Elizabethan Village Surveys

Abstract

The object of the present paper is to call attention to a class of documents which seem hitherto to have escaped much notice from economic historians, but which, it is thought, may throw light on the agrarian transitions which took place in England during the sixteenth century. The documents in question date from the reign of Elizabeth, and are termed by their compilers Libri supervisionis, or surveys. An examination of their contents shows that the name is justly applied; for they are not merely rentals or terriers, such as landowners in all ages have frequently compiled as evidence of the value or extent of their estates, but elaborate topographical descriptions, furlong by furlong, and strip by strip, of complete villages, extending sometimes in length to a hundred pages of manuscript. Herein lies their interest ; for, as the surveys are not confined to particular estates or particular manors, but make the complete circuit of the villages, giving the abuttals and compass bearings of the various parcels of land, only patience and ingenuity are required to compile a tolerably accurate map of each village as it was at the date of the surveyor's visit; and Elizabethan maps are not of such every day occurrence as to render their recovery a matter of indifference. Of course in some cases owing either to ignorance of the size and shape of the wastes, or to the complete obliteration of old landmarks by parliamentary enclosures, it may be difficult to compile a map ; but even in these cases the surveys themselves cannot fail to be illuminating, containing as they do a detailed statement of the arrangements of each village such as can nowhere else be obtained.