# Itinerary from London to the Holy Land > Matthew Paris - c. 1250-1259 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/matthew-paris/matthew-paris-itinerary-map-bl/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-14 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Matthew Paris - **Date:** c. 1250-1259 - **Medium:** Pen and ink line drawing with tinted colour washes and gold leaf on parchment - **Dimensions:** Folio dimensions not published in the sources consulted. The itinerary occupies four folios (ff. 2r-4r and 4v-5r) within an eight-folio prefatory quire (ff. 1v-8r) bound before the text of the Historia Anglorum. - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** English, mid-thirteenth century (Gothic) - **Current location:** British Library, London - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A strip map in pen, tinted colour and gold, drawn by or for the St Albans monk-chronicler Matthew Paris to preface his Historia Anglorum. It does not show a country. It shows a road: London up through Rochester, Canterbury and Dover, across the Channel, down through France and the Alpine passes into Italy, on to Rome, and south again to the Apulian ports of embarkation for the crusader states, with a further two folios carrying the reader on to Acre and Jerusalem itself.It is one of at least four versions Paris drew of the same journey, and the manuscript that carries this one, Royal MS 14 C VII, has been in continuous institutional custody since it entered the English royal library, given to the nation by George II in 1757 and held by the British Library since 1973. Scholars now read it less as a practical road map than as an aid to a form of devotion St Albans' cloistered monks could not otherwise perform: a journey to Jerusalem made in the mind, one town at a time.Where the picture, and the picture alone, has been asked to answer a question the sources cannot yet answer, this record says so rather than filling the gap: who owned the volume before 1757, and whether the hand that drew this particular copy was Paris's own or a later scribe's, are both left as open findings, not settled facts. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1250** Matthew Paris and the scriptorium of St Albans Abbey `[documented]` (creation) Produced at St Albans Abbey, England, within the date range c. 1250-1259 assigned by the British Library to the prefatory quire that carries this itinerary. Whether the itinerary was drawn by Paris's own hand or, as Connolly argues, by a later scribe working within the same tradition, is a separate and unresolved authorship question recorded under attribution. - **13th century-by 1757** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) No owner or custodial route is documented between the manuscript's production at St Albans and its presence in the Old Royal Library. St Albans Abbey was dissolved in 1539; how the volume passed from the abbey, or from whatever hands held it afterward, into royal ownership is not stated in the sources consulted. - **unrecorded date-1757** The Old Royal Library, sovereigns of England `[unknown]` (royal collection) The manuscript carries a Royal shelfmark, meaning it belonged to the roughly 2,000-manuscript Old Royal Library assembled by English sovereigns from the reign of Edward IV onward. The exact date and reign in which Royal MS 14 C VII specifically entered that collection is not established in the sources consulted. - **1757-1973** The British Museum, London `[documented]` (gift) King George II gave the Old Royal Library, some 2,000 manuscripts including Royal MS 14 C VII, to the recently founded British Museum in 1757, four years after the Museum's foundation on the Cotton and Sloane collections. - **1973-present** The British Library, London `[documented]` (transfer) The British Library was established as an independent institution in 1973, separating the national library's holdings, including the Royal manuscripts, from the British Museum. The manuscript has remained there since, catalogued as Royal MS 14 C VII. ## Open questions - Where was the manuscript kept between its production at St Albans in the 1250s and its appearance in the Old Royal Library? No specific owner or route is documented in the sources consulted, and St Albans Abbey itself was dissolved in 1539. - Was this specific copy of the itinerary drawn by Matthew Paris himself, as the British Library's catalogue and the traditional Vaughan attribution hold, or by a later scribe working for a royal patron such as Edward I, as Daniel Connolly has argued from the script and decoration? The dispute is unresolved. - Did the itinerary originate as a single continuous strip before being bound into the codex, as its 'now mounted separately' leaves suggest, and if so, when and why was it remounted in its current form? - What did the stitched flaps mentioned in the secondary literature originally carry, and do any survive intact, or have some been lost since the leaves were remounted? - Exactly when did Royal