Oakham, a single parish, was divided between two manors, probably in the reign of William ii. One, that came to be known as Deanshold, belonged to Westminster Abbey; the other, Lordshold, belonged by the late eighteenth century to George Finch, ninth earl of Winchilsea. Presented here is a map of the Lordshold properties dated 1787 along with a written survey of the same year that gives further information about the properties shown on the map. The survey is set out in each of four surviving notebooks that include varying additions and corrections.

The map is by William Cullingworth, who worked as an estate surveyor from the 1760s to the 1790s; it is drawn on seven sheets and two part-sheets of foolscap glued together (overall 1295 × 890mm) and is carefully, indeed beautifully, drawn and coloured. It covers only the manor’s properties within the town with a few neighbouring closes, and does not extend into the surrounding open fields. However, as the properties of the two manors were intermingled, what we have is a map of the whole town, though with many properties (the Deanshold) left without identifying numbers. The only reproduction of the entire map is reduced to fit the book’s A4 page, but there are large-scale, superbly printed images of all its details and there is a lot to be said for doing without a full-size, but inevitably vulnerable, folding sheet.

The content of the four notebooks is edited in full: one, the nearest to a fair copy, is fully transcribed and the variants and changes in the others are entered in straightforward lists. Other records are brought to bear on the evidence of the map and survey, among them the town-plan on John Speed’s map of Rutland in 1611, the enclosure map of 1836 and the entry for Oakham in the 1791 edition of the Universal British Directory of Trade, Commerce and Manufacture, etc, copied in full in an appendix. As a result, the account of the town that occupies the book’s first fifty pages, while focused primarily on the map and survey, is a detailed description of its earlier history, its topography and its inhabitants. While the author identifies points of which we have more to learn, he has given us an extremely full picture of an English market town, deeply rooted in the surrounding countryside, at the end of the eighteenth century.