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Summary
Summary
Measuring America is the fascinating, provocative, and eye-opening story of why America has ended up with its unique system of weights and measures--the American Customary System, unlike any other in the world--and how this has profoundly shaped our country and culture. In the process, Measuring America reveals the colossal power contained inside the acres and miles, ounces and pounds, that we use every day without ever realizing their significance.
The most urgent problem facing the newly independent United States was how to pay for the war that won the country its freedom; America's debt was enormous. Its greatest asset was the land west of the Ohio River, but for this huge territory to be sold, it had first to be surveyed--that is, measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic. English, Scottish, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and other settlers had all brought their own systems with them (more than 100,000 different units are reckoned to have been in daily use), and in his first address to Congress, George Washington put the establishment of a single system of weights and measures immediately after a national defense and a currency as the United States' most urgent priority.
The debate on this vital measure took place at a critical moment in the history of ideas, when the traditional, subjective view of the world was being increasingly challenged by objective, scientific reasoning. Thomas Jefferson--supported by Washington, Adams, Madison, Monroe, even Hamilton--championed the new idea of a scientific 10-based system derived from some universal constant such as time or the size of the earth. Such an alliance should have ensured a decimal America, but ranged against them was the invisible genius of Edmund Gunter, the seventeenth-century English mathematician whose twenty-two-yard surveying chain, introduced in 1607, had revolutionized land ownership in Britain and was still used by every surveyor in America--including Thomas Hutchins and his successors in charge of the land survey on the Ohio frontier.
How we ultimately gained the American Customary System--the last traditional system in the world--and how Gunter's chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast is both an exciting human and intellectual drama and one of the great untold stories in American history. At a time when the metric system may finally be unstoppable, Andro Linklater has captured the essential nature of measurement just as the Founding Fathers understood it. Sagely argued and beautifully written, Measuring America offers readers nothing less than the opportunity to see America's history--and our democracy--in a brilliant new light.
Author Notes
Andro Linklate was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on December 10, 1944. He was the youngest child of the novelist Eric Linklater. He attended Belhaven Hill school in Dunbar, East Lothian, and then Winchester College, before studying modern history at New College, Oxford. He taught at a London comprehensive school until he was asked to complete the history of the Black Watch regiment that his father had been writing at the time of his death in 1974. It was published three years later and was well received. His other works include Amazing Maisie and the Cold Porridge Brigade, Wild People, The Code of Love, Measuring America, The Fabric of America, An Artist in Treason, Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die, and Owning the Earth. He died from a heart attack on November 3, 2013 at the age of 68.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
American democracy was less a product of revolutionary war and constitutional ferment than it was of a particular way of measuring land, argues British historian Linklater in his delightful new study. Private ownership of land was a new concept in England in the 17th century, one that was grounded (so to speak) in the developing science of surveying, in particular, Edmund Gunter's simple new surveying system of squares and grids. But the idea that land could "be owned as a house or a bed or a pig was owned" was central to the new United States. Thomas Jefferson and others contended that property belonged to those who could purchase it and labor upon it. Thus, when the land west of the Ohio River was purchased by the United States, a new wave of settlers headed there with the intention of owning their own patch of land. Before the land could be sold, however, it had to be measured in roughly equal plots, and the surveyors used Gunter's method of drawing the boundaries of land in square miles. Linklater's detailed chronicle of the physical development of early America demonstrates the ways that the desire to own private property grew out of the individualism of the frontier and shaped the peculiarly American notion that the individual's right to property is both a foundation and a guarantee of democracy. 35 b&w illus. (Nov.) Forecast: Fans of Dava Sobel's Longitude (also published by Walker) and other books that examine systems of measurement as a foundation for the history of ideas will love Linklater's book. