Aims and scope

This is as complete a catalogue as possible of the county maps of Bedfordshire printed before 1901. The form of the entries follows the arrangement devised by Dr P. D. A. Harvey in his catalogue of The printed maps of Warwickshire 1576-1900 (1959) and since adopted for several other county cartobibliographies. A county map is defined as a map of the whole county on which detail outside the boundary is shown only incidentally or to supplement information given for the county itself. Where a map was on a scale to require publication on two or more sheets it is included, but maps of specific areas—single hundreds or parishes or groups of parishes—are excluded, even if when combined they would show the whole county. Bedfordshire being a small county was often grouped with its neighbours by cartographers and to exclude or relegate to a supplement these grouped maps would reduce the usefulness of the catalogue. Conversely, to include maps showing virtually all of southern Britain would defeat the purpose of a county catalogue. A somewhat arbitrary decision has therefore been made to include maps showing up to five counties.

A second section of the catalogue lists town plans published up to 1900—none has been found of towns other than Bedford, Teighton Buzzard and Luton. Plans showing only part of a town or village are excluded as are plans showing proposed or actual administrative changes in manuscript on printed maps.

Some maps of little more than decorative interest (for example, George Bickham’s perspective view and the map in Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion) have been excluded from the main catalogue and are listed in a supplement together with some other maps of interest which are outside the ‘county map’ definition. The maps of the Ordnance Survey are not properly county maps but are of such obvious importance that they are also listed in the supplement.

The information given about each map is restricted, the aim being to differentiate between editions only sufficiently for each to be identified and to list the atlases or other publications in which they have been seen so that the many maps removed from atlases and now collected individually can be dated with some accuracy. Decorative features of maps are not described in detail though they may be noted where appropriate.