 Hi! Wel! Welcom to really house. Many of you have been here all morning. My name is Jonathan Healy. I'm a lecturer here in English local history, local and social history. One of the things I'm going to quickly run through, well, give you a chance to have a quick look at, I suppose, is some of the courses we do here. But don't worry, I'm not going to do the hard sell here. If you do want to know about all the wonderful courses that we do, including the two that I direct, which are the top two, then do come along and grab me at the end. The other little piece of kind of cheeky advertising I'd like to do is that you'll have noticed that there's a lot of copies of something called local population studies kicking about. And that's because this journal is moving to really house. It's going to be situated here from November. It's an absolutely wonderful journal. I say this because I'm the editor. And it is particularly aimed at developing local studies for a market which is not necessarily entirely comprised of professional academics. So, just like really house, it kind of sits at that cusp between interested non-professional historians and the kind of hardcore professional historians. So, there are articles in there by interested amateurs, by local historians, and by some of the leading names in the field. There's also an article by me in one of them. So, if you want to see the kind of stuff that I do, then pick up the orange one. And there's copies on your way out on the stage. So, do grab as many as you want. If you try and sell them on eBay, you probably won't get a lot for them. But you're welcome to try. Now anyway, that's enough of the commercials. And I want to start with a little bit of a confession. And the confession is that when I was a young whippersnapper, I was a bit of a nerd. I mean, I wasn't a total nerd. I had a bike. I couldn't really ride it. But I had one. I like football. I'd only watched about 95% of Star Trek the next generation. So, I think there was still geek potential, which I wasn't quite utilizing. But one of the biggest geeky pleasures that I had when I was little was actually maps. So, while all my classmates were playing with their transformers on Super Mario Brothers, I was at home reading alternate survey maps. And if I wasn't reading them, I was drawing my own ones. I even created my own island so I could draw maps of it. I was that much of a nerd. But I think this level of maps has really come forward with me into my interest in social history, in local history. And I think what I'd like to try and convey to you today is something of my enthusiasm, not just for maps, but for what they can tell us about our historic past and about our local history. So there's lots that I won't talk about today. And I've sort of framed this as a kind of personal history of England. The maps that I am going to talk you through all have some position in my life. So it's a very personal thing. But I'm hoping that what I can convey to you is that these maps are not just interesting to me on a personal level, but they can also tell us something about the history of England. And hopefully kind of convey some of that excitement that I get from looking at a map historically. So to start, my first map is one that you all know very well. In fact, I have it here. I have a copy. It's an alternate survey, one to 25,000 scale. And to me, this is still a two and a half inch map because that's how long a Mario is on it. So I'm a bit traditional like this. And these are by far my favourites of all the alternate survey maps because they're easy to use, they're portable. And you can see the field boundaries. Field boundaries are really, really important for historians. And the one I have here is actually possibly one that some of you will have because it's quite a celebrity in the world of alternate survey maps. It's the Lake District Southeast Sheet. It covers Windermere, Grasmere, Ambleside, some of the big hills. You'd use this if you went up Helm Crag or Loughrig Fells. You did the Fairfield Horseshoe, sort of classic Central Lake District Walk. This is the map you'd have. And the reason I think I have such a fondness for this one is partly that when I was growing up I grew up in North Lancashire. This was the area of the lakes that I knew best. And this was carried on into my student days too. My first academic publication, not actually in local population studies, was on Grasmere, which is on this map. Reconstructing the history of land holding in that particular parish. And I used this map and a lot of good old fashioned legwork to identify all the old farms in the village, many of which are still surviving today. But actually it's not Grasmere I'll talk about today. It's somewhere a little bit further south. It's a place called Hawthead. Now I hope this has come out all right. You can't see that particularly brilliantly. But don't worry, I'll talk you through it and we'll have a look at a slightly closer version in a second. And the other thing to say is that all the power point of this is going online. So if there's one bit that you really want to come back to and say, oh that sounded interesting but I couldn't really see it because it was dead tiny, then you can have a look online at your leisure. Now Hawthead, let's have a little bit closer look at Hawthead. So you can see it a little bit better there. Hawthead is here, as you can see, and Lake Windermere is kind of over there, Coniston that way. Hawthead again is somewhere which like Grasmere has a lot of personal relevance to me because