A Cautionary Tale: Misreading the Palimpsest (Meitzen, Maitland, Bateson, Darby)

Here’s an example of how one can be hamstrung by making assumptions about what you read, the dangers of poor citation practices, and why having a careful editor is so important!

Maps as Palimpsests

Anglophone map historians of a certain generation will know how the eminent British historical geographer H. C. Darby and later J. B. Harley quoted a late nineteenth-century legal scholar about how the sheets of the Ordnance Survey of England and Wales formed a “palimpsest” of landscape history. In a 1953 article in which he laid out an agenda for an archivally sensitive program of landscape studies, Darby wrote

It is an article of faith among us that field work is the essential basis of geographical study. When R. H. Tawney said that what economic historians needed was stouter boots, [n1] many of us paused to consider the condition of our own shoe leather, and the cry among us has quite properly been “field work and more field work.” To many, the field has been a welcome relief from the methodological babble to which I am adding today. I can well imagine a geographer thinking as Tennyson did when he wrote:

And forth into the fields I went,
And Nature's living motion lent
The pulse of hope to discontent.

Yet I suggest that the new cry might well be “Field work is not enough.” The map, to use F. W. Maitland's familiar phrase, is a “marvellous [sic] palimpsest.” (Darby 1953, 9; quoting Maitland 1897, 15)

Pre-1950 British historical geography was very much a field science, with scholars headed out into the field in sturdy boots. Darby did not disparage field work entirely, far from it, but pushed for field work to be balanced by archival studies. To that end, he likened maps to palimpsests at least twice more (Darby 1962, 141; Darby 2002, 53).

Harley was among the cohort of young British historical geographers who took up Darby’s challenge. For his dissertation, he used “hundreds rolls” (i.e., tax registers) from 1300 as a basis for examining settlement changes in Warwickshire since William I’s “Domesday Book” of 1086 (Harley 1960; also Harley 1958). He thereafter turned to the study of early, fine-resolution maps as sources for information about England’s pre-industrial landscapes (Edney 2005, 19–31). He too followed Darby in quoting Maitland re Ordnance Survey maps as “palimpsests” (Harley 1964, 5; Harley 1987), and he extended the concept to the study of the earlier county surveys (Harley and Laxton 1974, 34; also Walters 1968, 144). The metaphor has been persistent, albeit with a heavy dose of literary criticism (Voekel 1998, 1; Shapinsky 2006, 5; Nöth 2007, 64; Brückner 2011, 18; Sparke 2011, 376; Lilley and Porter 2013, 40).

I should note that in his commentary, Darby translated into map form the long-standing idea that landscapes (and cities) are palimpsests, whose history of sequential occupation and modification has to be read in situ by the field researcher. In this formulation, topographical maps capture the features of the landscape so well that they also capture their historical depth, not just their current, cumulative state. Later interpretations turn the multiple stages of the palimpsest into a function of the mapping process by which maps are drawn, edited, and redrawn in the production and use (from Mumford 1999, 4; through Law 2014, 414; to Olmedo et al. 2024, 294, 299).

The idea of the palimpsest—of a piece of vellum scraped mostly clean for reuse, but with the original text still perceivable—contributes significantly to the idea that map meanings are layered, between a factual base and more rarified symbolism, or surficial fact and deeper significance (depending on the formula). So, it is a point of some interest to me.

The Supposed Origin of Maps-as-Palimpsests of the Landscape, and of My Misreading

Darby attributed the idea that Ordnance Survey maps are palimpsests to Frederic William Maitland, an eminent British legal historian who had studied the “Domesday Book”—the two-volume descriptio of England created from William I’s great fiscal survey of 1085–86—in the hope that it might yield evidence for his investigation of the legal system of early Norman England. To make use of the survey, he first had to come to terms with the complex spatial organization of Norman England and especially the manner in which the royal officers had arranged the data for presentation. The fiscal survey itself had proceeded according to the nominal hierarchy of English territorial administration: by county, then by hundreds (or equivalents) within counties, and by vills within hundreds. However, because the goal of the survey was to determine the amount of geld payable to the crown by each land holder, the final descriptio was organized first by county and then by nobles in order of the amount of their land and therefore the amount of geld they had to pay, regardless of the actual locations in the county of the noble’s lands. Indeed, Maitland found that land possessed a “notional mobility” in eleventh-century England: “land is constantly spoken of as though it were the most portable of things; it can easily be taken from one vill or hundred and be added to or placed in or caused to lie in another vill or hundred” (Maitland 1897, 10).

