CLASSICAL AND EARLY MEDIEVAL HERITAGE 27 



medieval lore as a map, and provides fascinating material for study. 



Of greater interest for this outline is the fact that, though 

 mainly copied from older sources, it contains additions show- 

 ing that interest in cartography had not entirely died out. 

 Several towns prominent in the English administration of 

 Gascony in the thirteenth century have been inserted, and 

 there are traces of a commercial route from north Germany 

 towards the Rhine from an earlier date. The depiction of the 

 British Isles on the Hereford map, though crude, is later than 

 the general content, with medieval forms of town names, 

 and four cities in Ireland. The representation of the Trent- 

 Ouse river systems of northern England also indicates local 

 knowledge. The evidence for medieval cartographic activity 

 in Britain is not however confined to this map. Dating from 

 A.D. 1250 are the four maps of Matthew Paris, the St. Albans 

 chronicler: in one case based on a straight line itinerary, from 

 Dover to Newcastle. Though presenting difficulties in inter- 

 pretation, they nevertheless show that attempts to draw maps, 

 however crude, were being made. Much more striking is the 

 'Gough' map of the following century {circa 1325) with its 

 elaborate road system and careful distinctions in the status of 

 the towns depicted. It has been suggested by R. A. Pelham 

 that this may be a copy of an official road map prepared for the 

 use of Edward I. 



As has been remarked above, Ptolemy's 'Geography' was 

 almost entirely without influence on the medieval West, but it 

 was known and studied in Byzantium, to whose scholars it is 

 possible we owe the extant maps. Further study of the precise 

 role of Byzantine culture in the history of cartography may 

 produce important results. There was also another centre 

 where Ptolemy's influence exerted itself, namely the Arab 

 world. The text of the Geography was translated into Arabic 

 in the ninth century, and versions of his maps were known to 

 Arab scholars, for example, Mas'udi, in the following century. 

 Except in one instance, however, there was no direct contact 

 between Arab and European cartography. In the twelfth 

 century, the geographer el-Idrisi was welcomed at the court 

 of Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, and there compiled a 

 world map, with a written description, incorporating Arabic 



