Mapping England, 1066-1688: Territory and Memory

A map looks innocent. It seems to describe a territory exactly as it is, with its coasts, rivers, roads and towns. Yet every map is an argument. Someone chose what to show and what to leave out, which names to write in large letters, what to put at the centre and what to push to the margins. Someone paid for it, and someone was meant to look at it. To map a place is to know it; to know it is, very often, to govern it.

Between 1066 and 1688, England was conquered, counted, taxed, divided by civil wars and rebuilt again and again. Across those six centuries, the people who ruled it kept producing images of the land: an embroidered strip of linen celebrating a conquest, a survey so thorough that the English compared it to the Last Judgement, monks' maps drawn along pilgrims' routes, county atlases decorated with royal coats of arms, battle plans sketched for generals and road maps designed for coaches. Each of these documents claimed the territory in a particular way, and each still shapes how the nation remembers its own past.

This course follows that story in eight stages. In each one, you will read an original text, study a primary source, work on a historical map or map-like document and debate one central idea: maps are never just about space. They are about power (who controls the land?), memory (which events are inscribed on it?) and identity (who belongs to it?). By the end, you will design your own memory map of England and defend the choices behind it.

When Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, three men believed the English throne was theirs. Harold Godwinson, the most powerful earl in England, was crowned the day after Edward's funeral. Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, invaded the north and was killed by Harold's army at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later, William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey on the south coast. On 14 October, near Hastings, Harold was killed and his army broken. William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066.

Victory on the battlefield did not yet mean control of the land. Over the following years, William and his followers crushed revolts, built castles of earth and timber, then of stone, and redistributed estates from English landholders to Norman lords. The conquest was a slow, often brutal takeover of territory, village by village and shire by shire.

The most famous record of these events is the Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidery about seventy metres long, probably made in England in the 1070s and most likely commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and William's half-brother. It is not a neutral chronicle. It tells the story as a question of broken faith: Harold swears an oath on holy relics, takes the crown anyway and is punished. The Channel crossing, the landing and the building of a fortification unfold like a moving map, turning the sea into a bridge and England into a destination. Nearly a thousand years later, the Tapestry still decides which images most people associate with 1066.

At Christmas 1085, at Gloucester, William the Conqueror held what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls a long and deep discussion with his council about England: how it was occupied and by what sort of men. The result was an inquiry without equal in medieval Europe. In 1086, royal commissioners travelled across the shires, questioning juries in every hundred about each estate: who held it in the time of King Edward, who held it now, how many ploughs, mills, meadows, woods and people it contained, and what it was worth.

The returns were condensed into two volumes that the English soon nicknamed "Domesday", after the Day of Judgement, because, as a royal official explained around 1179, there was no appeal against its verdict. Domesday Book is not a map in the modern sense: there are no lines, no coastlines, no symbols. Yet it maps England in another way, as a grid of property and obligation laid over the entire kingdom.

That grid is the skeleton of what historians call feudal England. The king owned everything in principle; tenants-in-chief held their lands from him in return for military service; they in turn granted land to knights, while peasants, many of them unfree villeins, worked the soil. Domesday records how far the old English elite had been replaced: by 1086, only a handful of the great landholders were English. A survey can describe a territory; this one also recorded a conquest.

By 1215, King John had lost Normandy, imposed heavy taxes and quarrelled with the Church. A group of rebel barons seized London and forced him to negotiate. On 15 June 1215, at Runnymede on the Thames, John agreed to a charter of liberties. Within weeks, both sides broke it and the Pope annulled it, yet the charter was reissued in 1216, 1217 and 1225, and by then it had a name: Magna Carta, the Great Charter.

Most of its clauses deal with feudal grievances: inheritance, forests, fines. A few, however, stated principles that later generations would invest with enormous meaning, above all the idea that the king himself was bound by law. Clause 39 promised that no free man would be imprisoned or deprived of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

During the thirteenth century, kings needing money increasingly summoned great councils that came to be called parliaments. In January 1265, Simon de Montfort, who had defeated Henry III, called an assembly that included not only barons and bishops but also knights from the shires and burgesses from the towns. Montfort was killed at Evesham that summer, but the precedent remained. In 1295, Edward I summoned what is often called the Model Parliament. In the same decades, Matthew Paris, a monk of St Albans, drew some of the earliest surviving maps of Britain. Representation and mapping share a logic: to speak for the shires, you must first be able to name them.

In the summer of 1348, plague reached England through a port in Dorset. Within two years, it had killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population, according to most estimates. Whole villages shrank or vanished. The survivors faced a world turned upside down: there were fewer hands to work the land, and labourers began to demand higher wages and better conditions.

Landowners responded with force of law. The Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to freeze wages at their old level. Resentment grew for a generation. When the government, short of money for war, imposed a series of poll taxes in 1377, 1379 and 1380, the anger exploded. In June 1381, rebels from Essex and Kent marched on London, burned the Savoy Palace, entered the Tower and killed the Archbishop of Canterbury.

