A beautifully coloured map of Herefordshire, with an inset of the city of Hereford and a vignette of the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, a key battle in the Wars of the Roses. The picture shows the omen seen before the battle: three suns (a phenomenon known as a sundog, or parhelion) appeared in the sky.

John Speed (1552-1629) was the outstanding cartographer of his age. His ‘Theatre of Great Britain’ was the first atlas of the British Isles: Speed prepared the maps himself about two years before they were published. His maps and books dominated the seventeenth-century English market. The present map is taken from the 1627 English edition published by George Humble.