this map, and in fact actually it was this very map, was the one that I used in my doctoral thesis and it's got pencil marks in. If you want to come to the front, I can show you my actual pencil marks. Don't worry, I'm not insisting that you do that. So it's an area which I had a very personal connection with as a doctoral student. But what I want to talk to you today about this map and what I think is so interesting is that this is the kind of ordinary, ordinary survey map that many of you will have on your shelves and yet it is teeming with history. There's some little curiosities for example. There's a place here called Hawthead Hall, I don't know if you can see it, which is strange because Hawthead never had a Lord of the Manor resident, so why is there a hall? What this is, is it's the old, it's where the monastery which used to own the land had their grain, which was where they managed their kind of large sheep and cattle farming business. And it became known over time as Hawthead Hall even though it isn't really a manorial court. There's also Hawthead Hill up here. Now, you probably can't see this very closely, but there's actually a tiny little chapel here in Hawthead Hill. And it's a little cross, so those of you who know your ordinary survey map will know that that's a chapel without a steeple or a tower. Now, it's a very strange place for a chapel, isn't it? What's it doing all the way out there? Miles, well not miles, but 1.5 miles possibly away from the main settlement up there on the hill in this tiny little village. The reason it's there is because it's a dissenting chapel that was founded in the very last days of the 17th century when there was a efflorescence of new versions of Christianity which were taking off in England. And many of these wanted to stay a nice distance away from the prying eyes of the Church of England, which of course was based right here, right in the centre of the town. So they set up their little chapel up in Hawthead Hill. The Baptists, and they're still actually active today, amazingly, they have a website and everything. You can also trace something of the old common land from this. I mean, that seems like a strange thing to suggest, but if you look at the very top, there's a place called Outgate. Now, a name like Outgate suggests very strongly that this is where the old common land started, something again you can tell from just looking at the map. Sorry, I'm putting it the wrong way. If you look at the previous map, just look a little bit closer, there's actually a place down here called Foldgate, which again is one of these places where you can sort of tell just by looking at the names, something about the history. In fact, it's actually the place names which I find most interesting here and which tell us so much about the landscape. You actually see around the village, there's a number of small hamlets, names which end in ground, so you've got Keen Ground here, Walker Ground, Roger Ground, Waterson Ground, and then you've got places like Nightfold, Sand Ground, there's another one. This is a very distinctive kind of name that you get in this part of the world, but they're a bit curious aren't they? Why are they all there? What do they all mean? Why are there so many places with these kinds of names? Roger Ground, Keen Ground, Sand Ground, Waterson Ground, Walker Ground. Now what they are is actually quite straightforward. They are settlements on the old common. They're squatter settlements, people who wanted to strike out from the main settlement and to get their own little patch of land. Amazingly though, and this is what I love so much about these places, is that their names probably preserve the names of some of the people who first set them up, some of the original squatters. These are quite probably the names of real peasants from the medieval age, which I think is amazing, that we're looking at an alternate survey map here, modern day, and we're looking at the names of insignificant, historically speaking, supposedly, insignificant guys from the medieval period. The question though is when they were made, and I think you can actually find some clues in the name here too. The names, think about the names, Walker Ground, Sand Ground. These almost certainly derive from surnames. Now, that may not seem that significant, but when we remember that the surname only developed in England in the sort of 12th and the 13th century, and in the Lake District it was a bit later, in the North we tend to do things a little bit later, like surnames, lattes, the internet. It's only in the 14th century that the surname takes off in this part of the world. The fact that these are surnames, with the possible exception of Roger Ground, which is a little bit ambiguous, suggests that they come from the 14th century. This gives us a nice clue to the date. In fact, there was evidence from nearby settlements that there was a significant expansion of population in this area in the late 14th and the 15th century, which is a little bit strange, because if you know your English history, you'll know that this is the post-Black Death period, and across England, across Southern England, the population had contracted massively. So there wasn't actually a huge amount of new settlement in most of England in the late 14th and the 15th centuries. But this area is strange, and these place names are telling us something about that strange history that you're getting here. And I think what it is is that in the 15th century, when the population of England dropped, people had a little