A Watercourse ‘in Variance’: Re-situating a Sixteenth-Century Legal Map from Ashbourne, Derbyshire

Abstract

ABSTRACTLaw-related English local maps, especially those dating from the early- to mid-sixteenth century, remain in need of both extensive and close study. In this article, a hand-drawn sketch map in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, is re-contextualized in relation to documents connected with lawsuits in The National Archives in England. These lawsuit documents, concerning disputes brought before the court of the Star Chamber in the mid-sixteenth century, allow us to correct the accepted date of the map’s creation, suggest its likely creator and identify its probable use at a time of expanding cartographic consciousness among the educated classes. The importance of the manuscript map to one English family’s subsequent assertions of proprietary rights in a small stream running from Bradbourne to Ashbourne, Derbyshire, explains its provenance outside official court records.