ABSTRACT
In the winter of 1598, Roger Harlakenden commissioned Israel Amyce, a prominent cartographer, Essex mapmaker and former surveyor to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to draw a plot of the manors of Earls Colne and Colne Priory, which Harlakenden had recently purchased. While Amyce's estate map conveyed a sense of legal ownership of the manorial holdings within the late sixteenth century to Roger Harlakenden, the circumstances surrounding the purchase of Colne Priory were murky, and contested. Amyce's survey map, completed six years after Harlakenden's purchase, and lacking a title and key, depicted none of this only hedges, ditches, trees, gates, rivers, streams and edifices in the conventional reductive symbolic fashion of late sixteenth-century cartography. In viewing Amyce's plot, Harlakenden could see the opportunities that presented themselves within his landscape. Amyce's symbols for manorial land and resources are also uniform, perhaps reflecting those elements directly under the control of the manorial lord and those that were not.
