The mappamundi, or "world map," of Ranulf Higden (Figure 2) has long attracted scholarly interest but more for its place within the Polychronicon in which is appears in a mid-fourteenth century manuscript than in relation to the city where Higden spent his life.49 As an incumbent of St Werburgh's Abbey, located at the north-east corner of the walled city of Chester, Higden occupied a place at the very heart of city. Indeed, far from having a distant existence from the civic and commercial life of late-medieval Chester, the abbey had a close relationship with Cestrians. For instance, one of Higden's forebears, Lucian of Chester, in c.1200, wrote a panegyric for his home city, Le Laude Cestrie, celebrating the local landscape and drawing parallels between Chester's cross-shaped, fortified city-plan and that of the holy city, as if conjuring up for Chester a visual image of Jerusalem in textual form and then projecting this onto the physical and material form of the city.50 In this sense then, Higden's Polychronicon, St Werburgh's and the mappamundi would together seem to hint at some heightened spatial sensibility and established geographical tradition within the abbey's precinct, the "field" through which this map of the world was drawn.

Chester's own geographical position at the north-west corner of England, itself at the north-west corner of the Latin Christendom, is something that Lavezzo draws attention to.51 Almost a paradox, she writes, that here at the very margins of the known late-medieval world, such concern for knowing the world—its history and its geography—is embodied by the Polychronicon, both in its text and its map, and rooted in the city by Higden and St Werburgh's. Yet, it would seem this spatial liminality of both England and Chester is precisely why there is such interest, locally, in the wider world that lay beyond the walls, bringing that world into the city, visually and textually. There is after all something special about Higden's Polychronicon, for not every such universal history of this period contained a visual geography even though the genre is characterised by textual geographies, a tradition tracing back to Classical precedents as well as medieval precursors.52

So Higden's mappa mundi points to something interesting and perhaps specific about the locale of its creation, Chester. It is not of course the visual geography of the map itself that places it in relation to Chester, Higden's map in fact does not show the city. The Polychronicon instead situates Chester textually in relation to other English cities of ancient origin such as London and York. Rather, it is the geographical situatedness of the map in the city that is significant.53 In this sense, the mappamundi is an instance of "urban cartography:" not a map of the city as such, but a map from the city as a lieux de savoir, as a mapping-site. As is so often the case for this period in English cartography there are of course few indications of Higden's own cartographic practices, either in the Polychronicon itself or indeed from contemporary texts. What there is are hints at geographical sources for Higden's Polychronicon, and by implication too the accompanying map that appears in the only autograph copy of the text, now Huntington MS HM 132.54 The map in this version has been somewhat neglected compared to others to be found in fourteenth-century copies of the Polychronicon, partly probably due to some later versions, notably the British Library Royal MS 14 C IX, having more visually striking appearances, with its vivid colours and iconography.55 Yet it is Huntington MS HM 132 that takes us to Chester, to Higden, to St Werburgh's, to c.1340, the time of the map's compilation, and probably composition.56

Chester in 1340 was a thriving city, networked particularly into trading links with Ireland and Dublin.57 It was also a borderland city with a mix of Welsh and English influences.58 Even though Chester itself was firmly on the English side of the border with Wales here, the River Dee, on which the city lay, connected Chester to a rich and fertile agrarian hinterland of the Welsh Marches to the south and west. Higden himself noted too the city's long-standing strategic connections with north Wales and English struggles over Gwynedd and the string of the then relatively newly-founded castle towns of King Edward I (1272-1307) situated along the north coast between Chester and Anglesey/Ynys Môn.59 This geographical positioning of Chester as a meeting point or crossing place between both near and distant cultures and regions perhaps begins to hint at a stimulus for this cartographic consciousness, or spatial awareness, of those who lived within its walls, despite the city's apparent liminality. Indeed, borderlands as hybrid spaces are often characterised by innovation and openness, the urban milieu in such locations propagating a sense of greater need and desirability because of the tyranny of distance created by their liminality and marginal geographies? It is a case here, then, of bringing the world to the city rather than the city to the world. As an exercise in geographical appropriation, Higden's mappamundi in Chester does just that, it orientates the city and its community to the wider world beyond their immediate horizons, drawing into the walled city those lands that lay distant. This is not simply an imagined geography, or a geography of the imagination, for the mappamundi that Higden created borrows certain tropes and characteristics of other contemporary world maps, not least, further south along the Welsh border, the now celebrated Hereford mappamundi created c.1300.60 Just a few decades later, Higden compiled his Polychronicon and felt the need and desire in it to include a similar "visual geography" of this wider world, mapping beyond his own spatial horizons.

