Mapping Liverpool — 1610: When Liverpool Was “Lerpoole”

JOHN SPEED’S MAP OF LANCASHIRE

Its full title is magnificent:

The Countie Pallatine of Lancaster Described and Divided into Hundreds 1610.

The map was produced for John Speed, one of the best-known English cartographers and historians of the early seventeenth century. The copperplate was engraved by the Flemish-born engraver and mapmaker Jodocus Hondius and published by John Sudbury and George Humble.

Speed’s county maps formed part of his great atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, first issued in the early seventeenth century. The project combined geographical information with history, heraldry, town plans and elaborate decoration. [1]

There is an important distinction when dating maps such as this.

1610 is the date engraved on the map, but not every surviving impression was necessarily printed in 1610.

The copperplate continued to be used in later editions. An impression printed years or even decades later could therefore retain the original 1610 date. Unless the provenance of a particular sheet is known, the safest description is simply John Speed’s 1610 map of Lancashire. [2]

MUCH MORE THAN A MAP

Speed’s Lancashire sheet was never intended to resemble a modern road atlas.

It combines geography with history, political identity, genealogy, heraldry and art.

Around the county map are royal figures associated with the Houses of Lancaster and York, recalling the dynastic struggle now known as the Wars of the Roses. Among them are Lancastrian and Yorkist monarchs, while Henry VII and Elizabeth of York represent the union of the two rival houses.

The sheet also contains coats of arms, decorative cartouches, maritime imagery and a detailed inset plan of Lancaster. [1]

What it does not give us is an Ordnance Survey-style street and road network. Settlements, churches, woodland, parks and other landscape features are shown pictorially and symbolically.

That matters. A tiny church symbol should not automatically be treated as an architectural portrait of the building standing there in 1610. A cluster of engraved trees represents woodland, not individually surveyed trees. Coastlines, distances and settlement positions belong to an age before modern precision surveying.

The map is invaluable evidence — but it tells us both about the landscape and about how an early seventeenth-century mapmaker chose to represent that landscape.

WHY “COUNTIE PALLATINE”?

The title contains another important piece of Lancashire history.

Lancashire was raised to the status of a County Palatine in the fourteenth century. Palatine status gave the Duke of Lancaster unusually extensive administrative and judicial authority within the county.

So Speed’s phrase “Countie Pallatine of Lancaster” was not decorative wording. It described a real historical constitutional status. [3]

And the Lancashire on this map is not the modern administrative county.

Historic Lancashire included Liverpool and the wider territory that now forms much of Merseyside and Greater Manchester, together with land extending farther north beyond the boundaries familiar today.

Liverpool in Speed’s world was firmly a Lancashire town.

“DIVIDED INTO HUNDREDS”

The second half of Speed’s title explains one of the most easily misunderstood features in the Liverpool section.

Lancashire was historically divided into large administrative districts known as hundreds.

Liverpool belonged to the West Derby Hundred.

That is why the enormous word:

WESTERBIE

runs across this part of the map.

At first glance it looks as though Speed is simply providing an old spelling of the village of West Derby. But the large lettering identifies the West Derby Hundred — a much larger district covering a substantial part of southwest Lancashire.

The actual settlement of West Derby is marked separately farther south.

Liverpool, Walton, Sefton, Childwall, Huyton, Prescot, Ormskirk and many other places belonged to this wider historic administrative geography. [4]

Speed is therefore mapping more than settlements. He is also showing the framework within which those settlements were governed and understood.

THE SPELLINGS — LIVERPOOL BEFORE SPELLING SETTLED DOWN

One of the great joys of the map is simply reading it.

Some place names seem wonderfully unfamiliar. Others have survived for more than four centuries with surprisingly little alteration.