Maitland was in the process of completing his analysis when August Meitzen published his huge study of Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavic settlement patterns: Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Westgermanen und Ostgermanen, der Kelten, Römer, Finnen und Slawen (Settlement and agriculture of the Western and Eastern Germanic peoples, the Celts, Romans, Finns, and Slavs) in three volumes and atlas (Meitzen 1895). Meitzen used hundreds of maps to argue for a racialized foundation of north European landscapes. Maitland was greatly influenced by Meitzen’s work, suggesting that it would “assuredly leave a deep mark upon all our theories of old English history” (Maitland 1897, v). He was particularly struck by Meitzen’s use of official surveys from the early nineteenth century to access feudal land patterns and tenure systems. He therefore looked, as Meitzen had, to the territorial maps published by the Ordnance Survey of England and Wales for information that might shed light on the variable character of the feudal vill. From the OS maps, Maitland identified two distinct kinds of vill that seemed respectively to embody the cultural and social practices of England’s two main ethnic groups, the Celts and the more recently settled Anglo-Saxons. Nonetheless, Maitland recognized that in practice there were likely many vills with hybrid forms:

But we are not entitled to make for ourselves any one typical picture of the English vill. We are learning from the ordnance map (that marvellous [sic] palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to decipher) that in all probability we must keep at least two types before our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the true village or the nucleated village. In the purest form of this type there is one and only one cluster of houses. It is a fairly large cluster; it stands in the midst of its fields, of its territory, and until lately a considerable part of its territory will probably have consisted of spacious “common fields.”…On the other hand, we may easily find a country in which there are few villages of this character. The houses which lie within the boundary of the parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or three, there three or four.…We see no traces of very large fields. On the face of the map there is no reason why a particular group of cottages should be reckoned to belong to this parish rather than to the next.

Maitland expanded on Meitzen’s attempts to explicate the cultural basis of agricultural settlement:

As our eyes grow accustomed to the work we may arrive at some extremely important conclusions such as those which Meitzen has suggested. The outlines of our nucleated villages may have been drawn for us by Germanic settlers, whereas in the land of hamlets and scattered steads old Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly effaced. Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way.

To show his readers the difference between the two forms of rural settlement, Maitland included his reproduction of “two little fragments of ‘the original one inch ordnance map’” which “will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse.”

F. W. Maitland’s “two little fragments of ‘the original one inch ordnance map.’” Details from sheets of the first-series, one-inch Ordnance Survey map, originally published at 1:63,360, reproduced by Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897, between 16 and 17) with differing degrees of enlargement. left “A Land of Villages on the border of Oxfordshire and Berkshire” (OS sheet 13; first published, 1830). right “A Land of Hamlets on the border between Somerset and Devon” (sheet 21; first published, 1809). Maitland’s argument was not affected by his use of late states of each sheet that delineated railroads, because the depictions of land use had not been updated. Lithographs, 20 × 11.5 cm and 20.5 × 12 cm, respectively. Author’s collection.

On the “land of villages” (left), villages along the upper course of the River Thames are surrounded by large, open fields that were farmed in common (“North Stoke Field”; “South Stoke Field”). Maitland might have selected another detail from another sheet to greater effect, had not most open fields already been enclosed by the time the OS mapped south-central England in the early nineteenth century. And the “land of hamlets” (right) might also have resulted, Maitland further wrote, from the colonization of tracts of forest land. He ended with the caveat that “very often…the parish or township looks on our map like a hybrid” of the two spatial types of vill. It seems, however, that Maitland’s enthusiasm for the study of early maps soon waned, but not before it had led him to wax poetic about how eloquently early surveyed maps might speak about the past when read properly as “palimpsests” (Maitland 1897, 15–16, added emphasis).

