Dury and Andrews' Map of Hertfordshire

Society and landscape in the eighteenth century

Andrew Macnair, Anne Rowe, Tom Williamson, Anne Rowe, Tom Williamson

• Publisher: Windgather Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781909686748
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book is about the map of an English county – Hertfordshire – which was published in 1766 by two London mapmakers, Andrew Dury and John Andrews.
For well over two centuries, from the time of Elizabeth I to the late 18th century, the county was the basic unit for mapping in Britain and the period witnessed several episodes of comprehensive map making. The map which forms the subject of this book followed on from a large number of previous maps of the county but was greatly superior to them in terms of quality and detail. It was published in a variety of forms, in nine sheets with an additional index map, over a period of 60 years. No other maps of Hertfordshire were produced during the rest of the century, but the Board of Ordnance, later the Ordnance Survey, established in the 1790s, began to survey the Hertfordshire area in 1799, publishing the first maps covering the county between 1805 and 1834. The OS came to dominate map making in Britain but, of all the maps of Hertfordshire, that produced by Dury and Andrews was the first to be surveyed at a sufficiently large scale to really allow those dwelling in the county to visualize their own parish, local topography and even their own house, and its place in the wider landscape.
The first section examines the context of the map's production and its place in cartographic history, and describes the creation of a new, digital version of the map which can be accessed online. The second part describes various ways in which this electronic version can be interrogated, in order to throw important new light on Hertfordshire's landscape and society, both in the middle decades of the eighteenth century when it was produced, and in more remote periods. The attached DVD contains over a dozen maps which have been derived from the digital version, and which illustrate many of the issues discussed in the text, as well as related material which should likewise be useful to students of landscape history, historical geography and local history.

CHAPTER ONE

The County Maps

Introduction

This book is about the map of an English county – Hertfordshire – which was published in 1766 by two London map-makers, Andrew Dury and John Andrews. The first section examines the context of the map’s production and its place in cartographic history, and describes the creation of a new, digital version of the map which can be accessed online at www.duryandrewsmapofhertfordshire.co.uk (Figure 1). The second part describes various ways in which this electronic version can be interrogated, in order to throw important new light on Hertfordshire’s landscape and society, both in the middle decades of the eighteenth century when it was produced, and in more remote periods. The attached DVD contains over a dozen maps which have been derived from the digital version, and which illustrate many of the issues discussed in the text, as well as related material which should likewise be useful to students of landscape history, historical geography and local history.

For well over two centuries, from the time of Elizabeth I to the inception of the Board of Ordnance (termed from 1845 the Ordnance Survey) in the late eighteenth century, the county was the basic unit for mapping in Britain. We can, admittedly a little simplistically, divide the history of county map making into three periods, which to some extent overlap. The first, covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saw the production of small scale maps by Saxton, Speed and others, which were then repeatedly copied, with very few new surveys being undertaken. The second period, from c.1700 to c.1840, saw the production of a large number of large-scale county maps, published at a scale of one or two inches to the mile, which were based on new surveys, more detailed than anything undertaken before. These maps, which were privately financed and in some respects anticipated the early work of the Board of Ordnance, will be the main concern of this book. The third period, which overlaps with the second by several decades, is dominated by the work of the Ordnance Survey, which was established in the 1790s as part of the nation’s preparations for an anticipated Napoleonic invasion. Their first map – of Kent, published in 1801 – was county-based, but after that they produced maps, gradually covering the whole of the country at a scale of one inch to the mile, which ignored county boundaries.

FIGURE 1. Dury and Andrews’ map of Hertfordshire, digitally redrawn but not yet geo-rectified.

