Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS)

Early Mapping: Domesday to the First Census

Most of our work has concentrated on the period marked by the formation of the New Poor Law, and the General Registry Office in the late 1830s. After this date the routine collection of large amounts of data on for example births, marriages deaths, and the relief of the poor became the norm and data were typically collected for sub-county level but for areas larger than parishes. Prior to this however the situation was far more simplistic; the Ancient Parish was the main unit of local government and data was generally collected in response to a particular need, often taxation.

We have been awarded a grant from the Pilgrim Trust for £10,000. This funds a pilot project that will test the feasibility of extending the GIS to cover the Ancient Parishes of England & Wales. This is primarily concerned with mapping a range of statistical sources, starting with the early 19th century and working backwards through the Hearth Tax and the Compton Census of the 17th century to the medieval Poll Tax and possibly the Domesday Book. The pilot study is limited to 12 counties: Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, the Soke of Peterborough, Durham, Westmorland, the Furness district of Lancashire, and possibly Cumberland and Warwick.

Here we present a few early examples of this work. The general idea is to attempt to use the place name information in the data set to link to our 1871 parish boundaries. The data sets themselves have normally been provided by collaborators. Although the actual boundaries must be regarded as suspect, this provides a method of shading areas on the map that will at least approximate to the real area on the ground. These maps should therefore be regarded as a visualisation tool rather than an accurate topographical record.