But had Maitland actually originated the map-as-palimpsest?

In researching Meitzen’s huge work, I had read a review by the medievalist Mary Bateson from 1897. In the course of which, she wrote:

The German migrations to Britain present some peculiar difficulties, for here the modern map shows no such sharp lines of distinction as are left to this day abroad. “That most wonderful of all palimpsests the map of England” is the hardest to interpret, for early enclosing and the pressure of population have gone far to obliterate the writing. (Bateson 1897, 320, added emphasis)

It certainly seemed to me that Bateson was attributing the map-as-palimpsest to Meitzen, as Maitland also perhaps had done. Not that I could find in Meitzen where he had said this; in his second volume, he made several comments about the utility of OS maps for outlining early landscape features in England, Wales, and Ireland, but not this precise quote. But—and here was my error—I trusted Bateson that Meitzen originated the map-as-palimpsest (Edney 2012, 293).

Discovering the Error

I repeated the attribution in my entry on “Histories of Cartography” for Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, Volume Five of The History of Cartography. The managing editor Jude Leimer, who has given each and every contribution to all of the History’s volumes a thorough and careful review, flagged the attribution: where, precisely, did Meitzen refer to OS maps as palimpsests? I looked again and again failed. I took a lunch break, wondering if there was some nativist German compound word for “palimpsest” that avoided any reliance on non-German words (like the coinage of Halbkugel rather than Hemisphäre).

As I returned from lunch, I found myself wondering about Bateson’s quotation. It was not, after all, the same as what Maitland wrote in his 1897 book. I plugged the entire quotation into Google, and got a single substantive hit, to volume 2 of Maitland’s collected essays. Digging into this book, I found that Maitland had in 1889 published an essay on “The Surnames of English Villages” in Archaeological Review, in which he held out the potential of OS maps as an aid in understanding the spatial organization of the early vill, if only he knew how to read them:

Now I cannot but think that some evidence about these things might yet be discovered in that most wonderful of all palimpsests, the map of England, could we but decipher it. (Maitland 1889, 235)

Aha! Maitland was the originator of map-as-palimpsest. In the 1880s, he plainly thought that the OS maps could be used, but he did not know how to do so. It was only after reading Meitzen’s huge work that Maitland saw how to read a racialized landscape. Thus, in 1897, he wrote that “under Dr Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to decipher” the OS map. The reference was one of confident accomplishment replacing previous uncertainty and hesitancy.

I had been misled by Bateson’s failure to cite the source of a quotation that she seems to have thought would have been familiar to other medievalists. Bateson refers her readers to Maitland’s works in several places, and she did cite his 1889 essay in Archaeological Review, but did so two pages and three footnotes after the quotation. There is, to my mind as I read and reread Bateson’s essay, no reason to ascribe the quotation to Maitland rather than to Meitzen.

I am therefore comfortable that I was not wrong in my reading of Bateson, but I was plainly misled. I have reworked that part of the entry to Volume Five.

Nonetheless, I still accept Bateson’s larger criticism of Meitzen (and Maitland) that OS maps are the hardest of palimpsests to interpret, because “early enclosing [of open fields] and the pressure of population have gone far to obliterate the writing.” To be sure, Maitland himself appreciated that the landscape represented in modern maps had undergone significant change during and after the medieval era, but he did not pursue the careful dating of each landscape component that was necessary for a full appreciation of early maps (Maitland 1897, 362, 381–83). In the end, Meitzen’s and Maitland’s racialized landscapes were the product of the partial interpretation of selected evidence.

Notes

n1. The economic historian R. H. Tawney stated, during a conference in the 1930s, and in response to a paper on the phenomenon of the medieval open field, that “what historians need is not more documents but stronger boots” (Terrill 1973, 7). This statement subsequently morphed into the admonition that historians must “lay aside their books in favour of their boots” (Kerridge 1951, 14) or, more simply, “get their boots muddy” (Morgan 1979, 132).

Works Cited

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———. 2002. The Relations of History and Geography: Studies in England, France and the United States. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

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