to think of how local space, that is, the very definition and extent of what is considered a local area, might change over the centuries. After all, what is local today? How large is a local area? What defines its parameters, and what are its characteristics? How could those fundamentals change over time? This chapter considers what was local in late medieval England and the paradigms according to which the local was defined. Part of the challenge is that historical alterations in space are more apparent at the larger scales, a geocentric versus heliocentric view of the cosmos being the starkest example. The ease of perceiving how people represented larger spaces is perhaps one explanation for the great many studies of universal diagrams, mappaemundi, and nationalist discourses in theology, geography, history, and literature. Smaller scales are more everyday, they are less often studied scientifically, and they are generally taken for granted. The evidence I examine indicates that large-scale perspectives were, however, not the only—and perhaps not the principal—ways that people recognized space. Indeed, even today we occasionally perceive the whole earth and think globally in various ways, but we more frequently encounter and experience the areas closest to us. It is possible, in fact, that people still do not think of universal or global spaces in any conscious or thorough fashion except in the physical sciences. Yet local space is at least as significant in people’s understandings of physical area, in culture, and in history as space at a universal, cosmological, global, or protonational scale. Moreover, it would be a mistake to think that local space is somehow free from the vicissitudes of history. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to bring to light the features of local space in late medieval culture. Readers will find some continuities between late medieval perceptions of local area and current ones, but they will also discover differences in how local space was presented and understood.
If we were trying to discern what people thought was local today, what information and signs would be representative? Would it include the common routes people use, an area that could fit on a screen, municipal definitions, a series of landmarks? How would the evidence be similar or different in late medieval Britain? To answer these questions about late medieval local space, I present two sources: local maps of smaller areas and what Claudius Ptolemy calls chorography, the detailed presentation of regional geographical features. In this chapter, I argue that surviving local maps from the time period are, in a sense, visual experiments about understanding and presenting space. Because cartographical practices were neither institutionally formalized nor standardized, the maps are witnesses to the ways mapmakers apprehended the spaces before them and worked through the challenges of forming them on a page. The maps are reproduced in R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Harvey’s Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England, and the editors state in their introduction that—in contrast to maps of all of England or the British Isles (such as the Matthew Paris, Gough, or John Hardyng maps), which they describe as the “products of scholarship or of philosophical speculation”—the maps in their collection appear from the evidence to be “entirely of areas known personally to their authors.”1 The evidence suggests that the mapmakers combined personal perception and more official kinds of knowledge about local areas; many of the maps were made for judicial ends and have accompanying documentation of different types. Their methods were, furthermore, embedded within social expectations; the maps were not made for their makers’ own delight nor to solve methodological problems of cartographic presentation but instead were, the evidence suggests, made for others to help them understand an area, in effect to express how people already think about a local space. People’s shared (conscious and unconscious) perceptions of spatial properties shaped the mapmakers’ approaches and their maps. The diversity and the mundane, heuristic, and quotidian nature of the maps are their strength as evidence because they are more intimately connected to everyday apprehensions of space. The reciprocity among mapmaker, audience, and map is a hermeneutics of local space, a way of understanding local area.
Less well known than mappaemundi, Macrobian zonal maps, and maps of all of England or Britain, the English maps of smaller areas require introduction. Approximately thirty-five local maps survive from the late medieval period in England, each showing some variety in land areas. One pair of Canterbury Cathedral plans depicts an area that is about a square mile, but a more typical late fifteenth-century map, such as one that survives from Lincolnshire, shows approximately fifteen square miles, while a mid-fifteenth-century map of the village of Boarstall in Buckinghamshire displays approximately thirty square miles. The largest areas depicted on these kinds of maps are of Sherwood Forest and the Isle of Thanet, both about 150 square miles.2 While it may seem solipsistic or redundant for a discussion of local space to select what have, after all, been called “local maps,” the following observations do not take map scale or objective scale (the size of a given area on the ground) at face value. Instead, the analysis includes examination of the scalar choices of their makers to discern what they were thinking of in terms of local area. After all, as the geographer Denis Cosgrove points out, “Enlarging or reducing the space generated and occupied by phenomena alters their form, their significance, their relations of meaning with other phenomena. Scale selection and manipulation is thus a powerfully imaginative and generative act which at once records and sets in train chains of meaning and association in an active process of knowing.”3
Since there does not appear to have been established training in mapmaking, part of the interest in the maps concerns disciplinary boundaries in the sense that they were produced between the scholastic learning of the quadrivium and practical use. They would appear to reside in the field of what was called the “mechanical arts,” transitional practices between the world within and outside the university. Hugh of St. Victor’s twelfth-century Didascalicon, his influential synthesis of all types of learning that sought to illuminate what to read and why to read it, does not include cartography. Maps, however, might arguably belong within the discipline of geometry or “earth-measure” (mensura terrae) in the quadrivium. Planimetry and altimetry are part of geometry in Hugh’s classification, and all are within the liberal arts.4 But because of their practical origins and, presumably on occasion, application, it is nevertheless also possible to see mapmaking as worthy of inclusion within his classification of the artes mechanicae. As mentioned in the introduction, Hugh is credited with raising the mechanical arts to being a part of philosophy. Maps are arguably “mechanical” in that they are “human works” (opera humana), because that form of knowledge “supervises the occupations of this life” (huius vitae actiones dispensat).5
While it would be incorrect to restrict the maps to inside the walls of the university, it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that their “mechanical” or “occupational” functions exhaust the meanings of the walls, buildings, flora and fauna, roads, and rivers they depict. A reasonable amount of information about the maps is available because they are often accompanied by, and occasionally embedded in, written documentation. Some of the maps were made for practical and frequently forensic or administrative ends: to record irrigation systems, to resolve boundary disputes between one field and another, and so on. These legal and other uses undoubtedly affected the production of some of the maps, but it is not possible to know whether all were made for practical purposes; besides, their trees, field tenements, religious and secular buildings, walls, roads, and other items exceed and are otherwise only occasionally explainable in terms of legal or other applications. As mentioned, the items can come from one or a combination of sources: recall from longer ago, from more recent observation of a particular local area, or from another map or in a written source without the mapmaker having seen an actual area in person. In the first place, the maps are diverse in style. Some appear crudely schematic, while others are painterly and ornate. Certain maps appear to be imitative of book illuminations, the maps secondary to, or even parasitic on, established artistic practices. Artistic and textual conventions undoubtedly affected the translation of spatial information to a page, but the potentially more significant elements are point of view, level of detail in rendering objects, and arrangement. These appear to be the mapmakers’ principal concerns, always with consideration of the audience. The emphasis in what follows therefore falls on how the mapmakers think through spatial problems in order to present them to their audiences, meaning that interest lies in between the map and the local space, in the interactions between page and place.
