John Norden

John Norden was born in 1548, possibly in Somerset, and set out to produce a set of maps of the counties from his own surveys, as Saxton had done. Although he obtained the authority of Queen Elizabeth to carry out his work, subsequent appeals to the throne for finance in his hour of need were ignored, much to the loss of the history of cartography!

He financed himself so far as he was able, and succeeded only in producing maps of Middlesex (1593), Surrey (1594), Sussex (1595), Hampshire (1595), Hertfordshire (1598), and probably Kent, although no maps are known. These are all very rare.

His surveys, however, were used by others, and some were only issued later. Cornwall for instance, was only engraved and printed in 1728, and the Essex survey was not published until 1840. He also introduced the triangular distance grids with the small thumbnail county map, and this was utilised later by van Langeren for Matthew Simmons's Direction for the English Traveller.