Patronage, National Security, and Service to the Crown
Frontispiece to Atlas of Christopher Saxton
The publication of Saxton’s Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales (1579), often simply referred to as Saxton’s Atlas, was made possible through direct royal and aristocratic patronage. It is thought that John Rudd himself, with whom Saxton had studied, introduced him to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, as a possible successor to himself. This would have been a great honour for Saxton, as Cecil was one of the most prominent and powerful figures of the Tudor era, officially serving Elizabeth I as her Secretary of State and Lord Treasurer, and acting as her prime minister and close confidant for much of her reign.
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
Cecil then introduced Saxton to Thomas Seckford, who was to become one of his chief benefactors. Seckford was Master of Requests and a trusted courtier to Queen Elizabeth I and it was under his auspices and financial backing that Saxton received his first commission from the Privy Council to begin surveying the English counties in the 1570s.
Saxton’s work was deemed so essential to statecraft that Queen Elizabeth granted him a license to publish his maps, and his survey was carried out under royal arms. His maps bore the Tudor coat of arms and were intended for elite circulation. They were considered vital tools for internal governance, taxation, and military logistics.
Lord Burghley famously annotated his own copies of Saxton’s maps with strategic and political notes, underscoring their role as instruments of national security. In an era of rising tensions with Spain and fears of rebellion, Saxton's precise visual documentation of the landscape enabled the Crown to better understand population centers, topographical vulnerabilities, and logistical pathways.
Christopher Saxton Eastern Half of Essex County
Christopher Saxton Wales
The legacy of Saxton’s cartography transcends the Elizabethan period. His maps formed the blueprint for subsequent county maps by John Speed and others in the early 17th century, but more significantly, they served as a reference point for the founding of the Ordnance Survey in the late 18th century. Established in 1791 as a military response to threats posed by France, the Ordnance Survey adopted the principles of triangulated fieldwork and geodetic precision which Saxton had systematized two centuries earlier.
By delineating county boundaries, roads, rivers, forests, and settlements, Saxton’s maps helped institutionalize the notion of the nation as a legible, governable space. They facilitated not only internal administration and taxation but also the development of infrastructure, the emergence of regional identities, and the consolidation of English national consciousness.
Beyond doubt the apex of Saxton’s career was the production of his 1579 atlas, which was comprised of thirty-five copperplate maps of the counties of England and Wales. Among these, the maps of Yorkshire (his home county), Lancashire, and Cornwall are particularly esteemed for their detail and aesthetic balance. Each was engraved by skilled Flemish artisans such as Remigius Hogenberg, Augustine Ryther, and other renowned engravers, adding a layer of highly polished cosmopolitan craftsmanship to Saxton’s empirically gathered data.
In addition to the county maps, Saxton created large wall maps and special commissions, including charts possibly used in naval contexts. His plates remained in use well into the 18th century, being recopied, pirated, and reissued, often without attribution - a testament to their durability and perceived authority.
Christopher Saxton’s work represents a fulcrum in the history of English cartography: a bridge between the symbolic and the scientific, between the medieval worldview and the modern state. His maps codified not merely geography, but the very identity of a uniting kingdom on the cusp of empire. In so doing, Saxton established a cartographic paradigm whose impact can still be seen in the contours of today’s official surveys.