Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 137

Much modern cartographic history has regarded maps as texts, subjecting them to post-modernist criticism aimed at eliciting their underlying assumptions. It is therefore in some ways a relief to find a book which focuses on methodology rather than meaning, construction rather than deconstruction. Andrews sets out to provide a comprehensive technical study of how map-makers went about their work, from earliest times up to around 1850. He describes his book as tertiary literature: but by bringing together just about every secondary source on the subject he fills a major gap. He incorporates well over a thousand end notes, which alone makes it worth buying: though it would have been even handier to have had them all in a bibliography.

One small problem is that only one of those end notes refers to an article in the long-awaited third volume of the monumental David Woodward (ed.), History of cartography (Chicago, 2007). This suggests Andrews had largely finished his work before its appearance, which is a shame, as there is much in its 2000-odd pages, particularly papers dealing with technical matters in the Renaissance period that could have added value to Andrews’ work. Thus had he read Catherine Delano-Smith’s paper there, he might have avoided the indiscriminate use of the two very different words ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’, and the propagation of what she calls enduring myths on the subject of ‘conventional signs’, there being little evidence of the standardization of map signs prior to the nineteenth century.

That said, Andrews writes fluently about everything from theoretical presumptions about the world, through sketch maps, to surveyors’ instruments and how they were used, how surveyors turned their measurements into maps, how problems of depicting height and slope, or deciding on place-names, were dealt with, what was the role of decoration, and how maps were copied and miscopied, edited and compiled. Comprehensive though this is, Andrews also sets an agenda for more research, for example into the difference between theoretical and practical mapmaking, and the difficult question of how ‘accurate’ maps were in the past. Much has been published on the advancement of tools, techniques and text-books, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: but to what extent did practical field surveyors actually work by the book? They seldom tell us, but most were probably content to use fairly rough-and-ready methods of determining direction and distance, and to fill in the gaps by field sketching. It is only in the nineteenth century, after the state gets fully involved in mapping, that ‘unchallengeable precision’ (p.34) becomes the aim. This in turn bears on the question of what Andrews calls ‘cartographic merit’ (p.469). Saxton’s counties, despite being surveyed at the rate of one every five weeks or so, are perfectly recognisable, with most places more or less where they should be, relative to each other. The same is true, to a slightly lesser extent, of Matthew Paris’s map of Britain of c.1250. But how ‘accurate’ are they, compared with the Ordnance Survey? Andrews, using Tobler’s previously little known ‘bidimensional regression’ method, puts a value of 99.3 per cent on the one and 83 per cent on the other. However, while such figures might measure accuracy in a mathematical sense, they do not seem to measure what ordinary observers mean by that term. Yet if there is a better method, Andrews is not aware of it. Clearly there is scope here for more work.

For the agricultural historian, those parts of the book which touch on estate mapping will be of greatest interest. However, there are some salutary lessons to be learned about the depiction of field boundaries on non-cadastral maps. Students looking at field patterns on military maps like William Roy’s famous map of Scotland c.1755 should know that no attempt was made there to reproduce actual field boundaries. All that the cavalryman needed was information on whether or not there were hedges in the district, not what size or shape the fields were. Similarly, the eighteenth-century commercial surveyor was not going to spend a great deal of effort mapping in detail something for customers who might be vaguely interested in knowing that they were travelling through an ‘improved’ landscape, but whose main concern was getting from A to B.

Overall, there is little doubt that Andrews largely succeeds in answering the question set him by a student many years ago: ‘How did they make maps in those days?’(p.xv). The book is well written and copiously illustrated. Andrews’s style is forthright and accessible, and he is not afraid to express an opinion, or to attempt to make understandable such arcane matters as the theory and practice of projections.