1

JOHN DEE AND CHRISTOPHER SAXTON’S SURVEY OF

MANCHESTER (1596)*

STEPHEN BOWD

Manchester Metropolitan University

The contribution of the mathematician and natural philosopher John Dee (1527-1609) to

geographical studies in Tudor England has long been recognised. In particular, Dee’s role

in the maritime history of the early British empire as an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I

(1558-1603) and to overseas explorers has been given careful attention.1 Dee also

maintained a friendly correspondence with Continental geographers and cosmographers,

and it is likely that such ties provided a significant channel for the movement of new

ideas and practices in mathematics and geography into England. Dee expressed many of

these ideas (and recorded his friendships with leading geographers) in his ‘Mathematicall

Praeface’ to the first English translation of Euclid’s Elementa Geometrica in 1570.2 As a

consequence, it has been argued that Dee was instrumental not only in promoting the

appreciation of geography but also the related practices of surveying and map-making in

England during the second half of the sixteenth century.3

In a similar fashion, Christopher Saxton (1542/4-1610/11) is widely considered an

important figure in the history of English cartography, largely on the strength of his set of

scale-maps of the counties of England which were issued separately after 1574 and

published in one volume in 1579.4 Saxton’s contemporaries may also have appreciated

his importance since it was the Lord Treasurer William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-98)

2

who sponsored Saxton, through the offices of Thomas Seckford, a contemporary of

Burghley’s at Gray’s Inn, to undertake a thorough national survey.5 Burghley himself

drew up maps of the troublesome Anglo-Scottish Border and the rebellious areas of the

diocese of Durham in the 1560s, and he used Saxton’s county maps as the basis for

domestic policy in the last decade of his life.6

Saxton’s maps also had less explicitly political or governmental uses. For

example, these carefully engraved productions seem to have encouraged landowners to

commission scale-maps to accompany written surveys of their lands. Versions of

Saxton’s county maps also accompanied the increasing number of chorographical (i.e.

topographical-historical) descriptions of the British Isles and its individual counties

which appeared from the end of the sixteenth century: most notably the 1607 folio edition

of William Camden’s (1551-1623) influential Britannia (first published in 1586). Saxton

was rewarded for his services with an estate in his native Yorkshire, and he spent the last

two decades of his life working as a surveyor in and around his home at Dunningley, near

Halifax. Saxton’s clients in Yorkshire during this period included Sir George Savile, and

it was a distant relation of this man who introduced Saxton to Dee, recently appointed

warden of the fractious and Puritan Christ’s College in Manchester.

Since Dee and Saxton contributed so significantly to the ‘cartographic revolution’

of the sixteenth century it is of some interest to historians that during the summer of 1596

Dee was visited by Saxton who spent at least four days making a survey of the town of

Manchester.7 This episode has naturally given rise to some speculation for, apart from a

‘plat of the Towne of Dewesbury’ and its river and waterways completed in 1600, it is

the only known town survey undertaken by Saxton. Secondly, the map, if it were found

3

or could be reconstructed, would be a valuable document in the neglected history of early

modern Manchester. Finally, the survey demonstrates that Dee’s mathematical,

geographical, and chorographical interests, most succinctly expressed in his 1570 preface

to Euclid, were still strong. The survey has never surfaced and since much of the

evidence pertaining to it and to Dee’s later life has been ignored or misinterpreted by

historians many mysteries remain, not least the question of who commissioned the survey

and for what reason. In this paper, some attempt is made to solve these mysteries by

providing new evidence for Dee’s activities in Manchester, new light on Saxton’s

involvement with Dee, and a fuller appreciation of the role of the lynchpin in the

enterprise: ‘Mr Harry Savill’.

The Survey

The surviving contemporary evidence for the survey can be rapidly reviewed. On 14 June

1596 Dee noted in his diary (actually an edition of Ioannes Stadius’ Ephemerides Novae)

that ‘Mr Harry Savill, the Antiquary cam to me’.8 In the margin of this page, next to the

printed date 15 June he simply wrote: ‘Christopher Saxton’, but on the facing page

alongside the printed dates 15 and 16 June he noted: ‘I wrote by Mr Harry Savill of the

bonk dwelling at hallyfax, to Christopher Saxton, ad Dunningley’. Against 5 July he

entered: ‘Mr Savill and Mr Saxton cam’, and on the following day: ‘I, Mr Saxton and

Arthur Rowland John and Richard to Howgh Hall’. Against the 10 and 11 July Dee

wrote: ‘Manchester town described and measured by Mr Christopher Saxton’, and he

inserted lines by the two following dates, presumably to indicate that the description and

4

measurement occupied those days as well. Finally, on 14 July Dee noted: ‘Mr Saxton

rode way –’. A month later Dee himself rode out to Halifax, probably to see Savile,

before visiting York where he spent about a week, most likely to discuss collegiate

business with the Archbishop.9

There is a brief, but suggestive coda to this episode. Two very different gifts from

Savile and Saxton reached Dee in Manchester the following year. Savile sent ‘two lings

and two haberdines’ (‘Aberdeen’ fish, i.e. cod) from Lichfield in January 1597: a useful,

if rather prosaic, present for Dee who was complaining about his poverty and poor table

at this time.10 On or about 13 March 1597 Dee received a less immediately practical gift

from Christopher Saxton: a twelfth-century copy of Boethius’s De Arithmetica which had

once belonged to the Franciscans of Doncaster. Dee made a careful and precise

inscription in the manuscript: ‘[Joannis Dee de dono] Christophori Saxton [chorographi

Angliae] Anno 1597. Martij. 13o Mancestriae: in comitatu Lancastriae’.11 Obviously,

Dee’s description of Saxton as ‘the chorographer of England’ indicates his admiration or

recognition of the surveyor for his work in the 1570s, and the provenance of the

manuscript itself indicates that Saxton, like Savile and Dee, collected medieval

manuscripts.

Christ’s College of Manchester

It is usually assumed that Dee’s diary references to the activities of Saxton in Manchester

indicate that the latter produced a town plan along the lines of his contemporary John

Speed (1551/2-1629), whose draft English town maps of the following decade have

5

recently come to light.12 While the town of Manchester might have been ‘described and

measured’ without a scale-map, just as written surveys of estates and manors without

maps were common in the first half of the century, Dee’s use of the term ‘described’,

echoing the ‘descripsit’ that follows Saxton’s name on his county maps of the 1570s

suggests that a map was the intended outcome. Moreover, Saxton was one of those

English surveyors in the latter part of the century who frequently drew up scale-maps of

land to accompany written surveys, especially where there was a dispute over boundaries

or rights.

One institution troubled with disputes over boundaries and rights at this time was

the Christ’s College of Manchester, where Dee was Warden. The college had been

founded in 1421 by the lord and rector of the manor to supply the parish church with a

resident community of chantry priests and with a warden to fulfil the duties of rector. In

the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries it was embellished with some very fine

buildings, but it was dissolved in 1547 and the property acquired by the Earl of Derby.

Although the college was refounded by Queen Mary in 1553, dissolved again by

Elizabeth I and refounded in 1578 as Christ’s College with fellows who served in the

parish church the buildings remained in hands of the earls of Derby (whose forebears

were wardens between 1481 and 1506) while much of its land was acquired by the

Crown and then leased.13

The college’s legal disputes over land, tithes, and entry fines were the inherited

results of this dispersal of the collegiate lands and tithes at the dissolution of the original

chantry college. Like much ecclesiastical property in England after the dissolution the

collegiate lands had tumbled into royal hands and had been leased to local landowners

6

even if the lands were already subject to existing leases. After the refoundation of the

college as an Anglican institution in 1578 the lessees were unwilling to pay higher rents

or give up their rights. At the end of the century Warden Dee and the seven fellows of the

college found their inadequate clerical incomes further eroded by inflation. Consequently,

Dee and the fellows sought to preserve or maximise their existing tithe income in a

variety of ways, which often included the use of surveys and maps. For example, Dee led

a traditional beating of the parish bounds and the production of a carefully surveyed map

in 1597. Dee and the fellows also sued for their rights to tithe income in a variety of

courts: the diocesan consistory court in Chester; the manorial court of Newton, over

which Dee presided within a couple of months of arriving in Manchester; and the Court

of Duchy Chamber in London, which employed written surveys of the areas in dispute.14

At precisely the same time that Saxton was working on the survey of Manchester

Dee was embroiled in disputes over college lands in the neighbouring township of

Salford. It was also at this moment that a ‘commission for the College’ was sent to

London to be engrossed in the Duchy of Lancaster office -- perhaps on the same matter.15

However, it may equally well have been an attempt to settle another long running dispute

over lands on Theale Moor around Nuthurst in the township of Moston, about five miles

from Manchester.16 Certainly, a special commission in this matter was formed on the

authority of the Duchy Chamber in 1598.17 This commission has survived, and it appears

that it was to look into the ‘great decay and poore estate of the foresaid Christs Colledg

[sic] in Manchester’, and to determine what belonged to the college and what had been

detained. The six special commissioners -- including Dee -- were to ‘enquire, survey,

search, and try out the yearly value quality and quantity of all the mannors lands’

7

belonging to the college, and could call in documents and take statements from witnesses

in order to do so. The ‘[r]ecord of survey made by our late dearly beloved Counsellor

Walter Mildmay Knight (then our principall Auditor)’ was noted.18 However, for better

information a jury of twenty ‘honest and sufficient gentlemen’ made a perambulation on

Theale Moor, viewed the boundary and gave a verdict favourable to the college, and

interrogatories were made of five men regarding ‘the lymytte and bounde of the parishe

of Manchester uppon Theylemore’.

