Gough card

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Gough card

The Gough map (Gough map) , also called in English after the storage location Bodleian Map , is probably the oldest map of (Great) Britain. The map was named after its owner Richard Gough (1735-1809), who gave the map to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1799 , where it is still located today.

Authorship problem

The Gough map is the work of at least two different scribes, the original 14th century author and the later 15th century redesigner of the map. It has been suggested that the increasing trade in overseas goods resulted in knowledgeable seafarers producing a more accurate representation of the coast. On the other hand, Pelham objects that in this case the land sections would hardly have been so detailed and cites the campaigns of Edward I as a more likely source for the geographic knowledge of the scribes.

Dating

The dating of the Gough map gave rise to various conjectures. When Thomas Martin presented the map to the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1768 , he placed it in the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377). In the absence of other evidence, Richard Gough , who bought the map at the auction of Martin's collection on May 20, 1774 , shared this opinion in his work British Topography . The Polish historian Joachim Lelewel dated the map in the second volume of his Géographie du moyen age to the 12th century.

Approaches by Sanders and Pelham

When in 1875 a facsimile of the map was to be published together with an explanatory pamphlet , WB Sanders dated the map after extensive research to the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) and explained his reasons for it in the pamphlet. Sanders argued as follows: Since the map shows bridges in Perth and Achmore, but not those over the River Don (built in 1329) in Aberdeenshire and the River Torridge in Bideford (built in the early 14th century ), it must be done before construction of both bridges. According to Sanders, the fact that the two Scottish counties Douglas (South Lanarkshire) and Crawford (South Lanarkshire) , which were created later, are not mentioned on the map.

Sanders' dating remained undisputed and was considered the current state of science until RA Pelham brought a new guess into play in 1928. Pelham had some arguments that the map was more likely to fit into the 14th century from a palaeographic point of view, and was helped by Edmund Craster , then Bodley's Librarian .

Pelham bases his argument mainly on the symbolism of the map. According to him, careful attention was paid to the use of symbols, even if the map has been revised several times over the years. As an indication that the map was supplemented at a later point in time, Pelham names the city walls of Coventry , which are marked on the map and whose construction did not begin until 1355. However, the town of Sheppey, renamed Queenborough in 1366 , still bears the name Sheppey on the map. This would limit the period of origin to 1355-1366.

Linguistic Geographies Project

In April 2010, King's College London (Department of Digital Humanities ) began an interdisciplinary project aimed at dating the Gough map using the Linguistic Geographies strategy.

Research methods

The "linguistic geography", which gave the project its name, is usually used for purely written sources and means a palaeographic and linguistic evaluation of a text, taking geography , history and cartography into account . In this project, the method was successfully applied to a map for the first time and showed the blurring boundaries between image and text. The more than 600 place names on the map were systematically transcribed and collected in a database , which was then linked to the digital version of the map using appropriate technologies.

As part of the project, a website was created on which the digitized map can be viewed and searched for place names. In addition, supplementary material, a blog, information about the project and further literature are made available on the site. The project is the official responsibility of King's College London and is supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Beyond Text Program, the Bodleian Library and the UK National Commission for UNESCO .

findings

During the course of the project, it turned out that the corrections made by the second, later writer, were much larger than previously assumed or were visible on the facsimile editions. It also revealed that Scotland had been completely neglected in the revision of the map, suggesting a change in the Scotland image of British politics. This omission of Scotland is also found in Thomas Butler's England map, which was made around the time the Gough map was revised. It also became clear that the map had been cut and that its original display spectrum could well differ from previous assumptions.

Elizabeth Solopova dates the origin of the map under the first scribe to the 1370s and the revision by the second scribe to the early 15th century, since he often uses Anglicana letters and omits the "g" entirely.

Research is interested in the physical state: in particular, whether the object is still in its original color or whether it was (sensibly) painted over. The map was digitized in 2005 and processed using the computer program ArcGIS (scan from 2005). The scan from 2010 in red (2005 in blue) showed a much better fidelity to the original.

