The Making and Re-making of the Gough Map of Britain: Manuscript Evidence and Historical Context

The results of a palaeographical and linguistic study of the Gough map demonstrate that although it was initially produced in the 1370s, the map was extensively revised not long thereafter. The pictorial features south of Hadrian's Wall were outlined in a darker ink and many place-names overwritten by a scribe who probably worked in the first thirty years of the fifteenth century. Discussion of the methods and scope of this revision is followed by an attempt to consider its historical context. The revision is most discernible in southeast England with virtually no changes made to Scotland, and only occasional changes made in Wales and the north of England. The reviser's focus on the south contrasts with the decision of the map's original makers to depict the whole island of Britain. This difference in approach raises questions about the ideological and political circumstances that made possible the original conception of the Gough map as a map of the whole island, and about an apparent decline of interest in or need for such a cartographic approach in the first decades of the fifteenth century. The original mapmaker's political outlook reflected the aspirations of the English kings in the late thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth centuries and the context of the Scottish wars of the period, whereas the different approach of the reviser may attest to changes in the political situation and ideology early in the fifteenth century.