Monthly Archives: January 2025

Good fences make good neighbours

In Robert Frost’s poem Mending wall two neighbours walk the shared boundaries of their properties, checking on the condition of the wall separating their land and making repairs where necessary. At one point the narrator teases his neighbour on the need for the wall, “My apple trees will never come across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him”. The neighbour replies, simply and memorably, “Good fences make good neighbours”.

Frost loves the phrase so much that it’s repeated again, to close the poem*, and I’m reminded of this when looking at these two estate maps, of Down Manor from 1718 and Mowden Hall, 1762, both in Essex. Both are typical examples of an estate plan, are in manuscript form and show the holdings and field names of each estate (with sizes in acres, roods and perches). The connection with Frost comes with both showing boundaries in two different colours, according to ownership and according to responsibility of maintenance, to mark the outer boundaries of each estate. Any boundary dispute in the future would be easily settled with reference to the map. The importance of boundary fences are obvious, the need to keep animals out of certain fields and in others, as a way of separating good land from not so good and as a way of marking the limit of your land from your neighbour. The Down Manor map nicely calls the fencing surrounding the property ‘Out fencing’.

A by-product of this in both maps is that those neighbours surrounding both Down Manor and Mowden Hall are named, so for instance we can see that the wonderfully named Mr Grump owed land to the south-east of Mowden Hall and the equally well-named Thomas Clutterbuck owed land just north of Down Hall, giving us a connection with those alive at the time the map was made.

Estate maps show the land owned by the local manor or estate, and are almost always privately commissioned works, which often lead to beautiful one-off maps such as the Down Manor map. These maps are historically important as they give a pre-enclosure view of the landscape and a record of who farmed this landscape. One of the most famous of all the estate maps is held in the Bodleian, of Laxton in Nottinghamshire, from 1635. We tell its story here and we’ve blogged previously about estate maps here, here, and here.

Most of the field names are explanatory, sometimes just size or use (Gravel Pit Field, Calves Pasture and so on) but some are more interesting. Great and Little Hungerdown in the Mowden map would suggest a poor field for growing crops on and needing much manure and feeding to make viable, while Bury Mead is a field near a moat or fortified building and Rushey pasture would be a poorly drained field, not much good for growing crops but ok for growing rushes, useful in chair making and hatching.

The Mowden map was first surveyed in 1723 by Daniel Halls, who is described in a dictionary of surveyors at the Bodleian as a Philomath in the year he surveyed the map. A Philomath is someone who loves learning. Halls’ map was then copied, the term used on the map is ‘diminish’d’, by Edward John Eyre in 1762. The owner of Mowden Hall, Brabezon Aylmer, also owed the paper mill near but outside his main land-holding. We can tell he owns the mill because the land included with the mill is delineated by the yellow line that the legend tells us ‘that the fence in the outward bounds of this map where it belongs to this estate is coloured with yellow…’.

A true map of the lands belonging to Mowden Hall together with a paper mill as they are situate lying and being in the several parishes of Ulting, Hatfield, Boreham & Little Baddow, Essex, belonging to Brabzon Aylmer, esq…1762. MS C17:28 (40)

Description of the Manor of Down Hall, situate and lying in the Parish of Rayleigh in the County of Essex. Containing altogether 170 acres, 1 rood and 2 perches being parcel of the possession of Edw. Downs Esq. and herein particularly measured in the year of our Lord 1718 by Will. Cole. 1718. MS C17:28 (88)

*Frost’s poem can be read here, it’s worth it Mending Wall | The Poetry Foundation

The same, but different

The Bodleian Library’s catalogues have a complicated history. New acquisitions are of course catalogued online and appear straight away on the online catalogue, SOLO. However, the collections have been acquired over the centuries and earlier records were made on index cards, in printed volumes and even as handwritten records. Over the years, these earlier records have been converted into online records, but the information is not always as comprehensive as it would be if we acquired the item now and catalogued it to modern standards.