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Make room on the library shelf for the never-before-told saga of the survey that converted the vast wilderness west of the Ohio River into a commodity marked out for government sale. In chronicling this saga, Linklater brings to life a host of compelling personalities--Edmund Gunter, the indifferent rector who gave American surveyors a revolutionary new measuring chain; Thomas Hutchins, the national geographer whose character of perfect integrity could not hide his miserable ineptitude; Ferdinand Hassler, the government appointee so monomaniacal for accuracy that he brushed snuff into his eyes to stimulate optical acuity; Joseph Dombey, the unlucky martyr who died in a Montserrat prison while trying to bring metric measures to America. But above the fascinating personalities loom huge political and economic issues. With spare lucidity, Linklater probes the conflicting pressures in the process that turned unmapped tribal lands into a plotted grid of properties for purchase, bringing much-needed revenue into the federal coffers but also setting loose a frenzy of land speculation. At the heart of this overheated process, Thomas Jefferson deployed his multifaceted genius against the greed of the speculators, heroically striving to make the unprecedented land sale foster the freedoms of democracy and the cause of progressive reform. But in Jefferson' s failure to guide America away from Gunter's traditional four-based measures toward a more rational decimal system, Linklater limns one of history's great missed opportunities. At a time when America finds itself a foot-and-pound island in a metric sea, the fascinating story of this missed opportunity holds considerable relevance for America's commercial future. --Bryce Christensen
Guardian Review
In the mid-19th century, when the cold tongue of land that is the Michigan peninsula was first being sliced up for development, the surveyors began to discover problems with their measurements, particularly during the winter. The lengths of metal chain they doggedly carried and laid out like giant rulers across the forests and swamps would shrink when the temperature dropped below zero. The resulting inconsistencies would only add up to a few inches a day, but over the vast distances of midwestern America the shrinking chains threatened to cause future disputes between landowners. Until a conscientious surveyor called William Burt came up with a solution: every frosty morning, he built a fire and warmed up his chain until it expanded back to exactly its original length. Such diligence, respect for figures, and slightly bloody-minded defiance of the elements is a very American combination. So to try to understand the country by describing how it was first surveyed and divided up, as this book does, is likely to be a fruitful enterprise. At first, in fact, Measuring America seems almost too neat a project, full of charmingly eccentric explorers, with echoes of two recent bestsellers about map-making, Dava Sobel's Longitude and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon . It details quirky discoveries about the 19th century and about America, two of contemporary publishing's favourite subjects. The opening sentences could almost be a cosy, sepia voiceover from the History Channel: "The imposing library of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in London is strategically situated. In one direction its tall windows look over the street to Whitehall, where the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns ruled . . ." Yet Andro Linklater is too restless and intelligent a writer to take a predictable route through the subject for long. He begins not with America, but with the pioneering land surveys in England and Holland during the early 16th century. Since the Domesday Book almost 500 years earlier, territory had usually been measured by its output and how many people it supported rather than by its physical dimensions. Then a few English and Dutch landowners, influenced by 16th-century mathematics and the generally ambitious business climate of their countries at the time, started to want their estates precisely surveyed. A failed Oxford divinity student called Edmund Gunter invented the ideal instrument. Gunter's metal chain was 22 yards long and made of 100 links. It thus combined both traditional English measuring scales and the new decimal system. In time, it would come to dictate everything from the length of a cricket pitch to the size of New York city blocks, which were laid out in multiples of 22 yards. But before the chain could cross the Atlantic and help create the great "chequered land" of modern America, as Linklater memorably calls it, a philosophical revolution needed to happen. A critical mass of landowners and politicians had to be persuaded that standardising how property was measured was a worthwhile rather than dangerous prospect. During the build-up to the French Revolution, arguments about the accuracy or otherwise of weights and measures were a major source