MS 14 C VII enter the Old Royal Library, and under which monarch? The sources consulted establish only that it was part of the collection by the time of George II's 1757 gift. - What are the manuscript's or the individual leaves' physical dimensions in millimetres? No figure was found in the sources consulted for this record. ## Sources - [1] British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue, 'Royal MS 14 C VII, ff 1v-8r' (record 041-002338754): scope and content list for the prefatory quire, giving the exact folio range of the itinerary (ff. 2r-5r), the map of Britain (f. 5v), the self-portrait (f. 6r), and the manuscript's date range (c. 1250-1259). - [2] British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue, 'Royal MS 14 C VII' (record 040-002106988): scope, content and decoration description for the whole volume, including the itinerary's split into an Apulia leg (ff. 2r-4r) and a Holy Land leg (ff. 4v-5r), and the note that its leaves are now mounted separately. - [3] British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue, 'Royal MS 14 C VII, ff 8v-156v' (record 041-002338755): catalogue description of the Historia Anglorum text itself, confirming it as the only complete copy, probably composed and written 1250-1255. - [4] British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue, 'Royal MS 1 A I-20 E X: Royal Manuscripts' (record 032-002105724): top-level description of the Royal collection as manuscripts collected by English sovereigns from Edward IV onward. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Royal manuscripts, British Library', for the formation of the Old Royal Library, George II's 1757 gift to the British Museum, and the 1973 transfer to the newly independent British Library. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the British Library's own published institutional history. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Matthew Paris', for the biography, the 1257 Henry III visit and quotation, and the 1248 mission to Haakon IV of Norway. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with Richard Vaughan's 'Matthew Paris' (Cambridge University Press, 1958) or a scholarly edition of the Chronica Majora. - [7] Camille Serchuk, review of Daniel K. Connolly, 'The Maps of Matthew Paris: Medieval Journeys through Space, Time and Liturgy' (Boydell, Woodbridge, 2009), in The Medieval Review 10.06.39: the Vaughan attribution, Connolly's counter-argument for a later scribe and a royal patron (probably Edward I), and the imagined-pilgrimage thesis. - [8] Wikimedia Commons, File:Itinerary by Matthew Paris - Historia Anglorum (1250-1259), f.2 - BL Royal MS 14 C VII.jpg: file description, date (1250-1259), source (British Library via Flickr Commons, released March 2014), and licence (CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication). - [9] Wikimedia Commons, File:Map of Britain (c.1250) - Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, f. 5v.jpg: file description confirming folio (f. 5v of Royal MS 14 C VII) and licence (Public Domain Mark 1.0). - [10] Wikimedia Commons, File:BritLibRoyal14CVIIFol006rMattParisSelfPort.jpg: file description confirming folio (f. 6r of Royal MS 14 C VII) and licence (Public Domain Mark / PD-Art). - [11] Wikimedia Commons, File:Map of Britain (c.1250) - Matthew Paris - STC255189.jpg: file description confirming this is a separate map, from British Library Cotton MS Julius D VII, f. 49v, distinct from Royal MS 14 C VII, with public domain licensing. - [12] Daniel K. Connolly, 'Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris,' The Art Bulletin 81, no. 4 (1999). Bibliographic citation only; full text and abstract were not accessible in this research session and the claims drawn from it here are cited via source 7 (the Medieval Review) and source 16, which discuss and quote the argument. - [13] Historia Cartarum, 'About Matthew Paris': overview of Paris's career as monk, chronicler and cartographer at St Albans, his royal connections, and his repeated production of itinerary and Britain maps across several manuscripts. - [14] Medievalists.net, 'A Thirteenth-Century Meditational Tool: Matthew Paris's Itinerary Maps' (2011), summarising Dana Vasiliu's 2009 article in British and American Studies, vol. 15, on the itinerary as a meditational device for cloistered readers. - [15] PeterRobins.co.uk, 'Medieval Itineraries: Matthew Paris': independent route-reconstruction resource giving the towns and day-counts along the itinerary and comparing the surviving manuscript versions. Not a peer-reviewed source; used here only for physical and route detail corroborated elsewhere, flagged for replacement with a scholarly edition. - [16] The Pilgrim's Guide, 'Medieval (Re)interpretation of the Holy Places: Virtual Pilgrimage, Matthew Paris's Itinerary Map, and Meditative Tools': synthesis of the imagined-pilgrimage scholarship, including the stitched flaps and fixed reading order, citing Connolly. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.