Something of these connections that existed between world-maps in fourteenth-century England, and the urban networks involved in their mobility, is revealed by comparing the mappamundi that appeared in contemporary copies of Higden's Polychronicon. In particular, the representation of Britain and Ireland on these mappaemundi yields something of the likely influences of the locales of their production, highlighting further the dynamic nature of urban lieux de savoir in acts of map-making in English cities at this time. Such a comparison is made possible because Higden's Polychronicon was swiftly, widely copied so present in other monastic houses across the land, some physically distant from Chester itself but each likewise rooted in particular urban locales and their communities.61 Five such examples are oval-shaped maps that collectively show, at the "corner" of the terrestrial world, England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man as an assembled group of schematic shapes all of approximately equal size.62 Moreover, the origins of these particular manuscripts can be traced and placed geographically in particular urban/monastic locales, namely St Werburgh's Abbey at Chester, Ramsey Abbey (Huntingdonshire), Norwich Cathedral Priory, and one each at St Oswald's Priory and St Peter's Abbey at Gloucester, and placed chronologically in sequence from the 1330s to c.1400.63

The result of this mapping out of the geographies of Polychronicon mappaemundi is revealing when the maps and their locales are considered together. There is little overall cartographic convergence, each having particular nuance, such as the two Gloucester examples, from two adjoining yet distinct monastic houses in the centre of the city.64 St Oswald's mappamundi differs from its neighbour's at St Peter's, despite both manuscripts being broadly similar in date. While St Peter's version chose the ovoid scheme for depicting Anglia on the map in their manuscript (Corpus Christi College MS 89, fol. 13v), the adjacent Augustinian Priory of St Oswald employed four detached rectangles to depict England, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, akin to Higden's autograph version.65 So as far as the two Gloucester examples are concerned was spatial proximity between monastic houses a factor behind subtly dissimilar-looking maps? It seems their particular mapping-sites mattered, with each locale—lieux de savoir—having a bearing on the individual mappamundi produced, which points rather more to an influence of geographical specificity in how Higden's Polychronicon was being read and copied in later-medieval England.

While Higden's Polychronicon and its mappamundi evidently circulated widely across English urban networks through the mid- to late-fourteenth century, its roots, its origins, lay in one particular city. This rootedness and specificity in urban mappings of the later Middle Ages can be explored further by turning to Bristol, which like Chester occupied a key geographical position facing out towards the Atlantic.66 Indeed, both Chester and Bristol shared in their maritime connections with Ireland especially, and by the end of fifteenth century increasingly linked to expanding European horizons and interest westwards. One of the city's particular geographically-minded inhabitants at this time, new to Bristol in the 1490s, was the Venetian John Cabot, who arrived via London having there visited the king, and made "hym sylf verray expert & kunnyng In knowlage of the cyrcuyte of the world and Ile landis of the same, as by a caart & othir demonstracions Reasonable."67 Cabot's cartographic consciousness in late-fifteenth century Bristol would have slotted effortlessly into what was then very much a map-minded city, for its Town Clerk, Robert Ricart, had in 1479-80 begun to compile a civic record, The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar, complete with map.68