• LERPOOLE — Liverpool
• LERPOOLE HAVEN — Liverpool’s harbour or haven
• MARSEE — Mersey
• ORMISKIRCH — Ormskirk
• FORMBYE — Formby
• LYDIATE — Lydiate
• ALTMOUTH — the mouth of the River Alt
• ALT FLU. — the River Alt
• SEFTON — Sefton
• LITTLE CRESBY — Little Crosby
• GREAT CRESBY — Great Crosby
• LETHERLAND — Litherland
• KIRKBYE — Kirkby
• WALTON — Walton
• KIRKDALE — Kirkdale
• EVERTON — Everton
• WEST DERBY — West Derby
• ROBYE — Roby
• KNOWESLEY — Knowsley
• HYTON — Huyton
• WAVERTRE — Wavertree
• CHILDWALL — Childwall
• PRESCOT — Prescot
• WALLASEE — Wallasey
• SIMONS WOOD FOREST — Simonswood Forest

A University of Liverpool study discussing Speed’s map specifically notes the forms “Lerpoole”, “Marsee” and “Lerpoole Haven”. [5]

And look at the names which hardly need translating at all:

Everton. Kirkdale. Walton. Sefton. Lydiate. Prescot. Childwall.

They are immediately recognisable to a modern Liverpudlian more than four centuries after this map appeared.

WAS LIVERPOOL REALLY CALLED “LERPOOLE”?

Yes — in the sense that Lerpoole was one of the written forms of the town’s name.

But we should not imagine a neat sequence in which the settlement was officially called Lerpoole until somebody formally renamed it Liverpool.

Early modern English spelling was far less standardised than modern spelling. Place names could appear in several forms in different records, produced by different clerks, printers, surveyors and mapmakers.

So Speed’s spelling does not record an official name change. It gives us one early seventeenth-century rendering of the name that became Liverpool.

The same warning applies to Kirkbye, Knowesley, Wavertre, Letherland and Wallasee. They are valuable glimpses of written language before modern spelling became fixed.

THE FUTURE CITY IS ALREADY HERE — BUT IN PIECES

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the map is not Liverpool itself.

It is everything surrounding Liverpool.

Today Liverpool, Everton, Kirkdale, Walton, West Derby, Wavertree and Childwall sit within a vast continuous urban landscape.

On Speed’s map they do not.

Lerpoole is one settlement. Everton is another. Kirkdale is another. Walton is another. West Derby is another. Wavertree and Childwall lie farther away again.

Between them is countryside.

The future city is already there — but it has not yet joined together.

Liverpool’s later expansion would absorb villages, townships, estates, fields and roads into a growing urban area. Names that once identified separate communities would eventually become familiar Liverpool districts.

Knowing what happened afterwards makes Speed’s landscape particularly compelling.

We can see the pieces.

Speed could not see the city they would eventually become.

AROUND 1,000 PEOPLE

There was no national census in 1610. Britain’s first modern census would not take place until 1801.

That means any population attached to Speed’s Liverpool must be labelled as an estimate rather than presented as an exact count.

Research into early Liverpool population suggests figures of roughly 570 inhabitants in 1563, about 800 in the mid-1560s, close to 1,000 by the end of the 1580s, and perhaps 1,200–1,600 during the 1620s. [6]

That makes around 1,000 people a useful working estimate for Liverpool around the date of Speed’s map — while acknowledging that other secondary estimates are higher.

The important point is scale.

The entire population represented by the little word Lerpoole could have fitted comfortably inside a modern Liverpool entertainment venue.

That tiny community would eventually become a city whose population was counted in hundreds of thousands.

1609–10: PLAGUE IN LIVERPOOL

Speed’s date also coincides with one of the bleakest episodes in Liverpool’s early history.

During the autumn of 1609, plague spread through Liverpool and the surrounding area.

By January 1610, records describe 19 houses in Liverpool as being shut up because of infection.

Even more strikingly, more than 440 people were recorded as unable to support themselves without outside assistance. Money was raised across the West Derby Hundred to support the poor and infected, and cabins were erected away from the town to isolate infected or suspected families. The outbreak also disrupted borough business. [7]

For a settlement containing perhaps little more than a thousand people, those figures take on an extraordinary meaning.

The word Lerpoole on Speed’s map was not simply a cartographic symbol.

It represented a small community of real households living through a devastating period.

THE RIVER ALT

Another feature that looks surprisingly important to modern eyes is the River Alt.

Speed shows it running westward through a largely rural landscape before reaching the coast at Altmouth.

Today the Mersey inevitably dominates our mental map of Liverpool, while roads, railways and dense housing fill much of the region.

Strip those modern layers away and rivers become much more obvious geographical markers.

