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THE IMPOSING LIBRARY of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in London is strategically situated. In one direction its tall windows look over the street to Whitehall, where the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns ruled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in another they gaze across Parliament Square towards the House of Commons, power-base of the rising class of landed gentry who during those two centuries challenged the royal authority. It is just possible to imagine the atmosphere of righteous indignation and pervading apprehension which accompanied the struggle between the two, but in the small, 450-year-old, leather-bound books kept in the Institution’s library, the reality that gave rise to the battles remains vividly alive.

In the earliest, such as Master Fitzherbert’s The Art of Husbandry, published in 1523, a surveyor still fills his original, feudal role as the executive officer of a landed nobleman. His duty is simply to oversee (the word ‘surveyor’ is derived from the French sur = over and voir = see) the estate. He is to walk over the land, noting the ‘buttes and bounds’ of the tenants’ holdings, and then to assist in drawing up the official record or court roll of what duties they owed. A model report, Fitzherbert suggests, might run like this: the land of a particular tenant ‘lyeth between the mill on the north side, and the South Field on the south, butteth upon the highway, and conteyneth xii [twelve] perches [a perch, like a rod, equals 16½ feet] and x [ten] fote [feet] in bredthe by the hyway, and ix [nine] perches in length, and payeth … two hennes at Christmas and two capons at Easter’.

To ‘butt’ upon something was to encounter or meet it; the alternative word was ‘mete’. This ancient method of surveying, which identified the boundary of an estate by the points where it met other boundaries or visible objects, thus became known as ‘metes and bounds’. Under that title it was to cross the Atlantic to the colonies of Virginia and Carolina and thence to Tennessee and Kentucky, to the confusion of landowners and the enrichment of lawyers.

Even in 1523, English landlords were engaged in a practice that was to transform the feudal order. There were infinite variations in feudalism, but at its heart was the principle that the land was the state, and only the head of state could own it outright. The dukes and barons, the king’s tenants-in-chief, technically held their broad acres of the Crown in return for the dues or service they paid; their vassals held their narrower farms from the great lords in return for rent or service; and so on down to the villeins, who had no land at all, but exchanged goods, service or rent for the right to work it. The feudal principle applied equally to the American colonies, whether they were founded by commercial concerns like the Virginia Company, or individual proprietors like William Penn. Every charter authorising the foundation of a colony, from Virginia in 1606 to Georgia in 1732, declared that the land was held of the King ‘as of his mannor of East Greenwiche in the county of Kent, in free and common soccage’ – a term which in fact imposed few obligations, but recognised the feudal framework governing land ownership on either side of the Atlantic. What the sixteenth-century manuals inadvertently reveal, as they detail the surveyor’s duties, is how that order was subverted from within.

Under the old system, tenants farmed narrow strips or rigs of land, often widely separated so that good and poor soil was distributed evenly among those who actually worked the land. For centuries, land-users had attempted to consolidate the strips into single compact fields which could be ‘enclosed’ by a fence or hedge so that crops were not trodden down or herds scattered, but the pattern remained fundamentally intact. Now, however, a period of savage inflation occurred, and in the early sixteenth century every lord and tenant was trying to squeeze the maximum profit from the land. Repeatedly Fitzherbert stresses the need for the surveyor to realise that enclosed land was more valuable than the strips and common pasture because it could be made more productive. The pressure for change is unmistakable, yet essentially the old values are still in place.

Then in 1534 comes the publication of The Boke named the Governour, by Sir Thomas Elyot, which gives advice to ‘governors’, whether of kingdoms or estates, on how to run their ‘dominions’. An essential first step according to Elyot is to draw a map or ‘figure’ of the estate so that the governor knows what it consists of, or as he puts it, ‘in visiting his own dominions, he shall set them out in figure, in such wise that his eye shall appear to him where he shall employ his study and treasure’. In the course of the sixteenth century, it became a habit of English landowners to have their estates and the surrounding countryside measured and then mapped. By 1609 John Norden could insist in the Surveior’s Dialogue that ‘the [map] rightly drawne by true information, describeth so lively an image of a Manor … as the Lord sitting in his chayre, may see what he hath, where and how it lyeth, and in whose use and occupation every particular is’.

