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Reinterpreting space: mapping people and relationships in late medieval and early modern English cities using GIS

Part of: Thinking Spatially: New Horizons for Urban History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2020

Justin Colson Open the ORCID record for Justin Colson [Opens in a new window]
Justin Colson*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, CO4 3SQ, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly popular in historical research, especially in urban contexts. However, digitizing historical sources in a way that can be mapped using the Cartesian co-ordinate systems of a GIS is often challenging, especially so in the case of records pre-dating centralized property registers or street numbering. This article explores how the vernacular spatial descriptions used in several case-studies of documents from late medieval and early modern London can be translated and geocoded into GIS compatible co-ordinates in a sympathetic way. Translating this data from a historical spatial paradigm into a modern one unlocks a whole range of new insights into spatial patterns, networks and relationships which would not have been feasible to construct using traditional methods

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Special Issue 3: Thinking spatially: new horizons for urban history , August 2020 , pp. 384 - 400
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Higher resolution, colour versions of the figures in this article can be viewed online as supplementary material. Follow the URL at the end of this article.

References

1 Some recent examples of broader spatial approaches to urban history of this period include: Liddy, C.D., Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McSheffrey, S., Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550 (Oxford, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berry, C., ‘“To avoide all envye, malys, grudge and displeasure”: sociability and social networking at the London wardmote inquest, c. 1470–1540’, London Journal, 42 (2017), 201–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 All deeds relating to four parishes around London Bridge, c. 1390–1510, were collected from the Husting Roll of Deeds and Wills (London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) CLA/023/DW/01); a large sample of wills relating to these parishes was collected from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury Will Registers (The National Archives (Kew) PROB11), and the Registers of the Commissary Court of London (LMA DL/C/B/004/MS09171). The published and manuscript indexes to these records were also used to attempt to identify individuals mentioned in sampled records, but not themselves the subject of records in the sample. This work is the core of my Ph.D. thesis: J. Colson, ‘Local communities in fifteenth-century London: craft, parish and neighbourhood’, Royal Holloway University of London Ph.D. thesis, 2011. A monograph building upon these conclusions is currently in preparation.

3 Gregory, I.N. and Ell, P.S., Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2007), 82–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Baker, A., ‘Vernacular GIS: mapping early modern geography and socioeconomics’, in Lünen, A. von and Travis, C. (eds.), History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections (Dordrecht, 2013), 98Google Scholar.

5 The classic pioneering example of town plan analysis is Conzen, M.R.G., ‘Alnwick, Northumberland: a study in town-plan analysis’, Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), 27 (1960), iii–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; recent examples of the genre include: Biddle, M. and Keene, D. (eds.), Winchester (Oxford, 2017)Google Scholar; J. Prunty and P. Walsh (eds.), Galway (Dublin, 2016); Rutte, R. and Abrahams, J.E. (eds.), Atlas of the Dutch Urban Landscape (Bussum, 2016)Google Scholar.

6 Geocoding is the process of matching address-type data to geographical co-ordinates. This is commonly confused with georeferencing, which is the process of overlaying images (including scans of historical maps) into a GIS using co-ordinates.

7 Rose-Redwood, R. and Tantner, A., ‘Introduction: governmentality, house numbering and the spatial history of the modern city’, Urban History, 39 (2012), 607–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Camille, M., ‘Signs of the city: place, power, and public fantasy in medieval Paris’, in Hanawalt, B. and Kobialka, M. (eds.), Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis, 2000), 1–36Google Scholar.

9 Based upon exhaustive study of City of London Court of Husting Deeds (LMA CLA/023/DW/01/) dating from c. 1375 to 1500 relating to the parishes of St Magnus the Martyr, St Botolph Billingsgate, St Margaret Fish Street Hill and St Mary at Hill. For detailed analysis, see Colson, ‘Local communities in fifteenth-century London: craft, parish and neighbourhood’, 104–6.

10 Keene, D. and Harding, V., Historical Gazetteer of London before the Great Fire – Cheapside; Parishes of All Hallows Honey Lane, St Martin Pomary, St Mary Le Bow, St Mary Colechurch and St Pancras Soper Lane (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Keene, D. and Harding, V., A Survey of Documentary Sources for Property Holding in London before the Great Fire (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

11 Bisschops, T., ‘It is all about location! GIS, property records, and the structuring role of space in late medieval urban life’, Post Classical Archaeologies, 2 (2012), 83–106Google Scholar.

12 See, for example, Lilley, K.D., ‘Urban mappings: visualizing late medieval Chester in cartographic and textual form’, in Clarke, C.A.M. (eds.), Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200–1600 (Cardiff, 2011), 19–41Google Scholar.

13 Statutes of the Realm, 1 Henry V, c. 5

14 Parents and children sharing the same name, occupation and residence are the most frequent complication with this formula.

15 On widows’ wills, see Barron, C.M. and Sutton, A.F. (eds.), Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500 (London, 1994), xviGoogle Scholar; Hanawalt, B.A., The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London (Oxford, 2007), 150Google Scholar.

16 For examples of the complex uses of spaces within single units in later sixteenth-century London, see Schofield, J., The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

17 A selection of the rentals are published in Harding, V. and Wright, L., London Bridge Selected Accounts and Rentals, 1381–1538 (London, 1995)Google Scholar. More detailed use of the rentals has enabled the reconstruction of the use of the shops along London Bridge, which will feature in my forthcoming monograph.

18 Gregory and Ell, Historical GIS, 82–7.

19 Muldrew, C., ‘The culture of reconciliation: community and the settlement of economic disputes in early modern England’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 926–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 This is detailed in chapter 8 of my Ph.D. thesis: Colson, ‘Local communities in fifteenth-century London: craft, parish and neighbourhood’.

21 This aspect is seldom discussed by historians, but witnesses called to the writing of plague wills in mid-seventeenth-century Newcastle were explicitly summoned from the local neighbourhood: Wrightson, K., Ralph Tailor's Summer: A Scrivener, his City and the Plague (New Haven, 2011), 54–9, 88–100Google Scholar.

22 See also Colson, J., ‘Commerce, clusters, and community: a re-evaluation of the occupational geography of London, c. 1400–c. 1550’, Economic History Review, 69 (2016), 104–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 The sources for the earlier period were explored in great depth in Britnell, R.H., Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Moens, W.J.C., Register of Baptisms in the Dutch Church at Colchester from 1645 to 1728 (Lymington, 1905)Google Scholar. This data was used as the basis for undergraduate student work at the University of Essex.

25 Bisschops, ‘It is all about location’; Navickas, K., Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2016), 106–17Google Scholar; S. Griffiths, ‘Historical space and the practice of “spatial history”: the spatio-functional transformation of Sheffield 1770–1850’, vol. 2 (5th International Space Syntax Symposium, TU Delft: Delft, Netherlands, 2005), 655–68, www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl/, accessed 2 Dec. 2011.

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