How did medieval people picture Britain on a map? From early manuscript sketches to portolan charts, these ten examples show how England, Scotland and Wales were drawn, imagined, and reinterpreted over time.
The Mappa Mundi of Albi
The Mappa Mundi of Albi
The Mappa Mundi of Albi, dating to the 8th century, is among the oldest surviving world maps. Like many medieval maps, it presents Asia at the top, with Europe on the left and Africa on the right, while the Mediterranean Sea dominates the centre. Some have suggested it may even be the first map to depict Britain: if you look closely in the lower-left corner, there seems to be the outline of an island. Then again, it could just be a smudge.
Could this be the earliest depiction of Britain on a map?
The World Map of Abbo of Fleury
Our next depiction of Britain is a little clearer. A world map linked to the French monk Abbo of Fleury (c. 945–1004) was produced around the end of the tenth century, and it places three small islands near the upper-left of the diagram. They are labelled Britannia and Hibernia, along with a third name that appears to read Tili. In other words, we are looking at Britain and Ireland, plus what may be Thule—a far-northern place-name that later writers sometimes connected with Iceland.
Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi
Created in (or near) Canterbury between 1025 and 1050, the Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi is one of the most important early medieval world maps—and one of the earliest surviving maps to depict the British Isles in a recognisable way. Like other medieval mappae mundi it is not a “map of Britain” so much as a diagram of the known world, but its treatment of north-western Europe is unusually clear.
Detail from British Library, Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi, MS Cotton Tiberius B. V, Part 1, fol.56v.
Britain and Ireland appear as small but distinct islands, and the map goes beyond outlines by naming places and marking key centres. London, Winchester, and Dublin are indicated using Roman-style town symbols, while the map also preserves the names of Roman provinces, showing how strongly it draws on older geographical traditions. We can also see what seems to be the Isle of Man and the Orkney Islands.
It also includes quirks that hint at what mattered in that inherited knowledge. The Cornish peninsula is drawn at an exaggerated size, perhaps reflecting Cornwall’s association with copper and tin in the ancient world. Most intriguingly, there appear to be two fighting figures in the peninsula—an arresting detail that has prompted speculation about post-Roman conflict in Britain and, more distantly, the kinds of stories that later fed into the Arthurian tradition, even if the image itself is too ambiguous to interpret with certainty.
Tabula Rogeriana
Created in 1154 by the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi for King Roger II of Sicily, the Tabula Rogeriana sets out to describe the known world with a level of detail that is striking for the period. The map is oriented south-up (so it looks “upside down” to modern eyes), and it gives coastlines and seas particular prominence—useful when you remember how much medieval movement and commerce depended on maritime routes.
Britain depicted in the Tabula Rogeriana
In al-Idrisi’s depiction, Great Britain appears with some coastal details and major rivers. The map also preserves a set of Arabic place-names for the islands and their major centres, with labels for England (Inqiltara), Scotland (Squsiyya), and Ireland (Irlanda), alongside cities including London (Londras) and Oxford (Gharkafurt).
Matthew Paris’ Map
British Library MS Cotton Claudius D.VI. fol.12
Matthew Paris (c. 1200–1259), a Benedictine monk of St Albans Abbey, produced a map of Britain in the 1250s. It survives in four manuscripts and presents the island with north at the top, an orientation that makes it feel strikingly direct compared with many medieval world maps. Rather than aiming for scale, Paris lays Britain out as a long, narrow shape that is meant to be read—a visual guide to places and landmarks.
What stands out immediately is the density of information. Paris provides over 250 place-names, packing the map with towns, regions, religious houses, and coastal points, while using rivers and key features to organise the geography. He even includes two Roman frontiers—Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall—drawn across the north to mark divisions in the landscape and in historical memory.
If you want to explore the map in detail, John Wyatt Greenlee has created an annotated version that lets readers click on labels across the image to see transcriptions and explanations of what Paris recorded. Click here to access it.
Planudes and Ptolemy’s British Isles
British Library Add. MS 19391, fol 19v-20
At the end of the thirteenth century, the Byzantine scholar Maximos Planudes located a copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia—a second-century AD work written in Alexandria that listed places using latitude and longitude and explained how maps could be constructed from those coordinates. Planudes and his team appear to have redrawn the maps from the numerical data, producing the earliest surviving Greek manuscript tradition with a full set of Ptolemaic maps. This includes a map of the British Isles. Viewers can see a distortion in which Scotland turns sharply eastward compared with the rest of Britain. This would be an ongoing feature of other Ptolemaic maps.
