Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/60

 Like its predecessor, it was in substance a gross or estimate survey. Commissions were issued to bodies of commissioners for each county, except where the survey made in Strafford's time already supplied a sufficiently accurate account of the lands in the district, their area, value, and ownership. It was to comprehend not only the forfeited lands, but all other estates and interests belonging to the State as successor to the Crown, and was in fact an attempt to make a land register. 'This improved and most important descriptive survey,' says Mr. Hardinge, 'was not intended for the sole purpose of supplying lists of lands to be measured and mapped and then cast aside as useless, as would be the result had it related to forfeited lands only; but it comprehended all other estates and interests—the Crown's hereditary estates, ecclesiastical and unforfeited, corporate and lay estates and possessions. Many persons are under the impression that the civil survey was designed as the basis of the satisfactions afterwards made to the soldiers for arrears of pay due to them, and that it was rejected by the Government in consequence of the complaints of its inaccuracy. Such an impression is altogether erroneous. This survey was not designed for the purpose assumed. It was a preliminary work, essential to the discovery and description in a legitimate and solemn manner of the forfeited lands, and from which lists, technically called "terriers," were afterwards supplied to the several surveyors, for their admeasurement and mapping.'

While the work of the Commission was proceeding, Dr. Petty was summoned to place before the Council his own plan for the mapping of the lands. The forfeited estates corresponded, as a rule, with former territorial jurisdictions—some very ancient—which had become the basis of the more modern division into baronies, themselves divided into parishes and townlands; just as in the early history of England the boundaries of what were originally the lands of villages became those of manors, and, later in the history of the