Manors and Maps in Rural England, from the Tenth Century to the Seventeenth

P.D.A. Harvey is a historian of medieval rural England with a wide interest in the history of cartography; this collection of his essays brings together both these strands. It first looks at the English countryside from the 10th century to the 15th, investigating problems in particular documents, in the village community and in underlying long-term changes. How landlords drew profits from their property in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, how and why there followed changes in the way landed estates were run and in the written records they produced, what new light their personal seals can throw on medieval peasants, are all among the topics discussed, while the local management of large estates and the development of the peasant land market are themes that recur throughout. There follow essays on the way maps were brought into the management of landed estates in the 16th and 17th centuries, starting with the introduction of consistent scale into mapping, a new concept crucially important in the general history of topographical maps. The collection closes by looking at some of the traps that both documents and maps set for the historian of the English countryside.

Contents: Preface; Rectitudines singularum personarum and Gerefa; The manorial reeve in 12th-century England; English cathedral estates in the 12th century; Non-agrarian activities in 12th-century English estate surveys; Initiative and authority in settlement change; The Pipe Rolls and the adoption of demesne farming in England; The English inflation of 1180-1220; Boldon Book and the wards between Tyne and Tees; Aspects of the peasant land market in England, 13th-15th centuries; The peasant land market in medieval England - and beyond; Personal seals in 13th-century England; Agricultural treatises and manorial accounting in medieval England; Mid-13th-century accounts from Bury St Edmunds Abbey; The Portsmouth map of 1545 and the introduction of scale maps into England; Estate surveyors and the spread of the scale-map in England 1550-80; A manuscript estate map by Christopher Saxton; English estate maps: their early history and their use as historical evidence; The documents of landscape history: snares and delusions; Index.

P.D.A. Harvey is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Durham University, UK.