Dury and Andrews’ Map of Hertfordshire: Society and landscape in the eighteenth century

By Andrew Macnair, Anne Rowe and Tom Williamson

This book is about the map of an English county – Hertfordshire – which was published in 1766 by two London mapmakers, Andrew Dury and John Andrews.
For well over two centuries, from the time of Elizabeth I to the late 18th century, the county was the basic unit for mapping in Britain and the period witnessed several episodes of comprehensive map making. The map which forms the subject of this book followed on from a large number of previous maps of the county but was greatly superior to them in terms of quality and detail. It was published in a variety of forms, in nine sheets with an additional index map, over a period of 60 years. No other maps of Hertfordshire were produced during the rest of the century, but the Board of Ordnance, later the Ordnance Survey, established in the 1790s, began to survey the Hertfordshire area in 1799, publishing the first maps covering the county between 1805 and 1834. The OS came to dominate map making in Britain but, of all the maps of Hertfordshire, that produced by Dury and Andrews was the first to be surveyed at a sufficiently large scale to really allow those dwelling in the county to visualize their own parish, local topography and even their own house, and its place in the wider landscape.
The first section examines the context of the map’s production and its place in cartographic history, and describes the creation of a new, digital version of the map which can be accessed online . The second part describes various ways in which this electronic version can be interrogated, in order to throw important new light on Hertfordshire’s landscape and society, both in the middle decades of the eighteenth century when it was produced, and in more remote periods. The attached DVD contains over a dozen maps which have been derived from the digital version, and which illustrate many of the issues discussed in the text, as well as related material which should likewise be useful to students of landscape history, historical geography and local history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909686748

Andrew Macnair

Andrew Macnair is a Research Fellow in the School of History, University of East Anglia. He read Natural Sciences at Queens' College, Cambridge prior to becoming a General Practitioner in rural Norfolk. In retirement he has developed an interest in computer-aided analysis of 18th century East Anglian maps.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The County Maps

Introduction

This book is about the map of an English county – Hertfordshire – which was published in 1766 by two London map-makers, Andrew Dury and John Andrews. The first section examines the context of the map’s production and its place in cartographic history, and describes the creation of a new, digital version of the map which can be accessed online at www.duryandrewsmapofhertfordshire.co.uk (Figure 1). The second part describes various ways in which this electronic version can be interrogated, in order to throw important new light on Hertfordshire’s landscape and society, both in the middle decades of the eighteenth century when it was produced, and in more remote periods. The attached DVD contains over a dozen maps which have been derived from the digital version, and which illustrate many of the issues discussed in the text, as well as related material which should likewise be useful to students of landscape history, historical geography and local history.

For well over two centuries, from the time of Elizabeth I to the inception of the Board of Ordnance (termed from 1845 the Ordnance Survey) in the late eighteenth century, the county was the basic unit for mapping in Britain. We can, admittedly a little simplistically, divide the history of county map making into three periods, which to some extent overlap. The first, covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saw the production of small scale maps by Saxton, Speed and others, which were then repeatedly copied, with very few new surveys being undertaken. The second period, from c.1700 to c.1840, saw the production of a large number of large-scale county maps, published at a scale of one or two inches to the mile, which were based on new surveys, more detailed than anything undertaken before. These maps, which were privately financed and in some respects anticipated the early work of the Board of Ordnance, will be the main concern of this book. The third period, which overlaps with the second by several decades, is dominated by the work of the Ordnance Survey, which was established in the 1790s as part of the nation’s preparations for an anticipated Napoleonic invasion. Their first map – of Kent, published in 1801 – was county-based, but after that they produced maps, gradually covering the whole of the country at a scale of one inch to the mile, which ignored county boundaries.

FIGURE 1. Dury and Andrews’ map of Hertfordshire, digitally redrawn but not yet geo-rectified.