of social tension. Being in favour of precision was a political position, part of the pro-science, anti-tradition agenda of the Enlightenment. When Gunter's surveying techniques arrived in America in the 18th century, a struggle began between those people, such as Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to use the chain to divide up the country into a new kind of property-owning democracy, and more cynical politicians and property speculators, who wanted to retain the more ambiguous and exploitable measuring systems of the old world. Linklater makes it clear which side he is on, praising Jefferson's "superlative combination of lucid intelligence and fierce emotion". But the book vividly describes how, once the land surveyors started inching their way inland from the coast, Jefferson's wishes for straight lines and clarity were not always followed. Surveyors made mistakes, got lost in swamps, came up against mountains, and sometimes just gave up. More damagingly for the rationalists in the long term, in the southern states the orderly grid pattern collapsed almost as soon as it was imposed. Absentee landlords, the manoeuvrings of speculators, a rickety local legal system and corrupt government officials all conspired to produce an untidy web of land holdings, in sharp contrast to the great rectangular estates marching westwards across the rest of the United States. In a revelatory passage, Linklater shows how the southern attitude to land has social consequences to this day, with impoverished farmers clinging precariously to small irregular plots in areas such as the Appalachians, too unsure of their tenure to sell up and move on, while absentee landlords hold millions of the best acres. He quotes William Faulkner: "This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it . . ." You wonder whether the region's aversion to precise measurements helped to produce WorldCom (based in Mississippi) and Enron (based in Texas). Linklater's book, like the surveyors, gets bogged down at times in the intricacies of rival measuring systems and the difficult early years of the American land survey. But then the story opens out, as it describes the race to carve up the great spaces of the midwest. "The grid, designed by Thomas Jefferson to create republican farmers, also turned out to be ideal for buying, trading and speculating," Linklater smartly points out; by the 1870s, railway companies had devised standard towns that could be laid out alongside their tracks at a cost, per paper street plan, of less than seven dollars. The names of these instant settlements, a land agent working for the Burlington railway company wrote, "should be short and easily pronounced. Frederic I think is a very good name. It is now literally a cornfield, so I cannot have it surveyed, but yesterday a man came to arrange to put a hotel there." Behind this expansion was the assumption that America was a blank canvas. But of course it was nothing of the sort. A little belatedly, Linklater turns his attention to what the land survey meant for Native Americans. To them, each surveying party was part of an invading army, each straight line drawn from boulder to creek a means of shutting them off from their ancestral territory. In a manner that has become all too familiar since, both in America and the wider world, each aggressive move by the US was accompanied by euphemisms and self-justifying rhetoric. The government in Washington, according to Jefferson, was "prime occupant" of the continent; it therefore had "the exclusive privilege of acquiring the native [title to land] by purchase or other just means . . . Even war may, sometimes, give a just title." After learning all this, it is hard to see "the greatest land sale in history", as Linklater's subtitle slightly breathlessly calls it, as the essentially benign project presented in the book's earlier chapters. But over the last 50 pages, Measuring America shifts tone once more, into a celebration of the modern landscape the surveyors helped to create, and Linklater's writing is lyrical enough to make you forget the coercion and dispossession that made it all possible. He describes flying east from Los Angeles: "All at once, looking down through the clean air, a surveyor's straight line can be imagined . . . running invisibly over the rocks and dry earth . . . stretching ahead as a street, along a rank of shopping malls . . . suddenly ending in red cliffs and obliteration, until ten or a hundred miles further east, wherever people have settled, it is reborn as a section road or the boundary of a trailer park." The measuring of America was more or less finished by the 1930s. Parts of Alaska remain unsurveyed. Perhaps they never will be now. America, to its foreign critics at least, has become less the world's great rational civilisation and more a sort of neurotically religious semi-democracy, where creationism is taught in school instead of science and family dynasties occupy the White House. Linklater is too optimistic and pro-American to say it, but these days, someone surveying the American wilderness from a hilltop might be arrested as a terrorist. Andy Beckett is the author of Pinochet in Piccadilly (Granta). To order Measuring America for pounds 15.