Hereford Mappa Mundi: The Medieval World on One Map

The Hereford Mappa Mundi is a map of the whole known world drawn on a single calfskin around 1300 and kept at Hereford Cathedral in England. It is the largest medieval world map to survive. More than a guide to places, it is an encyclopedia in picture form, showing Jerusalem at the centre, Paradise at the top, and the peoples, animals and wonders that medieval Christians believed filled the earth.

What the map is

“Mappa mundi” is Latin for “cloth (or chart) of the world” and was the usual medieval name for a world map. The Hereford map is drawn in ink, with red, blue, green and gold, on a sheet of vellum about 1.6 metres high and 1.3 metres wide. The top of the sheet comes to a point, following the shape of the animal’s neck.

The map is usually dated to about 1300, based on its handwriting, style and the places it shows. It contains around 1,100 inscriptions, most of them in Latin. They name cities, rivers, mountains and peoples, and tell stories drawn from the Bible, classical writers such as Pliny and Solinus, and medieval encyclopedias.

How the world is shown

The world is drawn as a circle surrounded by ocean, with east at the top. Inside, the three known continents are arranged in a pattern historians call a T-O map. Asia fills the upper half, Europe lies in the lower left and Africa in the lower right, divided by the Mediterranean, the Nile and the river Don. The names of Europe and Africa are famously swapped by mistake.

Jerusalem sits at the exact centre, marked by a circular city with the Crucifixion above it. At the very top, beyond the edge of the world, Paradise appears as a walled island with Adam and Eve. Above the frame, Christ sits in judgement at the end of time, with the saved rising to heaven on one side and the damned being led to hell on the other.

The map mixes geography with history. It shows Noah’s Ark on the mountains of Armenia, the route of the Israelites through the Red Sea (coloured red), the Tower of Babel and the travels of Alexander the Great. The British Isles are squeezed awkwardly into the lower left edge, with Hereford itself marked.

Monsters and marvels

Along the edges of the world, especially in Africa and Asia, the map shows the “monstrous races” described by ancient writers. These include the Blemmyes, men with faces on their chests, and the Sciapods, who shade themselves with a single huge foot. There are also unicorns, a lynx said to see through walls and a basilisk.

These figures were not meant as jokes. For medieval readers they showed the variety of God’s creation and the strangeness of distant lands that few Europeans had visited. The map is a record of what educated people believed, not of what travellers had measured.

Who made it

A note in Anglo-Norman French in the lower left corner asks all who see the map to pray for “Richard of Haldingham and Lafford”. He is generally identified with Richard de Bello, a cleric linked to Lincoln Cathedral (Lafford is the old name for Sleaford) who later held a post at Hereford. Scholars still debate whether he drew the map, designed it or simply paid for it, and whether it was made in Lincoln or Hereford.

The map was probably displayed in the cathedral as the centre of a wooden triptych, a frame with hinged side panels, and may have been used for teaching or as an object of devotion for pilgrims visiting the shrine of St Thomas de Cantilupe in Hereford.

How it survived

The map has stayed at Hereford for most of its life. Many other large medieval world maps have been lost; the Ebstorf map from Germany, which was larger, was destroyed by bombing in 1943 and is known only from copies. Older traditions of mapping the world, such as the Babylonian Map of the World, survive in far smaller form.

In 1988 Hereford Cathedral, short of money for repairs, announced that it intended to sell the map. The plan caused a national outcry. A trust was set up, and gifts from the philanthropist John Paul Getty Jr and the National Heritage Memorial Fund kept the map in Hereford. A new library building, opened in 1996, now displays it together with the cathedral’s chained library of medieval books.

Timeline

• c. 1300: The map is made, probably in Lincoln or Hereford.
• 1943: The larger Ebstorf map in Germany is destroyed, leaving Hereford’s as the largest survivor.
• 1988: Hereford Cathedral announces plans to sell the map, prompting a public campaign.
• 1989: A rescue settlement funded by private and public donors keeps the map at Hereford.
• 1996: A new library building opens at the cathedral to house the map and the chained library.

Why it matters

The Hereford Mappa Mundi shows how medieval Europeans saw the world: as a single story running from Creation to the Last Judgement, with Jerusalem at its heart. Later maps, such as the Waldseemüller map, would replace this vision with one based on voyages and measurement, which makes Hereford’s map a rare window into the mind of the Middle Ages.