The county maps of Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire occupies an important place in the history of British cartography. Matthew Paris (c.1200–1259), England’s most prolific medieval map-maker (as well as chronicler, historian and artist) was a Benedictine monk who spent almost the whole of his working life in the scriptorium at the Abbey of St Albans.¹ His maps stand out as the first attempts to portray the actual physical appearance of the country, rather than simply trying to represent the relationship between places in schematic diagrams.² His map of Britain, drawn in the late 1250s and now in the British Library, was made three hundred years before triangulation was used in surveying: although parts of the country are distorted, with Essex rather than Kent in the south-east corner, it is remarkably accurate with over 250 towns, rivers and hills individually named. Much later, the county was home to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who spent much of his life at Gorhambury just outside St Albans.³ Statesman, philosopher, scientist and essayist, Bacon had a profound impact on the development of cartography both in England and throughout Europe. But our concern here is more specifically with the development of maps of the county itself, and in particular with those which preceded Dury and Andrews’ survey of 1766.

Every English county can boast a series of maps published over the two and a half centuries before c.1800, but Hertfordshire is quite exceptional in the number and variety it can offer. As long ago as 1914 Fordham noted 43 different maps of Hertfordshire which were produced between that of Saxton (1577) and that of Dury and Andrews (1766), as well as 106 reprints of these maps.⁴ These figures have since been revised upwards by Donald Hodson in his 1974 The Printed Maps of Hertfordshire 1577–1900.⁵ While virtually all counties were mapped by Christopher Saxton and John Speed, Hertfordshire is almost unique in having, in addition, county maps made by John Norden and William Smith. The county is also unusual in that, in the period between Saxton’s map and that produced by Dury and Andrews, two maps were published which were based on entirely new surveys. If we compare the situation in Hertfordshire with (for example) Norfolk, we see the latter had no map by Smith or Norden (at least none that has survived) and only one map, by James Corbridge in 1730, published in the period which was based on a new survey.

The first series of county maps to cover the whole of the country were those produced by Christopher Saxton (c.1542–1606), often referred to as ‘the father of English cartography’, who was born at Dunningley near Dewsbury in Yorkshire. Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales, containing 34 maps of individual counties, was published in 1579 after only five summers of surveying. It was the second national atlas in the world,⁶ coming several years after Johann Strumpf’s 1552 map of Switzerland,⁷ and only Philip Apian’s 1568 survey of Bavaria approaches it in terms of comprehensiveness.⁸ The production of the Atlas was a consequence of deliberate government policy. Although the project was financed by Thomas Seckford (1515–1587), a Suffolk lawyer and master of the Court of Requests (whose arms are displayed at the bottom right corner of the Hertfordshire map) (Figure 2), Lord Burghley (William Cecil) – Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer, chief minister, confidante and adviser to Elizabeth I for almost all of her long reign – was the real mastermind behind the project (Seckford and Cecil had been law students together in the London Inns of Court and worked together in the Courts of Wards and Liveries).⁹ So impatient was Cecil to acquire Saxton’s maps that he insisted on being sent proof copies of each, prior to final drafting and engraving. These he gathered together and subsequently had bound into the ‘Burghley-Saxton Atlas’. This was acquired, probably in 1612, by King James I from Burghley’s son, Robert, Lord Salisbury, and later found its way into the Royal Library and finally in 1973 to the British Library. Burghley has been described as the most cartographically minded statesman of his time¹⁰ and Stephen Alford in his biography talks of his strong visual sense of where the Queen and her realm stood in the greater scheme of things.¹¹ He used any map that was available to him and clearly felt free to annotate them in his characteristic spikey hand. If no maps were available he drew his own.¹² On the proof map of Christopher Saxton’s Hertfordshire he added the words ‘Mr Capell’ next to Hadham Parva and ‘Lytton’ next to Knebworth.

