Moss Rooms and Hell Holes: the landscape of the Leyland Dispute Maps, 1571-1599

Large-scale local maps are rare before the eighteenth century, so for one small district in the north-west of England to have seven such maps dating from the end of the sixteenth century is remarkable. These maps were produced in connection with land disputes heard before the Court of the Duchy of Lancaster and depict a mossland landscape where the absence of natural boundary markers, and a history as an intercommon rather than in single ownership, readily led to disputes between notably litigious neighbouring resident landlords; while the hearing of the cases in Westminster, rather than before local juries, generated the need for the maps themselves, to help the court understand this unfamiliar landscape. By definition single-purpose ephemeral objects, the maps nevertheless often contained more information than was strictly necessary for the case in hand and so were sometimes brought forward by the courts or copied by the litigants for reuse in later suits. The maps today can be regarded as texts which throw considerable light on, and help us to reconstruct, a lost landscape of living sphagnum moss, peat diggings and seasonal grazings, which at the time was regarded as typifying Lancashire but which has since entirely disappeared from the county, and indeed from England as a whole.The maps restore to us a district name, Wymott, lost since the seventeenth century; and they capture a landscape in transition, as the thinner peats were becoming exhausted and as much of the district was becoming enclosed, drained and converted to farmland.