A RARE set of 337-year-old playing cards, including one of the first to mention Oxford, is set to fetch between £3,500 and £4,500 at auction.

The 53 cards were produced by cartographer and publisher Robert Morden in 1676, seven years before the Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683.

Each card shows a different English or Welsh county and a map of the county, showing features like its principal towns and roads. The cards also give the length, width and circumference of the county and its distance from London.

Oxford is mentioned on the Oxfordshire card, which was issued as the two of diamonds.

The court cards have the King depicted as King Charles II — in whose reign the cards were produced — the Queen, his wife, Catherine of Braganza and the Jack, various male heads.

Preparing for the auction on Tuesday, auctioneers Sotheby’s said: “For many counties, the Morden playing card is the earliest separate printed county map to show any roads.”

Catherine Slowther, maps and atlases expert at Sotheby’s, said: “The first set of playing cards bearing maps of English and Welsh counties was thought to have been produced by William Bowes in 1590.

“Robert Morden, the cartographer and publisher, produced a fine set of playing cards in 1676.”

In the top section of the cards is the names of the county with the number of the card on the left in small Arabic numerals and on the right in large Roman numerals.

The English and Welsh Counties cards, including the Oxfordshire card, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London on Tuesday.

They have been put up for sale following the death last January of the man who used to own them, Jaime Ortiz-Patino, who created the Valderrama golf course in Spain.

He was also president of the World Bridge Federation from 1976 to 1986 and owned one of the world’s greatest collections of early playing cards.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography confirms that cartographer Robert Morden was a “maker of maps and globes” and was first documented in 1688, having the foundations for a new building staked out on Cornhill, London, after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

His family background remains untraced.

TIMELINE

  • 1602 Bodleian Library opens
  • 1603 Plague hits Oxford
  • 1625-1626 Plague strikes Oxford again
  • 1642-1646 English Civil War
  • 1642 Royalists occupy Oxford
  • 1649 King Charles 1 executed
  • 1651 First coffee house in England opens in Oxford
  • 1653-1658 Oliver Cromwell head of state, as self-styled Lord Protector of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland
  • 1665 Great Plague of London
  • 1666 Great Fire of London
  • 1669 Death of Rembrandt
  • 1676 Oxford playing card produced by Robert Morden
  • 1683 Ashmolean Museum opens on May 24
  • 1695 Press Licensing abandoned. Freedom of Press established in England