Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
After the Benedictine abbey at Chertsey was involved in a property dispute in the 1420s,
the monks left an account for future custodians of the Abbey about its claims and where the
lands in question lay. This map was drawn in the cartulary to illustrate points made in their
text, and readily conveys important features in the case. The wisdom of the monks in creating
this record against future need was borne out when the cartulary was called as evidence in
later times; a note on the flyleaf states that it was deposited in the Exchequer Court in 1637.
The dispute was about grazing rights on the Abbey's pastures and meadows at certain times
of the year, claimed by some of the tenants for longer than the Abbey allowed. The map notes
the size and names of these low-lying fields, prone to flooding, and forming an island en-
closed by the River Thames. A smaller waterway cut across the land, dug by the monks to
drive the Abbey's water mills. The fields are drawn fairly conventionally in plan, and the oth-
er features of the map are in their appropriate position in relation to each other, although not
to a consistent scale.
The map has some of the quality of a picture, especially in the way it shows buildings:
houses in the village of Laleham across the river, the large barn above the church in which
grain from the fields would have been stored, and two mills to its right, either side of the
river, in which grain was ground. The far mill's wheel is drawn facing the viewer, while just
the top of the wheel of the near mill is visible. The Abbey's cluster of buildings is shown by a
detailed elevation of its church, with lit interior and open door, and drawn disproportionately
large, as if to emphasise the map's provenance; as the church itself must have towered over
the flat landscape.
The colours on this map have kept their brightness across more than half a millennium,
through being kept in the dark, enclosed in the cartulary. The red tile roofs sing out against the
grey lead of the church roof, the blue waterways, green vegetation, and the wood of Chertsey
Bridge at right. It must have seemed to the monastic mapmaker that the landscape he drew,
dominated by the church materially and socially, was set to last forever. Yet the church he
knew would be swept away in the next century by Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monaster-
ies, leaving this map, as with so many others in the archives, as a record of landscapes and
times past.
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