This map of Medieval England contains a wealth of historical information and sites as well as beautiful illustrations. Published in October 1979 as a companion to the modern map "British Isles".>> Order print map <<

This dataset is based on material published online at https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/ by the History of Parliament Trust.

ArcGIS shapefile of 288 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the fifty-five ancient counties of England and Wales as given in the 1831 census for England and Wales. As such this represents the counties of England and Wales as they were before the boundary changes caused by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act, 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. 61) which led to the elimination of some of the detached portions of counties.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. These data derive from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The GIS attribute data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases edited the GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10). The work involved changing one or more elements of information about place, parish, county, or three figure census number for 2,461 (10.8 per cent) of 22,729 lines of data in the Kain and Oliver GIS. This editing process saw the redigitisation of 644 of the 22,729 polygons, the deletion of 81 polygons, and the digitisation of 525 new polygons. The original Kain and Oliver parish and place dataset did not give details of which counties its units belonged to in 1831, though the authors did note some units had changed county under the auspices of the act of 1844. Max Satchell with help from Geoffrey Stanning and input from Peter Kitson and Tony Wrigley added the 1831 census counties as an attribute to the parish GIS primarily by systematic comparison between the censuses of 1831 and 1851 - the latter's footnotes being particularly informative concerning changes in the county boundaries. In situations where the 1831 county boundary deviated from the post-1844 alignment the polygons from the Burton et al. GIS were subdivided. At the end of this exercise all 23,177 polygons of the enhanced parish GIS could be assigned an 1831 ancient county. This attribute was then used to generate the shapefile of ancient counties.

R code and research dataset of medieval coins recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in England and Wales (https://finds.org.uk/) used in the article:

Oksanen, Eljas and Brookes, Stuart (2025). 'The afterlife of Roman roads in England: insights from the fifteenth-century Gough Map of Great Britain', Journal of Archaeological Science.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2025.106227

The coin finds data dump was obtained by the PAS website (https://finds.org.uk/) on 28.03.2025 under CC-BY licence and was filtered to contain only medieval coin findspots that have coordinate values. The R Code for analysis is included and was developed by Eljas Oksanen.

ArcGIS shapefile of 2433 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 1096 hundreds, wapentakes, wards, divisions, liberties and boroughs of England and Wales as given in the 1831 census.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. The GIS data originates from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The GIS attribute data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases edited the GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10). The work involved changing one or more elements of information about place, parish, county, or three figure census number for 2,461 (10.8 per cent) of 22,729 lines of data in the Kain and Oliver GIS. This editing process saw the redigitisation of 644 of the 22,729 polygons, the deletion of 81 polygons, and the digitisation of 525 new polygons. The hundreds data was created as follows. Geoffrey Stanning under the supervision of Peter Kitson added the hundreds as given in the population tables of the 1851 census to each census parish or place as given in the Burton et al GIS. The remainder of the work was done by Max Satchell who systematically checked the hundred of each 1851 administrative unit against the hundred of the same unit as it was given in the enumeration abstract volumes of the 1831 census. The hundred of the unit was then changed to its 1831 designation where necessary. Where the census listed a hundred, wapentake, division, liberty or borough as belonging to a larger unit below the level of the county, such as a lathe, rape, riding division or part, its name is given in the separate column. In some instances a parish or place lay within two or more hundreds in 1831 but was represented by only a single Burton et al polygon. In such situations the polygon was subdivided using a variety of cartographic sources of hundred boundary data where these were available. The most significant of these were those maps of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 prepared from 1844 to c.1880 when hundred boundaries were still shown. Maps of boundaries prepared for the Boundary Commissions of 1832 and 1837 were also invaluable for borough boundaries. At the end of this exercise only two out of 23,177 polygons could not be assigned to any hundred, wapentake, division, ward, liberty or borough.