bit more money to spend. So instead of spending all of their cash on grain, they started buying luxury products like clothes or meat. And clothes and meat, of course, came from animals, and animal conservation was a big thing in the late districts as it is today. So these areas did quite nicely out of the switch in population after the Black Death. And these small, tiny settlements with their strange names are reflecting that fact. And I think this is absolutely amazing that they're still there today. Let's just finish quickly with walker ground, which is here. The landscape of walker today is actually quite unspoil, very agricultural, but walker is strongly suggestive of an industrial history. So walker is someone who, is anyone here in the audience called walker today? No, OK, right, good, I'm not going to offend anyone. The surname walker comes from someone whose job it was to put finished cloth in a vat of urine and to walk on top of it. And this is a way of filling the cloth, so finishing it off and pushing the threads together. And this name, a medieval name, walker, is actually very strongly suggestive that this was an industrial area back in the medieval past. And then later, there's later evidence of this too, look at Tentahill up here on Hawkeshead Hill. Now a Tentah is a kind of hook, you've probably heard the phrase on Tentahooks, and this is where cloth was hung out to dry after filling. So walker would, you know, walk all over it and then it would hang it out on Tentahill. So these names are preserving a very different industrial past in Hawkeshead than the landscape that we have today, to the landscape we have today. Right, OK, so pottering around the Lake District I think was kind of one of the defining things I did as a youth. But if that was one of the major defining moments of my youth, I think one of the other really integral moments to how I grew up was when I went to Borstal. Now this was actually an experience I found hugely enjoyable, and the reason I found it so hugely enjoyable was at the time I was living in Reading. And this was a really good time for me to get out of Reading. I'm talking of course about the village of Borstal, don't worry, which is in Buckinghamshire. Some of you know it, some of you know it. And I remember going there on a field trip as part of my master's degree from Reading in rural history. It was one of the only times that I actually got out of the city, which is ironic given what my degree was in. Now Borstal is not a very well-known village. In fact, its namesake, which is not spelt the same near Rochester, is rather more famous. It's probably the world's most famous Borstal in fact. But Borstal Bucks does actually have its own claim to fame. And you're about to see it, if I can point the thing the right way. Here we go, this is it. Now this is Borstal in 1444. This is the first or the earliest surviving map of an English village. It's from the early 15th century and it is unique in terms of survival. It was part of a set of documents made to record the possessions of a guy called Edmund Reed, who held the manor at the time. But it's not entirely clear why it was made at the time. But it's, I think, surely indicative of in the 15th century, a new attitude to the landscape. This is seeing the landscape in a slightly more possessive way than had been the case before. It's a reflection, I suppose, of sort of late medieval capitalism. It's another example of a nucleated medieval village, too, if you can see the village there, clustered around the church and the manor house, that's the manor house there. And you can see a really nice example of a large medieval open field, which is divided into strips as we'd expect. The names of the fields are quite interesting. There's a frith field here, and frith means wooded area. So this is a landscape which has been cleared from woodlands, which you can, again, learn from the place names. As local historians, there's a tantalising little clue on the map to attitudes to the past amongst the social elite, as well. Now, you can't see this that well here. But what this is, it's a kneeling man presenting a boar's head. The boar's head is there, which is bleeding profusely to a guy which looks very much like a king, and that's there. And this is Nigel or Neil the Forrester, who is presenting the head of a particularly tricky boar to Edward the Confessor. Now, tradition had it that the manor of boar stools created when Nigel managed to get rid of this really, really annoying boar and present its head to the king. And the king was so grateful that he gave the manor to Nigel. And Edmund Reid, who had the map created, was one of Nigel's descendants. So he is staking acclaim with this to the local history of the area. It's a possessive document. Now, the field which was originally given was somewhere called Deahide. And there is, in fact, a field on this map called Deahide. It is down here. That sort of funny-shaped field there is Deahide. So that is theoretically the old centre of the manor, which goes back to the time of Edmund the Confessor. Now, the name of Deahide has gone, but let's see if we can find out where it might be. So let's have a look at the modern map of boar stools. Spot the difference here. The major difference here, and this tricked the person who wrote the Victoria County history for Buckinghamshire, is that on the ordnance survey map, the motor tower is on the left and the church is on the right. So they're both separate. And on here, the motor tower is on the right and the church is on the