This chapter is structured around three topics: local space, edges, and contents. First, it considers what a local area is and how far it extended—indeed, whether it was thought of in terms of physical extension such as distance or other factors. The important work here is Ptolemy’s Geography, which I explore in some detail along with its phenomenological implications. Second, the evidence suggests that late medieval culture defined local area to a certain extent by considering its edges: objective ones such as walls, tenement limits, or rivers, and cartographic ones such as the margins of the map page, diagrammatic edges, or other forms of drawn boundary. I therefore examine how edges on the ground and on the page contribute to creating different senses of a bounded local space, the nature of those edges, and their effects. I do so by studying the pair of Canterbury Cathedral maps and a map of Cliffe in Kent on the banks of the Thames. Third, the chapter addresses the contents of local spaces. Asking which things—flora, fauna, manufactured structures, and so on—were considered part of a local space allows us not simply to catalog. The maps suggest the importance of considering whether items are individuated or whether they are drawn systematically according to certain types. Also, the relations among items belonging to a local area contribute to what may be called the texture of local space, the warp and weft of interactions among local objects. The arrangement and presentation of the open fields, walls, roads, forests, and other features suggest the way viewers interact with the maps. The maps in this section of the chapter are of Sherwood Forest and of Inclesmoor in Yorkshire. The evidence about a local area’s contents also indicates that the temporality of a space’s features was an important consideration for late medieval culture, showing how the objects belonging to an area signify present realities and historical events. One further map of the Isle of Thanet at the eastern tip of Kent provides the evidence here because it reveals with particular clarity the temporal features of a local area’s contents.

Ptolemy’s Geography and Homogeneous versus Heterogeneous Space

What was a local area? What defined it in terms of extent, edge, and ways of thinking about its contents? And what is a useful framework to begin considering local space in these terms? Historians have not come to a consensus on the most basic question about what constituted a local area. In terms of sheer distance, Dick Harrison, in Medieval Space: The Extent of Microspatial Knowledge in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, points out that, among the annalistes, Marc Bloch proposed that “medieval human beings lived isolated lives in their own villages, rarely if ever travelling to other places” while Jacques Le Goff “maintained the opposite—that medieval men and women were extremely mobile.”6 Harrison’s point is that the size of a local space “varies according to cultural situation, social structure, age, sex, personal habits, etc.” He employed historical methods to plot how far people habitually traveled. It turns out this was quite far; for example, his study of Somerset in the first half of the fourteenth century shows people regularly journeyed twenty-five or thirty miles.7 A focus on miles and on human mobility, however, is not the best place to begin. Motion was a complex topic at this point in history, one that extended beyond the human sphere and that was addressed explicitly in scientific writings; I return to it in a later chapter, but it seems to lead away from local space rather than answering what it was.
Geographical writings directly address the topic of local space. Ptolemy’s Geography is commonly associated with the transition from medieval to early modern ideas about cartography and space more generally, but the late medieval era was quite aware of ideas from the Geography. Keith Lilley summarizes research demonstrating that “Ptolemy was neither ‘lost’ to the West in the Middle Ages nor was the Renaissance characterized by a switch from ‘medieval’ to ‘modern’ modes of cartographic and geographic representation.”8 The Geography was not itself available in the Latin West until 1407, but evidence shows its broad influence in medieval geographical writing and in maps before then. As mentioned, I will be concentrating on Ptolemy’s ideas about chorography. Jesse Simon writes that the term chorography “may have disappeared completely [in the West] sometime after the ninth century. The disappearance of the word, however, should not imply the disappearance of the practice,” and other historians have seen influences of chorographical practices in medieval writing and mappaemundi.9 When the Geography became available, it was immediately popular; in England, it was studied at Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth century. The more familiar Almagest—the Mathematical Systematic Treatise, as Ptolemy called it until it was translated into Arabic under the title of The Greatest—preceded the Geography in Ptolemy’s oeuvre.10 As is well documented, knowledge of Ptolemy’s Almagest was transmitted earlier in the West via Martianus Capella and was known within and outside the universities from the twelfth century on with Gerard of Cremona’s translation of the Arabic. In English writings, Ranulf Higden in John Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon refers to the Almagest, Chaucer refers to Ptolemy and his Almagest six times, Gower notes it, and Stephen Scrope’s Dicts and Sayings of Philosophers (later printed by Caxton) draws on it.11 Both Ptolemaic works are on the arrangement of the world, but the Almagest is an astronomical work on the cosmos that lays out the order of the spheres, stars, and planets down to earth at the immovable center, while the Geography addresses only the earth, it...