INTRODUCTION 1 5 



it is different. These picture exactly the condition of township 

 fields at the time when the rating was made; but, unfortunately 

 for the subject in hand, that time is usually so late that the old 

 field system of the township had already been much trans- 

 formed. The maps are likely to show considerable arable en- 

 closed and novel field systems in use. Had the tithe maps been 

 made in the middle of the eighteenth century, they would have 

 been a boon to the student; dating as they do from the middle 

 of the nineteenth, they are of only occasional assistance. 



A third class of documents, most valuable of all for the pur- 

 poses of this study, are the manorial surveys (supervisus) and 

 field-books^ of Tudor and early Stuart days.^ Their complete- 

 ness and detail, so far as field conditions are concerned, render 

 them a desirable starting-point for any excursus into earlier 

 or later agrarian history. To interpret the more fragmentary 

 material of an earlier time they can be used with particular 

 advantage. 



A word should be added regarding township maps other than 

 tithe maps. The earliest of them date from the late sixteenth 

 century and for graphic illustration surpass the surveys. When, 

 however, a township comprised two or more manors, as was usu- 

 ally the case in the southeast, the map often worked out detailed 

 areas for only one manor, merely sketching in the remainder of 

 the township. Such maps are properly akin to terriers rather 

 than to surveys. The rarer ones of the true survey type, giving 

 areas of all strips and plats, were probably made to accompany 

 field-books, as was the excellent one drafted for Sir Edward Coke 

 in 1601.^ 



^ Often calling themselves terriers, or draggae. 



2 Documents of this sort were first described by W. J. Corbett (" Elizabethan 

 Village Surveys," Royal Hist. Soc, Trans., new series, 1897, xi. 67-87), most of those 

 cited relating to Norfolk. Recently there has been printed for the Roxburghe 

 Club an excellent series of Wiltshire surveys, entitled Survey of the Lands of William, 

 First Earl of Pembroke, ed. C. R. Straton, 2 vols., Oxford, 1909. These and 

 others like them have been successfully utilized for writing the social history of 

 the sixteenth century by R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth 

 Century, London, 191 2. 



' The Weasenham field-book of 42 Elizabeth, with two maps, preserved in the 

 Holkham MSS. 



