Abstract

Estate surveyors and the spread of the scale-tnap in England 1550-80 P. D. A. Harvey accurately drawn, from measured survey, to a Not the least of the services performed by Maurice Beresford's History on the Ground in 1957 was to consistent scale set out on a scale-bar, mosdy with show what a valuable source of information we a pair of dividers drawn above it. They show us the have in the estate maps of the late sixteenth villages and their individual houses and closes, the fields with their often intricate divisions and century. The maps reproduced there -ofHoldenby (Northamptonshire) by Ralph Treswell in 1580 and boundaries, the streams and bridges, the hedgerows 1587, ofToddington (Bedfordshire) by Ralph Agas and trees. They offer us the closest, fullest, most in 1581 (Pl. I), ofWhatborough (Leicestershire) by exact view we can get of the detailed landscape of Thomas Clerke in 1586 and of Maids Moreton Tudor England- and of medieval England as well, (Buckinghamshire) and Salford (Bedfordshire) by for we have nothing comparable for earlier periods. Thomas Langdon in 1596- are all carefully and From the Middle Ages we have practically no local Plate I. Part of the map of Toddington (Bedfordshire)