Counties, Baronies, Hundreds, and Manors

Until the seventeenth century, sea charts were the most accurate maps available and were frequently consulted and borrowed from by other mapmakers. For inland terrain, however, most cartographers measured distances in mileage along roads and rivers and showed bird’s-eye views of towns. The geometrical methods of measuring used by astronomers and mathematicians had been known for several hundred years, but it was not until the sixteenth century that triangulation, the use of trigonometry to measure distances, was regularly practiced to produce local maps. In England a new landed gentry had taken over many of the estates of dissolved monasteries, creating uncertainty about boundaries and a demand for estate surveyors and mapmakers.