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-measuring.1 [Andro Linklater] makes it clear which side he is on, praising [Thomas Jefferson]'s "superlative combination of lucid intelligence and fierce emotion". But the book vividly describes how, once the land surveyors started inching their way inland from the coast, Jefferson's wishes for straight lines and clarity were not always followed. Surveyors made mistakes, got lost in swamps, came up against mountains, and sometimes just gave up. More damagingly for the rationalists in the long term, in the southern states the orderly grid pattern collapsed almost as soon as it was imposed. Absentee landlords, the manoeuvrings of speculators, a rickety local legal system and corrupt government officials all conspired to produce an untidy web of land holdings, in sharp contrast to the great rectangular estates marching westwards across the rest of the United States. Linklater's book, like the surveyors, gets bogged down at times in the intricacies of rival measuring systems and the difficult early years of the American land survey. But then the story opens out, as it describes the race to carve up the great spaces of the midwest. "The grid, designed by Thomas Jefferson to create republican farmers, also turned out to be ideal for buying, trading and speculating," Linklater smartly points out; by the 1870s, railway companies had devised standard towns that could be laid out alongside their tracks at a cost, per paper street plan, of less than seven dollars. The names of these instant settlements, a land agent working for the Burlington railway company wrote, "should be short and easily pronounced. Frederic I think is a very good name. It is now literally a cornfield, so I cannot have it surveyed, but yesterday a man came to arrange to put a hotel there." After learning all this, it is hard to see "the greatest land sale in history", as Linklater's subtitle slightly breathlessly calls it, as the essentially benign project presented in the book's earlier chapters. But over the last 50 pages, Measuring America shifts tone once more, into a celebration of the modern landscape the surveyors helped to create, and Linklater's writing is lyrical enough to make you forget the coercion and dispossession that made it all possible. - Andy Beckett.
Kirkus Review
Sturdy prose conveys the remarkable, still inspiring story of the struggle to standardize measurements and to apply them from sea to shining sea. Linklater (The Code of Love, 2001) begins on September 30, 1785, near Liverpool, Ohio, where Thomas Hutchins began surveying the public lands of the US. "He was Robinson Crusoe," the author writes, "landed in an uncharted wilderness, and his purpose was to measure it so that it could be sold." (We learn later he was also incompetent.) The narrative then circles back to early-16th-century England and to the nascent and novel notion of land ownership. Linklater guides us confidently through Henry VIII's sale of monastery properties to Edmund Gunter's creation of the 22-yard-long surveyors' chain. He provides a primer in surveying and then recounts the long effort to standardize weights and measures. Twenty pages later, we are back in the New World where, by the mid-18th century, land had become a hot commodity. The author notes wryly that the land's previous occupants surrendered their territory after potent doses of treaty and terrorism. Linklater sometimes tells us more than we want to know (e.g., the French systems of measurement), but we learn new stories about Washington and Jefferson (especially the latter), and we struggle along with the early surveyors who crossed swamps, forests, fields, streams, rivers, and purple mountains majestic as they unrolled chains, plotted townships and states, and established the stunning grids still visible today by cross-country air passengers. Linklater emphasizes the connections between measurement and commerce (measure it first, then sell it), and although he sprinkles a few dangling participles on the landscape of his prose, he writes with a firm command of detail and an ample measure of wit: Fanny Trollope, he observes, was "a Tory to the tip of her parasol." Immeasurably informative and lots of fun. (30 b&w illustrations, 5 maps, not seen)
Library Journal Review