left. Now, the Victoria County history, written in the early 20th century, missed this out. And so they were talking about the Deahide, which of course is here, and they were saying it was in the southeast of the parish. Now, what's happened? What's happened? Well, with the aid of PowerPoint, I'm going to show you what's happened. Now, watch, I'm really pleased with this. Oh, look at that! In the 15th century, they didn't quite have the same assumption that north would be at the top of the map and south would be at the bottom. So the map is actually upside down, depending on your perspective, that you've gone since it, are upside down. So, let's see if we can find Deahide. Now, the... Well, actually, before that, let's just have a look at something which I think is rather nice on this. Look at the way the road curves here. You see that? Now, that curves around the site of a medieval village. I don't know if you can see that, on marks on the map, there is the old remains of a medieval village, which is now gone, it was pulled down in the Civil War. Now, if we look at the 50th century map, we can see if this area here, a lot of the villages is in this curvy bit. Now, I am 99% certain that the reason that this unclassified road in the modern age does this kind of weird curve is because it's following that line there. It's following the old line of a long-lost medieval village. Now, what of Deahide though? It's quite an odd shape, as you can see. So, I sort of wondered whether it might be somewhere on the modern map. Now, there's a little sort of sticky-outy bit here. So, I sort of thought that that might be it. But that would actually put most of it in Oxfordshire rather than Buckinghamshire, which is the wrong county. As far as I know, the boundary of the county hasn't changed. In fact, if you see a county boundary and if you see a field boundary following a county boundary, that's quite a good indication that it's a very old field boundary. But the new enclosures out of forests tended to be roughly kind of circular in shape. And this is often quite a good clue to whether the oldest parts of the landscape are. And as you can see, there's a big circular bit here and there's a big circular bit there. And if you look here, there's somewhere called Manifam, which would seem to me to be preserving a memory of an old manorial estate, the centre of an old manorial estate. So, I'm not entirely sure, but I am pretty certain that in one of these sort of strange curvy boundaries, there is the ghost of the original enclosure in Borstal. If anyone wants to go out and do some archaeology, it's just up the road, have a look. That's the M40 there, you can see. Let's leave Borstal. I've had a bit of fun in Borstal, but I think we'll move on. And let's jump forward 150 years. Maps, this is a map from 1600 or 1610. And maps, as you can see by this point, have gone through a paradigm shift. They're roughly to scale. They're detailed. They're very beautiful. This is the kind of thing which you would put up on your wall. And many of you will know this kind of map because there are just so many of them around today. You can pick them up on eBay for a few hundred quid. They're a classic thing that you see in a sort of country pub, aren't they? And this is a map by John Speed, who is, of course, our sort of most famous map maker. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare. He's obviously not as well-known as old William is, but he's very much the kind of Shakespeare of English cartography, if you want a sort of cheesy tie-in. It's beautiful. It's skilled. It was part of the first atlas of Britain. There's some lovely continuity in subject matter, though. We still see the evidence of the older medieval landscape, such as the great mosses. This is Lancashire, by the way, in case you haven't worked that out. The old medieval mosses and some of the deer parks, these little blobs, all circular, of course. So there's a bit of continuity with the old medieval landscape. But I think what's most striking about this kind of map is that in cartographical terms, it's very modern. You know, it's to scale. It's a pretty accurate representation of the real geography as Lancashire, and that's true of all of John Speed's maps. But it's describing a landscape which is very pre-modern. So it's a modern map describing a very old landscape. It's, as I say, remnants of the medieval hunting landscape. Look at the way that rivers dominate it, not roads. That's because most travel in this period was by river. The roads weren't very good. There's some lovely old-fashioned spelling as well, and do have a look at this when you go away and check this out on the internet. There's Furnace Fowls, which is Furnace Fowls. Stockford is Stockport. And Lerpool, and I don't guess where that is. There's Liverpool on the River Marsea. So it's something which is very much looking backwards while at the same time looking forwards. And look at some of the towns on the map. You've got places like Manchester, Bolton and Wigan, which are all sort of in this area, and of course Liverpool, which is down here. They're all really small. This is the heartland of the Industrial Revolution, and yet, you know, there's no Barrow in Ffurnace. There's no Blackpool. So as I say, it's looking back to a sort of very old medieval landscape. It's before the great changes of the 18th century. But, funnily enough, it's actually what this tells us about the political history of England that I want to talk about a little bit longer. Because this is the thing which strikes me