Publicity

In 2008, the BBC aired the series In Search of Medieval Britain , in which Alixe Bovey made a number of trips across Britain in the footsteps of the Gough Map. A great success recorded by the Gough Map and its employees with the award of UNESCO for World Soundtrack Awards in May 2011th

Meaning and content

What is interesting about the Gough map is that it cannot be called Portolan and yet it contains a much more precise and for the first time complete representation of the coastal areas. Since the card is also not in the tradition of religiously motivated patristicism , it would be conceivable that it was a government object whose accuracy one had to rely on.

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
Current and comprehensible documents are missing. Since the digitized version of the map is accessible anyway, the question arises whether some information is really necessary here. --All'ermeneutica

The Gough map is - apart from the Tabula Peutingeriana - the first traffic map in Great Britain with roads and paths. Distances are noted in red and in Roman numerals.

The unit of length is "League", which means three miles, 1 League is about 4.8 kilometers. It is used for the first time notably before the 17th century. Watling Street (Old English: Wæcelinga Stræt, from pre-Roman times; now used by the A2 and A5 motorways) between St Albans (Verulannium; north London) and Canterbury (Durovernum) - continued to Wales west of Gloucester - is also partially included.

Special cities such as London and York are drawn in gold, and the most important building in the city is also drawn from the thoughts (out of scale). Islands and lakes (smaller) and rivers, all of which are of strategic importance (larger), are not true to scale. Mythologically, the map flipped over when Brutus landed in Devon.

The Gough map remains the standard-setting map of (Great) Britain until the 16th century, according to UNESCO until 1671 (Thomas Jenner's map).

further reading

  • David I. Bower: The Medieval Gough Map, Its Settlement Geography and the Inaccurate Representation of Wales . In: Imago mundi. The international journal for the history of cartography 67 (2015), pp. 145–167.
  • Millea, Nick: The Gough Map: The Earliest Road Map of Great Britain? Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2007. ISBN 9781851240227
  • Catherine Delano Smith: New Light on the Medieval Gough Map of Britain . In: Imago mundi. The international journal for the history of cartography 69 (2017), pp. 1–36.

Web links

Commons : Gough Map  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d About. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, 2011, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m R. A. Pelham: The Gough Map . In: The Geographical Journal . tape 81 , no. 1 . Wiley, January 1933, p. 34 ff .
  3. ↑ a b Elizabeth Solopova: The Scribes of the Gough Map. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, 2011, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  4. ^ The Gough Map. In: Conservation & Collection Care: Case studies. Bodleian Libraries, 2020, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  5. ^ Culture: Memory of the World. In: UNESCO in the UK. UKNC, 2018, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  6. ^ Richard Gough: British Topography. (=  British Topography. Or an historical account of what has been done for illustrating the topographical antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland. Band 1 ). T. Payne and Son, and J. Nichols, London 1780, pp. 76 ( archive.org ).
  7. ↑ a b Bodleian Library Map Room: The Gough map. In: Way Back Machine. Internet Archive, May 10, 2008, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Digital map. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, 2011, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Home. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, 2011, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  10. ^ Exciting discovery. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, June 15, 2010, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  11. ↑ a b Scotland did not qualify. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, June 25, 2010, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  12. ↑ a b The map was trimmed. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, June 25, 2010, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  13. ↑ In Search of Medieval Britain. In: BBC Four. BBC, 2020, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Gough Map plays its part in search for Medieval Britain. In: Bodleian Libraries. Bodleian Libraries, 2020, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Gough Map added to UNESCO's UK Memory of the World Register. In: Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. King's College London, May 25, 2011, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  16. ↑ a b Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bodley.ox.ac.uk
  17. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from April 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk
  18. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from April 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk
  19. ↑ http://www.jstor.org/view/00167398/ap020481/02a00040/0?frame=noframe&userID=81ea040a@dur.ac.uk/01c0a83474005076ac2&dpi=3&config=jstor  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.jstor.org  
  20. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.unesco.org.uk