Mapping The Itinerary of King Edward I

‘Is it the end of the world?’ remarked one thirteenth-century
Welsh poet, when English forces stormed into Wales in 1277. This
quote is symbolic of how national identity – the subject of this
project - was a matter of life and death, sovereignty and submission,
dreams and realities. It is an investigation into how Edward I’s
movements around the British Isles were linked inextricably to his
promotion of a ‘United Kingdom’, a ‘Great Britain’, by
bringing Wales and Scotland under English crown control. Using the
locations of castles, borders, revolts and battles, and Edward’s
movements between these points, we can visually document how location
was used to advance Edward’s ideology and establish him as the
avenging overlord of Britain. Many scholars have studied Edward I’s
life, before and during his kingship. Most have also utilised Henry
Gough’s Itinerary of Edward I, which was the basis of my work on
Edward’s itinerary. However, my research (stemming from the
University of Sheffield’s SURE project) departs from purely static
mapping of Edward’s itinerary to dynamic, statistical and
static mapping, allowing us to gauge just how important location was;
which military, progress and recreational routes were taken; which
castles were widely visited, all from a different visual perspective.
Using spreadsheets, data sets and mapping software we can demonstrate
in-depth that castles and borders – namely the Anglo-Welsh border
and River Severn, and Hadrian’s Wall in the north – were the
focal points of national identity, the battle grounds of sovereignty,
where Edward’s Great Britain was forged, practiced, implemented or
destroyed.

As we can see,
the dynamic map shows both the linear movement of Edward I across his
realm, as well as the vast mileage he totalled going between
South-Eastern England and North-Eastern Scotland during the years
1277-1307. This is further exemplified through charts detailing his
total mileage per month and per year, created by Dr Tom Stafford. The
dynamic map is cumulative in form; thus, it plots each location
visited on-top of those already present, allowing us to see which
areas were most important to Edward’s ideology of a ‘Rex
Britanniae’, a ‘Great Britain’. As we would expect from an
English king, Edward spent a significant amount of time around London
and the South-East. What is most telling, however, is that North
Wales, the Welsh Marches, the Anglo-Scottish borderlands and parts of
the eastern Scotland, around Stirling and Edinburgh, saw dense
clusters of movement. Across these areas, castles are widely present.
Considering that movement is clustered around borderland, coastal and
inland castles, this confirms my hypothesis: that castles were at the
core of Edward’s campaign to subsume Wales and Scotland into the
inalienable royal fisc of England, namely, the personal and private
property of the English Crown.

There are,
nevertheless, minor limitations with cumulative mapping. While the
importance of particular locations is exemplified by the density of
dots, cumulative mapping lacks the fluidity of non-cumulative forms.
While this map succeeds in displaying the linear routes that Edward
took across his realm, the contrast between peacetime and wartime
movements does become more muted. Aside from mapping itself, there
are issues with the data source that need addressing and measures I
took in response. The data was extracted from Henry Gough’s
Itinerary of Edward I, published in 1900. The publication year
is in-itself problematic, due to the sources available for Gough to
extract his data from, and although some revisions and additions to
the data were taken from Spufford’s revised Itinerary of Edward
I (Index version), significant gaps in the data still remained.
For example, where Edward was said to have spent 52 days in one
location, before moving to one nearby 10 days after the last day in
the original location, days 53-61 were marked ‘unknown’. This
appears frequently throughout the itinerary, so I took the decision
to extend the period spent in the original location from day 52 to
day 61, in order to make the dynamic map fuller, but also to suggest
that the logical place of stay would likely have been the original
location. While some will not agree with my methods, the data from
the itinerary, latitudes and longitudes, are all correct, and my
extensions of duration were infrequent so as not to corrupt the data.
People are, of course, more than welcome to further the data
harvested from the itineraries, including the years that I have been
working on.

By Charlotte
Tomkins

Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Dr Tom Stafford from the University of
Sheffield for creating these maps and charts from the data I
provided, as well as assisting me on what would work best and give
the most coherent and useable results. Also, to Dr Charles West
(Department of History), whose suggestions over research and planning
and management advice were indispensable.

Bibliography
(for mapping, data collection and research blog on the Sheffield
University History Matters page):
Birkholz,
D., The King’s Two Maps: Cartography and Culture in
Thirteenth-Century England (London, 2004).
Connolly, D. K.,
The Maps of Matthew Paris (Woodbridge, 2009).
Crockford, J. E.,
‘The Itinerary of Edward I of England: Pleasure, Piety and
Governance’, in Journeying along Medieval routes in Europe and
the Middle East (Turnhout, 2016).

Davies, R. R.,
‘Edward I and Wales’ in T. Herbert and G. E. Jones (eds), Edward
I and Wales (Cardiff, 1988).

Edson, E.,
‘Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers viewed their world’
in The British Library Studies in Map History vol.1 (London,
1977).