Saxton’s work was thus, in a sense, a government project, and the Privy Council gave him an official placart or pass to ensure that local Justices of the Peace supplied him with men and horses during the survey, and guided him to elevated places from which he could view the landscape. His was a fresh survey, taken while travelling on horseback, based on compass sketches and using a plane table to plot rough maps. It is likely that he used a form of triangulation, a technique pioneered in the Low Countries 40 years earlier, but much of the survey would have depended on survey by traverse – that is, taking lateral measurements from roads and tracks. The maps were engraved onto copper plates, ensuring that multiple copies could be printed. Over the years each plate was repeatedly revised to include new information and Saxton’s maps were still being sold as late as 1770, admittedly by then for their antiquarian interest. His Hertfordshire map, surveyed in 1577, measures 19.1 by 15.1 inches, and was drawn at a scale of one mile to 0.46 inches. It was engraved in London but it is unclear whether the engraver, Nicholas Reynolds, was English or whether, as with other engravers of Saxton’s maps, he was a Flemish Protestant refugee: at the time the Low Countries were the home of the finest engravers and cartographers. Saxton’s map of Hertfordshire is only one of five county maps to show the boundaries of hundreds – the ancient administrative subdivisions of the county – as well as the boundaries of the principal deer parks, represented by a circuit of paling.¹³ Cardinal points are indicated but somewhat surprisingly the maps do not include a key, display the coordinates of latitude or longitude, or depict the principal roads – all features that were standard on European maps of the period. Saxton was given sole rights to sell his maps for ten years (at four pence a sheet, before they were bound into an atlas in 1579), as well as a 21-year lease of land in Grigston Manor near Saxmundham in Suffolk, as payment ‘for certain good causes, grand charges and expenses lately had, and sustained, in the survey of divers parts of England.’¹⁴

FIGURE 2. Christopher Saxton’s map of Hertfordshire, published in his Atlas of England and Wales in 1579.

The next map of the county to appear was that produced by John Norden (c.1547–1625), the renowned English cartographer and antiquary. He planned to publish his Speculum Britanniae or ‘Mirror of Britain’ as a series of pocketsized county maps with an accompanying county history, but only Middlesex (1593), Surrey (1594), Hampshire, Sussex (both 1595) and Hertfordshire (1598) were produced during his lifetime. Essex, Northamptonshire and Cornwall were published at a later date and there may well have been maps of other counties which have not survived. He was very dependent on the support of Lord Burghley, whose death in 1598 brought many of his plans to an end: the copy of the Middlesex map in the British Library has corrections made in Burghley’s own hand. The Hertfordshire map (Figure 3) measures 9.2 by 7.4 inches and is drawn at a scale of one mile: 0.21 inches. Although it is thus smaller than that produced by Saxton, it depicts more villages and more parks, has a map key, includes roads and shows the sites of three important battles (those of St Albans, 1455 and 1461, and High Barnet, 1471) as well as the house of Norden’s patron and sponsor, Thyobald or Theobalds near Cheshunt.¹⁵

FIGURE 3. John Norden’s map of Hertfordshire, published in 1598.

The third in the sequence of Hertfordshire maps is that produced in 1602 by William Smith (1550–1618), which measures 18.7 inches by 14.9, and which has a scale of 1 mile:0.42 inches. Smith made only twelve county maps and of these only four, including that of Hertfordshire, now in the British Library, survive in their original manuscript form, drawn by Smith himself. The Hertfordshire map (Figure 4) was engraved by Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam. Little is known of Smith apart from the fact that he worked for four or five years in Nuremberg, then at the centre of the cartographic world. Most of his maps are based on those produced by Saxton, although the Hertfordshire map is also much influenced by that by John Norden, with whom he was well acquainted.

