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The Domesday Book initiated by William I of England in 1086 was a government survey on all the administrative counties of England; it was used to assess the properties of farmsteads and landholders in order to tax them sufficiently. In the survey, numerous English castles were listed; scholars debate on exactly how many were actually referenced in the book.[10] However, the Domesday Book does detail the fact that out of 3,558 registered houses destroyed in 112 different boroughs listed, 410 of these destroyed houses were the direct result of castle construction and expansion.[11] In 1316 the Nomina Villarum survey was initiated by Edward II of England; it was essentially a list of all the administrative subdivisions throughout England which could be utilized by the state in order to assess how much military troops could be conscripted and summoned from each region.[12] The Speculum Britanniae (1596) of the Tudor era English cartographer and topographer John Norden (1548–1625) had an alphabetical list of places throughout England with headings showing their administrative hundreds and referenced to attached maps.[13] Englishman John Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine published in 1611 provided gazetteers for counties throughout England, which included illustrative maps, short local histories, a list of administrative hundreds, an index of parishes, and the coordinates of longitude and latitude for county towns.[14] Starting in 1662, the Hearth Tax Returns with attached maps of local areas were compiled by individual parishes throughout England while a duplicate of their records were sent to the central government offices of the Exchequer.[12] To supplement his "new large Map of England" from 1677, the English cartographer John Adams compiled the extensive gazetteer "Index Villaris" in 1680 that had some 24,000 places listed with geographical coordinates coinciding with the map.[13] The "Geographical Dictionary" of Edmund Bohun was published in London in 1688, comprising 806 pages with some 8,500 entries.[15] In his work, Edmund Bohun attributed the first known Western geographical dictionary to geographer Stephanus of Byzantium (fl. 6th century) while also noting influence in his work from the Thesaurus Geographicus (1587) by the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), but stated that Ortelius' work dealt largely with ancient geography and not up-to-date information.[15] Only fragments of Stephanus' geographical work Ethnica (Εθνικά) have survived and were first examined by the Italian printer Aldus Manutius in his work of 1502. The Italian monk Phillippus Ferrarrius (d. 1626) published his geographical dictionary "Epitome Geographicus in Quattuor Libros Divisum" in the Swiss city of Zurich in 1605.[16] He divided this work into overhead topics of cities, rivers, mountains, and lakes and swamps.[16] All placenames, given in Latin, were arranged in alphabetical order for each overhead division by geographic type;.[16] A year after his death, his "Lexicon Geographicum" was published, which contained more than 9,000 different entries for geographic places.[16] This was an improvement over Ortelius' work, since it included modern placenames and places discovered since the time of Ortelius.[16] Pierre Duval (1618–1683), a nephew of the French cartographer Nicolas Sanson, wrote various geographical dictionaries. These include a dictionary on the abbeys of France, a dictionary on ancient sites of the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans with their modern equivalent names, and a work published in Paris in 1651 that was both the first universal and vernacular geographical dictionary of Europe.[15] With the gradual expansion of Laurence Echard's (d. 1730) gazetteer of 1693, it too became a universal geographical dictionary that was translated into Spanish in 1750, into French in 1809, and into Italian in 1810.[17] Following the American Revolutionary War, United States clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap and Postmaster General Ebenezer Hazard intended to create the first post-revolutionary geographical works and gazetteers, but they were anticipated by the clergyman and geographer Jedidiah Morse with his Geography Made Easy in 1784.[18] However, Morse was unable to finish the gazetteer in time for his 1784 geography and postponed it.[19] Yet his delay to publish it lasted too long, as it was Joseph Scott in 1795 who published the first post-revolutionary American gazetteer, his Gazetteer of the United States.[19] With the aid of Noah Webster and Rev. Samuel Austin, Morse finally published his gazetteer The American Universal Geography in 1797.[20] However, Morse's gazetteer did not receive distinction by literary critics, as gazetteers were deemed as belonging to a lower literary class.[21] The reviewer of Joseph Scott's 1795 gazetteer commented that it was "little more than medleys of politics, history and miscellaneous remarks on the manners, languages and arts of different nations, arranged in the order in which the territories stand on the map".[21] Nevertheless, in 1802 Morse followed up his original work by co-publishing A New Gazetteer of the Eastern Continent with Rev. Elijah Parish, the latter of whom Ralph H. Brown asserts did the "lion's share of the work in compiling it".[22] |
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