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The Down Survey, also known as the Civil Survey, is the title of the mapping of Ireland carried out by William Petty, English scientist in 1655 and 1656. Sir William Petty (May 27, 1623 – December 16, 1687) was an English economist, scientist and philosopher. ...
Motto (French) God and my right Anthem God Save the King (Queen) England() – on the European continent() – in the United Kingdom() Capital (and largest city) London (de facto) Official languages English (de facto) Government Constitutional monarchy - Queen Queen Elizabeth II - Prime Minister Tony Blair MP Unification - by Athelstan 967 Area...
The survey was apparently called the "Down Survey" by Petty because the results were set down in maps; ‘admeasurement down’ was used; it is referred to by that name in Petty's will.
Background
In August 1649 the New Model Army, led by Oliver Cromwell, went to Ireland to re-occupy the country following the Irish Rebellion of 1641. This Cromwellian conquest was largely complete by 1652. This army was raised and supported by money advanced by private individuals, subscribed on the security of 2,500,000 acres (10,000 km²) of Irish land to be confiscated at the close of the rebellion. This approach had been provided for by the 1642 Adventurers Act of the Long Parliament, which said that the Parliament's creditors could reclaim their debts by receiving confiscated land in Ireland. The New Model Army became the best known of the various Parliamentarian armies in the English Civil War. ...
Oliver Cromwell (April 25, 1599–September 3, 1658) was an English military and political leader best known for making England a republic and leading the Commonwealth of England. ...
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 began as an attempted coup détat by Irish Catholic gentry, but rapidly degenerated into bloody intercommunal violence between native Irish Catholics and English and Scottish Protestant settlers. ...
Combatants English Royalists and Irish Catholic Confederate troops English Parliamentarian New Model Army troops and allied Protestants in Ireland Commanders James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde (1649 - December 1650) Ulick Burke, Earl of Clanricarde (December 1650-April 1653) Oliver Cromwell (1649-May 1650) Henry Ireton (May 1650-November 1651) Charles...
The Adventurers Act is an Act of the Parliament of England with the long title An Act for the speedy and effectual reducing of the rebels in His Majestys Kingdom of Ireland. [1]It was passed by the Long Parliament on 19 March 1642 as a way of raising...
The Long Parliament is the name of the English Parliament called by Charles I, in 1640, following the Bishops Wars. ...
The Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 provided for the confiscation and re-distribution of the lands of the defeated Irish, mostly Confederate Catholics, who had opposed Cromwell and supported the royalists who were to be transported to Connaught and other countries. Parliamentarian soldiers who served in Ireland were entitled to an allotment of confiscated land there, in lieu of their wages, which the Parliament was unable to pay in full. Lands were also to be provided to a third group, settlers from England and America. The Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1662 was passed by the Long Parliament, who had taken power in England after the English Civil War, after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, itself in response to the Irish Rebellion of 1641. ...
Kilkenny Castle, where the Confederate General Assembly met. ...
Prince Rupert of the Rhine Cavalier was the name used by Parliamentarians for a Royalist supporter of King Charles I during the English Civil War (1642–1651). ...
Connaught redirects here. ...
Survey initiation To facilitate the re-distribution, an accurate survey of the lands was required. Benjamin Worsley, the Surveyor General, had made a survey in 1653, which was notoriously erroneous. William Petty, then physician-general to the Irish armies, on a leave of absence from his position as Professor of Antatomy at Brasenose College, Oxford, pointed out the defects and suggested remedies. He offered to undertake a new survey which would be concluded quickly - within thirteen months, more cheaply than the surveyor-general's proposals, and he would prepare a general map of the country. Despite Worsley's objections, the contract with Petty was signed on December 24, 1654. The Surveyor General is an official responsible for government surveying in a specific country or territory. ...
College name The Kings Hall and College of Brasenose Latin name aula regia et collegium aenei nasi Named after Bronze door knocker Established 1509 Sister college Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Principal Prof. ...
December 24 is the 358th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (359th in leap years). ...
Events April 5 - Signing of the Treaty of Westminster, ending the First Anglo-Dutch War. ...
