We offer below brief biographies of those mapmakers more often encountered. It is our intention to add to these pages on a regular basis, so we hope that you will 'book-mark' them for future reference.
CAMDEN'S BRITANNIA : William HOLE : William KIP
William Camden (1551-1623) was an English historian and antiquary who devoted himself to the study of the antiquities of Britain, travelling round the country visiting sites. The results of his work were brought together in the Britannia, first published in 1586 then much reissued and augmented over the following two centuries. However, one of the few criticisms levelled at the 186 first edition of this work was the absence of maps.
This failing was remedied in the sixth edition of 1607 for which maps were commissioned from William Kip and William Hole. Drawing on the surveys of Christopher Saxton, John Norden and the Anonymous/William Smith series, they produced a series of 57 maps. The maps are clearly engraved, often with decorative cartouches displaying ships and sea monsters. These maps form an attractive and popular series. A number are the earliest individual maps of some counties that can be obtained - although the maps are predated by those of the Saxton atlas, first published in 1579 and now very rare, Saxton frequently combined counties on one sheet, rather than mapping them separately and Kip and Hole did.
Three editions of the Kip and Hole maps may be found; the first is identifiable by Latin verso text, the second (1610) lacks text while the third (1637) displays an engraved plate number. Such was the popularity of the Britannia with its history and nature of the English and Welsh counties, that the work was re-published under the editorship of Edmund Gibson in 1695 (and then 1722, c.1730, 1753 and 1772) with maps by Robert Morden. Richard Gough (1735-1809), the celebrated English collector and onetime Director of the Society of Antiquaries, also edited a 1789 edition of the Britannia with maps by John Cary.
The frequency with which the Britannia was re-printed and the number of editions, under different editors, with maps by different mapmakers bears testament to the success and popularity of the work.
