Maps in Sixteenth‐Century English Law Courts

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Notes

Rose Mitchell is map archivist at The National Archives.

A version of this paper was presented at the 21st International Conference on the History of Cartography, Budapest, July 2005.

1. The National Archives was formed in 2003 by amalgamating the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission.

2. For more information on this complex subject see John H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd ed. (London, Butterworths, 1990).

3. Legal maps were produced in the Low Countries from the late fifteenth century (Paul Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (London, The Public Record Office and the British Library, 1993), 103); also in France, for which the situation was described in François de Dainville, ‘Cartes et contestations au XVe siècle’, Imago Mundi 24:2 (1970): 99–121. While reference has been made to a Russian map relating to a dispute over fishing rights in 1483, legal maps were not generally in use in Russia until the seventeenth century (Denis Shaw, ‘Mapmaking, science and state building in Russia before Peter the Great’, Journal of Historical Geography 31:3 (July 2005): 409–29, at 414; Valerie Kivelson, 'Cartography, autocracy and state powerlessness: the uses of maps in early modern Russia, Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 83–105). In the Spanish colony of Mexico, legal maps appeared in the later sixteenth century; see Georgina Endfield, ‘Pinturas, land and lawsuits: maps in colonial Mexican legal documents’, Imago Mundi 53 (2001): 7–27.

4. R. A. Skelton and Paul D. A. Harvey, eds, Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), 7.

5. The commissioners’ report given to the court at judgement in the Huntingdon example below (see note 6). The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Public Record Office (hereafter PRO) DL 5/5, fol. 46.

6. TNA, PRO, MPCC 1/9 (map); DL 5/5, fol. 46 (see note 5), and DL 3/23 R1 (associated legal proceedings).

7. In two cases in Lancashire in about 1550 rough sketch maps made to show the respective claims of plaintiff and defendant are orientated differently and show different land features (Ashworth, TNA, PRO, DL 3/54 H2h and H2i; Over Kellett, circa 1546, TNA, PRO, DL 3/38 D1q and D1r).

8. TNA, PRO, MR 1/1 (map), and DL 3/22 L1 (associated legal proceedings). I surmise that this map represents the villagers’ claim because features depicted match their depositions. It may, however, be the prior’s map, or indeed, a map ordered by the court, for which the order survives among the legal proceedings.

9. I have not found this at The National Archives, and a search on the database ‘Access to Archives’ at <http://www.a2a.org.uk>, which is a gateway to on‐line catalogues of other English archives, did not produce anything.

10. The judgement is given in the decree and order book (TNA, PRO, DL 5/5, fol. 458).

11. TNA, PRO, MPC 1/33 (map), and legal proceedings relating to Sturmer Mere at DL 4/13/5 and DL 44/141.

12. I estimate that explicit orders for maps to be made account for perhaps a quarter of maps in legal cases in the Duchy of Lancaster court up to about 1550 (with the earliest order dated 1515), with some increase shown thereafter. Not all commissions have survived, and certainly not all the maps asked for are extant, even if they were made.

13. See Peter Barber, ‘England II: monarchs, ministers and maps’, in Monarchs, Ministers and Maps, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), 57–98, especially 66–77.

14. TNA, PRO, DL 3/22 L1b; for papers in the Marton case mentioned above (see note 8).

15. TNA, PRO, MPB 1/25 (map), and E 315/122, fol. 96 (associated legal proceedings), in the Court of Augmentations in a case between the manors of Morden and Cheam about rights to common land.

16. TNA, PRO, MPB 1/7 (map), and E 134/3JasI/East2 (associated legal papers in the Court of Exchequer in a boundary dispute).

17. TNA, PRO, DL 3/49 (F1f); legal papers and two maps in a case over rights to common land.

18. TNA, PRO, DL 44/596 (papers), with map at MPC 1/214.

19. TNA, PRO, DL 3/56; commissioners’ report in a case, with map at MPC 1/201a.

20. TNA, PRO, DL 3/19 (S1). Commission in a case at Over Haddon in Derbyshire in 1528, with related map at MPC 1/59.

21. TNA, PRO, C 24/3/12, depositions in the Court of Chancery. The related map, MPA 1/61, is Figure 2 in Sarah Bendall’s article on sixteenth‐century maps of Romney Marsh, ‘Enquire “When the Same Platte Was Made and by Whome and to What Intent”’, Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 34–48, on 40.

22. TNA, PRO, MPI 1/64; no accompanying legal papers in this case in the Court of Star Chamber have yet been found.

23. TNA, PRO, DL 4/54/51, contains interrogatories and other legal papers. The related map at MPCC 1/8 is discussed and illustrated in colour in Rose Mitchell, ‘A Jacobean landscape’, in The Map Book, ed. Peter Barber (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), 144–47.

24. TNA, PRO, E 315/120, fol. 158–159, contains legal papers relating to the case over boundaries between Maxey and Glinton in Cambridgeshire. The related map is at MPI 1/251. It is not clear whether this is one of the maps made for the villages, or whether it is another, since the order to the commissioners in the case specified that they should make a map or have one made.

25. TNA, PRO, E 315/120, fol. 159

26. TNA, PRO, MPC 1/61/1, list of men. The map viewed by the men is at MPC 1/61/2. A second map, made for the plaintiff’s side, is at MPC 1/211, with another list, of men sworn to that map, at DL 44/294.

27. TNA, PRO, MPC 1/251 (map), with related legal papers in DL 4/31/9. The court was that of the Duchy of Lancaster.

28. TNA, PRO, MPC 1/75. Plate 78 in Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (see note 3), 111.

29. Little is know about this man, and this is the only known example of a map bearing his signature (the second map listed in John Lane’s entry in Dictionary of Land Surveyors and Local Mapmakers of Great Britain and Ireland 1530‐1850, ed. Sarah Bendall (London, The British Library, 1997), 2: 304, is a photographic copy of the original (TNA, PRO, MPC 1/75) cited in note 28 above; personal correspondence with Sarah Bendall). I surmise from the style that John Lane was responsible for making at least two other maps for the Duchy of Lancaster, both showing lands in Lancashire rather than in East Anglia (Myerscough at TNA, PRO, MPC 1/31, and Bowland Forest at MPC 1/32). Mrs Diana Gunasena, who is knowledgeable about the seventeenth‐century surveyor Nicholas Lane, is unaware of any connection between these two men (personal correspondence).

30. TNA, PRO, DL 44/653. Legal proceedings in a case at Austwick (or Austwich) and Selside, Yorkshire, heard in the court of the Duchy of Lancaster. This portfolio also contains the rough draft with the commissioners’ signatures (item 3) and Saxton’s fair drawing (item 4).

31. TNA, PRO, E 134/39Eliz/East14, item 9, Saxton’s deposition in a boundary dispute in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire, for which Saxton made a map, now at TNA, PRO, MPB 1/16.

32. TNA, PRO, E 178/910.

33. TNA, PRO, MF 1/59. The map, which has been extracted from the written record of the legal proceedings (see note 32), is the only Gloucestershire map known to have made by Treswell. Bendall, Dictionary of Land Surveyors (see note 29), 2: 517–18, lists none. The Cistercian monastery of Hailes, near Winchcombe, Cheltenham, had been founded in 1246 but was already in ruins by the time Treswell mapped it, less than half a century after its dissolution by Henry VIII.