The Tithe Maps of England and Wales: A National Land Use Survey?

Abstract

It was a rare privilege to have been invited to deliver the inaugural Helen Wallis Memorial Lecture. I first met Helen in January 1971 when, as a postgraduate student, I gave a paper to the annual conference of what was then the Institute of British Geographers. It was in the early days of the application of computers to analyse large historical data sets and I was speaking about how this technology could help obtain information on land ownership from the parish tithe surveys. Re-reading that paper reminded me of what Helen said to me at the end of my talk: 'Don't forget that these tithe surveys were based on maps. Why don't you get your computer to tell us more about the maps?' So, for the subject of my Helen Wallis Memorial Lecture I return to the tithe surveys of mid-nineteenth century England and Wales, not only because it was through these maps that I met Helen, but also because last year Richard Oliver and I published another monograph on tithe maps. Our Tithe Maps of England and Wales is the nearest book that I have written to what Helen suggested all those years ago. It is an analysis of the cartographic characteristics of the surveys and a cartobibliography of the maps. Maps are there, first and last.