most, I think, about this absolutely beautiful and wonderful map. As I say, many of you will have heard of John Speed, and some of you will be familiar with his work. And that's because so many of his maps have survived. Now, why have they survived? Well, lots of them were printed. That's the key question. They tended to be marketed towards the gentry. Now, the landed gentry in the late Tudor and the early Stuart period were actually going through a period of quite incredible wealth creation. They're doing really, really nicely. But what this shows us most, I think, is something a little bit stranger, which is, think about why it's the county. Why has John Speed decided to depict the county? It's because this is where these gentry were getting involved in government. They had a new kind of emerging idea that the county was somewhere that they should spend their time. It was an institution worth their time. And this may seem like a sort of throwaway point, but the county is an abstract territorial unit. It's not a family, it's not a religion, it's not a monarch. It's an abstract unit of territory. It's a bit like our modern concept of a state. The reason that John Speed was so keen to draw counties was that in this period, the political class of England were developing a new ideology in which they had an allegiance to an abstract territorial concept. Partly that was manifested through the county, but also the nation, the nation state, which is a development from the Tudor period. Well, my colleagues would argue with this, but a development which took on leaps and bounds, I think, in the Tudor period, and this is reflecting that. But there's also, I mean, our John couldn't resist a little cheeky side either, because on the two sides of this map, there are some little mug shots. And these are the kings and queens of Lancaster and York. Or, as Speed puts it, those kings sprung from the royal families of Lancaster and York, which, with variable success, got and enjoyed the crown and kingdom. Now, on the right side, he notes the troubled history of these crown heads, Henry IV, the first of Lancaster. By a first resignation, an affectioned election got the kingdom. His son and son's son succeeded him, Edward IV of York surprised, and after him, his son and brother reigned. His eldest daughter of York, matching with Lancaster, joined the red and white rose in one. This was Elizabeth of York, of course, who married Henry Tudor. And very, very, very pointedly indeed, on the top of the left-hand panel, John Speed has a nice little quotation from the Beatitudes, and he says, blessed are the peacemakers. So, in much the same way that Shakespeare's plays are sort of telling the story of the way the Tudors brought political stability to England. John Speed's maps are doing that too. I mean, in general, they are creating an ideology of abstract territorial units for the new gentry. But also here, he's pretty explicit about it. You know, these guys made a real mess, and thank heaven for Henry Tudor who sorted everything out. Let's have a look at the half map. There we go. Here it is. It's the late district again. This is the head of Long Sleddle, which is one of the more obscure parts of the late district. And the map is from around 1580. It purports to show, as you might be able to see from the Latin, a description of the more or waste of Sandgill. It's rather rough and ready, as was common for this kind of map in the Northwest at the time. It's not to scale, it's pictorial. To the bottom, you can see some houses. This is the House of John Lickbow of Stockgill, and these are the houses of the peasants of Sandgill. It's all part of the Crown Estate, which is why we have the map, because it ends up in a court in London, which is a specific court designed for dealing with cases in which the Crown had an interest. Now, there are some, the place names, which you can't quite see around the side, but many of those are still there so if you do get a chance, go away and see if you can find them. So why was this map in the papers of a London law court? Why was it so interested? Well, the answer is fairly simple. The fell was in dispute. It was being argued over. The people who lived on the left side of the map were bitterly arguing with John Lickbow on the right and his neighbours over a particular parcel of the moor. This is what's known as a dispute map, and hundreds of these survive for the early modern period. The bigger picture here, I think, is that the English legal system in the late 16th century is suddenly interested in the fate of obscure bits of really, really bad land in the north of England. And these guys are suing these guys and they are at it for over a century suing each other left, right and centre. Now, this may not seem like a particularly happy story, but think about the alternative. They went to law. They went to London. They fought things out with lawyers. They didn't reach for their pitchforks. So, in a sense, the map is telling again a kind of quite optimistic story about the development of social stability and the development of the English state this time manifested through the legal system. Nonetheless, this is but a half map. It has a partner. And this is the partner. There we go. Now, I don't really notice, but in this map there's a rather bizarre chunk which is missing here, whereas in this map there's a whole area here with a little lake. Now, they're both entitled a description of the Wastes of Sandgill or the Moor of Sandgill. It's just that the one on the right which claims that this