This is the second, largely corrected, edition dated 1668, the first to be issued following the Great Fire of London. The city would still be largely in ruins. Matthew Simmons (fl.1635-54) is most associated with printing John Milton’s works but in 1635 he published his one and only cartographic work ‘A Direction for the English Traviller’. Known famously as the thumbnail maps due to their size the three editions of this work are all exceedingly scarce. The maps were engraved by Jacob van Langeren and incorporated into a plate containing a distance table for the county, an invention of John Norden’s in 1625. In 1643 Thomas Jenner published an improved edition with four extra folding plates, three of which were maps of England, Wales and Yorkshire (lacking in this example). For this new work the van Langeren maps were entirely re-engraved slightly larger.

In 1649 he added text and published it as ‘A Booke of the Names of all the Hundreds’, of which only one complete example is known. This was followed in 1657 by a slightly renamed work, which was effectively an expansion, listing all of the towns and hundreds. Accompanying each map are printed from type, lists of towns and their hundreds in three columns continued on additional leaves. These all derive from those in John Speeds ‘Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine’. This 1668 edition has an entirely reset title and text. Despite the revision of errors for this corrected 1668 edition, many are repeated. The practice of combining typographic text and engraved plate on the same leaf required two runs through the press. The printer ‘M.S. is quite likely Mary Simmons, the surviving widow of Matthew Simmons. Bennett (1996) p. 8; Chubb (1927) 51; ESTC R170715; Fordham (1924) p. 10; Shirley (2004) T.Lang 1k; Skelton (1970) 88; Tyacke (1978) p. 118.