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William Senior's Survey of the Estates of the First and Second Earls of Devonshire c.1600–28
Edited by D.V. Fowkes and G.R. Potter
with a biographical note on William Senior
by Peter Eden
William Senior was a mathematician and surveyor commissioned by the Cavendish family to compile one of the most extensive and detailed surveys to survive for any great estate of this period. Senior surveyed some 97,000 acres, half of which lay in Derbyshire, centred mainly on Chatsworth and Hardwick. There was a further 26,000 acres in Yorkshire, 4,500 acres in Lancashire, 3,000 acres in Nottinghamshire and a similar amount in Leicestershire, plus another 2,000 acres in Staffordshire and Lincolnshire. There were also outliers in Buckinghamshire, Suffolk, Huntingdonshire and Somerset, where Senior made what is apparently the earliest survey of Glastonbury Tor.
Senior mapped each estate and prepared a schedule listing each holding with its tenant, and each field within the tenement. In some cases the state of cultivation is given. Copyholds and freeholds are distinguished from leaseholds; acreages are given for common waste and woodland. Because it covers such a large area, the survey includes an enormous range of landscape. Thus, within the pages of a single book, it is possible to see, vividly brought to life, a representative cross-section of the landscape of early seventeenth-century England.