In a similar fashion, Dee led the Rogationtide beating of the bounds of the parish

of Manchester in May 1597.19 The procession on the third Rogation day took in Theale

Moor. Dee advised the rector of the neighbouring parish in advance that these bounds

were ‘now in laying out, and by exact workmanship to be drawn into a plat, or Charte:

(uppon diverse waighty causes)’. Dee requested that ‘some one, or two, of the auncient of

your parish, to be allso beholders of our bownds notifying’ in that place by the order ‘of

an enioyned worke by the higher powres: for avoyding of undue encroaching of any

neighborly parish, one on the other’.20 This ‘survey geometrical of the very circuits of

Manchester parish’ took six days for the ‘workfolks’ to complete, and it allowed Dee to

inspect the stakes placed at its bounds and to determine where the college’s parish

boundary touched that of the rector of Prestwich’s parish. Dee himself visited the ‘three

corner stake’ placed by the parish boundary and he ascertained, in a way consonant with

the practices approved by contemporary surveyors, the precise length (six feet three

inches) of the ‘stick’ used by ‘Mr Standley’ to measure the distance from the three corner

stake to the stake in the bank of a ditch near to ‘Mr Standysh’s new enclosure’.21

8

Manorial or estate surveys, increasingly accompanied by a map, were not

uncommon in the later sixteenth century, and indeed the Duchy court of Lancaster

commissioned many in the case of disputes similar to those in which the college was

involved.22 Saxton drew up maps for the Duchy of Lancaster in 1598 and 1606, and he

was also involved in boundary disputes: for example, he acted as a witness in a case

brought to the Duchy Court of Exchequer in May 1596, for which he produced a map in

September the same year.23 Therefore, it might be expected that Saxton acted in the same

capacity in one or other of the Manchester disputes. However, there is no record of his

involvement in the Theale Moor case, and in fact there is more evidence of the existence

of capable local surveyors on the ground in Manchester. For example, on 11 May 1597

Dee’s servants John Cholmeley and John Crocker surveyed ‘the way to Stopford’ (i.e. the

town of Stockport, eight miles from Manchester), probably as part of the survey of parish

limits.24 Surveyors were also at work ‘describing’ the manor of Newton, contiguous with

Manchester, although their activities provoked an ‘unlawful assembly and rout’ against

them.25 Finally, given the parlous financial state of Dee and the college an unusually

elaborate commission to survey the town’s boundaries such as this seems unlikely.26 In

any case, if such a map was drafted in 1596 why did Dee or his servants not make use of

it rather than undertake a survey ‘to be drawn into a plat, or Charte’ of disputed areas the

following May?

Nicholas Mosley

9

There may be another clue about the purpose, if not the ultimate form, of this survey in

the visit made on 6 July 1596 by Saxton, Dee and his teenage sons Arthur and Rowland,

as well as ‘John’ (probably his servant John Crocker), and ‘Richard’ (probably his

servant Richard Walkedine27) to ‘Howgh Hall’ or Hough End Hall a few miles south of

Manchester. Although Christ’s College owned the tithe-corn of Hough End and Hough

Park, it is unlikely that Dee and his companions would have visited en masse simply to

discuss yet another dispute with tenants. The presence of an experienced surveyor and

four assistants under Dee’s direction suggests that some larger project was envisaged:

possibly the survey of the manor of Manchester. Hough End Hall was the recently

constructed and fashionable residence of the new lord of the manor Nicholas Mosley

(c.1527-1612). Mosley, who had spent the previous two decades in London exporting

cloth, was a wealthy and ambitious man who served as Lord Mayor of London in 1599-

1600 and was subsequently knighted. In March 1596 Mosley and his son Rowland

acquired the manor from John Lacy of London for £3500.28 Around the same time both

men acquired the manor of Cheetham and Cheetwood, and Rowland paid £8000 to Sir

Robert Cecil (c.1563-1612) for the manors and lordships of Withington and Hough near

Manchester.29 The township of Manchester stood at the centre of the manor of

Manchester (although it was not conterminous with it).30 Therefore, the manorial ‘bookes

of surveye’ which were acquired by the new lord and presumably held at Hough End Hall

would have been useful to Saxton in his survey of the town.31

The Mosleys were building up their influence and wealth in the region, and they

had a vested interest in commissioning a survey to identify tenants and pasturage. At the

end of the sixteenth century such manorial surveys were not neutral legal or estate

10

documents but contentious representations and emblems of seignorial power. Surveyors

argued that by fixing the extent and nature of his lands with modern techniques of

geometrical survey, legal categorization of tenurial relationships, and tables of land

values the landlord could ‘improve’ his income. Traditionalists, on the other hand,

alleged that such surveys disturbed and disrupted the static order of rural society, which

rested on customs and Christian morality rather than the pull of the market and capitalist

greed.32 As a suspicious farmer in John Norden’s Surveyors Dialogue (1607) put it:

oftentimes you [i.e. surveyors] are the cause that men lose their land: and sometimes

they are abridged of such liberties as they have long used in Mannors; and customes

are altred, broken, and sometimes perverted or taken away by your meanes: And

above all, you looke into the values of mens lands, whereby the Lords of Mannors do

rack their tenants to a higher rent and rate then ever before.33

John Dee noted the connection between geometry and ‘land-measuring’ or ‘iust

measuring’ in his ‘Mathematicall Praeface’ to the first English translation of Euclid’s

Elementa Geometrica in 1570. In this preface he praised the use of surveys in

ascertaining ‘true’ land values. Dee also recognised that geographical information in the

form of maps was of wide appeal since it could complement historical and natural or

philosophical studies very well. Moreover, as he wrote in this preface: ‘some, to beautifie

their Halls, Parlers, Chambers, Galeries, Studies, or Libraries with … liketh, loveth,

getteth, and useth, Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes’.34 Estate maps were

therefore useful and decorative status symbols, especially for new landowners from

11

commerce, such as Mosley, who capitalised on inflation and the volatility of the land

market to rise up the social scale.35

Mosley certainly acted quickly to maximise his income from the manor, which

had not proved very profitable to his predecessor. A payment appears to have been made

to obtain a copy of a medieval survey of the manor of Withington, and in 1598 and 1599

Mosley reaped increased fines from this property in a way said to reflect ‘the new lord

asserting his rights’. Officers of the court leet (the manorial court) were kept sweet with

dinners and wine, and broken fences were, quite literally, mended -- perhaps indicating

trouble with commoners unhappy with the ways in which Mosley was reviving old rights

or inventing new ones to his advantage.36 In 1602 the burgesses of Manchester claimed

that Mosley had worked ‘to alter, overthrowe and chaunge all the auncient priviledges,

usages and customs’ such as common pasturage in 100 acres of Collyhurst, which had

hitherto benefited the burgesses and the town as a place of recreation, shooting,

mustering troops, and the placing of cabins for plague victims.37 Mosley pointed out that

the burgesses themselves had enclosed common land, and in 1603 he saw off a riotous

group which threw down hedges and broke closes.38

Mosley therefore had the money and the motive to commission an extensive new

survey from a prestigious surveyor such as Saxton. It is just possible that Mosley may

have wished for a map of an important regional centre as an expression of local pride.39

This certainly seems to have been a common inspiration behind many cartographic

enterprises, as the frequent inclusion of the arms of local gentry suggests. However, there

is one obvious objection to both these theories. Given that Dee specified in his diary that

Saxton described and measured neither the manor nor the parish but only the ‘town’,

12

neither Mosley nor the college would have found the map entirely adequate for their

purposes.40 Perhaps Dee used the term in its medieval sense of any enclosed area,

whether of land or buildings.41 Perhaps Saxton intended to return and complete the job.42

However, another, more compelling explanation for what went on in the summer of 1596

is suggested by Dee’s acknowledgement the following year of Saxton as the

‘chorographer of England’, a description which encompasses Saxton’s topographical

achievements of the 1570s and also places him in the same tradition as William Camden

who first praised Saxton’s expertise in ‘chorography’ in his 1586 edition of Britannia,

and later declared himself to be a chorographer rather than a ‘Historiographer’: that is to

say, interested in topography and antiquities but wary of historical controversy.43 Apart

from Saxton’s published maps there is little other evidence for his interests, but a closer

examination of the involvement of Dee and Savile in chorography and its closely allied

field of antiquarianism may help to illuminate this aspect of the survey.