There was a particular significance in the surveyor’s new duty of mapmaking, because in that era only the rulers of states and cities made maps. A map was a political document. It not only described territory, but asserted ownership of it. From 1549 a map of Newfoundland and the North Atlantic seaboard of North America detailing Sebastian Cabot’s discoveries used to hang in the Privy Gallery at Whitehall outside the royal council chamber, so that foreign ambassadors waiting to see the sovereign would know of England’s claims overseas. When the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius produced the first modern atlas in 1570, his Theatrum orbis terrarum, which included the freshly discovered territories of the New World and the newly explored Pacific and Indian Oceans, he took care to dedicate it to his sovereign, Philip II of Spain, and to ensure that Philip could find in it his own claims across the ocean.

Consequently, when the sixteenth-century English landowners ordered maps of their estates, they were making a very particular claim. For a long time almost no one but the English made such a claim. Surveying manuals were published in the German states, but there were hardly any estate maps until late in the seventeenth century. Sweden produced her first national map in the sixteenth century, but it was a hundred years later before noblemen began measuring and mapping their estates. In sixteenth-century France, the Jesuits taught maths and all the theory needed by a surveyor, but, as the distinguished historian Marc Bloch noted, no plats or plans parcellaires were drawn before 1650. The first Spanish maps appeared as early as 1508, but no Spanish lords showed any interest in measuring their lands for another two hundred years. Only in the economically sophisticated Netherlands, where the mathematician Gemma Frisius wrote the first manual on mapmaking, A Method of Delineating Places, in 1533, were farms, especially those close to cities, measured and mapped, yet even there the aristocrats’ landed estates remained feudal. But in England, Henry VIII collected so many estate maps that an inventory of his possessions at his death in 1547 showed he had ‘a black coffer covered with fustian of Naples [which was] full of plattes’.

The significance was unmissable. When English landowners commissioned surveyors to measure out their estates and make maps or plats of them, they were asserting a form of ownership that until then only rulers and governors could make.

If there is a single date when that idea of land as private property can be said to have taken hold, it is 1538. In that year a tiny volume was published with a long title which begins, ‘This boke sheweth the maner of measurynge of all maner of lande …’. In it, the author, Sir Richard Benese, described for the first time in English how to calculate the area of a field or an entire estate. He was probably borrowing his methods from Frisius, but his values were purely English. Noting that sellers tend to exaggerate the size of a property while buyers are inclined to underestimate it, he advises the surveyor to approach the task in a careful and methodical manner.

‘When ye shall measure a piece of any land ye shall go about the boundes of it once or twice, and [then] consider well by viewing it whether ye may measure it in one parcel wholly altogether or else in two or many parcels.’ Measuring in ‘many parcels’, he explains, is necessary when the field is an uneven, irregular shape; by dividing it up into smaller, regular shapes like squares and oblongs and triangles it becomes easy to calculate accurately the total area. The distances are to be carefully measured with a rod or pole, precisely 16½ feet long, or a cord. And finally the surveyor is to describe the area in words, and to draw a plat showing its shape and extent.

Like the maps, this interest in exact measurement is new. Before then, what mattered was how much land would yield, not its size. When William the Conqueror instituted the great survey of England in 1086, known as the Domesday Book, his commissioners noted the dimensions of estates in units like virgates and hides, which varied according to the richness of the soil: a virgate was enough land for a single person to live on, a hide enough to support a family; consequently the size shrank when measuring fertile land, and expanded in poor, upland territory. Other Domesday units like the acre and the carrucate were equally flexible, but so long as land was held in exchange for services, the number of people it could feed and so make available to render those services was more important than its exact area. Accurate measurement became important in 1538 because, beginning in that year, a gigantic swathe of England – almost half a million acres – was suddenly put on sale for cash.

The greatest real-estate sale in England’s history occurred after Henry VIII dissolved a total of almost four hundred monasteries which had been acquiring land for centuries. He justified his action on the grounds that these houses of prayer had grown depraved and corrupt, but tales of drunken monks and lecherous nuns served to conceal a more mundane purpose – Henry needed money. On the monasteries’ dissolution, all their land, including some of the best soil in England, automatically reverted to their feudal overlord, the king. These rich acres were then sold to wealthy merchants and nobles in order to pay for England’s defences.