Ricart's Kalendar as a register for the city of Bristol is by no means unusual for later medieval England, but it is rather exceptional in having in it an image of the city. There would appear to be something unusual, therefore, about how those within Bristol at this time perceived the need for a visual geography of the city in a book about the city created for the city, and also the function this image served for the urban community in the 1490s. This Kalendar had been commissioned in 1479 by William Spencer, the then mayor of the city of Bristol, who tasked Robert Ricart to compile the work.69 The book ostensibly provided a record and account of the city's civic statutes with lists of mayors interspersed with descriptions of significant events.70 The opening pages of the Kalendar are devoted to the origins of Bristol, as Ricart himself observes,

It is as part of this historical framing for the city, right at the start of the volume, that the image of Bristol is inserted, taking up nearly a full page, and representing the inner, walled city (Figure 3). With its circle of walls, cross of streets pierced by four gates the styling of Bristol here visually compares with visualisations of the Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem.72 There is however a more spatially localised field for the map-image, for it effectively focuses on the part of the city that was of earliest in origin, dating back perhaps to the ninth century.73 The image Ricart included—and the likelihood is the image and text were both a product of his own hand—took the viewer back in time, to the very foundations of Bristol, and present a stylised image of the city's initial layout.

While historians of cartography have tended to refer to the image of Bristol as a "map," "bird's eye" or a "plan," these are modern-day descriptions.74 The oblique perspective image of the city follows immediately on from a passage in the Kalendar relating to an account of its founding, which fits within a historiography of British urban foundations popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth's mid-twelfth century Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain).75 Although the Historia does not explicitly mention Bristol, its genealogy is used by Ricart however to situate the city within a legendary history and geography of Britain and the cities founded by its ancient rulers, thus on folio 5v Ricart states:

This topographical account roots the city's late-fifteenth century landscape in Bristol's distant past. Here Ricart thus connects Bristol's visible urban features to their mythical founder "Brynne," drawing a parallel with London's associations with Belinus (Brynne's brother), and similarly orientating Bristol spatially and temporally to the past through its manifest material and physical form.77 The image of the city in the Kalendar immediately follows this topographical account, filling the rest of the page, as if words alone were not enough. Through materialising the form of the city visually, through an image, Ricart shows a cartographic sensibility, a map as much as a text was intelligible to the Kalendar's audience.

By the 1470s and 1480s, as Ricart was compiling the Kalendar, Bristol's merchants had wide maritime networks along the eastern Atlantic littoral, from Iberia to Iceland.78 This broad geographical compass of Bristolians at this time is indicated, for example, by William Worcestre, a contemporary of Ricart's and also writing in Bristol in c.1480.79 In his Itineraries Worcestre thus observed,

The "island of Brasylle" had long attracted the interests of mariners,81 and for Bristol this had two important implications, for such ventures brought geographical knowledge and navigational experience to the city, and this itself increased the city's cartographic consciousness. Bristol's "map-mindedness" of the 1480s and 1490s, is expressed though Ricart's Kalendar and his use of a visual image of the city, as well as by those like him inhabiting the city at this time, including John Cabot and William Worcestre. Worcestre's Itineraries reveal this growing geographical impetus in late-fifteenth century Bristol, for example. In an entry on Ireland, he lists "The ports and havens in their right order," by which he meant their right geographical order, as if reading from a map, or onto a map, the locations of the ports he lists: "Waterford, Wexford, Arklow, Wicklow, Dublin, Howth, Malahide, Rogers Town, Boyne, Dundalk, Carlingford, Strangford, Carrickfergus."82 Such accounts hint at an inherent geographical awareness among those Bristolians at this time, not just an interest in the wider world but a means for organising it and recording it, thus linking the city to the world.

