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Map of the Taking of the Earl of Ormonde in anno 1600
by George Carew, Earl of Totnes, 1555-1629

A parley. The Earl of Ormond, the Earl of Totnes, the Earl of Thomond & their escort are mounted. The Irish rebels under Owny MacRory are on foot.

Source: Trinity College Dublin MS1209_007
c.1600. 40 x 40 cm; vellum (parchment). In an atlas catalogued by James Hardiman.

The collection of maps made by George Carew, Lord President of Munster at the beginning of the 17th century, contains nearly 70 maps and is one of the largest sets of original Tudor and early Stuart maps of Ireland surviving anywhere. They are known collectively as the 'Hardiman Atlas' after their first cataloguer, James Hardiman. Quoting from J.H. Andrews: These maps, which are 'for the most part competently drawn and attractively coloured' and which 'diplay not one scale of latitude or longitude in the entire collection ... are essentially the by-product of a military and political conquest. However, as well as forts, defended towns and troop movements, they are rich in placenames, territorial boundaries and a good deal of ordinary landscape detail. Carew is said to have wanted all his Irish papers to be deposited at Trinity ... though as it turned out most of them finally came to rest at Lambeth Palace in London. Nobody knows when, how or why the maps became detached from the collection and found their way to Dublin. They simply turn up in the College records of the late eighteenth century .... It was a non-Trinity historian, James Hardiman of Galway, who first catalogued them in 1821, apparently on his own initiative, and after being bound into a single, large volume they became generally known as the Hardiman atlas ...The credit for [the rediscovery of their true origin] belongs to a recent Keeper of Manuscripts William O'Sullivan, who put the issue beyond any doubt by identifying Carew's hand on many of the Hardiman maps and by collating all their titles and subjects with the original early-seventeenth-century catalogue still at Lambeth'.