Sheldon tapestries

The Sheldon Tapestries is a group of 121 tapestries dateable to the late 16th century. They include four tapestry maps illustrating the counties of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, with most other tapestries being small furnishing items, such as cushion covers. The tapestries are included in three major collections: the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, Scotland (still uncatalogued). Pieces were first attributed in the 1920s to looms at Barcheston, Warwickshire by a Worcestershire antiquary, John Humphreys, without clear criteria; on a different, but still uncertain basis, others were so classified a few years later. No documentary evidence was then, or is now, associated with any tapestry, so no origin for any piece is definitely established.

These are the four tapestry-woven maps commissioned in the late 1580s by Ralph Sheldon (1537–1613), based on the county surveys of Christopher Saxton. The tapestries illustrated the counties of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, with each tapestry portraying one county. Designed to hang together in Ralph Sheldon's home in Weston, near Long Compton, Warwickshire, they would have presented a view across central England, from the Bristol Channel to London, covering the counties where Sheldon’s family and friends held land. The maps are important in showing the landscape of central England in the 16th century, at a time when modern map making was in early development. Of the original four tapestries, three survive in part and only the Warwickshire one is still complete, now displayed at Market Hall Museum, Warwick.

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