Yates' Map of Glamorgan 1799

unoiv^u asuc WCopper' %> f â f l f t 7r \ \ M ean- %\%eryrfian '^JrgkSBuy/i C C oiuiy iB ettus I ennui £W<a.N Morri s JEfij AN SEA ru /u L i n ' Jo u'rroyrs rvn< /»• y â /ìr«• A • !üaJer,:M A M A P O F ^ * 8 8 T H E A * County of Glamorgan! m m FROM AN 4 Bay ACTUAL SURVEY, MADE % GEORGE Y ATES of Liverpool ON WHICH dreDelineated the Courfe ojthe Rivers, anelJVavigable Canals; WITH Tlie R orcLs,Parks Gentlemens Seats,CaftlesWoods, 1799 George Yates’s Map of Glamorgan (1799) A FACSIMILE EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GWYN WALTERS AND BRIAN JAMES South Wales Record Society Volume 2, 1984 a joint publication with the Glamorgan Archive Service First Published in this Edition 1984 PuBlished jointly By the South Wales Record Society, 22 RedBrink Crescent, Barry Island, South Glamorgan, and the Glamorgan Archive Service, County Hall, Cathays Park, Cardiff. ISBN 0 9508676 1 6 © Introduction copyright Gwyn Walters and Brian James. Facsimile copyright South Wales Record Society and Glamorgan Archive Service. The South Wales Record Society acknowledges with gratitude the generosity of the Mid Glamorgan County Council (from its Welsh Church Acts Fund) and of The Twenty Seven Foundation. The Glamorgan Archive Service wishes to acknowledge the kind co-operation of Mr. Alan Date, owner of the original map used for this fascimile. Printed by D. Brown & Sons Ltd., Cowbridge and Bridgend, A38802/117L INTRODUCTION by Gwyn Walters and Brian James The map of Glamorgan surveyed By George Yates and puBlished by John the Society of Arts had been pressurised into awarding premiums for enhanced By Lhuyd’s further strictures on the faulty orthography. It is Cary on 21 May 1799 represents the culmination of a century’s tradition original surveys of counties Based on the lin. scale;5 By 1784 the Board of interesting in passing to note that a map in Lhuyd’s miscellaneous of copper-engraved county maps at a scale of one inch or more to a Ordnance had commenced a full-scale trigonometrical survey of England papers, Jansson’s map of South Wales, betrays by its folded and worn mile.1 Its puBlication, moreover, was on the eve of the issue of the first and Wales, and in the early nineteenth century was to produce a series of state that it was in all proBaBility Lhuyd’s working map on his one-inch map, that of Kent, By the Board of Ordnance. Thrust upon it lin. maps which more than vied with the 182 sheets of French areas for antiquarian sorties into South Wales Before 1695.10 therefore, whatever other merits it displayed, was a special chronological which Cassini was responsiBle from 1756 onwards. In 1720 William Williams’s New map of the counties of Denbigh and position in this genre of map production. This uniqueness requires us to Awards by the Society of Arts were dependent not only on the lin. Flint heralded, it seemed, a new dawn in Welsh mapping. Here was a fathom its lineage and to place it in its Welsh, wider British and even, in scale But on such stringent requirements as correct bearings and adequate map on the scale of one inch to a mile, plotting and naming all one particular, its European context. and authenticated topographical in-filling. The standards set By the settlements and houses of note, and tracing the lines of the frontier Society were high. This, coupled with the quality and quantity of earthworks of Offa’s Dyke and Watt’s Dyke. EmBellishment was a The English County One-Inch Map from Gascoigne (1700) contestants, resulted in such accomplished map-makers as John Rocque, further feature, Williams stating, in his Proposal to puBlish, that he to Baugh (1808) Isaac Taylor and Thomas Jefferys failing to secure awards. But some intended to have engraved ‘the elevation of the best building, protracted A certain chronological stridency also accompanies the first private won douBle awards—the excellent William Faden for instance, later by a large scale in the vacant part of the mapp’. This added enormously English county map on the one-inch scale, for that of Cornwall By puBlisher to the Board of Ordnance, for his Hampshire (1791) and to the aesthetic appeal of the map, with Gadlis Workhouse at Bagillt (a Gascoigne was puBlished in the opening year of the eighteenth century. Sussex (1795). Richard Davies of Lewknor, a farmer, is of interest in that smelting house) vying with the more expected Wrexham and Gresford There were earlier examples of the use of this scale But not for county he surveyed the Gogerddan estate of the Pryses in Cardiganshire, and churches as display pieces. It is easy to see from the evidence of these maps. Areas such as the Fens (1684) and Romney Marsh (1662) had Been was later rewarded with the sum of fifty guineas By the Society for a 2in. illustrations why Williams