 I'm Peter Barber and for 15 years I was responsible for maps and views in the British Library and an area of particular interest to me was Tudor photography and the item I'm going to be talking about is a remarkable example of that photography but when you look at it, it seems nothing very special. It's a map of land south of Lincoln's Inn. It looks perhaps a bit odd because it's oriented with east at the top rather than north at the top but once you get your head around that it almost looks like a coloured Google map at the largest scale. And that's essentially what it is. What really is surprising about it is that it dates from about 1583 and it's one of the earliest maps drawn to scale now or to a uniform scale. Now to us that seems nothing special but until that date, if you got maps at all, they tended to emphasise what was important rather than everything else in context. But the fact that it was made of land south of Lincoln's Inn is actually very significant because it was probably sponsored by the Benches of Lincoln's Inn who wanted to know what the state of play was with a field that they own. It was thickets field south of Lincoln's Inn and we can get an idea roughly of where it is because on the map you can see chance relaying which still exists and at the bottom of the map and onwards at the west you've got Clements Inn which is now eroded by the LSE. So you've got a fairly clear idea of the area depicted. But why is it interesting that the lawyers sponsored it? It's that since about 1500 lawyers had increasingly been illustrating their legal problems with sketch maps. I mean they'd done it in a few cases beforehand but particularly from 1500 onwards they were doing it more and more. And of course it was the lawyers who became the new men in the Tudor Government which helps to explain why this sort of mapping caught on with government. But there was more to it than that. As I say, this map was made in about the 1580s, say 1583. And in 1570, Abram Mortelius had published the first modern actress, the first modern book of maps and that contained maps from all sorts of places by all sorts of cartographers but what they all had in common was that they were down to a uniform scale. So lawyers had a chance to see what this sort of map looked like. And some of them immediately began grasping the advantages for things like legal disputes and depictions of fields like this because thanks to a map you could draw a line and that line would tell you exactly where the land was divided. So in this case quite literally one line was worth a thousand words and actually a line was much clearer. Now when we look at the map it looks fairly straightforward. It shows ownership and so certain houses are depicted in red which is simple enough. There are other divisions in yellow. Now those are mainly gardens and open spaces. They're the pieces of land that people happen to own or to occupy possibly by encouragement, possibly through ownership. So clearly there's a preoccupation there to know who owns what. So we get the sort of context for why the map was made. The map in its own right would be remarkable in many ways but what makes it particularly remarkable is the egg-like depiction of a pile of earth at the bottom of the map and the inscription that here were found the images of wax. Now the images of wax have got nothing to do with the property, disputes, potential or actual that are depicted on the map. But map makers are human beings and they've always liked to add a little bit of extra to show a bit of interest. For instance their medieval maps where the map makers have shown the hamlet that they came from not because the hamlet in any way was a rival to Jerusalem but because it meant something to them. But the maker of this map noted the lace or the rubbish tip in which the images of wax were found. Now what were the images of wax? Well, witchcraft. The images of wax were waxen models of Elizabeth I and for First Minister Lord Burley. And they were found with needles in them some five years before this map was made. And this poses an interesting sort of fantasy. I want to add also that I've just noticed that this rubbish tip is just a few yards away from a bridge which is entitled The Lord Treasurer's Bridge. Well, the Lord Treasurer was Lord Burley. So perhaps it was placed as close as the people could place it to an area which Lord Burley would go along. I don't know. But there it is. And had it been discovered some 30 years earlier, I'm absolutely sure that it would have been a fit subject of investigation by Matthew Shardlake, the creation of Christopher Sandsam. And it would have been a nice thought to see how Shardlake would have discovered who did it and actually what happened to the culprit. But in this particular case the authorities called on John D, the magician, the mathematician, the polymath, who had been working as magician to the Holy Room and Emperor Rudolph II in the hope that he could sort out the problem. Well, I don't know whether he did. But what is fact is that both Elizabeth and Lord Burley happily died in their beds. And there is a pathway that goes through other people's property and, in fact, even through a house.