Chorography

In his ‘Mathematicall Praeface’ of 1570 Dee outlined the principal mathematical sciences

of arithmetic and geometry and their ‘artes’ or ‘derivatives’, which were the practical

applications of this knowledge. Three of the principal arts derived from geometry were

‘Geodesie’ or measuring and surveying land; geography or the description and

representation of land in maps or globes for decorative or scholarly purposes; and

chorography, or ‘Topographie’. Dee wrote that as well as simply being adornments to the

hall, gallery, study, or library, maps could also be useful to some people in the study of:

13

thinges past, as battels fought, earthquakes, heavenly fyringes, & such occurentes,

in histories mentioned: therby lively, as it were, to vewe the place, the region

adioyning, the distance from us: and such other circumstances. Some other,

presently to vewe the large dominion of the Turke: the wide Empire of the

Moschovite: and the litle morsell of ground, where Christendome (by profession)

is certainly knowen … Some, either for their owne iorneyes directing into farre

landes: or to understand of other mens travailes.44

Dee further explained that:

Chorographie seemeth to be an underling, and a twig, of Geographie: and yet

neverthelesse, is in practise manifolde, and in use very ample. This teacheth

Analogically to describe a small portion or circuite of ground, with the contentes:

not regarding what commensuration it hath to the whole, or any parcell, without

it, contained. But in the territory or parcell of ground which it taketh in hand to

make description of, it leaveth out (or undescribed) no notable, or odde thing,

above the ground visible. Yea and sometimes, of thinges under ground, geveth

some peculier marke: or warning: as of Mettall mines, Cole pittes, Stone quarries.

&c. Thus, a Dukedome, a Shiere, a Lordship, or lesse, may be described

distinctly. But marveilous pleasant, and profitable it is, in the exhibiting to our

eye, and commensuration, the plat of a Citie, Towne, Forte, or Pallace, in true

Symmetry: not approaching to any of them: and out of Gunne shot. &c.45

14

Dee’s practical involvement in ‘geodesy’ or surveying in Manchester in the fifteen-

nineties has already been noted. However, Dee also made use of geography as a tool of

Tudor government and imperial expansion, or what he called ‘this British discovery and

recovery enterprise’.46 For example, Dee cited King Arthur’s conquests of Greenland and

the Northern Isles in order to promote Queen Elizabeth’s claims there.47 Such claims

were accompanied, and to a large extent encouraged, by the growing Tudor interest in

British history, in which both geography and chorography played key roles. Establishing

the ancient nature of English towns and the pre-Norman and pre-Roman origins of

Britain as a foundation of Brutus the Trojan, whose sons ruled England, Scotland, and

Wales, was a matter of national pride and political significance at this time. Myths about

Brutus, Arthur, and finally the retreat of the Britons to Wales and Cornwall after their

defeat by the Saxons and Africans were largely drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s

Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1135), and were accepted entirely or at least in part by

antiquarians: partly because they served to flatter the Tudor dynasty which had emerged

from Wales as if in fulfilment of the prophecies which form the conclusion of the work.48

The impetus for much later work in this celebratory and patriotic vein came from

John Leland’s (c. 1506-52) extensive notes of his itineraries around England. Although

they remained in manuscript for centuries, Leland’s notes proved influential and provided

his successors with a wealth of topographical and historical material as well as a model

for the county survey. In a similar way, William Lambarde’s manuscript topographical

dictionary of England (compiled 1566-70) encouraged county topography, and was

widely consulted by antiquarians although it too remained in manuscript for almost two

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centuries.49 The dictionary provided a basis for many subsequent chorographical

perambulations of the country and studies of British place-names including Lambarde’s

own Perambulation of Kent (1576; reissued 1596) in which he attempted to give an

etymology of place-names and listed the important features of the county, notably its

antiquities. In recognition of his importance William Camden sent the manuscript of his

Britannia to Lambarde. In return, many of the county chorographers forwarded

information to Camden for inclusion in successive printed editions of Britannia.50

Dee’s personal antiquarian interests were evident in 1574 when he undertook a

tour through north Wales and Cheshire noting the epitaphs and tombs, inscriptions, and

ecclesiastical remains which he discovered along the way.51 There is also some evidence

that twenty years later Dee was recovering and recording manuscripts, inscriptions, and

other remains or ‘monuments’ relating to Roman Manchester and the medieval origins

and history of Christ’s College. Shortly before his departure for Manchester Dee asked a

protégé of Camden, the antiquarian Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631) to spare his writer

or scribe for a few days to give his ‘cownsayle’ and ‘to write [i.e. copy] an old recorde of

the first foundacion of Manchester Colledge’.52 Sometime after 1600 Dee informed his

old friend Camden about a Roman inscription found near Manchester, which Camden

incorporated into his description of ancient ‘Mancunium’ in the 1607 edition of

Britannia.53

At some point between 1603 and 1609 Dee may have used these materials to

compose a series of short biographies of the wardens of Manchester College from the

fifteenth century to his own time. The original manuscript, once in the Manchester

collegiate church archives, seems to have been destroyed in the Great Fire of London in

16

1666 but in the seventeenth century a transcription of the original or a copy was made.

The lost manuscript clearly dates to Dee’s time at Manchester since it was not compiled

in annalistic fashion, has a uniformity of style and structure, and the entry for Dee (the

last in the series) runs: ‘He is now Warden and hath beene this good while, he is the King

his Mathamatitian’. This latter claim is one which only Dee is known to have made.54

Moreover, Dee’s authorship of the manuscript seems likely given the mixture of concern

with pedigree, primary documentation (letters patent as well as ‘Records of the Towre [of

London]’ are mentioned), and memorial inscriptions found there.55 If this is the case, it is

just possible that Dee was planning to contribute to the ecclesiastical history of Great

Britain projected by Cotton in November 1604, but equally possible that he intended to

interest Camden with his findings or provide the basis for a more thorough

chorographical description of the town and the region.56

British interest in national history seems to have reached a peak in the fifteen-

nineties which was to be unmatched for forty years.57 Dee certainly encountered

manifestations of this in Manchester: he lent a local man his copy of the second volume

of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587).58 He also met Thomas Holcroft, whose

library list for 1616 has survived and contains a mixture of modern works of history and

antiquarianism in English, Spanish, Italian, and Latin.59 Dee himself may have turned to

the history of the wardens in order to remind the obstreperous college fellows of the

traditions, past achievements and additions to the fabric and spiritual life of the college,

of which they were the heirs.60 If only finances and fellows would allow, he may have

implied here, the college might experience a sort of spiritual renaissance; or at the very

least he might save ‘popish’ tombs and inscriptions from neglect or iconoclastic Puritan

17

vandalism of the sort that he witnessed more than once in his lifetime.61 Dee’s attention

to chorography more broadly may also indicate that some of his other interests, such as

alchemy and angelic conversations, were of necessity relatively constrained at this time:

Lesley Cormack has argued that chorography and local history seem to have been the

preserve of men who were ‘often isolated, by geography, finances, or religion, from the

main community of scholars’.62

‘Mr Harry Savill’

The chorographical and antiquarian elements of the survey may be further illuminated by

paying some attention to Dee’s visitor and intermediary with Saxton in 1596. He was

described by Dee as ‘Mr Harry Savill, the Antiquary’ and as ‘Mr Harry Savill of the

bonk’. This may be a reference to Henry Savile of Blaithroyd ‘alias the Banke’ (d. 1607),

who lived at Southowram Bank (in the parish of Halifax), and subsequently at Shawhill

in Skircoat (a township of Halifax).63 Dee may also (or alternatively) have been referring

to his son ‘long’ Harry or Henry Savile (1568-1617), also known as ‘of the Bank’.64 In

any case, both Saviles shared an interest in antiquities and ancient history which Dee

would have found congenial. The elder Henry knew William Camden who may have

visited him at Halifax in 1582.65 A few years later Savile lent Camden a manuscript of

Asser’s Life of Alfred containing a spurious passage establishing the pre-Alfredian origins

of the University of Oxford.66 This Savile also lent ‘an olde booke’ to the antiquarian

