Daniel Defoe's 'Tour through the whole island of Great Britain (1724-6)'* occupies curiously equivocal position among the source materials of historical geography. No book of its time has been more widely quoted, or more widely praised, as an original authority on matters of social and economic geography; yet time and again its author has been charged with plagiarism, inaccuracy and deliberate deception. Defoe himself expected criticism and defended himself in advance; indeed he was inclined to protest too much, and did not improve matters by con? stantly shifting the ground on which his defence was based. Thus he was anxious to minimize his debt to other authors (I copy nothing from books, but where I quote the books, and refer to (II, 149)*), but this disclaimer is weakened by being confined to published work: the 'Tour' was admittedly corrected and enlarged with the help of friend's manuscript (II, 136). Defoe also claims to be writing mainly from personal experience of the country. Part of his Scottish material is acknowledged to be second-hand, but in his account of England and Wales, with which the present paper is chiefly concerned, is no such admission; on the contrary he contrives, without ever making the claim explicit, to suggest that he has visited every place described in the book. This effect is skilfully achieved by several devices: frequent references to coaches, horses, inns and other details of the road; unsparing criticism of other writers who pretend to speak positively of the places which they ought not to have done if they had not been there (II, 182); and confessions, disarmingly candid, that few, unimportant, localities had been omitted from the book because he had been unable to see them for himself. Finally, the 'Tour' claims to be up to date; its first chapter tells how the author set out from London in April 1722, and the preface to the last volume looks back on a tedious and very expensive five years journey.2 In the intervening pages, though very few of his observations are dated, Defoe frequently stresses that the book is tracing the routes he had followed only short time before. This claim is somewhat weakened, however, by his evident dependence on much earlier journeys for substantial part of his material, five of the seven dated visits in the 'Tour' having taken place before 1700; it is even more seriously weakened by revealing slip in the first volume, where he gives list of recent excursions (I, 3) some of which, according to later volumes, had not then taken place. These slightly ambiguous claims have encountered mixed reception. Many local historians and some historical geographers 3 have accepted that Defoe des? cribed what he saw on his travels in the 1720's, but few serious critics or biographers have been wholly convinced, and most of them have considered that, while the 'Tour' provides an admirable general impression of the English scene, some of its detail is either second-hand, out of date, or unreliable. But these opinions seem to be based not so much on any close study of the 'Tour' as on certain general preconceptions about Defoe's literary methods; at any rate no critical study of the 'Tour' has appeared in print.4 For the historical geographer concerned with individual regions this kind of overall judgment is not enough; if the book is open to criticism, one must show exactly how and where. In the following paragraphs an