ABSTRACT
IN the previous chapter it was shown how the landowners' eagerness for large-scale plans of their properties provided a powerful
incentive for surveyors to sharpen their skills and multiply their numbers. It also appeared that many of a landowner's anxieties arose either from his fear that others might lay claim to a particular piece of land or from his desire to make claim on a piece of land hitherto possessed bysomeone else. The survey and map might equally well be weapons of defence or attack. In the Elizabethan villages surveyed for Warden Ravenden of All Souls the projected changes went no further than a continued re-shuffle of open-field strips, as the College and the other freeholders sought compact blocks of strips and to cancel out that scattering of strips throughout the open fields which medieval colonization had created.