John Stow (1524/5-1605) in 1577, and was in correspondence with him about the

imminent publication of medieval chronicles by Lord William Howard and the state of

18

Robert Hare’s work on the ancient privileges of the University of Oxford.67 It appears

that sometime between 1584 and 1589 Savile acquired the library of John Nettleton,

which was largely made up of books and manuscripts collected from the library of the

dissolved Byland Abbey in Yorkshire by Robert Barker (d. 1581), the vicar of Driffield.68

Many of these books and manuscripts were passed from father to son. The

younger Henry Savile’s library catalogue has survived and shows that many of these

manuscripts and books related to early British history, as well as to another topic of great

interest to Dee: alchemy.69 Moreover, some of the manuscripts bear Dee’s mark of

ownership, which indicates some exchange of manuscripts between Dee and the

Saviles.70 The antiquarian habits of the younger Savile also extended into the field. Henry

Savile ‘the yonger’ wrote to William Camden some time around 1600 describing a visit

to see Roman antiquities at Ilkley in Yorkshire. Savile noted that Camden had not seen

two ancient stones on his last visit there (in 1599) and, as promised, Savile had been to

record them. Savile wrote: ‘I portrayed one of them w[hi]ch was embossed with picturs,

and the other I copyed out w[hi]ch was engraven, both w[hi]ch I saw sent you here

inclosed.’ He went on: ‘I was at Bolton Abbey and found many armes of the nobilitie’

embossed in stone, and he asked Camden to ‘remember the gravestone (in your next

edition) … I toke paynes to drawe it as exactlie as I could’.71 Camden incorporated only

one of these illustrations in his 1600 edition of Britannia, while the other appeared in the

1607 edition of the growing work.72 Further evidence, especially relevant to this paper, of

Henry Savile the younger’s practical fieldwork, antiquarianism, and draftsmanship has

recently come to light in the form of a fairly elaborate engraved map of Bath c. 1600.

This map, signed ‘H. Savile’, features the principal baths in the town in separate

19

cartouches and incorporates a text based on Camden’s Britannia in which Savile records

the etymology of the town name, describes its setting and early history, and discusses the

process of bathing in the therapeutic springs.73 Savile was licensed to practise physic in

1601, and this project would therefore have conveniently combined many of his personal

and professional interests.74

It seems most likely then that Dee became acquainted with both Saviles through

Camden. Indeed, Dee also knew their distant relations Sir Henry (1549-1622), Warden of

Merton College and subsequently Provost of Eton, and his brother Thomas (d. 1593) who

displayed considerable scholarly expertise in mathematics, astronomy and

antiquarianism.75 Given this network of men with shared interests in which Camden

played a key role, might the Manchester survey have been intended for use in a future

edition of the Britannia ? Secondly, given that some of these Saviles can be tied closely

to the Society of Antiquaries which Camden and his younger colleague Robert Cotton

founded in 1586, might the survey have been connected with the activities of that society

in any way?

It is generally acknowledged that Britannia and the Society of Antiquaries were

both concerned with surveying and chorography and thereby stimulated shire history and

the production of town plans.76 The edition of Camden’s Britannia published in 1607

included versions of John Norden’s and Christopher Saxton’s county maps as well as

engravings of epitaphs and Roman inscriptions, coins, and other illustrations. In turn,

Camden’s work formed the basis for much of John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of

Great Britain published in 1611-12. Speed, who was responsible for printing the coins in

the 1600 edition of Britannia, drew on Robert Cotton’s collection of coins and papers,

20

including a map of Huntingdonshire, as well as on Henry Spelman’s map of Norfolk,

Saxton’s maps, plans by John Norden and William Smith, and even the plan of Bath by

‘H. Savile’.77

Speed and Smith, if not Dee or Saxton, were both associated with the Society of

Antiquaries by the fifteen-nineties although the society does not appear to have met

between 1594 and 1598. However, among the papers discussed in 1598 was one by

Robert Cotton on measurements of land, towns, and castles, while in the following year

papers on cities, towns, and dimensions of land were presented and discussed.78 The

attention to towns would obviously have been congenial to Speed, and to other members

such as William Lambarde, and John Stow whose A Survey of London first appeared in

1598 and was reissued the following year. Moreover, given the existence of a plan of

Bath probably surveyed by Henry Savile the younger, and considering Savile’s

antiquarian interests more generally, Dee’s diary reference to ‘Mr Harry Savill, the

Antiquary’ may take on an additional meaning -- it may indicate one or both Saviles’

involvement in the Society of Antiquaries. It seems most likely that the younger Henry

would be connected with the Society since he was resident in London after his graduation

from Oxford and tour of the Continent in c. 1595.79 On a list of members compiled by

one the founders, Sir Henry Spelman, is a note of: ‘Mr Savill of ye Midle Temple’.80

Unfortunately for this hypothesis, this Savile was probably Henry (1579/80-1632), son of

Sir John, who entered the Middle Temple in 1593.81 Thomas and a Henry Savile also

appear on a list compiled c. 1631-45, but at present neither of the Henry Saviles involved

with Dee, or with Saxton and the survey, can be securely identified with the Henry Savile

on this list.82

21

Conclusion

The 1596 survey of Manchester town seems to have disappeared very quickly.83 The

survey’s precise purpose may never be known, but through this reconstruction of a

midsummer’s work with Savile and Saxton, servants and children, some aspects of

Saxton’s later career and of Dee’s Mancunian life may be recreated, and a tentative

scenario can now be sketched. Henry Savile the elder, learning of Dee’s recent arrival in

the North and having friends such as Camden, and interests such as antiquarianism in

common, paid Dee a visit. It is possible that Savile hoped to purchase some of Dee’s

manuscripts, and more than likely that Dee was willing to sell them given his financial

difficulties. It may have been at this meeting that Savile mentioned that the map-maker

and surveyor Saxton was a neighbour, and that he had undertaken estate surveys for

various relatives. Accordingly, Dee wrote to Saxton inviting him to visit Manchester and

to survey it. Perhaps this chorographical exercise was part of a project begun by Dee to

record the antiquities of Manchester and its region, or possibly a more ambitious Saxton

envisaged a lucrative sequel to his successful county atlas: a purely English counterpart

to Braun and Hogenberg’s famous Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572-82).84

Either project would certainly have provided Dee with a pleasant distraction from

his ‘Cares & Cumbers for the Colledge affaires’.85 It would also have been in accord with

Dee’s own interests, and may have been prompted by the marked fashion for such

exercises in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Many of the men connected with

Dee and Savile undertook such projects themselves or formed part of a new audience

22

eager to read about their locality. In fact, there may have been more than one readership

in mind: possibly the new lord of the manor, Nicholas Mosley, whose house they visited

to consult medieval records, or even the College. In any case, the survey allowed Dee,

Saxton, and Savile to exercise their considerable skills in surveying and in fieldwork.

These skills, as we have seen, were not only vital to the social, political, and economic

life of Reformation Manchester but also important elements in the construction of the

‘spatial ideology’ of the town, just as they were more generally to the construction of

cultural memory and the historical self-fashioning of England in the Elizabethan age.86

23

* I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Manchester European Research Institute,

Manchester Metropolitan University for the cost of research trips to London, Oxford, and Cambridge. For

their help with references or other matters I am also grateful to John Adams, Peter Barber, Sarah Bendall,

Clare Hartwell, Matthew Hyde, Christopher Hunwick, Jean Manco, Michael Powell, Jurek Pütter, Lord

Ravensdale, and William Sherman. I have also benefited immensely from the superb resources of the Local

Collection in MMU library. Note: I use the modern term ‘Mancunian’ in this paper as the adjectival form

for Manchester although Dee and his contemporaries would have used the terms ‘Mancestrian’ or

‘Mamcestrian’.

1 E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485-1583 (1930), chs 5-7; Antoine de Smet, ‘John Dee et sa place

dans l’histoire de la cartographie’, in My Head is a Map: Essays & Memoirs in Honour of R. V. Tooley, ed.

Helen Wallis and Sarah Tyacke (1973), pp. 107-13; and William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of

Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, 1995).

2 John Dee, ‘Mathematicall Praeface’, in THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRIE of the most auncient

Philosopher EVCLIDE of Megara … With a very fruitfull Praeface made by M. I. Dee, specifying the chiefe

Mathematicall Sciences, What they are, and whereunto commodious: where, also, are disclosed certaine

new Secrets Mathematicall and Mechanicall, untill these our daies greatly missed (London, John Daye,

1570).