Survey methodology The survey employed about a thousand men and was performed with the promised rapidity, not by introducing new scientific methods, but by careful direction of the numerous subordinates among whom the labor was apportioned. Instead of using skilled surveyors, he completed the project using the now-unemployed - and cheap - soldiery. To enable unskilled soldiers to complete the task properly, Petty designed and built some simple instruments. The soldiers were only required to note the position of natural features and then use the chain provided to measure distances. Skilled cartographers then laid the information collected onto gridded paper at a central office in Dublin. Cartography is the study of map making and cartographers are map makers. ...
WGS-84 (GPS) Coordinates: 53. ...
The method used was one of surveying the boundaries of parishes, the block of townlands inside those boundaries was not usually detailed. The scale used was generally 40 Irish perches to an inch (sometimes 80 perches), one perch equalling 21 feet (6.4 m). This land survey method was used widely in rural Ireland up to the nineteenth century and sorting out the precise details was left usually to the legal profession. As a result, the Down Survey is considered to be about 87% accurate.
Profitable and unprofitable land were distinguished, and there were abbreviated captions for arable, meadow, bog, wood, mountain and several kinds of pasture, with area figures for each of these categories. Coverage of other subjects was uneven. In the parish maps, dwelling houses with the owners' names are entered in each townland.
Generally speaking, it was a survey of confiscated land. Parts of Roscommon, Galway, Clare and Mayo were not surveyed as they had been covered in the Strafford Survey of Connaught (1636-1640) and were anyway not to be confiscated.
Survey results and payment On the completion of the work, the surveyor-general examined the survey but advised its rejection. A fresh committee accepted the survey on 17 May 1656. May 17 is the 137th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (138th in leap years). ...
// Events Mehmed Köprülü becomes Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. ...
Petty's other requests were reserved for consideration, and only after a delay of more than six months were his sureties released, and his claim for pay acknowledged.
After a delay, he received £18,532, for conducting the survey, to include payment for his asssistants and general expenses. He had difficulty in collecting further agreed payments from the army, set at £3,181 which was still due in February, 1657. In payment of this debt, 9,665 acres (39 km²) of land were allotted to him.
Subsequent land allocation Petty also took a prominent share of the subsequent commissioners' work of evaluating and allotting the lands among the claimants, for which he was compensated him by assigning him 6,000 acres (24 km²) of land, and permission to buy £2,000 worth of debentures.
As a result of the re-distribution, approx 7,500 New Model Army veterans settled in Ireland, in what became known as the Cromwellian Plantation. The New Model Army became the best known of the various Parliamentarian armies in the English Civil War. ...
Plantations in 16th and 17th century Ireland involved the seizure of land owned by the native Irish and granting of it to colonists (planters) from Britain. ...
Allegations of fraud In the 1650s, Petty was charged with fraud in the survey, by several members of Parliament, particularly Sir H Sankey - illustrating that this survey involved fortunes for speculators and creditors of the Cromwell government. The allocations of land to Petty by the army in lieu of payment were alleged to be over-stated. His work in allocating the lands also made him open to attack and bribery by those seeking allocation of the limited lands.
Following investigations, he was acquitted, but a dissenting report accused him of magnifying the debt due to him by the army, of charging the army with debts not really due by them, of reserving for himself portions of choice lands.
Although never convicted of mis-appropriation, charges related to the Irish survey pursued Petty for a number of years. In 1660, Petty published a pamphlet, "Reflections upon some persons and things in Ireland" where he explained that he had defected from the ranks of scientists to doing the survey
- in order to demonstrate to the public the utility of a scientific training.
He further explains his unpopularity by the need to attack him rather than directly attack his leader Henry Cromwell.
Impact on Petty Petty gained fame for his Survey of Ireland. It was the first British imperial survey of an entire conquered nation and Petty was given great credit as a pioneer by the Royal Society. The results became part of his life's work. Petty also undertook the first complete mapping of Ireland in 1673 and the first census of Ireland, for the year 1659. The premises of The Royal Society in London (first four properties only). ...
Sir William Petty further used the Down Survey, supplemented with other materials from surveys in 1636-40 and 1656-9, as research towards his 1685 atlas publication, Hiberniae Delinatio, the first printed atlas of Ireland, which used reduced edited versions of his maps.
