ABSTRACT
In the later chapters of this book it will be possible to compare Elizabethan town-and village-plans with the modern appearance of the same places and to learn the alphabet of topographical history in the normal way. But there are features on the English landscap~ which are older than any map, and in some cases older than any
document. Among these are the boundaries of parishes and townships. It was only in the sixteenth century that the art of the surveyor encompassed large-scale plans with the parish boundaries accurately measured, 2 but earlier generations had been forced to adopt more crude methods of recording. In the Psalter of Kirkstead Abbey there is a primitive plan of the boundaries between cow-pastures in the Lincolnshire Fens. The plan was entered in the Psalter about 1300 but may have been first drawn about 1150. The bounds of Sherwood Forest were shown on a crude plan drawn about 1376. In the cartulary of the Northamptonshire Priory of Fineshead, written c. 1300, the scribe attempted to show the ownership of meadowland by a sketch which is half diagram, half plan. A monk of Chertsey Abbey made a plan of its demesnes (c. 1432). The bounds of the Isle of Thanet are shown on a plan made about 1414. The technique of these plans is ofthe roughest, and the plan ofElford made in 1508 (fig. 21), is very little better. The contrast with the plans made by the Elizabethan surveyors (e.g. Plates 2, 3, 5, 6) is striking.3