The county maps of Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire occupies an important place in the history of British cartography. Matthew Paris (c.1200–1259), England’s most prolific medieval map-maker (as well as chronicler, historian and artist) was a Benedictine monk who spent almost the whole of his working life in the scriptorium at the Abbey of St Albans.¹ His maps stand out as the first attempts to portray the actual physical appearance of the country, rather than simply trying to represent the relationship between places in schematic diagrams.² His map of Britain, drawn in the late 1250s and now in the British Library, was made three hundred years before triangulation was used in surveying: although parts of the country are distorted, with Essex rather than Kent in the south-east corner, it is remarkably accurate with over 250 towns, rivers and hills individually named. Much later, the county was home to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who spent much of his life at Gorhambury just outside St Albans.³ Statesman, philosopher, scientist and essayist, Bacon had a profound impact on the development of cartography both in England and throughout Europe. But our concern here is more specifically with the development of maps of the county itself, and in particular with those which preceded Dury and Andrews’ survey of 1766.

Every English county can boast a series of maps published over the two and a half centuries before c.1800, but Hertfordshire is quite exceptional in the number and variety it can offer. As long ago as 1914 Fordham noted 43 different maps of Hertfordshire which were produced between that of Saxton (1577) and that of Dury and Andrews (1766), as well as 106 reprints of these maps.⁴ These figures have since been revised upwards by Donald Hodson in his 1974 The Printed Maps of Hertfordshire 1577–1900.⁵ While virtually all counties were mapped by Christopher Saxton and John Speed, Hertfordshire is almost unique in having, in addition, county maps made by John Norden and William Smith. The county is also unusual in that, in the period between Saxton’s map and that produced by Dury and Andrews, two maps were published which were based on entirely new surveys. If we compare the situation in Hertfordshire with (for example) Norfolk, we see the latter had no map by Smith or Norden (at least none that has survived) and only one map, by James Corbridge in 1730, published in the period which was based on a new survey.

The first series of county maps to cover the whole of the country were those produced by Christopher Saxton (c.1542–1606), often referred to as ‘the father of English cartography’, who was born at Dunningley near Dewsbury in Yorkshire. Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales, containing 34 maps of individual counties, was published in 1579 after only five summers of surveying. It was the second national atlas in the world,⁶ coming several years after Johann Strumpf’s 1552 map of Switzerland,⁷ and only Philip Apian’s 1568 survey of Bavaria approaches it in terms of comprehensiveness.⁸ The production of the Atlas was a consequence of deliberate government policy. Although the project was financed by Thomas Seckford (1515–1587), a Suffolk lawyer and master of the Court of Requests (whose arms are displayed at the bottom right corner of the Hertfordshire map) (Figure 2), Lord Burghley (William Cecil) – Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer, chief minister, confidante and adviser to Elizabeth I for almost all of her long reign – was the real mastermind behind the project (Seckford and Cecil had been law students together in the London Inns of Court and worked together in the Courts of Wards and Liveries).⁹ So impatient was Cecil to acquire Saxton’s maps that he insisted on being sent proof copies of each, prior to final drafting and engraving. These he gathered together and subsequently had bound into the ‘Burghley-Saxton Atlas’. This was acquired, probably in 1612, by King James I from Burghley’s son, Robert, Lord Salisbury, and later found its way into the Royal Library and finally in 1973 to the British Library. Burghley has been described as “the most cartographically minded statesman of his time”¹⁰ and Stephen Alford in his biography talks of his “strong visual sense of where the Queen and her realm stood in the greater scheme of things”.¹¹ He used any map that was available to him and clearly felt free to annotate them in his characteristic spikey hand. If no maps were available he drew his own.¹² On the proof map of Christopher Saxton’s Hertfordshire he added the words ‘Mr Capell’ next to Hadham Parva and ‘Lytton’ next to Knebworth.