lake was part of that waste, and the one on the left claims that for some strange reason the boundaries sort of went in like that and then round again. So, what these are, is these are two different maps. One brought by either side in the dispute. This is the map of the people of Sandgill, these guys. This is the map for the people of John Lickbarra and the people of Stockdale, so these guys. And they're using cartography as a way of arguing over the landscape. Funnily enough, there's actually a piece of ground marked on the modern survey map sort of up here called Lawyer's Fell, I think, something like that. And I don't know whether that's someone a bit later having a bit of a joke. But what this shows you, I think, is the way that cartography was linked in to estate management, developing capitalism, developing ideas about the purpose of the landscape and the development of the English state. Right, okay. Maps of Lancashire and the Lake Strict are one thing and we've been in the North West a while. But by the late 17th century, it's not completely unknown to see maps of much more exotic places. And here's one of them from 1670. This is a map presented to the Governors of the English East India Company. But its origins, in fact, were not English. It's a French map which was sort of anglicised. And one of the ways it was anglicised is you can see little crosses of St George dotted around this. This one is at Bombay. This one's at, sorry, no, this one down here is at Fort St George, which is the centre of modern-day Chennai, on Madras. There's one here at Hoogley, which would be the fortress which would evolve into Calcutta. But it's astonishing how detailed it is, isn't it? I mean, you can, for example, Bangkok is marked on the map. Look at how many towns there are on it. And it has the political boundaries of late 17th century Vietnam. It's that much knowledge of the world is conveyed in this map. As I say, it's not English. It was created by a guy called Nicholas Samson, who's the cartographer general to Louis XIV. He's actually of Scottish descent, but he's a Frenchman. And he produced some of the best French maps in the period, and therefore some of the best maps in the world. Now, we tend to think of England's connection to this part of the world, especially India, of course, as being somehow inevitable. For example, India gave us many of our words that we use today. We live in bungalows. We drink out of bottles. We wear pyjamas. We listen to pundits. We put shampoo in our hair. We even put our children in cots. Even the word blighty is of Hindi origin, blighty meaning Britain. So, I mean, our connection with this part of the world in the last couple of hundred years has been huge, and it's why our favourite dish is chicken tikka masala and why our football fans sing a song about vindaloo. But when this map was created, there was absolutely nothing set in stone about this. The Little Red Crosses, the most amazing thing about these, is just how tentative the English grasp on this part of the world is at that time. Tiny little springboards. Springboards for the future, perhaps, but tiny, tiny little ones. And the reason is, and what this map is kind of showing us, is that the English East India Company never really intended to set up in mainland India. The original idea had been to trade spices in Indonesia. But the trouble with this is that there were already Europeans there doing it, and it was, of course, Europeans' most notorious hard men, the Dutch. The Dutch East India Company fought a long-running battle with the English East India Company over the 70th century, over control of the spice islands, or control of the spice island trade, and the English lost. And what happened once they'd lost is they thought, well, we'd better try something else. We can't trade spices. Well, what about textiles? There's a great textile industry going on in India. Their cotton is the best in the world. Let's see if we can pick some of that up. So they started trading to all these ports, and as they went to each one, they made a note of what the local rulers were like, how cantankerous were they, what traded well. Initially, quite charmingly, they were trying to sell English woollen cloth in India. And these plaintive letters going back saying, well, it's not really selling, is it? It's rather hot here. It's not going to wear it. But eventually they discovered that they could trade weapons. They could bring money. They could eventually, of course in the 80th century, go to China and trade tea and opium in India. But I think what this map represents is the way that knowledge is so important to this trading expansion. They would, as I say, go to ports, record what was selling and what wasn't, and bring it back. And a major part of that knowledge is, of course, cartographical, because you have to know where you're going. You have to know where Bangkok is. You have to know where Bombay is. So what this is telling is, is that the way that English traders worked in the late 17th century was very rational. This may not seem very surprising, but it was very much about gathering information and seeing what worked. It was indeed very Baconian. Now Francis Bacon, some of you will know, he's not as well known today as, say, Einstein or Newton, but he's every bit as important. He was an Elizabethan polymath par excellence. He spent much of his life working in the legal profession. He rose to become Attorney General and Lord Chancellor under James I. But he's credited with being the major influence behind something we