3 The influence of Dee and his ‘Mathematicall Praeface’ to Euclid is acknowledged by William Bourne in

various editions of his Regiment for the Sea after 1573: see Taylor, Tudor Geography, p. 156; Sherman,

John Dee, p. 41. Note also that in his dialogue on surveying Edward Worsop discusses Dee’s preface to

Euclid with approbation and asserts that Dee is ‘accounted of the learned Mathematicians throughout

Europe ye prince of Mathematicians of this age’: Edward Worsop, A Discoverie of sundrie errours and

faults daily committed by Landemeaters, ignorant of Arithmetike and Geometrie, to the damage and

preiudice of many of her Maiesties subjects, with manifest proofe that none ought to be admitted to that

function, but the learned practitioners of those Sciences. Written Dialoguewise (London, Printed by Henrie

Middleton for Gregorie Seton, 1582), sig. G3v. Dee’s influence is discussed in Lesley B. Cormack,

Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620 (Chicago, 1997), passim.

24

4 On Saxton’s career see principally Ifor M. Evans and Heather Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, Elizabethan

Map-Maker (Wakefield and London, 1979); and, more succinctly, Sarah Tyacke and John Huddy,

Christopher Saxton and Tudor Map-Making (1980). On Saxton and his place in the ‘cartographic

revolution’ of the sixteenth century see P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (1993), pp. 54-65, 113;

and Victor Morgan, ‘The Cartographic Image of “The Country” in Early Modern England’, Transactions of

the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXIX (1979), 129-54.

5 Tyacke and Huddy, Christopher Saxton, pp. 24-31.

6 For example, see Joseph Gillow, Lord Burghley’s Map of Lancashire in 1590. With notes on the

Designated Manorial Lords, Biographical and Genealogical, and Brief Histories of their Estates traced

down to the Present Day (1907). The map seems to have been intended as a guide to men who were, or

who would make, reliable J.P.s in the county. A coloured version on vellum, possibly drawn up for the

Privy Council and showing the boundaries of the hundreds, churches, chapels, and seats of gentry with

names (a very few have been boxed in ink, but otherwise they are unmarked) is in the National Archives:

Public Record Office, MPF 1/123 (extracted from the Secretary of State’s papers in NA: PRO, State

Papers, SP 12/235, item 5). In a similar fashion, during the build-up to the reception of the Spanish troops

in 1588 Burghley annotated Saxton’s county maps with lists of J.P.s, and on maps of the vulnerable coastal

counties he added the names of local gentlemen and made notes on ordnance stores, divisions of the county

for military purposes, and ‘companies and numbers’. Burghley’s copy of Saxton’s engraved map of

Lancashire is accompanied by a list of J.P.s sworn in November 1592. See R. A. Skelton and J.

Summerson, A Description of Maps and Architectural Drawings in the Collection made by William Cecil

first Baron Burghley now at Hatfield House (Oxford, 1971), esp. pp. 21, 25-28. In general, see Peter

Barber, ‘England I: Pageantry, Defense and Government: Maps at Court to 1550’ and ‘England II:

Monarchs, Ministers and Maps 1550-1625’, in Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of

Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, 1992), pp.

26-98.

7 On the survey see the judicious summary in Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, p. 100.

8 Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 487. Microfilm. Most subsequent references to Dee’s diary in this article

are to the modern spelling edition of the text: The Diaries of John Dee, ed. Edward Fenton (Charlbury,

25

1998) [hereafter cited as Dee, Diaries]. This edition is not definitive, and I have compared all entries with

those given in original orthography (although omitting Dee’s astrological symbols, which Fenton provides)

in the annotated and generally reliable text of the Manchester diary edited in six parts by John Eglington

Bailey, ‘Dr John Dee, Warden of Manchester (1595 to 1608)’, Local Gleanings: an archaeological and

historical magazine chiefly relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, I (1-6) (1879), and occasionally with the

original MS. A separate edition of the diary, limited to twenty copies, was also privately printed: Diary, for

the years 1595-1601, of Dr. John Dee, Warden of Manchester from 1595-1608. Edited, from the Original

MSS. in the Bodleian Library by John Eglington Bailey (n. p., 1880).

9 Dee, Diaries, 13, 20 Aug. 1596.

10 I intend to examine Dee’s religious and economic troubles in Manchester during 1596- c.1605 in a future

publication.

11 Bodl, Savile MS 20. It should be noted here that Dee always dated the beginning of the year from 1

January. The words in brackets have been partially erased in the original. The manuscript probably came

into the collection of Sir Henry Savile (1549-1622), mathematician, antiquarian and Warden of Merton

College, Oxford sometime after Dee’s death. It was given to the Bodleian Library in 1620: see John Dee’s

Library Catalogue, ed. Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (1990), p. 177, D[ee] M[anuscript] 124.

12 Sarah Bendall, ‘Draft town maps for John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine’, I(mago)

M(undi), LIV (2002), 30-45. I am grateful to Dr Bendall for sending me an offprint of her article.

13 An account of the whole tangled affair is given by S. Hibbert, ‘History of the Collegiate Church of

Manchester’, in idem, History of the Foundations in Manchester of Christ’s College, Chetham’s Hospital,

and the Free Grammar School, 3 vols (Manchester, 1830), I, 82-135. See also Christopher Haigh, ‘Puritan

evangelism in the reign of Elizabeth I’, English Historical Review, XCII (1977), 41-45.

14 The records of the consistory court in Chester reveal that Dee was the complainant in nine cases during

1596 and 1597: Chester, Cheshire County Record Office, Consistory Cause Papers, EDC 5/1596, nos. 31

(versus Thomas Lowe), 32 (Thomas Travesse); EDC 5/1597, nos. 35 (Roger Sowle), 36 (John Booth), 37

(Thomas Goodyere), 38 (Robert Bourdman), 39 (Robert Brooke), 41 (George Birch), and 42 (Hugh Travers

[sic]). Dee notes his problems with Goodyere in his diary on 14 and 21 Mar. 1596. He also mentions his

problems with the tithe-corns of Hulme and Crumpsall, 20-27 Aug., 30 Aug. 1596; and records that he

26

‘stayed’ his disputes with Birch, Goodyer, Traves, and one Baxter in the Chester courts, 9 Feb. 1598. All

references to Dee, Diaries. There is a record of the plaintiffs in the Court of Duchy Chamber in Ducatus

Lancastriae pars quarta. Calendar to the Pleadings from the fourteenth year to the end of the reign of

Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London, 1834), III, 64, 80, 106, 124, 237, 265, 286, 370, 401. Suits which came

before the manorial court of Newton are given in H. T. Croften, A History of Newton Chapelry in the

Ancient Parish of Manchester, Chetham Society, new series, LIII (1904), 47-52, 63-74, 126-30. Note also

Dee, Diaries, 20 Apr. 1596. For a highly pertinent discussion of the effect on urban life of the redistribution

of ecclesiastical property in the Tudor and Stuart periods see Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the

Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c.1540-1640 (Oxford, 1998), ch. 5.

15 Dee, Diaries, 7 May, 22 and 25 Jun. 10-14 Jul. 1596; 12 Oct. 1597. Unfortunately, there is no record of

this matter in the surviving papers of the Court of Duchy Chamber in the NA: PRO.

16 There are extensive cathedral and collegiate papers relating to disputes about the commoners’ rights,

enclosures, and tithes of Theale Moor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deposited in the J(ohn)

R(ylands) U(niversity) L(ibrary) (of) M(anchester), Clowes Deeds. Note the ‘platt’ or map of 1557

covering the disputed area and the lands around Nuthurst in JRULM, Clowes Deeds, MS 636 [893], ‘A

platt or carde for the devisyon of the Theylmosse’. This has been reproduced and discussed in H. T.

Croften, ‘Moston and White Moss’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society,

XXV (1907), 32-64.

17 NA: PRO, Duchy of Lancaster, DL 44/585.

18 Ibid. This is now lost. Sir Walter Mildmay (1520?-89) was principal north auditor of the Duchy of

Lancaster between 1546 and 1589: see Robert Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster, Vol. 1. 1265-

1603 (1953), 437.

19 On Rogationtide processions see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in

England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 136-39.

20 Chetham’s Library, Manchester, MS Mun.C.6.63, Dee to William Langley, Manchester, 2 May 1597.

21 Dee, Diaries, 4 May 1597.

22 The Duchy Court used maps to settle disputes in 1531, 1560, 1564, and 1581. See Harvey, Maps in

Tudor England, pp. 107, 109-10. Several other maps related to disputes which have been extracted from

27

Duchy of Lancaster records are now in the NA: PRO. In order to resolve a dispute over taxation and troop

levies in April 1590 Middleton parish (contiguous with Manchester parish) was ‘measured, & th[o]roughly

surveighed’, but no map, if any were drawn up, survives. Preston, Lancashire Record Office, DDKE/acc.

