Here's a lovely neat little map of Liverpool's earliest history, from Ramsay Muir's classic 1907 book A History of Liverpool.
The book was produced to celebrate (you may have guessed) the 700th anniversary celebrations of Liverpool's founding in 1207. Muir had gained a first degree in History at University College Liverpool (as it was then known) and became a lecturer in History there in 1899, after a stint as Assistant Lecturer at Manchester University.
His History is notable for refusing to romanticise Liverpool's past at a time it would have been very easy (and tempting) to do so, and John Belchem (in Liverpool 800) says that more recent historical studies have "enriched, rather than undermined" Ramsay Muir's own writings. Muir was an exceptional historian by Victorian standards.
Click the buttons with this icon to zoom to that part of the map.
The map - reproduced here - is, however, typically Victorian, and all the better for it. It's a neat, hand-drawn and attractive little diagram, with the map itself decorated with an elaborate North arrow and cherubs holding up the title scroll (known as the cartouche), which is topped by the Liverpool coat of arms. Trees and marshland are picked out for illustration, and the fields are represented by neat parallel lines, evoking medieval ploughing schemes.
The main fields are all named (Castle Fields, Sheriff Acre, The Great Oldfield etc), and other features like the Fall Well and the Great Heath are labelled. Areas bordering on Liverpool are marked (Everton, Kirkdale) and the road 'To West Derby' is indicated too.
Field names around the townThere also appears to be a dolphin in the Mersey, but we'll let that one slide I think...
The town is little more than a village, with the original Seven Streets very visible here. The castle protects the Pool, separating the town from the water and the slightly imposing Great Heath beyond.
The town and castleFurther out of town is the Eastham Mill and the Little Oldfield. Assuming these names are factual, I do wonder whether the centre of pre-Liverpool settlement was out here, where there's a stream, and a location closer to the Fall Well, another source of water. Of course, nothing worth recording in Domesday was here, so there would be little more in the 11th century as there was in the 14th. Eastham Mill and Little Oldfield
To get a real sense of the (small) scale of Liverpool at this point, look in the top right of the map. There we see the Moss Lake, which was to become a crucial feature in the industrial expansion of the town in the 18th century. That location is now covered by the University and Hospital areas, firmly a part of the town centre landscape these days.
And we can also see the border of Toxteth Park - a solid line, probably a wall, with trees beyond. The ordinary folk of Liverpool would not be allowed in the Park in the 14th century, on pain of severe punishment. It was a landscape reserved for the king and his closest circle to hunt. It would only be opened up in the 17th century, and is also now something we'd consider part of the inner city.
Beyond Liverpool - the Moss Lake and Toxteth ParkThe description in the List of Illustrations at the front of the book goes as follows:
Drawn, from the calculations and measurements of Mr. W. Ferguson Irvine, F.S.A., by Mr. L. K. Adams, B.A., of the University School of Architecture. The small strips near the streets represent burgages. Each of the larger strips is drawn to indicate the average amount of the agricultural holding of a single burgage tenant. the names of the fields, and the directions in which the strips lay, are definitely ascertained facts; the actual divisions between the strips are conjectural only.
So it seems that this map is as academically rigorous as the rest of the book, and a testament to the pride with which Liverpool regarded its history, even if the historian himself insisted on (rightly) recording Liverpool's past as "long centuries of small things".
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