The fourteenth-century Hereford mappa mundi is a temporally and spatially dynamic representation of the medieval English geographic and cultural imagination. Although it is centred on Jerusalem, it is the waterways of the map that draw the eye. The Mediterranean Sea, which may have once been a vibrant green but has become darkened with time, dominates the parchment as it flows into the oceans that enclose the physical world, inviting viewers to examine the earth's margins. The world's edge contains islands inhabited by monstrous peoples, with the blemmyes to the south, the cenocephali to the north, and sciapods found in the southern and western reaches of the world. Yet the map's peripheries also contain another set of islands, tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner: the British archipelago.

While the British Isles’ location on the edge of the world map was both a part of the European map-making tradition and a geographical necessity given that few in Europe knew about the Americas, it also suggests that English writers, artists, and cartographers may have embraced their own marginality. Britain itself was widely perceived as a periphery, a border space between the known and the unknown world. Aisling Byrne notes that descriptions of the British Isles drew on imagery associated with otherworlds, while Kathy Lavezzo writes, ‘the English were not simply self-conscious of their marginality during the Middle Ages; English writers and cartographers actively participated in the construction of England as a global borderland’. England was, after all, one of the most prolific sites of mappa mundi production in the premodern West. Levazzo argues that the margin was a socially and politically powerful position to occupy, straddling the line between wildness and sophistication. This discourse of marginality arose because of the regional heterogeneity within England itself; by presenting itself as a threatening symbol of alterity to the rest of the world, it could mask the internal difference that might dismantle the unity of the ‘nation’. However, if we envisage England as a borderland rather than simply a margin, then this dynamic shifts: England instead becomes an interconnected space.