7840, fol. 3v (pencil foliation). Saxton produced two maps of the boundary between the manors of

Wadsworth and Midgely (west of Halifax) in 1594 and 1602 for Sir George Savile who was in dispute with

John Lacy, lord of the manor of Midgely. See Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, pp. 93-99.

23 Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, pp. 99-101, 105-06, 118-19.

24 Cholmeley was clearly a man of some education: he borrowed Dee’s copy of Hieronymus Mercurialis,

De morbis puerorum (1583) on 15 Apr. 1597; and on 15 Sept. he went with one of Dee’s creditors ‘to give

him and [an]other physic’. Crocker had been Dee’s servant at least since 1583; and indeed he was

described as ‘my good servant’ and given leave to visit his parents until the following Easter or

Whitsuntide on 30 Sept. 1597. All references to Dee, Diaries.

25 Ibid., 14-16 Jun. 1597.

26 Saxton was paid 6s. 8d. per day while employed as a surveyor by St Thomas’ Hospital, London in 1587-

93: see Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, pp. 81-82. Unless he waived it, his fee for a week’s work

in Manchester would therefore have amounted to £2 6s. 8d.

27 Walkedine had a bill preferred against him in the sessions on the matter of the Salford lands in Oct. 1597:

see Dee, Diaries, 12 Oct. 1597. The relevant quarter sessions records are no longer extant.

28 T. S. Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, CS, 3rd series, XXVII (1980), 8-9.

29 The impressive extent of Mosley’s wealth and lands is revealed in his will of 1612 printed in John

Booker, A History of the Ancient Chapels of Didsbury and Chorlton, CS, old series, XLII (1857), 131-40.

There is a mildly satirical epitaph on Mosley suggesting sharp practice and miserliness, as well as fabulous

wealth, in the British Library, Harleian MSS, 2113, fol. 121v. This has been printed in Oswald Mosley,

Family Memoirs (n.p., printed privately, 1849), Appendix 2. The deeds relating to the Withington sale are

in Manchester Central Reference Library, Archives Department, Egerton MSS, M31/1/1/17-27. Cecil made

a handsome profit from this sale: he had purchased the land from Sir William Hatton in July 1595 for only

£2660.

28

30 Arthur Redford, assisted by Ina Stafford Russell, The History of Local Government in Manchester, vol. I,

Manor and Township (1939), Part 1, esp. chs. 1-3. The township comprised of 1,646 acres, and measured

roughly two miles by three at its widest points: see Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, pp. 3-4.

31 The Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester, ed. J. P. Earwaker, 12 vols (Manchester, 1884), II,

110 n. I owe this insight to Peter Barber who was kind enough to discuss the matter with me. Several

surviving medieval surveys have been edited and published: Mamecestre: being chapters from the early

recorded history of the barony; the lordship or manor; the vill, borough, or town, of Manchester, vol. III,

ed. John Harland, CS, old series, LVIII (1862), 476-532 (rental of manor of Manchester, May 1473); and

Three Lancashire Documents of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries … CS, old series, LXXIV (1868).

32 Andrew McRae, ‘To Know One’s Own: estate surveying and the representation of the land in early

modern England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, LVI (1993), 332-57.

33 John Norden, The Surveyors Dialogue. Divided into five Bookes: Very profitable for all men to peruse,

that have to do with the revenues of land, or the manurance, use, or occupation thereof: as also and

especially for such as indevor to be seene in the faculty of surveying of Mannors, Lands, Tenements, &c.

(London, Printed for Hugh Astley, dwelling at S. Magnus Corner, 1607), p. 3.

34 Dee, ‘Mathematicall Praeface’, in Elements of Geometrie, sig. aiiijr.

35 P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Estate surveyors and the spread of the scale-map in England, 1550-80’, Landscape

History, XV (1993), 37-49. Saxton drew up a written survey and map for a new landowner in 1599: see

Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, pp. 108-09.

36 Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, pp. 9-17. For comparable examples of gentleman – especially

newcomers like Mosley – exploiting tenants see Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England

and Wales, 1500-1700 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 103-16, 123-25.

37 Claim to the Duchy Court by the burgesses quoted in Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, p. 12.

38 Ibid. Compare the Midlands revolt of 1607 against the enclosure of arable land for pasture farming which

resulted in the destruction of enclosures across a wide area and the consequent prosecution of the

ringleaders for treason. On revolts in general see Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early

Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002).

29

39 There is no evidence for Mosley’s chorographical interests. He appears in Stow’s A survay of London as

a mayor indifferent to the treatment of the Cheapside Cross: see J. Stow, A survay of London, rev. edn

(1603); repr. with introduction by C. L. Kingsford as A survey of London, 2 vols (Oxford, 1908); repr. with

addns (Oxford, 1971), I, 267. Perhaps his Puritanism was at the root of this neglect: Daniel Woolf has

noted how the cross suffered frequently from ‘unofficial vandalism’ before its final destruction by Puritans

in 1643. See his The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730 (Oxford, 2003),

p. 187.

40 It is unlikely that Dee was being uncharacteristically imprecise in his use of the term ‘town’ since in May

1597 he was careful to specify that ‘Manchester parish’ was surveyed; and in Jun. 1597 Dee mentions the

hostility towards his men ‘describing the manor of Newton’ (my emphases). All references to Dee, Diaries.

41 The town, standing at the centre of the manor and containing a high fixed point (the Collegiate Church)

would have been the natural place to begin a manorial survey. Norden’s ideal surveyor asserts: ‘I hold it

most fit to beginne about the middle of the Mannor, and then to take a course, as the convenient lying of the

land will move us, or one end or side, all is one.’ See Norden, Surveyors Dialogue, p. 128. I am grateful to

Jurek Pütter for his suggestive remarks on Saxton’s likely method of surveying.

42 Saxton’s nine days in Manchester does not seem adequate when compared with his known record

elsewhere. He spent twenty-one days on a survey of six manors near Wye in Kent in 1588; fourteen days

on a survey of a farm (187 acres) and manor in Middlesex and Cambridgeshire in 1592; and just over

twenty days on a survey of the manor of Aveley in Essex in 1593: see Evans and Lawrence, Christopher

Saxton, pp. 82-84. However, John Speed spent a little more than one day in each of the towns he surveyed a

decade later: Bendall, IM, LIV, 41.

43 William Camden, Britannia, sive Florentissimorum regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, et insularum

adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio ... (London, 1586), unpaginated preface to the

reader; Camden, quoted in Stan Mendyk, ‘Early British Chorography’, (The) S(ixteenth) C(entury)

J(ournal) XVII (1986), 476. The original Latin terms used were ‘Chorographus’ and ‘historicus’: Camden,

Britannia (1607 edition), p. 261. Camden was apologising for his digression on Richard, Duke of

Gloucester since it had led him to explore manuscript material and make contentious historical judgements

rather than leaving the field to those more qualified to do so: historians.

30

44 Dee, ‘Mathematicall Praeface’, in Elements of Geometrie, sigs. aiiiv-aiiijr.

45 Ibid., sig. a.iiijr.

46 See Sherman, John Dee, esp. Part III. It is worth noting here that in an undated letter to John Stow Dee

supplied a list of the Cinque Ports and their burgesses, and directed Stow to a ‘very true plat’ of one or

more of them in the possession of Lord Cobham’s secretary: BL, Harl. MSS, 374, fol. 15, Dee to Stow, 5

Dec. [1592?]. Peter French dates this letter to 4 Dec. 1592 although Dee simply dates it ‘in hast this 5. [a

correction of the diagonal and horizontal strokes of a ‘4’] of Decemb.’: see Peter J. French, John Dee: The

World of an Elizabethan Magus (1972), p. 206, and Plate 16 where the letter is clearly reproduced. In fact,

Dee visited Lord and Lady Cobham in London around this time: Dee, Diaries, 21, 22 Aug. 1592.

47 BL, Harl. MSS, 249, fols 95r-105r, Dee to Sir Edward Dyer, Manchester, 8 Sept. 1597.

48 T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (1950), esp. ch. 3.

49 William Lambarde, Dictionarium Angliae Topographicum & Historicum: An alphabetical description of

the chief places in England and Wales; with an account of the most memorable events which have

distinguished them (London, 1730), p. 216 (on Manchester).

50 Mendyk, SCJ, XVII, 464-81. John Norden cited Leland, if only to correct him, in the manuscript of his

1593 description of Middlesex, and he cited Camden approvingly in his 1594 work: Speculi Britanniae

Pars: An Historical and Chorographical Description of the County of Essex, ed. Sir Henry Ellis, Camden

Society, old series, IX (1840), xvii, 22, 27. In Nov. 1596 Norden acknowledged the work of Saxton:

Norden’s Preparative to his Speculum Britanniae. Intended a reconciliation of sundrie propositions by

divers persons tendred, concerning the same (London, 1596), 1.

