This book collects together early maps of Lincoln, and demonstrates their importance in describing the changing geography of this historic city, and also the development of cartography and its increasing application of scientific techniques for improved accuracy and precision. Speed published the earliest surviving map of the area in 1610; his work was followed in 1722 by that of William Stukeley, whose map concentrates on historical features. The nineteenth century saw Lincoln mapped a number of times, by William Marrat (1814-17) and shortly afterwards by James Sandby Padley and the Ordnance Survey. It was the electoral reforms of the 1830s that drove the next map-makers to define ward and parish boundaries, the details of which required a larger scale than previous works. Then in 1842 Padley published his remarkable Large Map of Lincoln. The collection ends with the OS map of 1920, a detailed record of the city scaled at six inches to the mile, where modern Lincoln is clearly visible.

Legal documents from eighteenth and nineteenth-century Lincolnshire provide fascinating insights into life at the time. The legal system in eighteenth-century England has generally been viewed as an instrument of class justice, imposed by magistrates drawn from the gentry and aristocracy, and weighing harshly on the labouring and servant classes. The rare survival of the justicing notebooks of Thomas Dixon of Riby, as a working farmer an unusual recruit to the magistrates' bench, make it possible to draw a more nuanced picture. The only Lincolnshire magistrate to leave records of his work "out of sessions", his books detail those cases he heard and resolved alone, often "in my house at Riby", between his appointment in 1787 and his death in 1798; they provide an illuminating glimpse of the justice system in operation at its lowest level, where stealers of ducks and absconding servants were brought before a country justice - and reveal procedures frequently not found in other published accounts. The detail furnished by thesevolumes is amplified with extracts from other records, including those of quarter sessions and parish constables. Edited by B. J. Davey. The second part of the volume presents papers from an arbitration of 1838 between the licensee of a remote beer house ("The Blackamoor's Head") and the son of the local squire, with the former pressing the latter for repayment of a debt. The near-verbatim evidence describes the behaviour of the "bankers" - the localterm for navvies - engaged in deepening the adjoining river. The inn also provided hospitality to drovers who stopped overnight with their beasts en route from Scotland, and their bills provide rare quantitative evidence of the final years of this trade. Edited by R. C Wheeler. B.J. Davey taught History at the Immingham School and the University of Lincoln; R. C. Wheeler has written widely on cartographic and local history.

Reproduction of 48 maps from Lincolnshire's past sheds new light on the county's history. The low-lying parts of Lincolnshire are covered by an array of maps of intermediate scope, covering a greater area than a single parish but less than the whole county. Typically produced in connection with drainage or water transport, and considerably predating the Ordnance Survey, to which many are comparable, they go back as far as the medieval period, with the remarkable Kirkstead Psalter Map of the West and Wildmore Fens [c.1232-39], and continue to the late nineteenth century. . This volume covers the Witham Valley, with the East, West and Wildmore Fens north of Boston, but extending as far as Grantham and Skegness, reproducing the most important of the maps and listing the less useful ones. The history of the drainage of the area is unusually dramatic. By 1750 the Witham was a failed river: the winter floods were worse than they had been for centuries and navigation from Boston to Lincoln had ceased. Over the following sixty years, local interests, aided by some able engineers, brought both navigation and drainage to a state of perfection that made Lincolnshire prosperous and fed the industrial north. These maps, reproduced here to a very high quality and in both colour and black and white, are an essential tool for understanding this history, and the volume thus illuminates certain episodes that have previously been opaque. They are accompanied by a cartobibliography and introduction.