John Speed (c.1552–1629), perhaps the best known of the early county map-makers, produced his map of Hertfordshire in 1610. He had no outside financial support and so, to aid sales, he was obliged to make his maps as visually attractive as possible. In this he succeeded, adding inset maps of county towns (some surveyed by him) as well as historical and topographical notes. Speed borrowed freely from earlier sources, principally the maps by Saxton, Norden and Smith and – in the case of Hertfordshire – he openly pays credit to the first of these men. The Hertfordshire map, which measures 19.4 by 14.4 inches and has a scale of 1 mile:0.34 inches, includes small inset ‘bird’s eye’ plans of ‘Hartforde’ and ‘Verolanium’ (St Albans). It was – like that by Smith – engraved by Jodocus Hondius, and was printed in London by William Hall and John Beale (Figure 5). The scale of ‘Pases’ (paces) on the inset map of Hertford may indicate that Speed himself surveyed the town; he quotes that a pace was five feet in length, that is, two strides.¹⁶ The maps were sold as uncoloured single sheets but also, in 1611, in hand coloured form, collected into a book entitled The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, which in 1627 was selling at the considerable sum of 40 shillings.¹⁷ Surprisingly, no roads are shown on the map, but the various hundreds are named and several beacons are depicted, including one on the hills to the east of Therfield. A topographical note on the map states ‘the River Lea much diminished from the greatnes which once it bare’, perhaps a reference to the construction of the New River by Sir Hugh Myddleton between 1609 and 1613 (below, pp. 205–206), although at the time the map was surveyed work on this new canal, intended to supply London with drinking water, had only just begun (the New River itself is not shown on the map). During the Civil War sets of Speed’s county maps were stitched together in such a way that they could be rolled up and strapped to a saddle in a stout vellum cover.¹⁸ His county maps remained popular for many years and as late as the 1770s the firm of C. Dicey and Co. were still printing them from the original copper plates.

FIGURE 4. William Smith’s map of Hertfordshire, published in 1602.

FIGURE 5. John Speed’s map of Hertfordshire, published in 1610.

The seventeenth century is often described as the ‘empty century’ in cartographic terms because so few new surveys were undertaken at the county level. It was instead a period of cartographic plagiarism, in which earlier maps were freely copied, revised and republished. John Seller’s Hertfordshire map of 1676 – ‘Hertfordshire Actually Survey’d and Delineated’ – is an exception in that it was based on a new survey and, significantly, it is the first English map to use the prime meridian of St Paul’s Cathedral instead of the Azores. This may be because St Paul’s had recently been rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, but ignores the fact that Charles II had founded the Observatory at Greenwich in 1675 ‘to settle the vexed question of longitude’.¹⁹ In the Seller map longitude is measured from this ‘new’ prime meridian, and the compass rose gives cardinal directions.²⁰ The map measures 19.5 inches by 15.7 and is drawn at a scale of 1 mile:0.46 inches. Although the map is usually associated with Seller (1632–1697) he was in fact the publisher, and provided most of the capital for the survey work: John Oliver was the map’s actual surveyor, and Richard Palmer the engraver.²¹ They originally intended to publish a folio of county maps, Atlas Anglicanus et Cambria, but in the event only six were completed, again emphasising how fortunate Hertfordshire is in its early cartography.²² John Seller, in addition to his activities as a map-maker, was also an instrument maker and mathematician with a keen interest in navigation and magnetic variation. A practising Baptist, fourteen years before the publication of the Hertfordshire map he had been accused of involvement in a plot to assassinate Charles II, found guilty, and sentenced to death: but after a spell in Newgate prison was reprieved. Four of his co-defendants were less fortunate and were executed.²³ His interests in navigation culminated in the publication of his The English Pilot, a series of charts of the coasts and waters round Britain. Somewhat bizarrely, considering his past history, Seller became Hydrographer to Charles II in 1671.