Amongst this mapping milieu of Bristol in the 1480s and 1490s, John Cabot arrived from London.83 It was surely not just Bristol's geographic maritime Atlantic seaboard location that attracted him there, but the reputation of the city's geographical—and cartographic— knowledge and expertise, a "mapping-site"? Cabot took up residence in the walled core of the city, the very area "mapped" by Ricart in the Kalendar, just a few streets distant from John Jay's house.84 Situated between them both at this time lay the residence of Nicholas Thorne, another Bristol merchant with geographic and cartographic interests. Thorne had endowed the then newly-founded Bristol Grammar School and at his death, in 1546, bequeathed, "all such books as I have meat for the said library, more my astrolabia, which is the keeping of John Sprynt, [a]poticary, numbers of cardes etc., maps and all such instruments belonging to the science of astronomye or cosmography."85 These maps and instruments of Thorne's are not precisely known from his will, but point to an expertise in their use among Bristol's merchants at this time,86 those men seeking distant lands across the sea, and those who saw the need to illustrate their civic register with a map. Here, then, Bristol is functioning as a cartographic lieu de savoir in the later decades of the fifteenth century. The city's geographical position, as well as its geographical reputation, mutually reinforcing one another, such that in his search for new worlds, across the Atlantic, Cabot set sail for the Americas in 1497.87

"In the England of 1500 maps were little understood or used," observed Paul Harvey in his book, Maps in Tudor England.88 Bristol and its mapping sites in around 1500 might stand as an exception, a curious and productive combination of both "geography" as setting and "Geography" as discourse. Or perhaps instead there were others, elsewhere, for Bristol did not stand alone, isolated, but was instead thoroughly networked in an urban hierarchy connecting towns and cities across the land. This "geography of geography" in an English provincial city is glimpsed through the example of Bristol therefore. So rather than seeing 1500 as a magical turning point in the history of English cartography perhaps it is more a staging point on a journey, in as much as Ricart's drawing upon Geoffrey of Monmouth for Bristol in the Kalendar reflects continuity in geographical and historical knowledge? This all points to the important role cities play as lieux de savoir in intersecting geographies past, present and future. While the sixteenth century might now, in Harvey's words, be seen as a time of "cartographic revolution in England," there are grounds to at least think again.

Second only to London in the 1520s, Norwich, like Bristol, occupied a significant place high in England's urban hierarchy, both cities by then extending in size well beyond their original cores.89 Rather than looking west, to the Atlantic, Norwich looked east, across the "German Sea" to the Low Countries, and had long done so. In 1401–02, as part of the improvements of the River Wensum in the city, a certain William Fulkes was sent from Norwich to Colchester, in order "to consult there with a man called Blaumester."90 A year later Blaumester was then brought across to Norwich and paid twenty shillings by the city "for examining the place for the water mills to be newly built," the man's surname pointing to Flemish family origins (ie. Bouwmeester), an architect or master mason, and thus someone competent in matters of planning and design.91 These connections between eastern England and the Low Countries by the sixteenth century were further cemented through a shared and long-standing need for civil engineering required for draining lower-lying land, a task involving expertise in surveying, not just for levelling for water-management of dykes and canals but for measuring, for creating new land parcels, for dividing these up and allocating them, for which maps were often drawn.92 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in Skelton and Harvey's "map of maps" of late medieval England there is a marked geographical bias towards the eastern counties of England in the spatial distribution of "local maps."93

As with Bristol, for Norwich the earliest extant map of the city (Figure 4) forms part of a text itself the work of a local man, William Cuningham.94 Written in Norwich and published in 1559 in London, The Cosmographical Glasse is set out as a dialogue between two men of learning, in which Spoudaeus (repraesenting the Scholer)

The full title of the work, The cosmographical glasse conteinyng the pleasant principles of cosmographie, geographie, hydrographie, or nauigation, continued the close relationship of those fields of geographical knowledge being practiced in Bristol by merchants decades before The Cosmographical Glasse was published. For Cuningham, the "glasse"—or mirror—of the world was reflected in the city below, and his cosmography is a working through of that link between city and cosmos, the city as a world. Following discussion of Ptolemy and the distinction between cosmography, geography and chorography, the "map" of Norwich is used by Cuningham to illustrate "chorography," noting "And finally for Chorographie, I haue placed th'excellent Citie of Norwyche, as the forme of it is, at this present 1558."96 Little else is said in the dialogue of the map, for which Cuningham actually uses the term "picture" to describe it, but at the base of the image, an oblique perspective rather than planimetric view of the city, two figures are observed, in a field overlooking the city to the south.97