Pietro Vesconte’s Portolan Chart (c. 1325)
Britain is depicted in a portolan chart of western Europe. It was created around 1325 by the Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte, one of the key early innovators of this style of chart. Portolan charts were practical navigational aids used by mariners, built around coastal sailing and the identification of harbours rather than inland geography. The web of straight lines criss-crossing the surface is a rhumb-line network: it plots the thirty-two directions of the mariner’s compass from central points, with the principal lines aligned to magnetic north.
In Vesconte’s depiction, the emphasis is on naming ports, especially those along the southern and eastern coasts. Very little is depicted inland and the northern areas seem to be only vaguely depicted. The chart’s purpose was not to describe the island, but to make the shore legible for trade, travel, and navigation.
The Catalan Atlas
Created about 1375, the Catalan Atlas is one of the best-known map works of the later Middle Ages. Credited to the father-son duo of Abraham and Jehudà Cresques, it soon found its way to the French royal court. It is partly a mappa mundi and partly a portolan chart, and is filled with small drawings, flags and long captions.
For unknown reasons, Britain is depicted in the colour purple. Otherwise, it mostly names the various ports on the island, and has a flag depicting the coat of arms of England coming from London. You can learn more about the map at The Cresques Project.
The Gough Map
The Gough Map is the earliest known sheet map of Britain – scholars now believe it dates to the early fifteenth century. Drawn on sheepskin and oriented with east at the top, it covers England, Scotland and Wales and is celebrated for its remarkable accuracy—especially in south-east England—and for the sheer amount of detail it packs onto a single image.
The map shows major rivers and hundreds of settlements using little icons that range from a single building to more elaborate clusters of towers, spires, walls, and other features, each paired with a written place-name. It also includes other cartographic and illustrative details—such as islands, lakes, some region names, and even maritime imagery.
This detail of the Gough Map shows several red lines connecting places.
What draws the most attention are the red lines, some with distance markers, linking certain settlements across the landscape. A recent study used the map to build a GIS-based reconstruction of England and Wales’ road network, arguing that many of these lines correspond to real routes, including substantial survivals from the Roman road system. Check out the Gough Map website to get a close-up view.
Henricus Martellus Germanus’ Map
Henricus Martellus Germanus was a German-born cartographer working in Florence in the late fifteenth century, and his depiction of Britain survives as part of his Insularium illustratum (the Illustrated Book of Islands), a manuscript atlas devoted to islands and coastal regions. The shape of Britain is shown clearly, and the information is concentrated around the shores and ports, while the interior is comparatively sparse.
How did medieval people picture Britain on a map? From early manuscript sketches to portolan charts, these ten examples show how England, Scotland and Wales were drawn, imagined, and reinterpreted over time.
The Mappa Mundi of Albi
The Mappa Mundi of Albi, dating to the 8th century, is among the oldest surviving world maps. Like many medieval maps, it presents Asia at the top, with Europe on the left and Africa on the right, while the Mediterranean Sea dominates the centre. Some have suggested it may even be the first map to depict Britain: if you look closely in the lower-left corner, there seems to be the outline of an island. Then again, it could just be a smudge.
The World Map of Abbo of Fleury
Our next depiction of Britain is a little clearer. A world map linked to the French monk Abbo of Fleury (c. 945–1004) was produced around the end of the tenth century, and it places three small islands near the upper-left of the diagram. They are labelled Britannia and Hibernia, along with a third name that appears to read Tili. In other words, we are looking at Britain and Ireland, plus what may be Thule—a far-northern place-name that later writers sometimes connected with Iceland.
Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi
Created in (or near) Canterbury between 1025 and 1050, the Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi is one of the most important early medieval world maps—and one of the earliest surviving maps to depict the British Isles in a recognisable way. Like other medieval mappae mundi it is not a “map of Britain” so much as a diagram of the known world, but its treatment of north-western Europe is unusually clear.
Britain and Ireland appear as small but distinct islands, and the map goes beyond outlines by naming places and marking key centres. London, Winchester, and Dublin are indicated using Roman-style town symbols, while the map also preserves the names of Roman provinces, showing how strongly it draws on older geographical traditions. We can also see what seems to be the Isle of Man and the Orkney Islands.
It also includes quirks that hint at what mattered in that inherited knowledge. The Cornish peninsula is drawn at an exaggerated size, perhaps reflecting Cornwall’s association with copper and tin in the ancient world. Most intriguingly, there appear to be two fighting figures in the peninsula—an arresting detail that has prompted speculation about post-Roman conflict in Britain and, more distantly, the kinds of stories that later fed into the Arthurian tradition, even if the image itself is too ambiguous to interpret with certainty.