Speed’s map gives the Alt a prominence that helps us picture this landscape before urban Liverpool transformed it.

SIMONS WOOD FOREST

Another enormous feature is impossible to miss:

SIMONS WOOD FOREST.

The word Forest sprawls across a landscape represented by ranks of trees.

Around Knowesley, Speed also depicts a substantial enclosed and wooded landscape.

Modern Merseyside encourages us to think through buildings, roads, suburbs and industry. Speed reminds us how important woods, parks, estates, mosses, rivers and agricultural land were to the older landscape.

The map is not simply showing smaller versions of modern towns. It is showing a fundamentally different relationship between settlement and countryside.

LANCASTER GETS SOMETHING LIVERPOOL DOESN’T

The complete map contains an exceptionally detailed inset plan of Lancaster.

Liverpool receives nothing comparable.

Again, that tells us something about relative status at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The Lancaster inset depicts the built-up town, streets and buildings pictorially. The Catalogue of British Town Maps records it at about 16.7 × 13.3 centimetres, at a scale of roughly 1:8,400.

Even better, the printed plan can be linked to a surviving manuscript survey by Speed dated 17 August 1607. [2]

Lancaster was the historic county town and received a close-up town portrait.

Liverpool was represented with a comparatively simple settlement symbol and name.

The extraordinary reversal in the scale of the two places over the following centuries is part of what makes this map so compelling.

SPEED, HONDIUS — AND THE MAKING OF THE MAP

John Speed was born in the sixteenth century and originally trained as a tailor before becoming one of the best-known historians and cartographers of his age.

His Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine became a landmark in British map publishing.

But Speed did not engrave the Lancashire plate himself.

That work was carried out by Jodocus Hondius, the Flemish-born engraver and mapmaker whose Amsterdam workshop was central to the production of Speed’s county maps. [1]

There is an appealing international dimension to that story: one of the great visual records of early seventeenth-century Lancashire emerged from a network of English scholarship, Dutch and Flemish engraving expertise, publishers and printers.

Speed also belonged to a developing tradition of English county mapping that had been transformed in the previous century by cartographers such as Christopher Saxton. The result is not a modern survey, but it is a remarkable record of how the county was pictured and organised at the beginning of the Stuart period. [8]

AND THEN THERE ARE TWO WORDS: “LERPOOLE HAVEN”

For all the decoration, unusual spellings and geographical clues scattered across this sheet, perhaps the most significant words for Liverpool are:

LERPOOLE HAVEN.

Liverpool’s first commercial enclosed wet dock would not open until 1715 — more than a century after the date on Speed’s map.

The great dock estate did not exist.

There were no miles of dock walls. No great nineteenth-century warehouses. No Pier Head. No ocean liner terminals. No railway network feeding passengers and goods towards the waterfront.

Yet Speed’s map already identifies the Mersey entrance as Lerpoole Haven. [5]

That does not mean Speed somehow foresaw Liverpool’s extraordinary later growth.

It tells us something more useful.

The water mattered long before the great docks arrived.

Liverpool’s maritime geography was already fundamental to how the place was understood.

LIVERPOOL BEFORE THE CITY

This is what makes John Speed’s map such a remarkable place to begin Mapping Liverpool.

It shows us Liverpool before the Liverpool we recognise had really formed.

A settlement of perhaps around a thousand people.

A place embedded within the West Derby Hundred of historic Lancashire.

Everton, Walton, Kirkdale, West Derby, Wavertree and Childwall scattered separately across the countryside.

The River Alt running prominently towards the coast.

Simonswood Forest covering an enormous area.

Knowsley surrounded by park and woodland.

The Mersey written as Marsee.

Liverpool written as Lerpoole.

And beside it:

Lerpoole Haven.

Over the next four centuries the settlement became a town, the town became a major port, and the port became a city.

Fields disappeared beneath streets. Separate settlements were swallowed by urban expansion. The waterfront was completely transformed. A population once counted in hundreds eventually became hundreds of thousands.

Yet many of the names printed on Speed’s map survived.

Everton. Walton. Kirkdale. Childwall. Prescot. Sefton. West Derby. Liverpool.

Four centuries of transformation — with pieces of the older landscape still hiding in plain sight.