Cuningham's map of Norwich is unlike that of Portsmouth of fifteen years earlier not just in terms of its use of perspective rather than planimetry, it differs too in having no constructional geometry visible on the image itself. Instead, what links the map of Norwich to Cuningham's exposition in The Cosmographical Glasse on map-making and field-survey is evident in the small vignette included on the map.98 Here, "the map" is visibly connected to "the field," literally, through the depiction of two surveyors. It would seem from their appearance, and stance, that the two figures represent the protagonists in the dialogue, Philonicus as the teacher, pointing to the city, and Spoudaeus as the pupil, with dividers in one hand, looking out and pointing with the other hand in the same direction towards the city as his instructor. Between them on a block or table is laid out a horizontal compass-rose, and on the side of this is a sundial, the two orientating between the heavens and the city, the vertical and the horizontal. Though the "picture" Cuningham includes is not a scaled plan of Norwich, it nevertheless captures the action and practice of map-making in the field, a mapping-site. Indeed, few contemporary English maps of towns and cities contain such self-references to the instruments and processes of their making, in- and of-the-field. Thus while William Smith's later map of Norwich, of 1588, seems to owe much to the image in The Cosmographical Glasse in terms of angle of view, orientation and composition, these two figures making their observations on the city, do not feature as if expunged from the map's making and so masking its origins and links to the city it represents.99

The Cosmographical Glasse while otherwise silent on the map of Norwich it contains, does offer a particularly important link between map and field. Indeed, the horizontal compass-rose depicted on the map begins to make sense in the dialogue between Philonicus and Spoudaeus that follows, as it is an instrument that Cuningham goes onto to describe in some detail in the Third Book of the Cosmographical Glasse "in which is vttered the making and protracture, of the Face of th'Earth, both in Cartes Perticuler, and al|so vniuersall, with diuers necessarye thinges, incidente hereto."100 Following an illustration of "An Instru|ment seruinge th'vse to des|cribe a countrey," Philonicus explains,

The affinity with what the two figures overlooking Norwich are doing on the map in Book One is very close to the account of how to use the "Geographicall plaine Spheare" described by this passage. The planisphere, as it later becomes known,102 and its function as a cartographic and surveying instrument is clear, and so the map of Norwich (as a perspective) is really as much a device to show the field-operations using such an instrument, so suggestive to the reader that it was made by using such an even instrument even if it was not. Together the text and the image, relate the map to the field as a site of survey, a lieu de savoir, a place by which and through which geographical knowledge is made.

Cuningham's mention of Gemma Frisius is telling, for Cuningham had previously visited Heidelburg, "where he made many learned friends," for no doubt these acquaintances helped feed into Cuningham's knowledge and use of survey instruments as well as the practical mathematics of survey for map-making.103 His description of the planisphere is close to that of William Bourne, whose Treasure for Traueilers (London, 1578) also included a diagram for mapping from survey—based on angles between fixed points and using indirect measurement in the field—a diagram based on Frisius' Libellus de locorum describendorum ratione (Antwerp 1553).104 Bourne, like Cuningham, shared a friendship with John Dee, and in fact he dedicated the Cosmographical Glasse to Lord Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, whose children Dee had had tutored.105 However, rather than including a version of Frisius' diagram on triangulation, as Bourne had done in Treasure for Traueilers—using his part of Kent around Gravesend to explain his survey method—Cuningham instead chose a much simpler illustration and exemplification of triangulation.106 Again a localised example is used. In explaining "you shall take your in|strument and Paper, trauelinge vnto some other town […] & so in like man|ner you shall do with other places, vntil you haue drawn the hole region you desire," Philonicus notes "how the worke is right easy," and to this end a diagrammatic map follows the description.107 Showing three places positioned in the shape of a triangle, one of these is Norwich. Once again, then, a local map is used to locate the Cosmographical Glasse, and thus a chorography of cosmography, the city as a world.