Saxton’s work was thus, in a sense, a government project, and the Privy Council gave him an official placart or pass to ensure that local Justices of the Peace supplied him with men and horses during the survey, and guided him to elevated places from which he could view the landscape. His was a fresh survey, taken while travelling on horseback, based on compass sketches and using a plane table to plot rough maps. It is likely that he used a form of triangulation, a technique pioneered in the Low Countries 40 years earlier, but much of the survey would have depended on survey by traverse – that is, taking lateral measurements from roads and tracks. The maps were engraved onto copper plates, ensuring that multiple copies could be printed. Over the years each plate was repeatedly revised to include new information and Saxton’s maps were still being sold as late as 1770, admittedly by then for their antiquarian interest. His Hertfordshire map, surveyed in 1577, measures 19.1 by 15.1 inches, and was drawn at a scale of one mile to 0.46 inches. It was engraved in London but it is unclear whether the engraver, Nicholas Reynolds, was English or whether, as with other engravers of Saxton’s maps, he was a Flemish Protestant refugee: at the time the Low Countries were the home of the finest engravers and cartographers. Saxton’s map of Hertfordshire is only one of five county maps to show the boundaries of hundreds – the ancient administrative subdivisions of the county – as well as the boundaries of the principal deer parks, represented by a circuit of paling.¹³ Cardinal points are indicated but somewhat surprisingly the maps do not include a key, display the coordinates of latitude or longitude, or depict the principal roads – all features that were standard on European maps of the period. Saxton was given sole rights to sell his maps for ten years (at four pence a sheet, before they were bound into an atlas in 1579), as well as a 21-year lease of land in Grigston Manor near Saxmundham in Suffolk, as payment ‘for certain good causes, grand charges and expenses lately had, and sustained, in the survey of divers parts of England.’¹⁴

FIGURE 2. Christopher Saxton’s map of Hertfordshire, published in his Atlas of England and Wales in 1579.

The next map of the county to appear was that produced by John Norden (c.1547–1625), the renowned English cartographer and antiquary. He planned to publish his Speculum Britanniae or ‘Mirror of Britain’ as a series of pocketsized county maps with an accompanying county history, but only Middlesex (1593), Surrey (1594), Hampshire, Sussex (both 1595) and Hertfordshire (1598) were produced during his lifetime. Essex, Northamptonshire and Cornwall were published at a later date and there may well have been maps of other counties which have not survived. He was very dependent on the support of Lord Burghley, whose death in 1598 brought many of his plans to an end: the copy of the Middlesex map in the British Library has corrections made in Burghley’s own hand. The Hertfordshire map (Figure 3) measures 9.2 by 7.4 inches and is drawn at a scale of one mile: 0.21 inches. Although it is thus smaller than that produced by Saxton, it depicts more villages and more parks, has a map key, includes roads and shows the sites of three important battles (those of St Albans, 1455 and 1461, and High Barnet, 1471) as well as the house of Norden’s patron and sponsor, Thyobald or Theobalds near Cheshunt.¹⁵

FIGURE 3. John Norden’s map of Hertfordshire, published in 1598.

The third in the sequence of Hertfordshire maps is that produced in 1602 by William Smith (1550–1618), which measures 18.7 inches by 14.9, and which has a scale of 1 mile:0.42 inches. Smith made only twelve county maps and of these only four, including that of Hertfordshire, now in the British Library, survive in their original manuscript form, drawn by Smith himself. The Hertfordshire map (Figure 4) was engraved by Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam. Little is known of Smith apart from the fact that he worked for four or five years in Nuremberg, then at the centre of the cartographic world. Most of his maps are based on those produced by Saxton, although the Hertfordshire ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The County Maps
• Chapter 2: Dury and Andrews’ Map of Hertfordshire
• Chapter 3: The Map Redrawn
• Chapter 4: Hertfordshire in Context
• Chapter 5: Fields, Woods and Commons
• Chapter 6: Village, Farm and Hamlet
• Chapter 7: Social Geography: Names on the map
• Chapter 8: Mansions, Parks and Gardens
• Chapter 9: Towns and Industry
• Chapter 10: End Note
• Bibliography
• Introduction to the DVD and explanatory notes
• Maps 1–23
• Written reports based on Dury and Andrews’ geo-rectified map
• Personal names on Dury and Andrews’ map with properties in alphabetical order
• Places used for geo-referencing
• Appendix 1: County maps that won awards from the Royal Society of Arts
• Appendix 2: County maps that have been analysed in any detail
• Appendix 3: George III and cartography