The survey brought him considerable personal profit. As his reward, he acquired approximately 30 000 acres (120 km²) in the Kenmare area, in southwest Ireland, and £9 000. This was described in Aubrey's Biography of Petty as 50,000 acres (200 km²) visible from Mount Mangorton [Mangerton]. By 1658, when Cromwell died, Petty owned so much Irish land that he essentially owned county Kerry and was Earl of Landsdowne, as the British renamed Kerry. WGS-84 (GPS) Coordinates: 51. ...
That model of an English gentleman, Evelyn, who knew Petty well, thus speaks of him: John Evelyn (October 31, 1620 – February 27, 1706) was an English writer, gardener and diarist. ...
- The map of Ireland, made by Sir William Petty, is believed to be the most exact that ever yet was made of any country
Resulting documents The resulting maps of the parishes, all drawn by Petty himself, were preserved in the Surveyor General's office and in the Public Records Office in Dublin. The original Down Survey parish maps were lost in a fire in the Surveyor General's office in 1711, and the authenticated copies of the parish maps were lost in fires at the Public Records Office in the Four Courts during the Irish Civil War of 1922. The Four Courts (Na Ceithre Cúirteanna in Irish) in Dublin is the Republic of Irelands main courts building. ...
The Irish Civil War (June 28, 1922 – May 24, 1923) was a conflict between supporters and opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 6, 1921, which established the Irish Free State, precursor of todays Republic of Ireland. ...
Petty also edited the parish maps into barony maps.
The details listed in terriers beside the maps include the names of previous owners of the lands, religious affiliation, land valuation, and acreage (area). The maps themselves include townland boundaries, and sometimes houses/castles, roads and fields. It listed the owners of land in 1640, and the new owners.
Considering the time and circumstances in which these maps were executed, their accuracy is surprising, and they continue to be referred to as trustworthy evidence in courts of law even at the present day.
Parish maps Copies of a number of the parish maps survive in various institutions. The National Library of Ireland holds a set of Down Survey parish maps copied by Daniel O'Brien in the 1780s and purchased in the 1960s from a firm of Dublin solicitors. These maps cover land in Cork, Dublin, East Meath [Meath], King’s County [Offaly], Leitrim, Limerick, Longford, Queen’s County [Leix], Kilkenny, Tipperary, Waterford, Westmeath, Wexford and Wicklow. In some cases, summary barony maps have been included, though these barony maps are not necessarily fully comprehensive. National Library of Ireland is a national library located in Dublin, Ireland. ...
Barony maps Some copies of the original Down Survey barony maps survive. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) has a set in the Annesley Collection. The British Library acquired another set in recent years. The best set, a personal set of Sir William Petty's, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It seems that set was en route by sea to London in 1707, when a French vessel captured the ship. The Bibliothèque Nationale subsequently received the maps. The Ordnance Survey Office, Dublin, published a facsimile set of these maps in 1908. British Library Ossulston St entrance, with distinctive red logo. ...
The new buildings of the library. ...
Related publications - A full account of the proceedings in connexion with the survey, from the will of Petty, was edited by Sir Thomas A. Larcom for the Irish Archaeological Society in 1851.
- The terms of reference of the survey are given in Andrews, J H Plantation acres: an historical survey of the Irish surveyor and his maps. Belfast, Ulster Historical Foundation, 1985, P 21-22.
Sir Thomas Aiskew Larcom, KB, Bart (1801-79), was a leading official in the early Irish Ordnance Survey that started in 1824. ...
Publications of the maps - The National Library of Ireland Down Survey maps are issued on microfilm to readers.
- Surviving parts of the maps have been published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission as DOWN SURVEY (1654-1656)
- Copies of both Hiberniae Deliniatio and the edited barony maps are available in Special Collections at UCC.
- Another group of maps from this Survey, the parish maps, are available in microfilm at UCC.
University College Cork - National University of Ireland, Cork - or more commonly University College Cork (UCC) - is a constituent university of the National University of Ireland and is located in Cork. ...
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