The sale of so much land for cash was a watershed. Although changes were already underway, with feudal services often commuted for rents paid in coin, and feudal estates frequently mortgaged and sold, up to that point the fundamental value of land remained in the number of people it supported. From now on the balance would shift increasingly to a new way of thinking. Prominent among the purchasers of Church property were land-hungry owners, like the Duke of Northumberland, who had been enclosing common pastures, but far more common were the small landlords who had done well from the rise in the market value of wool and corn, and who now chose to invest in monastery estates. In Norfolk, Sir Robert Southwell attracted attention because of the mighty pastures he carved out from common land for his fourteen flocks of sheep, each numbering around a thousand animals, but the Winthrop family who acquired and enclosed monastery land in the same county almost escaped notice.

They and their surveyors knew that the monasteries’ widely separated rigs and shares of common land would become more valuable once they were consolidated into fields. It was what later generations would term an investment opportunity. The old abbots and priors had understood land ownership to be part of a feudal exchange of rights for services. The new owners knew that it depended on money changing hands, and that to maximise profits the old ways had to be replaced.

‘Jesu, sir, in the name of God what mean you thus extremely to handle us poor people?’ a widow demanded of John Palmer, an enclosing landlord in Sussex who in the 1540s bought the monastic estate on which she lived, and evicted her from her cottage.

‘Do ye not know that the King’s grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns?’ Palmer retorted. ‘Therefore now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be.’

As enclosures and rising rents forced thousands of villeins and farm-labourers away from the manors that once supported them, protests kept the printing presses busy. Some represented the propaganda of conservative voices like Sir Thomas More, who memorably wrote of pastoralists like Southwell, ‘Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.’ Resentment also triggered popular uprisings in the north, east and west of England, and the government itself introduced Bills in Parliament against enclosure, though by the second half of the sixteenth century few were passed.

Recent research downplays the actual number of enclosures, but no one questions the enormous redistribution of land that occurred. Even G.R. Elton, the most sceptical of Tudor historians, accepted that it ‘laid the foundation for that characteristic structure of landlord, leasehold farmer, and landless labourer which has marked the English countryside from that day to this’.

The hidden hand in this gigantic upheaval was provided by the survey and plat that recorded the new owner’s estate as his property. The emphasis in Benese’s book on exact measurement reflected the change in outlook. Once land was exchanged for cash, its ability to support people became less important than how much rent it could produce, and that depended largely on the size of the property. The units used to measure this could no longer vary; the method of surveying had to be reliable. The surveyor ceased to be a servant, and became an agent of change from a system grounded in medieval practice to one which generated money.

Some at least became uneasily aware of what they were doing. In the Surveior’s Dialogue, John Norden specifically blamed the act of measuring itself for helping to destroy the old ways, and held surveyors responsible as ‘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 altered, broken, and sometimes perverted or taken away by your means’.

What the new class of landowners required of their surveyors above all was exactness, and the sudden increase in the number of manuals the last quarter of the sixteenth century testified to the urgency of their need. Before that, in 1551, Robert Recorde wrote a book called Pathway to Knowledge in praise of the accuracy that geometry offered surveyors, but warning of its potential for destruction:

Survayers have cause to make muche of me.

And so have all Lordes that landes do possesse:

But Tennauntes I feare will like me the lesse.

Yet do I not wrong, but measure all truely,

And yelde the full right to everye man justely.

Proportion Geometricall hath no man opprest,

Yf anye bee wronged, I wishe it redrest.

It was against this background – an urgent and growing need for the accurate measurement of land – that Edmund Gunter devised his chain. Born in 1581 to a Welsh family, Gunter had been sent to Oxford University to be educated as a Church of England priest, but by the time he was ordained he had discovered that numbers were more inspiring to him than religion. In twelve years as a divinity student he preached just one sermon, and its reputation endured long after his death because, according to Oxford gossip, ‘it was such a lamentable one’. What really interested him was the relationship of mathematics to the real world, and consequently he spent most of his time making instruments to illustrate the way in which numbers worked.