take very much for granted today. And this is scientific experimentation. Knowledge, he famously said, was power. And the way to get knowledge was not to refer slavishly to what the ancient Greeks or the ancient Romans or indeed the Bible had said, but it was to test it. It was to observe, to see what worked. And maps of this quality with this amount of trading detail are very much a reflection of that culture of experimentation which was starting to take over English elite culture by the 17th century. It was about describing the world as it was seen. So in a funny kind of way, the imprint of Francis Bacon can actually be seen in our final map. And we've come all the way from the Lake District. We've been to Lancashire. We've been via India. And we're now going to come to a parish which is just down the road. In Berkshire, which is just outside Oxford. You start in Berkshire until it was reorganised in 1974. Now, this is a kind of map which many of you will know already. It's an enclosure map, one of the most well-known kinds of English rural map mostly created from about the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century as a way of reorganising the countryside, getting rid of old common lands and turning the landscape into a landscape of private property. Let's look a little bit closer here. There's a wonderful website on the Berkshire, run by Berkshire Council, I think, which has all the enclosure maps for Berkshire. So I do check it out. It's fantastic stuff. Nothing to do with those, of course. So, as I say, this is an enclosure map. And there's so much that we can get from these kind of maps. But Cymru is actually a major part of one of those courses I was talking about earlier on. We use it quite a lot in the advanced diploma via the internet. So I'm not going to spoil the course for you and tell you too much about it. But I want to focus on one element of this, and it's perhaps the most sort of cartographically or perhaps the most striking. It's the number of straight lines. Look how straight everything is. Look at those. Look at those. All those straight lines. Now, the idea that a boundary between two plots of land should be nice and straight seems kind of logical to us, doesn't it? But a few hundred years ago, people really didn't think like this. Boundaries, they thought 500 years ago, should be set by custom. The boundaries should follow the path that it has done for centuries, with time whereof memory of man is not to the contrary, as the convoluted phrase had it. So there's a kind of battle here between, I suppose, modern reason and tradition. And enclosure maps like this, with all their straight lines, represent the triumph of reason, whatever that means, or at least one form of reason. For parliamentary enclosure was essentially a process by which legislators tried to squeeze the maximum productivity, or at least lent, out of the land. It was fundamentally about improvement. And improvement was a very 18th century idea. Like all good 18th century ideas, and like all good 18th century ideas, it came from Francis Bacon. The basic notion was to make the best use of the resources at one's disposal. And this didn't require slavish deference to custom. It required experimentation and observation. By experimentation and observation, most famously by men like Arthur Young, it was increasingly felt that private property in land was the most efficient way of making use of it. It's a very elite sort of rationality, isn't it? And parliament was rather bad that accepting the needs of a few landlords might not always be in keeping with the equally rational needs of those who had common lands or grazed cattle on the commons or pigs. But in the 18th and 19th century, it was always going to be improvement, straight lines which run over bendy lines custom. For experimentation and improvement were everywhere. This was, as I say, the spirit which underpinned the explorations of the East India Company. It was the spirit, of course, which gripped 18th century industry with its new gadgets, each, of course, described in publications. So anyone who read that particular journal liked their own improvements. It even touched upon social policy, most famously, of course, with Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism. And it was a spirit which underlaid agriculture in the period. So the straight lines on this map of Cymna, which you may think are fairly minor details, I think you can see modernity. And if that isn't pretentious, I don't know what is. But the modern world is the child of the 18th century. It's the child of that culture of improvement. Ultimately, like this map, we are all Bacon's children. So thank you very much for listening to all this. Of course, there are as many histories of England as there are people in the country. And everyone's individual take on the past is very different. This is something of my own. And it's been, as I say, a very, very personal story about maps and what we can learn for them, not as cartographers or as art historians, but as local historians. Local history is a wonderful journey into the past, into the landscape and into the treasures of our archives. The five and a half maps I've just shown you are a tiny scratch on the surface of that journey. But I do hope that many of you will take away from this lecture something of my enthusiasm for maps. But also think about how you can go on that local history journey as well. Thank you very, very much. And as I say, there are three copies of local population studies which you are welcome...