>I would be most grateful if you could inform me of how the parishioners
>or inhabitants in mid-17th
>century rural England measured the distance between their own parishes
>and the market towns?
One question would be where you measured from and to. If you wanted to be
reasonably accurate you would have to have an agreed point in a town or
village from which measurement started and to which measurements were
made. In London this was traditionally, I think, London Stone. In my own
town, Wolverhampton, measurements were always made to and from High
Green. This was where the market was - and was about 100 yards across,
giving plenty of room for dispute. I would guess that most places measured
to and from the market cross or the church gates.
Another question would be what route you measured: as the crow flies or
along public highway (including foot paths or not?)? The answer to that
would probably depend on the purpose of the measurement. If it was for the
application of the old rule that markets should be at least seven mile
apart, I suppose you would use public cart and carriageways.
From the 1750s onwards - if not long before - there were surveyors quite
capable of making very accurate measurements - the canals relied on such
services and I do not recollect any problems with measurements arising
under enclosure legislation. (But I do recollect many complaints about a
shortage or surveyors when most of the ones of any ability were engaged in
projects at the time of Railway Mania). Even before those times there must
have been reliable surveyors engaged in various sorts of public works, from
castle building to medieval new towns to river navigations.
But all of these efforts would have been bedevilled by a lack of a national
standard for almost any measure of distance, from the mile
downwards. There was no statutory - and universally applied definition of
a mile until about 1824(?). There is a wealth of information on such
matters in R. D. Connor, The Weights and Measures of England, HMSO for the
Science Museum, 1987 - but it does not seem to contain anything on how
things were measured. There must be, somewhere, a history of civil
engineering which would give information on such matters. (F M L
Thompson's History of Chartered Surveyors seems not to).
All of which leads me to agree that most people in most villages would have
given the distance to the next village mainly in terms of how long it took
to get there (which is usually what mattered) or perhaps in terms of
"miles" whatever a "mile" was understood to be locally.
I have an idea that none of this is very helpful in reaching a clear
conclusion. But after much contemplation I have come to the opinion that
life isn't simple.
Frank Sharman
Wolverhampton
01902 763246
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