Why do we use gallons, feet, and dollars and cents? How were these measurements created? Why do we not use the metric system, and why do so many cities and states have grids visible from the ground and the air? To answer those questions and more, British historian Linklater brings to life the creator of the system we use today, a rector named Edmund Gunter, along with a host of major personalities (Washington and Jefferson) and unknown or forgotten players (geographer Thomas Hutchins and geodesist Ferdinand Hassler). These figures play out against Linklater's elegantly drawn backdrops-national and international history, politics, economics, and business-to reveal how we came to measure as we do. Linklater also shows how as the United States expanded from the original Colonies to the West Coast over its first 100 years, our choice of measurement became part of the American psyche and legal system and also affected society. This expertly written and eminently enjoyable chronicle is highly recommended for history and history of science collections.-Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Invention of Landed Property The imposing library of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in London is strategically situated. In one direction its tall windows look over the street to Whitehall, where the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns ruled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in another they gaze across Parliament Square toward the House of Commons, power base of the rising class of landed gentry who during those two centuries challenged the royal authority. It is just possible to imagine the atmosphere of righteous indignation and pervading apprehension that accompanied the struggle between the two, but in the small, leather-bound books kept in the institution's library, the reality that gave rise to the battles remains vividly alive. In the earliest, such as Master John Fitzherbert's The Art of Husbandry , published in 1523, a surveyor still filled his original, feudal role as the executive officer of a landed nobleman. His duty was primarily to oversee (the word surveyor is derived from the French sur [over] and voir [see]) the estate. He was to walk over the land and make a note of the boundaries-the "buttes and bounds"-of the tenants' holdings, and then to assist in drawing up the official record or court roll of what duties they owed. A model report, Fitzherbert suggested, would record that the land of a particular tenant "lyeth between the mill on the north side, and the South Field on the south, butteth upon the hyway, and conteyneth xii perches and x fote [feet] in bredthe by the hyway, and ix perches in length, and payeth ... two hennes at Christmas and two capons at Easter." To "butt" upon something is to encounter or meet it, for which the equivalent word was mete . This ancient method of surveying, which identified the boundary of an estate by the points where it met other boundaries or visible objects, thus became known as "metes and bounds." Even in 1523, English landlords were engaged in a practice that was to transform the feudal order. There were infinite variations in feudalism, but this was its heart-that the land was the state, and only the head of state could own it outright. The dukes and barons, the king's tenants-in-chief, technically held their broad acres of the Crown in return for the dues or service they paid, and their vassals held their narrower farms from the great lords in return for rent or service, and so on down to the villeins who often had no land at all but exchanged goods, service, or rent for the right to work it. What the sixteenth-century manuals inadvertently reveal, as they detail the surveyor's duties, is how that order was subverted from within. Under the old system, tenants farmed narrow strips, or rigs, of land, often widely separated so that good and poor soil was distributed evenly among those who actually worked the land. For centuries, impatient land users had attempted to consolidate the strips into single compact fields that could be "enclosed" by a fence or hedge so that crops were not trodden down or herds scattered, but the pattern remained fundamentally intact. In the early sixteenth century, however, a period of savage inflation occurred, and every lord and tenant tried to squeeze the maximum profit from the land. Repeatedly, Fitzherbert stressed the need for the surveyor to realize that enclosed land was more valuable than the strips and common pasture because it could be made more productive. The urgency was unmistakable, yet essentially the old values were still in place. Then in 1531 came the publication of The Boke Named the Governour by Sir Thomas Elyot, which gave advice on the education of rulers and landowners. An essential part of their training was to learn how to draw so that, according to Elyot, they could make a map or "figure" of their estates. In this way, they would have a clear picture of what they owned, or as Elyot put it, "in visiting his own dominions, [the governor] shall set them out in figure, in such wise that his eye shall appear to him where he shall employ his study and treasure." In the course of the sixteenth century, it became a habit of English landowners to have their estates and the surrounding countryside measured and then mapped. By 1609 John Norden could insist in the Surveior's Dialogue that "the [map] rightly drawne by true information, describeth so lively an image of a Manor ... as the Lord sitting in his chayre, may see what he hath, where and how it lyeth, and in whose use and occupation every particular is." There was a special significance in making this part of the surveyor's duty, because in that era only the rulers of states and cities made maps. A map was a political document. It not only