Ratios and proportions were his passion. He invented an early slide-rule, known as Gunter’s scale, to demonstrate proportional connections between numbers, and worked out to seven places of decimals the logarithms for sine and cosine. The point at which this enthusiasm for numerical ratios touched upon concrete reality was trigonometry, which allowed mathematicians to calculate the length of two sides of a triangle, when only the third side and two angles were known; it also, as we have seen, enabled surveyors to work out the distance between two objects without having to walk between them.

Since only the most basic instruments existed at that time, mathematicians and astronomers were expected to design their own. To demonstrate the solutions to problems in geometry, Gunter was constantly adapting and improving nautical instruments like the quadrant and cross-staff, which measured vertical angles between the sun and the horizon, or horizontal angles between towers, trees and churches. Indeed his enthusiasm for new gadgets cost him the best scientific job in the land. In 1620 the wealthy but earnest Sir Henry Savile put up money to fund Oxford University’s first two science faculties, the chairs of Astronomy and Geometry. Gunter applied to become Professor of Geometry, but Savile was famous for distrusting clever people – ‘Give me the plodding student,’ he insisted drearily – and the candidate’s behaviour annoyed him intensely. As was his habit, Gunter arrived with his sector and quadrant, and began demonstrating how they could be used to calculate the position of stars or the distance of churches, until Savile could stand it no longer. ‘Doe you call this reading of Geometrie?’ he burst out. ‘This is mere showing of tricks, man!’, and according to a contemporary account, ‘dismisst him with scorne’.

Fortunately Gunter was supported by the Earl of Bridgewater, who did like brilliance, having grown up in a house where poets like Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson were guests and where Othello was first performed. Since his father had inherited huge estates on the Welsh border and acquired valuable land north of London, the Earl was also even richer than Savile, and it seems probable that the surveyor’s chain that Gunter designed in about 1607 was first used to measure the immense Bridgewater property.

Aided by aristocratic influence, Gunter was then appointed rector of the wealthy parish of St George’s, Southwark, in London, and, in 1619, Professor of Astronomy at Gresham’s College, London. However, both his congregation and his students were utterly neglected in favour of his scientific instruments. Like electronic devices today, these were sold with a book of incomprehensible instructions. Gunter at least had the excuse that few could understand his instructions because they were written in Latin. In 1623 the chorus of complaints persuaded him to produce a translation. ‘I am at the last contented that it should come forth in English,’ he wrote. ‘Not that I think it worthy either of my labour or the publique view, but to satisfy their importunity who not understanding the Latin yet were at the charge to buy the instrument.’

The complete collection of Gunter’s instructional books issued in 1623 was called The description and use of the sector, the cross-staffe and other instruments for such as are studious of mathematical practise. By then Gunter must have known that the last bit of the title was nonsense. The reason the book had to be in English was because his instruments were being used not by maths students but by surveyors for measuring and by sailors for navigating – and, unlike mathematicians, neither group could read Latin. Nevertheless, it contained so much new information on logarithms, trigonometry and geometry that one of his contemporaries paid him this tribute: ‘He did open men’s understandings and made young men in love with that studie [mathematics]. Before, the mathematical sciences were lock’t up in the Greeke and Latin tongues and so lay untoucht. After Mr Gunter, these sciences sprang up amain, more and more.’

It was in this book that Gunter first described the chain that was to bear his name: ‘for plotting of ground, I hold it fit to use a chaine of foure perches in length, divided into an hundred links’. Four perches measured twenty-two yards, and the fact that this strange distance eventually became integral not only to the game of cricket in his own country (it is the length of the pitch), but to the town planning of almost every major city in the United States (the lengths of most city blocks are multiples of it), was a tribute to the chain’s versatility. Its practical advantage was simply that, unlike a rod, its links made it flexible enough to be looped over a person’s shoulder, and that being made of metal it neither stretched nor shrank as cords always did. Yet there was more to it than mere practicality. As a passionate believer in the usefulness of maths, Gunter built into his chain the most advanced intellectual learning of the time, until it could almost be compared to a primitive calculating machine.

His cleverness lay in dividing the chain into one hundred links, marked off into groups of ten by brass rings. On the face of it, the chain’s dimensions make no sense – each link is a fraction under eight inches long, ten links make slightly less than six feet eight inches, and the full length is sixty-six feet. In fact this is a brilliant synthesis of two otherwise incompatible systems: the traditional English land measurements, which were based on the number four, and the then newly introduced system of decimals, based on the number ten.