went on to puBlish that fine folio Book of thus mapped; and John OgilBy’s Britannia strip-maps (1675) also used survey of his native Oxfordshire. Two Welsh maps, as we shall see, were drawings, Oxonia depicta (1732-3). The map was engraved by John this scale. Ogilby Became the King’s Cosmographer, having earlier been accorded recognition in 1795 and 1803. The final recipient was RoBert Senex and, on the evidence of the imprint, printed by John Felton of entrusted with the ‘poetical part’ of James II’s coronation. His printing Baugh for his map of Shropshire (1808).6 The nature of puBlication from Oswestry. Most of the principal gentry and landowners of North Wales and Bookselling estaBlishment survived the Fire of London. After county to county varied with the potential demand, But the comBination suBscribèd to the undertaking. Gascoigne progress in other counties was, for the first half of the of wealthy patron and the opening of suBscription Books at key centres Nine years later, in 1729, Emanuel Bowen, the London commercial century, desultory. The period 1727-31 witnessed a sudden spurt of ac was the norm, for the high cost of survey seldom justified a straight cartographer, puBlished A new and accurate map o f South Wales ... tivity with the appearance of Henry Beighton’s Warwickshire, Senex’s forward commercial venture which eschewed these vital safeguards. from an actual survey and admeasurement. The scale of 3 inches to 5 Surrey and Gordon’s Huntingdonshire, the latter on a scale of 1 '/iin. to Mention has already been made of the military mapping of the miles is sufficiently large to engage our attention, But the claim to ‘actual the mile. 1736 saw Gordon’s Bedford and KirBy’s Suffolk emerging from Scottish Highlands on a large scale (1747-55). In Ireland too there was survey’ is merely a conventional formality. While it is possible to say that the rolling presses, then inactivity reigned until 1752-54 when John military mapping from 1765, associated with Roy, Vallancey and Taylor. the representation By symbols of the industrial and rural economy of Rocque’s Shropshire and Isaac Taylor’s Herefordshire Became the first Ireland, in fact, was the setting for the first really large-scale survey of an early eighteenth-century South Wales is here more detailed than hitherto, large-scale maps of the English Marcher counties. official nature when Sir William Petty directed the ‘Down Survey’ on there can be little douBt that the topographical in-filling is a product of In the following year a letter from the notaBle Cornish naturalist and Behalf of the Commonwealth government a century earlier. Military information received rather than true ground survey. The engraved antiquary William Borlase (1695-1772) to his friend Henry Baker expediency was not the only factor in the history of early Irish mapping names at the Bottom margin of the map indicate that some 400 leading (1698-1774) is significant for a numBer of reasons. Baker was already a however,7 for the Physico-Historical Society of DuBlin from 1744, and citizens of South Wales suBscriBed to the venture. The map was re-issued memBer of the recently founded Society of Arts. One of its more imagin the ‘Grand Juries’ map system from 1774, may be seen as the civil in 1760, with the suBscriBers’ list omitted, by the mapsellers Carrington ative activities was the award of premiums for useful inventions and equivalent there of the work of the Society of Arts in England and Bowles and RoBert Sayer. other accomplishments in the arts.2 Borlase now sought Baker’s aid in Wales. The next large-scale map of any part of South Wales was RoBert giving the Society’s terms of reference a cartographic slant: ‘Our maps of Snell’s Map of the county of Monmouth, engraved and printed by England and its counties’ he wrote, ‘are extremely defective’. He sugges The Mapping of Wales from William Williams (1720) to J. Ames, Clare Street, Bristol, in 1785. The one-inch scale would lead us ted that ‘if among your premiums for drawing some reward were offered John Evans (1795) to expect that it was in the standard tradition of English county surveys for the best plan measurement and actual Survey of City or District, it At the opening of the eighteenth century the cartographic portrayal of of the second half of the eighteenth century. This would be to misrep might move the attention of the puBlic towards Geography, and in time the Welsh counties was patently inadequate.8 There had Been no real resent the map, for it was a crudely engraved, sketch-like compilation, perhaps incline the Administration to take this matter into their hands advance in original survey since the pioneer efforts of Saxton and Speed almost devoid of the usual topographic detail.

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