described territory but asserted ownership of it as well. In 1549 a map of Newfoundland and the North Atlantic seaboard detailing Sebastian Cabot's discoveries was displayed in the Privy Gallery at Whitehall outside the royal council chamber, so that foreign ambassadors waiting to see the sovereign would know of England's claims overseas. When the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius produced the first modern atlas in 1570, his Theatrum orbis terrarum , with the freshly discovered territories of the New World and the newly explored Pacific and Indian Oceans, he took care to dedicate it to his sovereign, Philip II of Spain, and to ensure that Philip could find in it his own claims across the ocean. Consequently, when the sixteenth-century English landowners ordered a map of their estate, they were implicitly asserting a claim to ownership in a way that only rulers of states and kingdoms had been able to make. For a long time only landowners in England made such a claim. Surveying manuals were published in the German states, but there were hardly any estate maps until late in the seventeenth century. Sweden produced its first national map in the sixteenth century, but it was 100 years later before noblemen began measuring and mapping their estates. In sixteenth-century France, the Jesuits taught math and all the theory needed by a surveyor, but no plats, or plans parcellaires , of aristocratic land were drawn before 1650. The first Spanish maps appeared as early as 1508, but another 200 years passed before it became the custom for Spanish lords to measure their lands. Only in the economically sophisticated Netherlands, where the mathematician Gemma Frisius wrote the first manual on mapmaking, A Method of Delineating Places , in 1533, were farms, especially those close to cities, measured and mapped, yet even there the aristocrats' landed estates remained feudal. But in England, estate maps were so common that an inventory of Henry VIII's possessions made at his death in 1547 showed he had "a black coffer covered with fustian of Naples [which was] full of plattes." If there is a single date when the idea of land as private property can be said to have taken hold, it is 1538. In that year a tiny volume was published with a long title that began, "This boke sheweth the maner of measurynge of all maner of lande ..." In it, the author, Sir Richard Benese, described for the first time in English how to calculate the area of a field or an entire estate. He was probably borrowing from Frisius, but his values were purely English. Noting that sellers tended to exaggerate the size of a property whereas buyers were inclined to underestimate it, he advised the surveyor to approach the task in a careful and methodical manner. "When ye shall measure a piece of any land ye shall go about the boundes of it once or twice, and [then] consider well by viewing it whether ye may measure it in one parcel wholly altogether or else in two or many parcels." Measuring it in "many parcels," he explained, was necessary when the field was an uneven, irregular shape; by dividing it up into smaller, regular shapes like squares and oblongs and triangles it became easy to calculate accurately the total area. The distances were to be carefully measured with a rod or pole, precisely 16 1/2 feet long, or a cord. And finally, the surveyor was to describe the area in words, and to draw a plat showing its shape and extent. Like the maps, this interest in exact measurement was also new. Until then, what mattered was how much land would yield, not its size. When William the Conqueror instituted the great survey of England in 1086, known as the Domesday Book, his commissioners noted the dimensions of estates in units like virgates and hides, which varied according to the richness of the soil: a virgate was enough land for a single person to live on, a hide enough to support a family, and consequently the size shrank when measuring fertile land, and expanded in poor, upland territory. Other Domesday units like the acre and the carrucate were equally flexible, but so long as land was held in exchange for services, the number of people it could feed and so make available to render those services was more important than its exact area. Accurate measurement became important in 1538 because beginning in that year a gigantic swath of England-almost half a million acres-was suddenly put on sale for cash. The greatest real-estate sale in England's history occurred after king Henry VIII dissolved a total of almost 400 monasteries, which had been acquiring land for centuries. He justified his action on the grounds that these houses of prayer had grown depraved and corrupt, but tales of drunken monks and lecherous nuns served to conceal a more mundane purpose: Henry needed money to pay for England's defenses. Upon the monasteries' dissolution, all their land, including some of the best soil in England, automatically reverted to their feudal overlord, the king. These rich acres were then sold to wealthy merchants and nobles so that a navy could be built to defend England's shores against the