In 1695 Seller’s surveyor for Hertfordshire, John Oliver (c.1616–1701), produced his own map of the county, in two sheets measuring (in all) 29.8 by 22.8 inches. It is closely based on Seller’s map but at one mile: 0.73 inches is drawn at a larger scale, and contains more detail (Figure 6). Oliver, who married Susanna Speed, John Speed’s grand-daughter, was also a mezzotint portraitist and a window glass-painter (an example of his work can be seen at Christ Church College, Oxford). ²⁴ His map of Hertfordshire shows ‘measured miles, furlongs and poles, on all the roads’, an innovation which, as the text rightly boasts, was ‘a work never performed in any county before’.²⁵ In the same year Robert Morden (c.1650–1703), a bookseller, publisher and cartographer, produced another county map, measuring 17.0 inches by 13.7 and at a scale of 1 mile:0.46 inches. All Morden’s maps carried a text which claimed they were ‘newly engrav’d, according to surveys never published’ but they were not, in fact, based on original surveys and the Hertfordshire map is based on that published by Seller in 1676. It also includes some details culled from the 1695 version of the map by Oliver, to whose manuscript he must have had access before publication.²⁶ Morden’s is the first published map of the county to mark longitude in minutes of time (along the top border) as well as in degrees (along the bottom border), but otherwise makes few significant changes to the originals on which it is based, beyond correcting some errors in the placenames.

It was not until 1749 that the next map of the county was published, by John Warburton (Figure 7). This, measuring 30.1 inches by 23.5, with a scale of 1 mile: 0.66 inches, had originally been published in 1724 as ‘A New and Correct Mapp of Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire by John Warburton, Joseph Bland and Payler Smyth’ and was based on a new survey, carried out in 1721. Warburton was the publisher of the map, Bland collected the subscriptions and arranged distribution, and Smyth was surveyor. In 1749 the Hertfordshire and Middlesex sections were republished separately, at the same scale as the original 1724 map and with very little revision. John Warburton (1682–1759) was an antiquarian, cartographer and Somerset Herald and, to help sales, his maps were festooned with coats of arms, no less than 724 in the case of the three counties map. He also published county maps of Northumberland and Yorkshire.

The map which forms the subject of this book – Andrew Dury and John Andrews’ ‘Topographical Map of Hartford-shire’, first published in 1766 – thus followed on from a large number of previous maps of the county (and there were many others, as already noted, which plagiarised these to varying degrees). But it was, as we shall see, a work of very different quality and detail. It was in fact published in a variety of forms over a period of sixty years. The first edition, drawn at a scale of one mile: 1.95 inches, was issued on 1 May 1766 as nine sheets which combined to give a total size of 81.8 inches by 60.1 inches. An Index map, at a smaller scale, was also provided, to help purchasers find their way round the larger map: this was 27.7 by 20.1 inches, giving a scale of one mile: 0.66 inches. The imprint at the bottom of the main map states that it was published and sold by A. Dury in Duke’s Court, near St Martins Lane, London at a cost of £1 16 shillings. A further note informs us that the area of the county lying to the west of ‘the North Road’ – later the A1 – was surveyed by John Andrews, that to the east by Andrew Dury ‘&c.’ It is unclear whether the two men carried out the survey themselves, on the ground, or whether they employed others to assist them. The nine sheets were sold individually as well as together: the first edition of the accompanying index map, and detailed town plans of Hertford and St Albans, were offered at the same time. In 1777 the nine sheets were sold ‘with a few additions’,²⁷ together with a second edition of the index map. In January 1782 a new imprint was published ‘by William Faden, Charing Cross’, which remained in print until 1822. Many county maps were republished in this manner, after a period of several years, either at smaller scale (for example, half an inch to one mile) or else with multiple revisions. Some minor revisions were indeed made by Faden: the proprietor of Bury Park at Rickmansworth was thus changed from William Field Esq to Fotherley Whitfield Esq, and ‘R. Prentice’ was added to the map at Hoo End near Kimpton, but Faden ignored many more drastic alterations which occurred in the landscape after 1766, including the enclosure of many large commons in the county, such as those in Ickleford, Lilley, Elstree, Hexton and Hitchin.

The index map which accompanied the original version of the map – and which is reproduced in digitally redrawn form in Figure 8 – contains only a limited amount of information, relevant to its purpose. But Dury, evidently seeing a financial opportunity, republished it with more detail in 1777 when a new imprint of the nine sheet main map itself appeared, and also sold it on its own. The additions included a number of personal names, such as that of the Earl of Salisbury at Hatfield House, and those of certain topographic features, such as Goff’s Oak and the Icknield Way. The revised map was subsequently used in an English atlas published in 1785 by Thomas Kitchin. In 1782 William Faden’s name was added to the index map, and he continued to sell the map until his retirement in 1822.

