Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 114

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Roger Kain has been, if not the pioneer, then certainly one of the pioneers in the construction of large data sets, and the presentation of those data sets in more user-friendly forms. We need only refer to his work on the tithe files to confirm his place in the historiography of agricultural history and historical geography. In this volume he is joined by two other central figures and pioneers in their own realms, John Chapman, noted for his work on enclosure, and Richard Oliver, a man of maps and of the history of cartography and surveying. In this volume they have brought together their different talents to produce a wonderfully rich source on the enclosure maps of England and Wales from 1595 to 1918 (though we are told that the first map is for 1598 for Haselbech in Northamptonshire). Moreover, they also invite the user to consult the database they have constructed and which is available online through the History Data Service of UK Data Archive at hds.essex.ac.uk/em/index.html. This review therefore will treat the two sources separately.

The narrative in the book occupies more or less half of its pages with the remainder in the form of data appendices. This narrative is divided into three parts. The first is a relatively brief history of the enclosure movement of England and Wales from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It does not tell the reader anything new about this movement. This is not a criticism because the purpose of the book is not to offer a new interpretation or new twists to a well-known tale. Rather it is to introduce the reader to the maps that weregenerated, including insights into the surveyors and how the maps they produced changed over time. history review One distinction that is made in defining what or what not to include in the exercise undertaken is to include only formal enclosures. These are defined as those deriving either from parliamentary legislation, or from formal written agreements. Thus informal enclosures, perhaps the result of unity of possession whereby one individual in acquiring all land and common rights in a place then decided to enclose, are not included.

The second part is a county by county analysis of enclosure map characteristics including the area covered by enclosure maps (in both acres and hectares), the extent of the county and hence the density of cover of the maps, the number of maps and their chronological limits, and the average size of the maps. Thus Bedfordshire has 90 maps covering 67.8 per cent of the county from 1761 to 1890 at an average size of 2249 acres. Incidentally that is the highest proportion of enclosure map coverage of all the counties. In contrast Yorkshire North Riding has 143 maps covering 18.5 per cent of the county from 1709 to 1883 with an average size of 1758 acres, and Cheshire has as many as 75 maps but covering just 4.7 per cent of the county from 1762 to 1883 with an average size of only 405 acres. However, Cheshire is second only to neighbouring Shropshire in the proportion of maps that resulted from enclosure agreements as distinct from parliamentary intervention. The commentary which accompanies each county analysis includes details of map scales and of features such as decorative pictorial cartouches found on maps. Of great interest to most historians will be the lists of surveyors, the number of maps with which they were associated, and the areas those maps covered. Top surveyor in any single county seems to have been Robert Corby of Kirstead in Norfolk, working on 32 Norfolk enclosures amounting to 72,380 acres, followed by John Browne of Norwich, also working in Norfolk on 28 enclosures amounting to 67,843 acres, followed very closely by William Church of Abingdon inBerkshire working in Berkshire on 30 enclosures amounting to 66,169 acres.

The third part is an essay on enclosure maps. It takes the story forward by using illustrations from photographic reprints of original maps, and also from reconstructed county-based maps of the proportion of each county covered by surviving maps, distinguishing enclosure agreements from parliamentary enclosure, and distinguishing the distribution of maps constructed at different scales. This chapter also has something to say about the development of cartographic representation, not least the use of colour in maps and whether features like roads, drains and other depictions are present.

More or less half the book is an alphabetical index offirst, the surveyors of the maps and secondly, an indexof those places in England and Wales with extant enclosure maps. This is a large database of names, addresses, counties with which the surveyors were associated and the acreages of land they surveyed. Top of this hit parade isRobert Corby, already referred to above, this time forwork on 41 enclosures covering 117,964 acresin Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. It looks like an old friend of mine, William Collisson of Brackley in Northamptonshire, comes second with 82,653 acres on his ownin 17 enclosures of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, and a further 20,341 acres in collaboration with other surveyors in five enclosures in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Hertfordshire. I first drew attention to Collisson in 1977 and noted the enclave of surveyors in and around the town of Brackley, notably the Collisson and Russell families. The latter also figures prominently in this wider study.

The second or hidden half of this work is the website. The book is indexed by place name, and the website also allows a search by place name, but one very useful partof the website is that it also allows the user to put in a county name – say Buckinghamshire – and then produce an alphabetical list of all the places for that county for which there is an extant enclosure map. This information includes a unique number, a date, the typeof place involved – dominantly described as townships in the north midland and the northern counties, parishes elsewhere in England and Wales, but also including places described as hamlets, liberties, manors,and tithings, or remaining unspecified – the name of the place itself and the county in which it islocated, and a record office reference which is usually a county record office but the National Archives for those enclosures enrolled in the central records, especially those under the General Acts dating from the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, having once selected a place it is possible to delve further into the detail of the map associated with that enclosure. This is categorized under literally dozens of different headings offering sometimes the most intimate details imaginable for a map.

In summary, this is an immense catalogue of enclosure maps which should be a standard source for generations of future researchers.