46 



Ireland respectively, before the year 1599, distributed to the under- 

 takers, in the counties before named, 295,379 arable acres, English 

 measure, according to the statute of Winchester, as the record states, 

 at annual crown rents, amounting in gross to £2,704 14s. 9d. of late 

 Irish currency. 



Having been permitted, by the kindness of the Kev. J. H.Todd, D.D., 

 Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, the opportunity of inspecting, 

 in the library of that college, a volume of curious and interesting maps 

 and plans, ranging in date between 1557 and 1723, I found at folio 38 

 of the collection a manuscript map, entitled, " The Plot of Munster, by 

 Prancis Jobson," and dedicated to " The Honourable Lord Bourlay, Lord 

 High Treasurer of England." In a long and expressive marginal note, 

 Jobson sets out his services, stating " that he was three years in her ma- 

 jesty's service, surveying and measuring part of the lands escheated 

 to the crown in Munster;" and further, ''that Arthur Eobinson and 

 Lawson were employed on same survey." The map in question is ge- 

 nuine, and clearly a reduction by Jobson from the townland surveys, 

 made in pursuance of the pre-recited commission, as a gift likely to be 

 acceptable to Lord Burleigh. 



Erom such accumulated evidence, I concluded that there must have 

 been mapped surveys accompanying the inquisitions and books of survey; 

 and that nothing less could satisfy the exigencies of the plantation — 

 a work that was to be guided by a measure of land up to that time un- 

 known in Ireland, and by a scale of crown rent imposition of three-pence 

 per English arable acre. 



Under these circumstances, I attended at Her Majesty's State Paper 

 Office in London, early in the year 1860, and asked to be shown mapped 

 Biirveys relating to lands in Ireland referable to the reign of Queen 

 Elizabeth. This public department profess to have collected with care, 

 arranged in order of time,, and bound up in three volumes, their MS. 

 mapped surveys relating to Ireland. The first of these volumes was 

 placed before me. It contained the earliest mapped specimens, and 

 embraced the period between 1558 and 1602. I did not discover among 

 them the maps I was in search of ; but I found there a manuscript 

 map of the great and small county of Limerick of the year 1586 — the 

 very year of the survey — upon which, in a marginal note of contempo- 

 raneous handwriting, it is stated, ''that all the lands in that county 

 were accurately mapped on a scale of 1 6-J feet to the perch, agreeably to 

 the statute of "Winchester, the particulars whereof were distinguished by 

 name and colour, and were all set down on the plot." After such a re- 

 velation and complete confirmation of the views I had arrived at from the 

 records in my own official custody, I think it may fairly be concluded 

 and conceded that MS. mapped surveys were taken at same period of all 

 the Munster forfeitures adverted to; and, further, that these maps, if not 

 destroyed, are somewhere stowed away in London record repositories, 

 and that sooner or later they will see the light. Except as historical 

 curiosities, and illustrative of the progress towards perfeetion since arrived 



