Gardiner's Atlas of English History

An excellent £2 worth from the book stall associated with the museum at Bourne Hall. Once the property of the inhabitant of 98 Maybank Road, South Woodford, a property which now appears to overlook an important junction on the North Circular Road. One can only speculate how it turned up in Epsom.

Printed in 1910, long enough ago that if you wanted colour on your maps, you could only have them printed on one side of the paper. Also that topography was shown by means of what a hirsute teacher of geography at my secondary school used to call woolly bear caterpillars.

An interesting selection of maps. Plenty of Great Britain, as one would expect. Quite a lot of Ireland, showing the ebb and flow of tribes and of English interest there. Quite a lot of Europe generally. Several each for North America and the Indian sub-continent, on which last lower Burma just about makes the bottom right hand corner. One of Africa as a whole.

Then at the end we have a selection of maps of important battles. I learn, for example, that at the Battle of Senlac Hill (aka Hastings), the English had an output on a spur of their main hill, just below their right wing. The map of Waterloo looks entirely recognisable from my recent reading of Heyer on the subject (see reference 1).

The illustration was chosen for its presentation of the Ottoman Empire, showing clearly that while the Ukraine was at that time (1730) part of Russia, large chunks of what is now the Ukraine were then Polish and the Crimea & its hinterland were Turkish. Not really part of mother Russia at all. And showing clearly that most of what is now the Middle East and North Africa were Turkish too. With Morocco just about making it as an independent state on the far west, just out of reach of the Sublime Porte. Cyprus is also shown as Turkish although on a later map it is described at British but paying tribute to the Turks. I was surprised that in those wave-ruling days we put up with such a shameful arrangement.

Note also the substantial Persian finger pushing up the east of the Caucasus.

No red underlining for Tangier, so perhaps our attempts to make it a twin of Gibraltar had been given up. Attempts out of which I recall S. Pepys making a few bob in backhanders.

Furthermore, the area which on a previous map had been called 'Finnish Tribes' had by 1730 been divided between the Kingdom of Sweden and the Russians.

Refrence 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/georgette-heyer.html.