Catalogue description Sussex: Pevensey. Plan of the harbour, sea walls, old and new sluices, marshland noted...

Sussex: Pevensey. Plan of the harbour, sea walls, old and new sluices, marshland noted as late of the Earl of Essex; to show proposed work, and responsibility for maintenance. Pevensey Castle and houses in Pevensey in perspective. Three-masted ship outside the harbour. No scale shown. Cardinal points. Oriented to the south. Endorsement on label in late seventeenth-century hand: 'No 11 Pevensey'. Date of [c. 1541] assumed from the fact that the map mentions the ‘late’ earl of Essex, Thomas Cromwell (executed in 1540) but does not so designate Lord Dacre (executed in 1541). The map would therefore appear to date from the period after Cromwell’s execution, but before that of Dacre.

‘Instructions’ concerning building work to the sea walls at Pevensey (DL 44/224), while appended to a commission dated 15 Elizabeth, appear to be of an earlier date and clearly related to the evidence on the map. By the date the instructions were written, Dacre was dead.

Maps and Plans in the Public Record Office: I. British Isles, c.1410-1860 (London, 1967), entry 1914. A reproduction of a tracing of this map was printed as plate 4 to illustrate 'The Inning of the Pevensey Levels' by L F Salzmann, Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 53. Salzmann suggests (pp 54-55) that the map was made to illustrate schemes to repair broken sea walls or make new ones, required because of inundation of reclaimed land about 1542.