On 15 June, at Smithfield, the fourteen-year-old Richard II met the rebels. Their leader, Wat Tyler, was struck down by the Mayor of London, William Walworth, and the king promised the crowd that he would be their leader. The promises were soon withdrawn and the revolt was crushed. Around the same time, an unknown mapmaker produced the Gough Map, the oldest surviving map to show Great Britain in a recognisable shape, crossed by red lines marking routes and distances. It shows a kingdom held together by roads: the same roads that carried tax collectors, plague and rebels.

From 1455, two branches of the royal family, Lancaster and York, fought intermittently for the crown. The conflict, later called the Wars of the Roses, grew out of the weak rule of Henry VI, rivalry between great noble houses and the loss of English lands abroad. Edward IV of York seized the throne in 1461, lost it, regained it in 1471 and ruled until his death in 1483.

His twelve-year-old son was proclaimed Edward V, but within weeks his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had declared the boy illegitimate and taken the crown as Richard III. Edward and his younger brother, the "Princes in the Tower", disappeared. On 22 August 1485, near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, Richard faced Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian exile. The decisive intervention of the Stanley family helped Henry win. Richard was killed, and Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, uniting the two roses.

Memory then took over. Tudor writers, and later Shakespeare, portrayed Richard as a monster. Even the battlefield was misplaced for centuries: archaeologists located the most likely site only around 2009-2010, some distance from the traditional spot. In 2012, Richard's skeleton was found under a car park in Leicester, on the site of a vanished friary; in 2015 he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral. A territory can forget where its history happened, and rediscover it.

When the Pope refused to annul Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the king broke with Rome. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared him supreme head of the Church of England, and between 1536 and 1540 the monasteries were dissolved, their lands sold or granted to loyal subjects. The break redrew the map of property in England more radically than anything since Domesday.

Henry's daughter Elizabeth I, queen from 1558 to 1603, inherited a divided realm. Her religious settlement of 1559 tried to hold Protestants and Catholics within one national Church. Abroad, rivalry with Catholic Spain culminated in 1588, when the Spanish Armada sailed to support an invasion. Elizabeth addressed her troops at Tilbury in August; the Armada, harried by English ships and scattered by storms, failed.

Elizabethan power was also visual and geographical. In the 1570s, Christopher Saxton surveyed every county of England and Wales with royal support; his atlas of 1579, often described as the first national atlas, put the royal arms on its maps and the queen herself on its frontispiece. Around 1592, the Ditchley portrait showed Elizabeth standing on a map of England, storms behind her and sunshine ahead. The message is unmistakable: the queen is the land, and the land is hers.

In 1603, James VI of Scotland became James I of England, uniting two crowns but not two kingdoms. His son Charles I believed that kings answered to God alone. He ruled without Parliament from 1629 to 1640, raised controversial taxes such as ship money and tried to impose religious changes on Scotland. War with the Scots forced him to recall Parliament, and conflict between crown and Parliament turned into civil war in 1642.

The war divided counties, towns and families. Armies needed accurate information about terrain, roads and enemy positions, and military engineers drew battle plans, such as Sir Bernard de Gomme's plan of the Royalist positions at Marston Moor in July 1644, a battle won by Parliament and its Scottish allies. After Parliament's New Model Army won at Naseby in 1645, the king's cause collapsed.

In January 1649, Charles was tried for treason against his own people, an unprecedented act. On 30 January, he was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. The monarchy was abolished. Oliver Cromwell's campaign in Ireland that year, including the sieges of Drogheda and Wexford, remains one of the most bitterly remembered episodes in Irish memory. Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. Few figures in British history are remembered so differently in different parts of the islands.

In 1660, after the collapse of the Protectorate, Charles II returned from exile: the Restoration. London survived the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, and the kingdom became more connected. In 1675, John Ogilby published Britannia, a road atlas of strip maps that unrolled each route like a scroll, measured in a standard mile of 1,760 yards. Travelling England became a matter of measured distances, not just local knowledge.

Charles's brother James II, who succeeded him in 1685, was openly Catholic and used his power to suspend laws against Catholics. When his queen gave birth to a son in June 1688, a Catholic dynasty seemed certain. A group of leading politicians invited the Dutch prince William of Orange, husband of James's Protestant daughter Mary, to intervene. William landed at Torbay on 5 November 1688; James's support melted away and he fled into exile.

In 1689, William and Mary accepted the crown together with a Declaration of Rights, later enacted as the Bill of Rights. It declared it illegal for the crown to suspend laws or raise taxes without Parliament's consent, and it called for free elections. In England, these events became known as the "Glorious" and even "bloodless" revolution. In Ireland and Scotland, however, they led to war, including the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. A single event can sit very differently on the map of collective memory.