FIGURE 6. John Oliver’s map of Hertfordshire, 1676.

No other maps of Hertfordshire were produced during the rest of the eighteenth century, but the Board of Ordnance, later known as the Ordnance Survey, was established in the 1790s and began to survey the Hertfordshire area in 1799, publishing the first maps covering the county between 1805 and 1834. The Board was, in origin, a military organisation and, as described below (pp. 60–64), went on to produce high-quality maps covering the whole of the country. Nevertheless, maps of individual counties, commercially financed, continued to be produced well into the nineteenth century, Andrew Bryant’s map of Hertfordshire appearing in 1822. This, drawn at a scale of one mile: 1.5 inches, and measuring 60.7 by 49.0 inches, was sold in four sheets, and was based on a new survey, made in 1820–1821. Although some sheets from the Board of Ordnance covering Hertfordshire were available by this date widespread public disquiet over their defects made it worthwhile for Bryant and others, such as the Greenwood brothers, to publish this and other county maps. Bryant’s map has been reproduced in a wallet of four folded sheets by the Hertfordshire Record Society.²⁸

FIGURE 7. John Warburton’s map of Hertfordshire, 1749.

FIGURE 8. The index map (digitally redrawn) produced to accompany the First Edition of Dury and Andrews’ map of Hertfordshire.

The large scale county maps

Of all the maps of Hertfordshire listed above, that produced by Dury and Andrews was the first to be surveyed at a sufficiently large scale to really allow those dwelling in the county to visualise their own parish, local topography and even their own house, and its place in the wider landscape. It is one of an extensive series of similar maps of counties in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland which were surveyed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the appearance of which has been described as a ‘cartographic revolution’²⁹ or as a ‘cartographic development without parallel elsewhere’.³⁰ Their publication followed, as we have already observed, a prolonged period of cartographic plagiarism and stagnation. The new maps were the result of private enterprise and publishers, surveyors and engravers worked in competition with each other. Most publishers managed to break even in their endeavours but some were financially ruined, and only a small number became rich. The contrast with the situation in neighbouring France is striking: French regional cartography was driven and financed, at least initially, by the Crown and central government, rather than being left entirely to private enterprise.

There are a number of explanations for this explosion of cartographic activity in eighteenth-century England. At a national level the country was embarking on a profound period of industrial and agricultural transformation – the ‘agricultural and industrial revolutions’ – and this required an integrated transport infrastructure to carry goods by road, sea, navigable rivers and canals, as well as a thorough knowledge of the character of the existing agrarian environment – the extent of common waste and open fields which could be enclosed and ‘improved’. The maps available to agriculturalists and early industrialists were simply inadequate to the tasks at hand and the essentially decentralised and laissez faire nature of the British governmental system ensured that only private enterprise could meet the need. The prospectus for the county map of Oxfordshire, eventually published in 1797 by Richard Davis, summarises these frustrations: When it is considered what great Alterations have been made in this County by the late Navigations, the new Turnpike and other roads, by the Inclosure of Parishes, since the last Survey …. and there is already a map by Mr Rocque of the County of Berks to the South Side … it is presumed a new survey of Oxford will not be unacceptable to the Public.

