Historic Parishes of England & Wales

An Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata

ROGER J. P. KAIN RICHARD R. OLIVER

ISBN 0-9540032-0-9

(Please note: This book is currently out of print)

From Friday 2 February 2007 we will not be selling copies of Historic Parishes of England and Wales. If you are a member of staff or a student from Higher and Further Education you can download a copy of the electronic maps from the AHDS Catalogue or the UK Data Archive.

This book introduces a newly compiled Electronic Map of the historic (mainly pre-1850) parishes, townships, and other local administrative areas of England and Wales which is set to become a standard reference resource. The book describes the data and the method of compilation, and includes an abbreviated version of the full Gazetteer/Metadata which serves as a hard copy index to the places located on the Electronic Map.

Contents:

The value of a map of the 'historic parishes' of England and Wales
The inadequacy of existing published maps of 'historic parish' boundaries
Sources of parish boundary information for the Electronic Map
Compiling the Electronic Map boundaries
The topographic underlay for the boundary mapping
Abbreviated Gazetteer/Metadata
12 figures and tables, 243 pages

The Electronic Map covers the whole of England and Wales, and is organised by Ordnance Survey Sheet number. The map consists of scanned bitmap images of the Ordnance Survey one inch to the mile (1:63,360) New Popular Edition maps (1945-8) with National Grid. It contains the boundaries of some 18,233 places, and is arranged as three electronic 'layers'. The first is a scan of the Ordnance Survey maps stored as grey tone sheet images. This enables Ordnance Survey physical, cultural and place-name content to be readily visible in the background for orientation and general location purposes, while not obscuring the added boundary and reference number material. The second layer consists of the boundaries, stored as solid red lines; and the third layer contains the reference numbers that link places on the map to the gazetteer/metadata dataset that accompanies the maps.

The maps are available on CD-ROM in Adobe Illustrator™ v.6 (£45 plus P&P) or Adobe Acrobat PDF™ (£15 plus P&P). Adobe Illustrator format is recommended if you already have the software (as it enables you to edit the maps and select the layers to view). However, the Adobe Acrobat PDF format is perfectly suitable for viewing the maps, and the the necessary reader software will be supplied.

This unique combination publication will become an invaluable tool for all those interested in plotting local area-based data from the past (population, agricultural, statistics, tax data etc.) from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

We wish to acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council which funded the research.

The sample extract of sheet 123 shows how the Electronic Map uses as a base the Ordnance Survey one inch to one mile (1:63,360) New Popular Edition maps (1945-8) with National Grid. The boundaries of places with their reference numbers are superimposed in colour above the map. Numbers link places on the map to the full electronic dataset of metadata which accompanies the maps and contains information on 11 fields, ranging from the provenance of the boundaries to data from the 1851 census

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