Visual images of real locations are rare in medieval England, but when there was a need to depict the minutiae of daily existence or to make an accurate record, it could be and was done. Hence we have the remarkable example of the detailed waterworks plan of Canterbury cathedral in the Eadwine Psalter (c.1150-60). Many images, especially in calendar pictures or in the borders of Psalters, give vignettes of rural life. One of the most frequently cited is the early fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter where rural pursuits at the bottom of nearly each page demonstrate the labour in the Lord’s domain. Place, landscape and people are represented in lively but stylized form with carefully judged, but not too much, observational detail. Even on authenticating images, such as seals, buildings appear only in summary form to show essential features. The seal of the city of Exeter of c.1200 is a typical example of a generalized fortified tower type, common throughout Europe.33 An exception is the very accurate view of the city of London made for the seal of the barons in 1219, which, while being clearly represented with spatial recession, retains a strongly symbolic function in being presided over by a proportionately giant figure of St Paul as the city’s protector.34
Although art does not on the whole record a broader sense of the environment, there was a developing visual concept of its shape and boundaries. During the reign of Henry III, the chronicler and artist Matthew Paris made four maps of Britain which constitute the earliest maps of a nation in Europe.35 (Plate 24.3.) They may have been stimulated by a particular interest by this king in images representing the place and shape of Britain in a world context: he also had Mappae Mundi, pictures of the world, on the walls of his palaces at Westminster and Winchester. There was also a wider interest at the time for depictions of the world, which seems to have been a common factor between English and German religious houses from the midtwelfth century. These images of the world form a distinct group and include large-scale examples for display, such as the Hereford world map, made in Lincolnshire, the Ebsdorf map made in northern Germany, as well as smaller manuscript versions, such as the so-called Psalter map now in the British Library.36 The last three, all made after the 1260s, show Jerusalem at the centre of a world held in place or presided over by the body of Christ, and it is possible that they were commissioned in an attempt to reclaim a Latin Christian identity for the Holy City which had become an urgent matter after its fall to the East in 1260. To Matthew Paris himself can also be attributed an interest in the world, its boundaries, travel and the visual identity of his country. He made the first visual itineraries since antiquity that recorded pilgrimage sites on the way to Rome and the Holy Land, and as such he must have been well aware of the traditions of travel literature and depiction, but also infused them with an especially sharp personal vision and knowledge.
World History