It was the Dutch engineer Simon Stevin who first published an account of decimals in 1585, and Gunter was quick to grasp the concept, using them in his logarithmic tables. Where the chain was concerned, he realised that units of ten made for simple calculation, hence the hundred links with the brass rings grouped in tens; but the overall length was no less important. His twenty-two-yard chain measured four rods long, which integrated it into traditional English measurements.

The rod’s inconvenient length of 16½ feet was derived from the area of land that could be worked by one person in a day. This was reckoned to be two rods by two rods (thirty-three feet by thirty-three). Thus, there were four square rods in a daywork. Conveniently there were forty dayworks in an acre, the area that could be worked by a team of oxen in a day, and 640 acres in a square mile. All these once variable units became fixed in the sixteenth century, and it was significant that all of them were multiples of four, a number that simplified the calculation of areas.

Gunter’s chain produced the happy result that ten square chains measured precisely one acre. Thus, if need be, the entire process of land measurement could be computed in decimals, then converted to acres by dividing the result by ten. With an understandable hint of satisfaction Gunter concluded his description of its use: ‘then will the work be more easie in Arithmetick’. It was that ease in calculating acreages, as much as its accuracy and straightforward practicality, that earned Gunter’s chain its popularity among surveyors using the old four-based system of measurements. Even the least competent could come close to the standards of exactness that were now expected of them.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the need that the growing army of surveyors had for this kind of assistance. Even an oblong field, where the length was longer than the breadth, made the maths go shaky, and repeatedly the manuals are forced to remind their readers that the area of any square or rectangular field can be calculated by multiplying the length by the breadth. Yet the same mistakes kept recurring: as late as 1688 John Love, who spent many years in Carolina, claimed that he was forced to write his classic work, Geodaesia, because ‘I have seen so many young men in America so often at a loss … when a certain number of acres has been given to be laid out five or six times as broad as long.’

The problems multiplied astronomically when the area to be measured was irregular. The surveyors’ commonest trick when faced with an irregular shape was to add the lengths of all the sides, divide the total by four, then square the result. The answer thus obtained was quick, easily worked out, and always wrong – but usually not by enough to alarm the landowner. As one more scrupulous measurer, Edward Worsop, observed of such shortcuts in 1582, ‘it is the way all Syrveyors do; – whether it originates in Idleness, inability or want of sufficient pay, it is not for me to determine’. The title of Worsop’s volume is self-descriptive: A discoverie of sundrie errours and faults daily committed by [surveyors] ignorant of arithmeticke and geometrie to the damage and prejudice of many of her Majestie’s subjects.

Yet the newly landed gentry of England knew that even an imperfect survey was better than none. While they were measuring and mapping their possessions, then squeezing the highest possible rents from their tenants, the Crown ignored its lands for seventy years after Richard Benese’s book came out. In 1603, the Lord Treasurer of England, Robert Cecil, at last commissioned a report on the extent of the Crown’s lands, and ‘found the King’s Mannors and fairest possessions most unsurveyed and uncertain, [their area estimated] rather by report than by measure, not more known than by ancient rents; the estate granted rather by chance than upon knowledge’.

Inefficiently run and casually disposed of, the royal estate which had once produced enough to pay for much of royal government now generated such a small income that the monarch was forced to rely on Parliament to raise taxes in order to run the kingdom. Imperceptibly, power was passing from the land-poor Crown to the land-rich gentry. And a few years later, when it was proposed to plant colonies in the new-found land of America, those who had the money to invest were the same gentry and the merchants, people who could measure their property and count its worth, and not the king.

This was the power contained in the untidy chain that lay round the feet of Rufus Putnam’s effigy in the museum at Marietta, Ohio. What Edmund Gunter had devised was a means of making private property. So long as it was the acre that expanded or shrank, while the price remained the same, no true market in land could be established. Once the earth could be measured by a unit that did not vary, supply and demand would determine the price, and it could be treated as a commodity. That was not Gunter’s intention, but it was a consequence of the accuracy that was built into his measuring device.