The answer thus came at a local, and specifically a county, level: for the county or ‘shire’ was still the principal unit of administration and politics, and of social interaction at an elite level, and its enduring importance was reflected in the contemporary fashion for multi-volume antiquarian ‘county histories’. If the money required to finance major cartographic surveys was not going to come from central government, then it could be raised through subscriptions received from people living within particular counties where there was, in addition, usually no shortage of qualified local surveyors. While the publication of many county maps was coordinated by London-based cartographers like Thomas Jefferys, who was responsible for no less than ten county maps, several were produced by local surveyors, both professional and amateur, such as those of Oxfordshire produced by Richard Davis or of Devon by Benjamin Donn. These ‘one county map’ surveyors were often enthusiastic members of locally based learned societies that espoused the ideals of Enlightenment science, in which religious belief and superstition were shunned in favour of observation and experiment. In cartographical terms ‘exactness of actual measurement’ was the order of the day. The concept of the map as just a visual encyclopaedia was thus being replaced by the notion that a ‘good’ map was primarily a functional expression of mathematical precision in the measurement of the earth’s surface.³¹ In total, 120 county maps were published in the period between the appearance of Joel Gascoyne’s map of Cornwall in 1699 and that of W. C. Hobson’s map of Durham in 1839; and while some counties gained only a single map, others had as many as four. Figures 9–11 illustrate the chronology of their production, and make clear that only a dozen or so were published in the first half of the eighteenth century and these, in general, added little to existing cartographic knowledge.³² Henry Beighton’s 1728 Warwickshire was an exceptional piece of work and, undoubtedly based on a trigonometrical survey, it set the standard for future county maps.³³ But most of the others produced in this period were not so good; one contemporary described how Budgen’s 1724 map of Sussex, for example, deserves but the name of a map at most, and even as such is neither correct nor well executed; while Arthur Young, the agricultural commentator, thought John Kirby’s 1736 survey of Suffolk a miserable one.³⁴ It was only after 1750 that maps of a consistently high standard started to appear. By 1775 half the country had been covered by such improved surveys and by 1800 only Cambridgeshire, and the highlands of Scotland and Wales, remained unmapped.³⁵ In a frenetic fifteen-year period from 1765 to 1780 no less than 25 English county maps were published, covering 65% of the total area of the country, a feat never equalled even by the Ordnance Survey. Figure 10 shows that Dury and Andrews’ 1766 map of Hertfordshire was published comparatively early in this sequence, and even earlier if we restrict our attention to those of better quality.

FIGURE 9. The progress of county mapping in eighteenth-century England, showing the number of square miles of England mapped in particular years, and the position of the maps of Hertfordshire produced by John Warburton, Dury and Andrews, and Andrew Bryant in this sequence.

FIGURE 10. The progress of mapping in the eighteenth century, by individual county.

FIGURE 11. Graph showing the proportion of England covered by ‘one inch’ maps and the place of Dury and Andrews’ map of Hertfordshire in this progression.

There was a lull in the publication of county maps during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars but Figure 9 indicates a late flowering of the genre, mainly in the work of the Greenwood brothers (Christopher and his younger brother John) and Andrew Bryant. Many of the 59 examples published between 1817 and 1839 can be considered as ‘second generation’ maps, in the sense that the counties in question had already been surveyed at the same or similar scale during the previous 60 to 70 years.³⁶ The Greenwood and Bryant maps were of a standard approaching that of the Ordnance Survey, and indeed at times the surveyors from all three organisations were working within a county at the same time.

The Society of Arts

Andrew Dury and John Andrews, when contemplating their planned map of Hertfordshire, would have been aware of an advertisement published in 1759 by the Society of Arts (more fully the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and from 1847 the Royal Society of Arts) which stated its aim of giving a sum, not exceeding £100, as a gratuity to any person …. who shall make an accurate survey of any county upon the scale of one inch to one mile … for the Improvement of Highways, making rivers Navigable, and providing other means for the Ease and Advancement of the National Commerce.³⁷ Still a very young society (it had been initiated in 1754 at Rawthmells Coffee House, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, a short walk from Dury’s home), it took a keen interest in a range of practical issues, including the expansion of trade and improvements in transport and agriculture, as well as in the ‘arts’ as more narrowly defined. Henry Baker (1698–1774), naturalist and antiquarian, was one of the founder members of the Society and the paucity of good maps in the country had been brought to his notice in a letter from a friend, the Rev. William Borlase (1695–1772), written in 1755:

I would