Events and excursions, Winter 2024-25
The Norah Witham Lecture - 8th February 2025
'Nottinghamshire surveyed: Mapping and documenting estates in the county before 1700'
Steph Mastoris
This year’s Norah Witham Lecture was delivered by Mr Steph Mastoris. Steph is well known to members of the Society. In the early 1980s he served on Council and contributed to Transactions in his role as documentary historian at Brewhouse Yard Museum. You can find several articles by Steph in Transactions from that period. Subsequently he held posts at Snibston Discovery Park, and Market Harborough Museum. In recent years he moved to Amgueddfa Cymru — the National Museum of Wales in Swansea. He still travels regularly between Swansea and Market Harborough. Steph moved away from Nottinghamshire, but he continued to base much of his research on topics relating to the county. His edition (with Sue Groves) of the 1609 Sherwood Forest Map and the Survey was published in the Record Series in 1997 and, also in the Record Series, the Welbeck Atlas in 2017. Since then, he has been preparing an edition of Nottinghamshire maps and surveys between c1550 and 1700, which he hopes will appear in the Record Series by the end of 2027.
A large audience, one of the best since COVID, turned out on 8th February to hear Steph about his progress. His starting point was a book published many years ago by Harold Nicholls on maps of estates in the county, but Steph had gone much further. Between 1550 and 1700 surprising quantity of land was documented by the rising profession of estate surveyors. Their work created detailed texts describing these estates and a fascinating body of manuscript maps.
Steph discussed some of the reasons why these surveys were commissioned and illustrated the range of their cartography. He had located four additional maps and added the estate surveys omitted by Nicholls. These, he suggested, were a critical addition to the maps. Steph explained the maps and their backgrounds including the surveyors who undertook the work. Maps might be about estates, or other physical areas, and were frequently very well detailed but the surveys, overlooked by Nicholls, are even more important because they often contain detail which is not recorded on the maps.
Not surprisingly given that we were in Nottinghamshire, Steph talked about the well-known map and survey of Laxton, dating from 1635, and now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. There were several others, mainly relating to large estates in the area. As he pointed out, landowners were the most likely to commission maps so they could find out how much land they owned, where it was, and its value. The spin off for us is that maps and surveys provided historical information which we can use in research.
Steph retired in September 2024 and has subsequently been busy with his research on Nottinghamshire maps. With his infectious laugh and unbridled enthusiasm, Steph is an excellent communicator, and we all learnt much about the county and how we can track it through surviving maps and surveys.
John Beckett, President