This is what library catalogues looked like in the old days, kids

So when we occasionally discover that we have two duplicate records for the same thing, and that it’s been in our collections for over 200 years, this isn’t particularly surprising and can usually be tidied up quickly. A recent case proved more intriguing. We appeared to have 2 separate records for an eighteenth-century map of London. There was one record for 3 copies of the map, and another for a single copy – surely a mistake? The map is a reproduction of one made by John Leake in 1667 after the Great Fire of London. (The need for detailed surveys for reconstruction after the fire led to the making of many maps, and indeed started the map-making career of the famous John Ogilby, who made and published a detailed survey with his step-grandson William Morgan). Leake’s map was reproduced over 50 years later by the engraver George Vertue, reduced in size and with embellishments such as views of notable buildings and streets before the fire.

The red line shows the extent of the area damaged by the Great Fire

A dotted line, highlighted in red, shows the extent of the area affected, and a cartouche carries a Latin inscription by George Vertue explaining that the map is a memento of London before the fire, and is dedicated to the Society of Antiquaries of London (who published this version of the map in 1723).

The cartouche represents a ruined fragment of wall

So far this is an interesting map, but there is an associated mystery, for the two versions of it turn out to be not quite the same. In one (presumably earlier) the lower border of the map runs through the River Thames, a little way from the shore. The names of docks, wharves and so on extend into the river. The plate mark (where the edge of the copper printing plate pressed into the paper) can be seen about 0.5 cm below the edge of the map border.

The original version of the map

The second copy is different. Although the map is almost identical, and certainly printed from the same plate, it appears that the plate has been trimmed. The lower border of the map has moved up a little and some of the writing has had to be shifted, while the words ‘The River Thames’ overlap the map border. A similar compression has happened at the top of the map. The plate mark is now only just outside the border of the map.

The later version in which the map’s lower border has been moved up

This is extremely unusual. It was common for map plates to be reused and for changes to be made to them; the map might be updated with new information, or the plate sold and the new publisher’s details added, for example. But we have rarely, if ever, seen a case where the plate was cut down to a smaller size. It is uncertain why this was done, but it’s notable that 2 of our 3 copies of the ‘reduced’ version of the map are printed on paper only just large enough to accommodate the map image. It may be that this was a way to produce the map on slightly smaller sheets, either to reduce costs or for ease of binding with other similar items. This was not a case where we needed to de-duplicate the catalogue records, but rather to retain both and explain their complex relationship in more detail.

An exact surveigh of the streets, lanes, and churches comprehendd. within the ruins of the City of London … / George Vertue [London]: [Society of Antiquaries], [1723]. Gough Maps London 8; Gough Maps London 9 & 10; Map Res. 127

Maps on the radio

Two members of the Map Room team have recently been featured on WRFM, a local radio station based in West Oxfordshire. Science on the Radio is a weekly show, interviewing local experts across a range of fields connected with the sciences, presented by Nina Morgan and Grant Grindley. Broadcast every weekend, the show is also available online as an on-demand podcast.

‘Fascinating Maps‘ is a recent episode featuring Nick Millea, in which he talks about the 3D facsimile of the 15th century Gough Map of Great Britain (MS Gough Gen. Top. 16), recently produced by the Factum Foundation in Madrid. Nick explains that recent high resolution 3D recording of the map has revealed pinholes invisible to the naked eye, indicating that the map is a copy of an earlier map which does not survive. The 3D scanning unusually included the reverse of the map too, allowing confirmation that the pinholes only appear on the front of the map. Identical in size to the original, the facsimile has already proved useful for teaching and displays.

The Gough Map facsimile on display with other collections at a 'show and tell' event at the Weston Library.
The Gough Map facsimile on display with other collections at a ‘show and tell’ event at the Weston Library.

In ‘Digital Mapping‘, Martin Davis explains how some of our maps are being made available online via Digital Bodleian, and also why the digital maps we use every day pose new challenges for the library. While spatial analysis is something that we tend to associate with digital technology, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Martin explains that the origins of these techniques predate digital technology altogether; for example in the work of the 19th century epidemiologist John Snow on the spread of cholera.

Science on the Radio is broadcast on Saturdays at 10am and Sundays at 6pm, and available any time via wrfm.co.uk.