Birmingham, 600 years ago

Birmingham is already here

Zoom in between Lichfield’s spired cathedral and the salt town of Droitwich and you find it: one small house with a red roof, and above it a few strokes of faded brown ink. The scholar E. J. S. Parsons read them as bermyngham. It is the smallest kind of symbol the mapmaker used — but Birmingham made the map, and a red line runs straight through it.

Around 1400 Birmingham was a modest, busy market town. It had held a weekly market since Peter de Bermingham’s charter of 1166, and two fairs were recorded in 1400. In 1392 a group of townsmen founded the Guild of the Holy Cross, which ran a chantry in St Martin’s church and helped keep the roads and bridges in repair. A lawsuit of 1403 shows cloth, iron, brass and cattle being traded at the market — the metal trades that would later make the town famous were already here.

Birmingham was not yet a regional capital. In the tax returns of 1327 and 1332 only Coventry and Warwick, in Warwickshire, had more taxpayers. But scale matters: inspectors counted 44 cloths for sale in Birmingham in 1397–8, against more than three thousand in Coventry, one of the largest towns in England.

Britain before modern maps

The Gough Map is drawn on two joined skins, sheep and lamb, about 115 by 56 centimetres, and now kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It shows hundreds of towns, rivers, forests and coastlines across Britain, from Kent to Orkney. It is named after Richard Gough, the antiquary who bought it at auction in 1774 for half a crown; it came to the Bodleian after his death in 1809.

Its date has been argued over for a century. The Bodleian’s catalogue still says about 1360. Close study of the handwriting and the layers of ink has since pushed that later: scholars now date the map to around 1400, and show that it was never finished and was reworked at least twice during the 1400s. Nobody knows who made it, or exactly why.

A map made for movement?

The thin red lines that join many of the towns are what made the map famous. Beside most of them is a Roman numeral, a distance: the line from Lichfield to Birmingham is marked x, and so is the line on from Birmingham to Droitwich. For a long time the Gough Map was called the earliest road map of Britain.

Historians are now more careful. The lines are drawn straight, so they do not show where a road actually ran; they record that the mapmaker treated two places as connected, and how far apart they were thought to be. The unit is uncertain too — probably a medieval ‘computed’ mile, longer than ours. But when researchers matched the lines to roads on the ground, many followed Roman roads. Birmingham’s line follows Ryknild Street towards Lichfield and another Roman road towards Droitwich, the route kings are recorded taking from Lichfield to Worcester in 1235 and 1486.

The medieval Midlands

Look around Birmingham on the parchment and the region of 1400 comes into focus. Coventry is drawn large, with spires. Lichfield has its cathedral. Warwick has a castle. Coleshill, Solihull, Stratford, Alcester, Droitwich, Worcester and Kidderminster are all there, many with names now so faded that only fragments can be read.

Just as revealing is what is missing. Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley and Tamworth do not appear in the scholarly lists of places identified on the map. The Black Country towns that would one day surround Birmingham were, to this mapmaker, not worth marking — or not known.

Why does Britain look wrong?

The first surprise is that east is at the top. North is on the left, so Scotland lies sideways and Kent sits in the top right corner. Medieval maps had no fixed rule about which way was up.

The second is that places drift. Stafford is drawn almost due west of Birmingham when it lies to the north-north-west; Droitwich and Worcester are drawn in the wrong order to fold neatly onto a modern map. This was not carelessness. The mapmaker was working from lists of places, routes and distances, not from surveyed angles, and cared most about which places connected to which. Across England the result is still remarkably good: after turning and scaling the parchment, towns sit a median of about 13 km from where they really are.

Correcting the map

‘Correct the map’ moves every town from where the parchment puts it to where it really is, and stretches the parchment with them, pinned at each town like a rubber sheet. Fourteen of the 190 towns are left out of the pinning, because their order on the parchment would fold the sheet over itself; the towns themselves still move. Turn on ‘Distortion’ to see how far each place travels.

From parchment to GPS

A modern map starts with coordinates and draws places where the numbers put them. The Gough Map starts with relationships — this town, then that one, so many miles on — and arranges Britain around them. Placed side by side, the two show how much a medieval mapmaker knew, and how differently they knew it.

A short timeline

1. 1166Peter de Bermingham is granted a weekly market — the start of Birmingham as a town.
2. 1250William de Birmingham is granted a yearly four-day fair at Ascensiontide.
3. 1327 & 1332Tax returns: in Warwickshire only Coventry and Warwick have more taxpayers than Birmingham.
4. 1345Coventry, the great city of the region, receives its charter of incorporation.
5. 1377–1399Richard II reigns; he is often at Lichfield, and passes through it as a prisoner in 1399.
6. 1392Birmingham men found the Guild of the Holy Cross, which also kept roads and bridges in repair.
7. c.1400The Gough Map is drawn. It is later reworked during the 1400s.
8. 1399–1413Henry IV reigns.
9. 1774The antiquary Richard Gough buys the map at auction for half a crown.
10. 1809After Gough’s death the map comes to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Lost Birmingham in 3D →Lost BirminghamThe old Bull Ring