Tabula Rogeriana
Created in 1154 by the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi for King Roger II of Sicily, the Tabula Rogeriana sets out to describe the known world with a level of detail that is striking for the period. The map is oriented south-up (so it looks “upside down” to modern eyes), and it gives coastlines and seas particular prominence—useful when you remember how much medieval movement and commerce depended on maritime routes.
In al-Idrisi’s depiction, Great Britain appears with some coastal details and major rivers. The map also preserves a set of Arabic place-names for the islands and their major centres, with labels for England (Inqiltara), Scotland (Squsiyya), and Ireland (Irlanda), alongside cities including London (Londras) and Oxford (Gharkafurt).
Matthew Paris’ Map
Matthew Paris (c. 1200–1259), a Benedictine monk of St Albans Abbey, produced a map of Britain in the 1250s. It survives in four manuscripts and presents the island with north at the top, an orientation that makes it feel strikingly direct compared with many medieval world maps. Rather than aiming for scale, Paris lays Britain out as a long, narrow shape that is meant to be read—a visual guide to places and landmarks.
What stands out immediately is the density of information. Paris provides over 250 place-names, packing the map with towns, regions, religious houses, and coastal points, while using rivers and key features to organise the geography. He even includes two Roman frontiers—Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall—drawn across the north to mark divisions in the landscape and in historical memory.
If you want to explore the map in detail, John Wyatt Greenlee has created an annotated version that lets readers click on labels across the image to see transcriptions and explanations of what Paris recorded. Click here to access it.
Planudes and Ptolemy’s British Isles
At the end of the thirteenth century, the Byzantine scholar Maximos Planudes located a copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia—a second-century AD work written in Alexandria that listed places using latitude and longitude and explained how maps could be constructed from those coordinates. Planudes and his team appear to have redrawn the maps from the numerical data, producing the earliest surviving Greek manuscript tradition with a full set of Ptolemaic maps. This includes a map of the British Isles. Viewers can see a distortion in which Scotland turns sharply eastward compared with the rest of Britain. This would be an ongoing feature of other Ptolemaic maps.
Pietro Vesconte’s Portolan Chart (c. 1325)
Britain is depicted in a portolan chart of western Europe. It was created around 1325 by the Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte, one of the key early innovators of this style of chart. Portolan charts were practical navigational aids used by mariners, built around coastal sailing and the identification of harbours rather than inland geography. The web of straight lines criss-crossing the surface is a rhumb-line network: it plots the thirty-two directions of the mariner’s compass from central points, with the principal lines aligned to magnetic north.
In Vesconte’s depiction, the emphasis is on naming ports, especially those along the southern and eastern coasts. Very little is depicted inland and the northern areas seem to be only vaguely depicted. The chart’s purpose was not to describe the island, but to make the shore legible for trade, travel, and navigation.
The Catalan Atlas
Created about 1375, the Catalan Atlas is one of the best-known map works of the later Middle Ages. Credited to the father-son duo of Abraham and Jehudà Cresques, it soon found its way to the French royal court. It is partly a mappa mundi and partly a portolan chart, and is filled with small drawings, flags and long captions.
For unknown reasons, Britain is depicted in the colour purple. Otherwise, it mostly names the various ports on the island, and has a flag depicting the coat of arms of England coming from London. You can learn more about the map at The Cresques Project.
The Gough Map
The Gough Map is the earliest known sheet map of Britain – scholars now believe it dates to the early fifteenth century. Drawn on sheepskin and oriented with east at the top, it covers England, Scotland and Wales and is celebrated for its remarkable accuracy—especially in south-east England—and for the sheer amount of detail it packs onto a single image.
The map shows major rivers and hundreds of settlements using little icons that range from a single building to more elaborate clusters of towers, spires, walls, and other features, each paired with a written place-name. It also includes other cartographic and illustrative details—such as islands, lakes, some region names, and even maritime imagery.
What draws the most attention are the red lines, some with distance markers, linking certain settlements across the landscape. A recent study used the map to build a GIS-based reconstruction of England and Wales’ road network, arguing that many of these lines correspond to real routes, including substantial survivals from the Roman road system. Check out the Gough Map website to get a close-up view.
Henricus Martellus Germanus’ Map
Henricus Martellus Germanus was a German-born cartographer working in Florence in the late fifteenth century, and his depiction of Britain survives as part of his Insularium illustratum (the Illustrated Book of Islands), a manuscript atlas devoted to islands and coastal regions. The shape of Britain is shown clearly, and the information is concentrated around the shores and ports, while the interior is comparatively sparse.
See also: This map is 900 years old – how accurate is it?
See also: A Medieval Map of the World with Meredith Small
Top Image: Britain depicted in 1467 as part of the Cosmographia Claudii Ptolomaei Alexandrini
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