Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 135

This book fits perfectly with The Chetham Society’s aims to publish the ‘remains historical and literary connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester’. Shannon acknowledges that Kuerden ‘played an interesting, if perhaps marginal, role’, but historians of Lancashire will find this an illuminating tour through his notes and papers.

The structure of the book carefully organizes Kuerden’s jumbled materials into nine thematic chapters – no mean feat – but the sheer volume of his catalogue makes it a dense read. There are 18 small, black and white figures which serve as a whet to the appetite. The book begins with a very thorough introduction discussing the intellectual milieu of the time, setting Kuerden at the edge of, but never quite part of, noted circles of antiquarian studies, local history, and topographical practice.

The first chapter discusses Kuerden’s bold, but ultimately fruitless, proposal to create an all-encompassing five-volume history of Lancashire, usefully transcribed in full as Appendix 1. Chapter 2 is a biographical account, rich in detail regarding some areas – such as how Richard Jackson came to be known as Richard Kuerden – but there is little basic personal detail such as date of birth. This is no fault of the author; all that is known of Kuerden derives from an autobiographical account, probably intended to accompany his intended History of Lancashire. Kuerden’s statement that he was ‘interested in mathematics from childhood’ crops up several times throughout the book. Kuerden’s correspondence with William Dugdale proves an ongoing connection with the better-known antiquary, but the letters ‘throw little new light onto his biography’ (p. 47). We see how Kuerden’s increasing devotion to his antiquarian work had a detrimental effect on his medical career, a mismatch recognized even by his contemporaries (p. 74). Thus, Chapter 3 provides an illuminating – if alarming – account of medical training and practice at the time. Kuerden’s flirtation with Catholicism is the subject of chapter 4, although no definitive conclusions can be drawn from the available evidence; this is perhaps as much a reflection of the limitations of being a professing Catholic at the time Kuerden was working.

The five chapters of the second half of the book feel more substantive, being a thorough analysis of the contents of Kuerden’s extant papers. As such, it will be an invaluable source for those interested in the history of Lancashire, signposting the contents and coverage of his notes. This is given further weight by the inclusion of a second Appendix giving a description and discussion of the contents of each surviving manuscript folio. Kuerden had a voracious appetite for the written text, amassing a huge collection of papers and notes copied from – and sometimes onto – original documents. Preston Corporation were still trying to wrest their papers back from Kuerden decades after he had ‘borrowed’ them (p. 121). Kuerden, Shannon tells us, had ‘substantial, albeit unfulfilled, ambitions as an author’ (p. 124), and this amassed material was arranged into several unfinished drafts, none of which made it to publication during Kuerden’s lifetime.

Shannon’s chapters on Kuerden as map-maker and the Towneley maps (Chapters 7 and 8) are perhaps the strongest; whilst his discussion of whether the maps were made by or with Kuerden’s involvement is inconclusive, what is not in doubt is the huge value of the Towneley maps. As Shannon states on p. 245, ‘the town plans, road strip maps, and the Cartmel boundary survey, individually and collectively, not only throw considerable light on the methodologies and techniques of the seventeenth century surveyor but … add considerably to our knowledge of the landscape and townscapes of Lancashire in the late seventeenth century’. Three further appendices give the reader a partial transcription, calendar and notes relating to the Description of Leyland Hundred, the Towneley Maps, and the War Office Accommodation Returns of 1686, further enriching this volume.

Shannon gives us a window into the process of mapping, the specialist paper (including a gridded paper of Kuerden’s own invention), tools and methodology of the surveyor, and an analysis of annotations and calculations on the map paper itself to reconstruct the process in real time. The note on Statute and Customary Measurements forming part of the front matter of the book is a very useful adjunct, explaining some of the challenges of interpreting mapping attempts given the range of lengths in use. As an example, a perch could be anywhere from 5 to 8½ yards in length, varying even between north and south Lancashire, despite attempts of Charles I to introduce a standard yard.

Whilst Kuerden’s work was never brought to completion during his lifetime, and ‘much of his work on medieval texts has been superseded’ (p. 182), his surviving papers are useful to us now in providing insight into Kuerden’s Lancashire in the seventeenth century, his working practices, and some of the social and scholarly reverberations of the political and religious upheaval of the time. Shannon’s thorough and helpful descriptions of the archive are perhaps most useful in the way they shed light on the life and afterlife of antiquarian and miscellaneous papers; the initial collection, then dispersal, loss, acquisition, rebinding, and annotations made over subsequent centuries.

Shannon successfully achieves his intention to restore Richard Kuerden to Lancashire’s historiography, although Kuerden comes across more akin to a disorganized uncle than ‘Father of Lancashire History’ (p. 240) – particularly given his collaborator, Christopher Towneley, started twenty years earlier. Kuerden’s materials do indeed reveal to us ‘some aspects of seventeenth-century Lancashire which are perhaps available to us from no other source’ (p. 18). But, whatever the authorship of the Towneley maps, they are the jewel at the centre of this treasure trove of papers, and I found myself agreeing with Shannon’s assertion that ‘these maps today have more value than the 11 manuscript volumes put together … [throwing] a unique light upon seventeenth-century Lancashire, unavailable from any other sources’ (p. 182).