Catalogue description Map of Holland Fen, Lincolnshire, showing the area between Donington, Crowland, Market...

Map of Holland Fen, Lincolnshire, showing the area between Donington, Crowland, Market Deeping and Horbling. Shows monastic and parish churches, houses, crosses including St Guthlac's cross at Brotherhouse Bar; roads, bridges, rivers and dykes, causeway; marshland, Bourne well, cloot near Brotherhouse Bar; boundary between Parts of Kesteven and Holland. Note to effect that villages of Rippingdale, Dunsby, Morton and Bourne had common in marsh of Pinchbeck; Thurlby did not. Place-names in English: notes in Latin. Buildings apparently drawn from life, and outlined in red: churches, houses, bridges in perspective; Crowland bridge in plan. No scale shown. Oriented to the north. Endorsed: 'The plais For bestes Holand' in contemporary hand; 'Holland Fenn', 'Lincoln', 'No 55 Holland Fen' in later hands.

The British Isles catalogue proposed a dating of 'Elizabeth I or earlier' (Maps and Plans in the Public Record Office: I. British Isles, c.1410-1860 (London, 1967), entry 2688); Edward Lynam suggested a date of 1550 (number 86 in list of 'Maps of the Fens', Victoria County History, Huntingdonshire vol III (1936)); Arthur Owen placed MPCC 1/7 in the sixteenth century (in Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England, R A Skelton and P D A Harvey, eds., (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), chapter 25 on a map of Deeping Fen, p 291). However, palaeographic and stylistic evidence suggests a mid-fifteenth century or earlier date for this map. A detailed analysis is given in 'The Pinchbeck Fen Map: A Fifteenth-Century Map of the Lincolnshire Fenland', Rose Mitchell and David Crook, Imago Mundi, volume 51, pp 40-50.