51 Notebook in BL, Harl. MSS, 473, e.g. fols 7r-9r (notes on arms, pedigrees, and tombs in Wrexham

church). Dee had a personal interest in Welsh history since he claimed descent from Welsh royalty:

Sherman, John Dee, p. 108, Figure 6.

52 BL, Cotton MSS, Julius C III, fol. 135r, letter dated 17 Nov. 1595.

53 Camden, Britannia (1607 edition), pp. 610-11. The first English translation of Britannia appeared three

years later and the relevant passage is rendered thus: ‘In a Parke of the Earle of Derbies neere adjoyning,

called Alparke, where the Brooke Medlocke entreth into Irwell, I saw the plot and groundworke of an

ancient Fortresse built foure square, commonly called Mancastle: which I will not in any wise say, was that

31

ancient MANCUNIUM, it is contained in so narrow a peece of ground, but rather the Fort of Mancunium,

and station of the Romanes where they kept watch and ward: at which I saw this ancient Inscription in a

long stone to the memory of Candidus a Centurion. [Figure] As for this other, Iohn Dee that most famous

Mathematician, and Warden of Manchester College, who had sight of the same heere, copied it out for me

[Figure of a centurial stone set up by centuries of the First Cohort of the Frisiavones]. Both which may

seeme erected in honour of those Centurions, for their loyalty and honesty so many yeeres approoved.’

William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the Most flourishing Kingdomes, England,

Scotland, and Ireland, and the Islands adjoyning, out of the depth of Antiquities ... trans. Philemon Holland

(London, G. Bishop and J. Norton, 1610), p. 746. The addition to previous versions of the text is

underlined.

54 Dee claims that he is the ‘king’s mathematician’ in two places: John Dee, A Letter, Nine yeeres since,

written and first published: Containing a most briefe Discourse Apologetical, with a plaine demonstration,

and fervent Protestation, for the lawfull, sincere, and very Christian course, of the Philosophicall studies

and exercises, of a certaine studious Gentleman: a faithfull Servant to our late Soveraigne Lady, Queene

Elizabeth, for all the time of her Raigne: and (Anno 1603. Aug. 9) sworne Servant to the King his most

excellent Maiestie (London, 1603); and idem, To the Honorable Assemblie of the Commons in the present

Parliament (London, 1604?).

55 In 1664 William Dugdale or his amanuensis Gregory King copied ‘Exemplar cujusdam Rotuli

pergamenacei, in Bibliotheca Ecclesiae Collegiatae de Manchester existensis’ into the manuscript now in

London, College of Arms, MS Lancaster C.37, fols 168r-9r. This manuscript was consulted and first

attributed to Dee by F. R. Raines in A History of the Chantries within the County Palatine of Lancaster

being the Reports of the Royal Commissioners of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Queen Mary, 2 vols, CS, old

series, LIX-LX (1862), I, 29n. Raines later used it extensively in The Rectors of Manchester and the

Wardens of the Collegiate Church of that Town, 2 vols, CS, new series V-VI (1885), I, xvi (editor wrongly

alleges that Raines thought the MS to be in Dee’s handwriting), 17 (unattributed quotation), 19 (MS

‘written probably by Dr Dee’), 30, 33, 36-7, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 68, 72, 75, 77-8, 100; ii. 102, 110. The MS

is inconclusively discussed by H. A. Hudson, ‘A List of the Wardens of the College of Manchester, with

Remarks upon an Old MS Catalogue and an Early Printed List’, TLCAS, XXXIII (1915), 178-91. On

32

Dugdale’s visitation see George Ormerod, ‘Calendars of the Names of Families which Entered their

Several Pedigrees in the Successive Heraldic Visitations of the County Palatine of Lancaster’, in Chetham

Miscellanies, CS, old series, XXIV (1851), 11-12, 22-26; ‘A Fragment, Illustrative of Sir Wm. Dugdale’s

Visitation of Lancashire, from a Manuscript in the Possession of the Rev. F. R. Raines, M.A., F.S.A.’, in

ibid., pp. 3-8; and The Visitation of the County Palatine of Lancaster made in the Year 1664-5, by Sir

William Dugdale, Knight … ed. F. R. Raines, 3 parts in 3 vols, CS, old series, LXXXIV-V, LVIII (1872-

73).

56 Robert Cotton, ‘The State of the Church of Greate Brittain from ye first Plantat’on of Religion unto the

most happy raigne of King James with all other occurrences between the Sea of Rome and the Soveraings

of this Realme. Collected out of Publick Recordes, Popes Bulls & Breves, Originall Instructions, & other

letters of State, Ancient Histories of the Kingdome, Registers of Religious houses. The First Volume.

Ending with the entrance of K. Edward the Third.’ BL, Cotton MSS, Cleopatra E I. Dated on fol. 2r. It is

worth noting here that John Stow projected a ‘book of foundations’ in 1594, and Camden asked for the loan

of manuscripts connected with the foundation of abbeys in several counties: Barrett L. Beer, Tudor

England Observed: The World of John Stow (Stroud, 1998), pp. 9, 172-73.

57 Daniel Woolf has charted the rise and fall of this interest in reading British history in a variety of ways,

including an analysis of entries in the stationers’ register: see D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early

Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), Figure 5.7.

58 Dee, Diaries, 19 Jul. 1600.

59 Ibid., 27 Mar. 1601; ‘Catalogue of the Library of Sir Thomas Holcroft, Knight, at Vale Royal, in 1616’,

Palatine Notebook, II (1882), 164-68, 190-92.

60 Compare the suggestive remarks about notions of change and the use of the past in early-modern

England made by Woolf, Social Circulation, esp. ch. 1.

61 Ibid., pp. 94, 186-91. On outbursts of iconoclasm directed against funerary monuments between c.1540

and c.1640, see Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000),

esp. pp. 218, 246, 253-69. Dee observed the early outbreaks: ‘Everywhere statues were destroyed in the

churches’. Dee, Diaries, Oct. 1547. Dee would have found ‘iconophobia’ highly antipathetic as he sketched

his own elaborate title-pages and he praised the art of painting in his preface to Euclid: see French, John

33

Dee, pp. 151-52. For an example of Dee’s art see ibid., Plate 14. It is also worth noting that in the history of

the wardens Dee (if he is indeed the author) betrays no hint of the anti-Catholicism often found in the

works of contemporary antiquarians and historians. For example, see May McKisack, Medieval History in

the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1971), p. 136.

62 Cormack, Charting an Empire, p. 194. However, Dee’s surveying also had mystical undertones. In his

angelically-inspired ‘cabala of nature’ some of the angelic ‘princes of nature’ serving an angelic governor

of wisdom were described by Dee’s scryer as holding ‘stiks like Measures’, which Dee associated with an

expertise in geometry. See Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy,

and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 2000), p. 186. In Edward Worsop’s dialogue on surveying a servant

expresses the view that surveying, particularly the ability to measure large distances by calculation, appears

to be one of the black arts: Worsop, Discoverie of sundrie, sigs. Cr, E3v-E4r.

63 Henry Savile of Blaithroyd is called of ‘the Banke’ in the 1584/5 visitation of the Somerset Herald

Robert Glover: see The Visitation of Yorkshire made in the Years 1584/5, by Robert Glover, Somerset

Herald; to which is added the subsequent Visitation made in 1612, by Richard St. George, Norroy King of

Arms …, ed. Joseph Foster (1875), p. 329, with an authoritative note: ‘Teste me Henricus Savillus’. He is

referred to as ‘nuper de Shay hill in Skircoat’ in the administration of the will granted to his son in 1607/8:

see Andrew G. Watson, The Manuscripts of Henry Savile of Banke (1969), p. 3.

64 A single surviving bookplate on a manuscript of Henry of Huntingdon’s chronicle is inscribed ‘Henry

Savill cawled <lo>nge Henri Savell ownes this booke, He that fynddes yt let him have yt.’ This Savile’s

tomb, now destroyed, apparently recorded: ‘Imago est Henrici Savilli Genrosi ex Antiquo Savillorum de

Banco prope Halifax in Comitatu Eboracensi Familia.’ Ibid., pp. 2 n. 1, 20-21.

65 BL, Additional MSS, 36294, fol. 3r.

66 Watson, Manuscripts of Henry Savile, Appendix III.

67 BL, Harl. MSS, 542, fol. 105; BL, Harl. MSS, 374, fols 24r-25v, Henry Savile to Stow, Halifax, 1 May

[1592]; BL, Harl. MSS, 530, fol. 1, same to same, Oxford, 21 May 1592, in which Savile acknowledges

receipt at Halifax of a letter dated 10 May, and says that he is now at Oxford still looking out for Hare’s

book.