Gough, H.,
Itinerary of King Edward the First throughout his reign, A.D.
1272-1307, exhibiting his movements so far as they are recorded,
vol. 2., 1286-1307 (1900).

Gough, H.,
Itinerary of King Edward the First throughout his reign, A.D.
1272-1307, exhibiting his movements so far as they are recorded,
vol. 1., 1272-1285 (1900).

Jones, D., The
Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England (London, 2012).

Lawson, S., (ed),
Hadrian’s Wall (London, 2003).
Lilley, K. D.,
‘Mapping medieval geographies’, Geographical Encounters in the
Latin West and Beyond 300-1600 (January, 2011), pp. 1-20.

Morris, M.,
Castle: A History of the Buildings that shapes Medieval Britain
(London, 2012).

Morris, M.,
Edward I: A Great and Terrible King (London, 2009).

Parker, P.,
History of Britain in Maps (Glasgow, 2017).

Prestwich, M.,
Edward I (London, 1988).
Spufford, E. W.,
Itinerary of Edward I: Index, part of the List & Index Society
collection, vol. 135., (London, 1977).
Traquair, P.,
Freedom’s Sword: Scotland’s Wars of Independence (London,
1998).

十三世纪的一位威尔士诗人曾言：‘世界末日将至？’言及1277年英格兰军队侵袭威尔士之景。此言象征着民族认同——本项目的主题——关乎生死存亡、主权与屈服、梦想与现实。本研究旨在探讨爱德华一世在英伦三岛的行踪如何与他的‘联合王国’、‘大不列颠’的推广不可分割地联系在一起，通过将威尔士和苏格兰纳入英格兰王冠的控制之下。运用城堡、边境、叛乱和战役的地理位置，以及爱德华在这些地点之间的行踪，我们可以直观地记录地理位置如何被用来推进爱德华的意识形态，并确立他作为英国复仇领主的地位。众多学者对爱德华一世的生平进行了研究，其中多数人也利用了亨利·高夫的《爱德华一世旅行记》，这成为我研究爱德华行程的基础。然而，我的研究（源于谢菲尔德大学SURE项目）区别于对爱德华行程的纯粹静态映射，而是转向动态、统计和静态的映射，使我们能够衡量地理位置的重要性；哪些军事、进步和娱乐路线被采用；哪些城堡被广泛访问，所有这些均从不同的视觉角度呈现。通过使用电子表格、数据集和地图软件，我们可以深入证明城堡和边境——尤其是英威边境、塞文河以及北部的哈德良长城——是国家认同的焦点、主权争夺的战场，爱德华的大不列颠在此锻造、实践、实施或摧毁。由此可见，动态地图展示了爱德华一世在其领土上的线性移动，以及他在1277年至1307年期间从东南英格兰到东北苏格兰的漫长旅程。这一点通过展示他每月和每年总行程的图表，由汤姆·斯塔福德博士创建，得到了进一步的例证。动态地图是累积性的；因此，它将每个访问的地点叠加在已有的地点之上，使我们能够看到哪些地区对爱德华‘不列颠之王’的意识形态最为重要。正如我们预期的一位英格兰国王所做的那样，爱德华在伦敦及其东南部花费了大量的时间。然而，最引人注目的是，北威尔士、威尔士边境、英苏格兰边界地区以及斯特灵和爱丁堡附近的苏格兰东部地区出现了密集的活动集群。在这些地区，城堡遍布。考虑到活动集中在边界、沿海和内陆城堡周围，这证实了我的假设：即城堡是爱德华将威尔士和苏格兰纳入英格兰不可分割的皇家财政（即英格兰王冠的私人财产）的核心。然而，累积映射存在一些局限性。虽然特定地点的重要性通过点的密度得到了体现，但累积映射缺乏非累积形式的流畅性。虽然此地图成功地展示了爱德华在其领土上采取的线性路线，但和平时期与战争时期的移动对比变得更为模糊。除了映射本身之外，数据源的问题也需要解决，以及我为此采取的措施。数据是从1900年出版的亨利·高夫的《爱德华一世旅行记》中提取的。出版年份本身就是一个问题，因为高夫提取数据时可供参考的来源，尽管从斯帕福德修订的《爱德华一世旅行记》（索引版）中吸取了一些修订和补充的数据，但数据中仍然存在重大空白。例如，据称爱德华在一个地点停留了52天，然后在原地点最后一天后的10天前往附近的一个地点，第53至61天被标记为‘未知’。这种情况在旅行记中频繁出现，因此我决定将原地点停留的期限从第52天延长至第61天，以使动态地图更加完整，同时也暗示逻辑上的停留地点很可能是原地点。尽管有些人可能不同意我的方法，但旅行记中的数据、纬度和经度都是正确的，我延长停留期限的情况很少，以避免数据被破坏。当然，人们非常欢迎进一步从旅行记中收集数据，包括我一直在工作的年份。