ABSTRACT
In 1960, the author completed a doctoral thesis on the medieval history of Cuxham in Oxfordshire, a village with peculiarly good manorial records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There are as many problems in using documentary sources for the history of landscape as in drawing on them for any other sort of information. Different colour washes distinguish the lands of each manor and a great deal of other detail is drawn in, including many field boundaries. In the early nineteenth century Thomas Hornor, an estate surveyor and mapmaker, tried to get over this difficulty by what he called ‘panoramic chotometry’. Some features of course were already old in 1901: Durham Castle assumed its present form in the early nineteeth century, the enclosed fields beyond the town are older, Durham Cathedral is older still, yet not as old as the line of hills that closes the horizon.