French. The sale of so much land for cash was a watershed. Although changes were already under way, with feudal services often commuted for rents paid in coin, and feudal estates frequently mortgaged and sold, up to that point the fundamental value of land remained in the number of people it supported. From then on the balance shifted increasingly to a new way of thinking. Prominent among the purchasers of church property were land-hungry owners, like the duke of Northumberland, who had been enclosing common pastures, but far more common were the landlords who had done well from the rise in the market value of wool and corn, and chose to invest in monastery estates. In Norfolk, Sir Robert Southwell attracted attention because of the mighty pastures he carved out from common land for his fourteen flocks of sheep, each numbering around 1,000 animals, but others who did the same on a smaller scale almost escaped notice. In the neighboring county of Suffolk, the Winthrop family, who acquired and enclosed hundreds of acres of monastic and common land, might have remained in the background had the grandson, John, not sailed for America in 1630 as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The new owners and their surveyors realized that the monasteries' widely separated rigs and shares of common land would become more valuable once they were consolidated into fields. Their predecessors, the old abbots and priors, had understood landownership to be part of a feudal exchange of rights for services. But those who had bought their land knew that ownership depended on money passing hands, and that the old ways had to change if they were to maximize the return on their investment. "Jesu, sir, in the name of God what mean you thus extremely to handle us poor people?" a widow demanded of John Palmer, an enclosing landlord in Sussex who, having bought the monastic estate on which she lived, had evicted her from her cottage. "Do ye not know that the King's grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns?" Palmer retorted. "Therefore now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be." As enclosures and rising rents forced thousands of villeins and farm laborers away from the manors that once supported them, resentment against the new owners grew rapidly. Sir Thomas More launched a particularly bitter attack on pastoralists like Southwell: "Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves." There were popular uprisings in many parts of England, forcing Henry VIII and his successors to introduce bills in Parliament to prevent enclosure. It was a pointer to the growing influence of the landowners that few were passed. The hidden hand in this gigantic upheaval was provided by the survey and plat that recorded the new owner's estate as his property. The emphasis in Benese's book on exact measurement reflected the change in outlook. Once land was exchanged for cash, its ability to support people became less important than how much rent it could produce. And to compare the value of rent produced by different estates, it was essential to know their exact size. The units could no longer vary; the method of surveying had to be reliable. The surveyor ceased to be a servant and became an agent of change from a system grounded in medieval practice to one that generated money. Some at least became uneasily aware of what they were doing. In the Surveior's Dialogue , Norden specifically blamed the act of measuring itself for helping to destroy the old ways and held surveyors responsible as "the cause that men [lose] their Land: and sometimes they are abridged of such liberties as they have long used in Mannors: and customes are altered, broken, and sometimes perverted or taken away by your means." What the new class of landowners required of their suveyors above all was exactness, and the sudden increase in the number of manuals in the last quarter of the century testified to the urgency of their need. In 1551 Robert Recorde wrote a book titled Pathway to Knowledge in praise of the accuracy that geometry offered surveyors, but warning of its potential for destruction: Survayers have cause to make touche of me. And so have all Lordes that landes do possesse: But Tennauntes I feare will like me the lesse. Yet do I not wrong, but measure all truely, And yelde the full right to everye man justely. Continue... Excerpted from Measuring America by Andro Linklater Copyright © 2002 by Andro Linklater Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Measuring America Introduction |
1 The Invention of Landed Property |
2 Precise Confusion |
3 Who Owned America? |
4 Life, Liberty, or What? |
5 Simple Arithmatic |
6 A Line Drawn in the Wilderness |
7 The French Dimension |
8 Democratic Decimals |
9 The Birth of the Metric System |
10 Dombey's Luck |
11 The End of Putnam |
12 The Immaculate Grid |
13 The Shape of Cities |
14 Hassler's Passion |
15 The Dispossesed |
16 The Limit of Enclosure |
17 Four Against Ten |
18 Metric Triumphant |
Epilogue: The Witness Tree |
Acknowledgments |
Appendix: General Tables of Units of Measurement |
Notes |
Bibliography |
Index |