34

68 Michael Hicks, ‘John Nettleton, Henry Savile of Banke, and the Post-Medieval Vicissitudes of Byland

Abbey Library’, Northern History, XXVI (1990), 212-17.

69 Henry Savile of Banke’s autograph library catalogue has been published by J. P. Gilson, ‘The Library of

Henry Savile, of Banke’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, IX (1906-08), 127-210. This article

has been superseded by the much more detailed and supplemented list edited by Watson, Manuscripts of

Henry Savile.

70 Roberts and Watson, John Dee’s Library Catalogue, pp. 58, 160, 175; and Watson, Manuscripts of

Henry Savile, nos. 16 (work of Robert Grosseteste), 75 (late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century ‘Liber de

iudicijs astrorum’, fols 88-95 include a draft letter from Dee to William Camden, Mortlake, 7 Aug. 1574),

136 (a gloss on the theological works of Boethius), 175, 202 (both medieval ecclesisastical works), and 276

(‘Aegidius de regimine principum’).

71 BL, Cotton MSS, Julius F VI, fol. 316, Savile to Camden, ‘Sh[a]whill neare hallyfax’, 26 Aug. [1600?].

Savile signs off as ‘the yonger’ having forwarded his ‘fathers comendations’ to Camden.

72 Camden, Britannia (1600 edition), pp. 616, 620; idem, Britannia (1607 edition), pp. 567-68. In neither

case was Henry Savile’s efforts acknowledged. In fact, only Sir John Savile ‘of Medley’ (i.e. Methley

manor) (1546-1607) was praised for his contributions to Camden’s enterprise, perhaps because he was a far

more important figure than his distant relation, and possibly because Camden had been embarrassed by the

scandal of the faulty Alfredian manuscript supplied by the elder Savile. On Camden and Sir John Savile

note Leslie W. Hepple, ‘William Camden and early collections of Roman antiquities in Britain’, Journal of

the History of Collections, XV (2) (2003), 164.

73 Jean Manco, ‘Henry Savile’s Map of Bath’, Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society

Proceedings, CXXXVI (1992), 127-39. I am grateful to Ms Manco, who identifies the younger Henry as

the surveyor, for discussing this interesting map with me. It is now in a private collection.

74 Watson, Manuscripts of Henry Savile, p. 2.

75 On Thomas Savile and Camden see F. J. Levy, ‘The Making of Camden’s Britannia’, Bibliothèque

d’humanisme et Renaissance. Travaux et documents, XXVI (1964), 84-85. For their correspondence, 1582-

93 see BL, Add. MSS, 36294, fols. 3r-9r. Thomas Savile was also widely travelled and his range of

interests, including astronomy, Greek, and English antiquarianism, would also have made him congenial

35

company for Dee. On 1 Dec. 1590 the astronomer Tycho Brahe wrote to Thomas Savile: ‘Saluta quoque

meo nomine officiose nobilissimum et excellentissum dominum Johannem Dee, quem in patriam feliciter

reversum audivi, ipsique hoc nomine congratulor, omniaque prospera opto …’. He asked Savile to give

copies of his new book to Dee and Thomas Digges: see BL, Harl. MSS, 6995, fols. 21-22. On 3 Feb. 1583

Dee noted in his diary that ‘Mr Savile, Mr Powel, the younger, travellers, Mr Ottoman his son, came to be

acquainted with me’ at Mortlake. This is almost certainly a reference to Sir Henry Savile (1549-1622), later

Warden of Merton College and Provost of Eton, who had been travelling on the Continent since 1578 and

was in Italy in 1581 and Nuremberg the following year before returning to Oxford: Robert B. Todd, ‘Henry

and Thomas Savile in Italy’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, LVIII (1996), 439-44. See also the

letter from Alvise Lullini to Henry Savile, Venice, 20 Apr. 1582, which discusses Savile’s manuscript

collecting, and is endorsed ‘the year I came out of Italy’: Calendar of State Papers Foreign, 1581-82, p.

633, discussed in J. R. L. Highfield, ‘An Autograph Manuscript Commonplace Book of Sir Henry Savile’,

Bodleian Library Record, VII (2) (1963), 73-83. Savile travelled in a party that included Robert Sidney

(1563-1626), younger brother of the poet Sir Philip. Dee’s close connection with the latter helps explain

how this meeting came about. On Dee and the Sidney circle see French, John Dee, ch. 6. ‘Mr Powel’ was

probably the Oxford graduate David Powel (1549/52-98), who was Sir Henry Sidney’s private chaplain

between 1584 and 1586. He published The Historie of Cambria (1584) and an edition of Giraldus

Cambrensis (1585) (dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney). For the former he borrowed manuscripts of

unpublished chronicles from Stow: see Beer, Tudor England, p. 15; and McKisack, Medieval History, pp.

52-53, 58-59.

76 See Woolf, Social Circulation, pp. 151-52; and Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English

Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995), p. 43 (Britannia was recognised ‘as a touchstone

of achievement which gave focus to research into the origins and development of the nation and its

institutions, and established a standard for British antiquarian studies in the future’.) .

77 R. A. Skelton, ‘Tudor Town Plans in John Speed’s Theatre’, Archaeological Journal, CVIII (1951), 109-

20. Speed’s correspondence with Cotton of c. 1609 regarding chronicles of Kings Henry IV and Henry V,

and the preparation of wood engravings of Roman coins and altars for his Theatre is in BL, Cotton MSS,

Julius C III, fols 354-58.

36

78 Linda Van Norden, ‘Sir Henry Spelman on the Chronology of the Elizabethan College of Antiquaries’,

Huntington Library Quarterly, XIII (1949-50), 147-48, Table. On Cotton and the Society see Kevin

Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979), ch.

1.

79 Savile’s tomb inscription apparently recorded: ‘Ac Italiam Deinceps, Galliam Germanium ardore

quodam Amoris quo Literes est prosecutus peragrasset, tandem Londoni post reditum bene Diu Beateque

vivens …’. It is now lost, but see Watson, Manuscripts of Henry Savile, p. 2 n. 1.

80 Norwich Library Roll, formerly Gurney MS XXII, Macro 105.2, fol. 65: cited by Linda Van Norden,

‘The Elizabethan College of Antiquaries’ (unpub. Ph. D. thesis, Univ. of California, 1946), p. 155.

Microfilm.

81 Middle Temple Records, ed. Charles Henry Hopwood, 4 vols (1904), I. Minutes of Parliament of the

Middle Temple, trans. and ed. Charles Trice Martin, 336. But see McKisack, Medieval History, p. 158,

where it is suggested that Sir Henry’s elder brother Sir John Savile (1546-1607) is the more likely

candidate. He was certainly in the Middle Temple by 1565, but is not on any known list of the Society’s

membership: Hopwood, Middle Temple Records, I, 336; R. J. Schoeck, ‘The Elizabethan Society of

Antiquaries and Men of Law’, Notes and Queries (October 1954), 420.

82 Van Norden, thesis, p. 232.

83 It may yet turn up or be correctly identified, perhaps among the papers of the Duchy of Lancaster or the

Court of Exchequer, just as several of Saxton’s written surveys and estate maps of c. 1590-1608 have been

identified: see Evans and Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, p. 74. As already noted, John Speed’s draft town

maps c.1605-08 have recently been rediscovered in the library of Merton College, Oxford by Dr Sarah

Bendall: see Bendall, IM, LIV, 30-45. Although Speed surveyed Lancaster on 17 Aug. 1607 he apparently

bypassed Manchester, and no plan of the town was produced until c.1660-70. However, in a personal

communication John Adams has suggested to me that there may be grounds for linking this later map with

Saxton’s lost survey.

84 Perhaps to be engraved by Augustine Ryther, thought to be a native of Leeds, who worked on Saxton’s

Atlas and on plans of Oxford (1588) and Cambridge (1592-3). Or perhaps William Rogers who provided

the title-plate and several illustrations for Camden’s Britannia in 1600, as well as Speed’s map of Cheshire

37

c.1604. Or even Remigius Hogenberg: he also engraved maps for Saxton’s Atlas, as well as a plan of

Exeter (1587) after a drawing by the city’s chamberlain. Arthur M. Hind, Engraving in England in the

Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries: A Descriptive Catalogue with Introductions. Part 1. The Tudor Period

(Cambridge, 1952), pp. 138-49, 258-80, 64-78.

85 BL, Harl. MSS, 249, fol. 104v, Dee to Sir Edward Dyer, Manchester, 8 Sept. 1597.

86 The concept of ‘spatial ideology’ is discussed by J. B. Harley, ‘Meaning and ambiguity in Tudor

cartography’, in English Map-Making, 1500-1650: Historical Essays, ed. Sarah Tyacke (1983), pp. 22-45.