Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
this map was made, and must have had enormous impact on its surrounds both physically and
symbolically. Indeed, it completely erased a village on its chosen site.
Yet the landscape pictured here just outside its gates suggests an unchanged countryside
where life continued in a traditional way. Villages are represented by their church and perhaps
a few houses. Fields (coloured brown) are shown in detail, with hedge or hurdle boundaries,
and their names or the villages to which they belonged. Individual trees are drawn at field
edges or in groups. Spark's Elm, a single tree just above the map's centre, stands as a land-
mark on the common called Sparrow Field (coloured green, along with paths). This common
was both a scene of much activity and the place where village boundaries met, which caused
friction over who could do what, and when.
This map was one of two produced in a case in the Exchequer Court of Augmentations,
concerning villagers' rights to graze their beasts on the common. The first and plainer map
(also in the archives) was submitted to the court by the plaintiff, but deemed not to show the
relevant features correctly when taken to the field by the commissioners appointed to invest-
igate the complaint. Maps submitted by parties in a dispute were thus not accepted uncrit-
ically, but judged by the criteria of the time. The 'imperfection' of the first map was that it
was not sufficiently accurate to convey the facts of the case to a court in London which was
distant from, and unfamiliar with, the ground in question.
The commissioners, who were local gentry, then made this second map, which they de-
scribed as 'a true and perfecte new plot', for 'the more playne manifest and direct underston-
dyng' of the problem. Important and relevant additional details include the drove ways by
which villagers took their animals to the common; places where beasts of one village were
impounded for trespass by another; and processional paths to crosses on Sparrow Field, used
by the villagers of Morden and Cheam when beating the parish bounds.
This map was seen as 'true' in the sense that it was drawn to make the matter clear, al-
though it is not necessarily true in the modern sense of being drawn to scale. It may appear
rather quaint to us now, but this map gives an insight into the workings of village life in the
Tudor landscape and was thought 'perfect' at the time it was made.
