Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 330

John Norden’s Surveyor’s Dialogue, published in 1607, 1610 and 1618, is widely recognized as one of the most articulate reflections on agrarian practices and changes in early seventeenth-century England. Surveyors, who were increasingly employed to review manorial records, advise on estate management and improvement, and in some cases to map estates, assumed a role at the centre of debates about agrarian structures and values. Norden’s volume, in this context, was one of many surveying manuals to be published, but arguably the most influential of all. Its author was also one of the most prominent surveyors and cartographers of his generation, working extensively on state projects, such as the Jacobean surveys of forests, as well as surveys of private estates. Moreover, as this timely modern edition demonstrates, The Surveyor’s Dialogue has since assumed a kind of canonical status, and has been quoted widely in a range of recent work, across disciplines ranging from economic history to Renaissance literary studies. And yet, as Mark Netzloff quite rightly argues in his introduction, it has too rarely had the sort of attention, as a full and coherent work, that it deserves.

Netzloff is determined to correct this situation. He looks carefully, for instance, at parts of the book concerned with agricultural improvement and the sale of land, as well as some of the better-known discussions of the role of the surveyor and the social structure of the estate. He is astute on the peripatetic expertise of the surveyor, seeking at once to encode common standards across the country and to spread innovation from one region to another. As Netzloff writes, from this position the surveyor ‘begins to refer to the customs of his “country” as customs – as local, subjective, and open to reform and improvement’ (p. xxxii). Yet this remains a studied, measured argument for reform, and Netzloff reflects thoughtfully on this. In particular, he argues that Norden wrote the book at the same time as the Midlands Revolt, and indeed ‘deliberately sets his dialogues at exactly the same time’ as the uprising, on an estate that remains ‘undisturbed by the most tumultuous events in agrarian England during the Jacobean period’ (p. xxxv). It is not easy to base much of an argument on the lack of reference to an event, and Netzloff himself is not entirely clear what to make of this, but he is surely right to note the text’s commitment to an ideal of economic reform without social destabilization. Others at this time were developing radical arguments in favour of enclosure; Norden notably skirts around this most controversial of rural issues.

For all its strengths, however, the introduction is disappointingly short, at thirty pages, and in some respects somewhat sketchy. On textual matters, in particular, it is a little weak. There are a couple of interesting observations about changes to the text between the 1607 and 1618 editions, including Norden’s recognition of deforestation, an issue that had absorbed much of his time in the employment of the state, but no substantial analysis of the text’s development. Moreover, apart from a passing reference to editions of the book in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is no discussion of readership and influence. More might also have been said about the author himself, and his relationship with the book’s powerful dedicatee, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury.

Given the availability of Early English Books Online, the value of a new edition of an early modern text must always be an open question. This volume, though, justifies the effort. The decision to modernize spelling will not please all readers, but makes sense for a publication of this kind. The annotations are helpful, Norden’s many marginal notes are preserved as footnotes, and text added for the 1618 edition is indicated in square brackets, or recorded in textual notes, to allow readers to analyse aspects of the book’s development that may interest them. The index is slight, especially on the text itself as opposed to the introduction, but may be sufficient for navigation. While some researchers may continue to use the original versions, there is much here to make the text more accessible, and some genuine reasons to cause those familiar with it to look at it afresh.