Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 265

Why would anyone who doesn’t live in that county want to read a whole book about a county map? The answer is that the authors of this book have provided a template for all future studies of maps as documents, rather than just as ‘pretty pictures’. Maps can be, and have been, looked at as works of art, as moments in cartographic history, or as sources for landscape history. This book starts by looking at the Hertfordshire map qua map and in its context – but then goes on to show how, by digitization and geo-rectification, it can become a fundamental source for understanding the settlement, agricultural and social history of this county. Beautifully produced and extensively illustrated, the book also includes a DVD with a larger-than-life scan of the map broken into 36 separate images, plus the digitally redrawn map, with accompanying maps of the underlying relief, geology and soils of the county, and separate maps showing the wastes, woodlands, arable, pasture, churches, roads, mills and other features.

The authors are under no illusions about the quality of this map. Made by two London-based cartographers of Huguenot extraction, and influenced by the work of Dury’s father-in-law, the prolific map publisher Jean Rocque, also a Huguenot, in many ways the map harks back rather than looks forward to the new age of map-making. It was published in 1766, as the first epoch of county map-making based upon regurgitating the works of Christopher Saxton and his contemporaries was giving way to the new era of Society of Arts influenced, large-scale, mathematically accurate, functional maps. In 1759 the Society had issued an advertisement offering cash prizes for county maps at the one-inch scale or better, based upon trigonometrical surveys, using theodolite and perambulator; and in 1765 had awarded its first such prize for Donn’s map of Devon. Dury and Andrews never applied for a prize, and probably would not have been awarded one had they done so. Although published at a scale of 1 mile to 1.95 inches, their map tells us nothing about where the map-makers laid out their baseline, nor where their stations were located, which perhaps gives rise to some suspicion as to their methods. Unusually, too, Dury and Andrews appear to have taken Hertford Castle as their prime meridian, rather than St Paul’s, London, or even Greenwich Observatory, which was becoming the norm at this date. Moreover, they appear in many cases to have filled in the topographical details by eye, or even by imagination, with the field boundaries in particular showing little relationship to reality. On the other hand, they took great care with their cartouche, wherein their ‘target market’ of a gentleman, standing with his gun dog before a classical country house, is illustrated in a rococo style influenced by Rocque. By this date, this was beginning to look a bit old-hat, although it no doubt still appealed to the 169 noblemen and gentry whose names appear upon the map alongside their residences.

Nevertheless, as the authors move from a discussion of the map itself to the next stage of digitizing and geo-referencing in order to make it available for the analyses to come, the usefulness of the map for today’s historian become clear, for all its shortcomings. Using Adobe Photoshop for the digitization, each feature – boundaries, roads, windmills, parks and the like – was drawn in by hand as a separate layer in Photoshop. The map was then ‘warped’ to fit some 113 control points taken from the British National Grid, using mapping software ArcGIS, after which new layers were added from modern maps showing the underlying relief, geology and soils.

The final section of the book then uses this geo-rectified map to discuss the detailed landscape, settlement, social, agricultural and industrial character of the county in the eighteenth century, and from that point goes back in time to consider developing patterns. As just one example, the authors look at the 44 places named on the map as containing the place-name element ‘bury’, showing how these places emerged in the mid-late Saxon period on the light, free-draining soils of the county, many of them going on to give their name to their parishes.

There are detailed endnotes to each chapter and an extensive bibliography which perhaps not surprisingly lists some fourteen references by J. B. (Brian) Harley, the doyen of cartographic historians and perhaps the first to study the corpus of eighteenth-century county maps. Unfortunately, his untimely death in 1991 only just post-dated the launch of the first edition of Adobe Photoshop (1988), so he never got to digitize or geo-reference his maps. However, he would have loved this book, which can be commended to anyone who wants to know how to use old maps to their fullest extent as key – albeit often overlooked – historical documents.