Search Results: this boke sheweth the maner of by benese richard

Title within architectural woodcut border & many woodcuts in the text (many highlighted in red). Printed in black letter. [208] pp. Small 4to, modern calf (title with a few minor stains). London: "Prynted in Southwarke in Saynt Thomas Hospitall, by me James Nicolson," [1537].<br /> <P> First edition of the first English work on surveying in the modern sense: the measuring and plotting of land. In the 16th century, "surveying" could also mean giving instructions to land stewards and overseers of the manor; John Fitzherbert wrote the first book on that subject in 1523. Our book is very rare and is a fine copy.<br /> <P> Benese (d. 1547), Augustinian canon and surveyor to Henry VIII, noted that sellers tended to overestimate the size of the land they were selling and buyers underestimated. He set out to devise geometric rules for the accurate measuring of land to be sold.<br /> <P> This book "represents the first real attempt to put into… Read More

[London]: Prynted in Southwarke in Saynt Thomas hospitall, by me James Nicolson, 1537. First edition. LAND AS PRIVATE PROPERTY - A NEW ERA OF CAPITALISM. First edition of "the first English textbook on geometrical land-measurement and surveying" (Buisseret, p. 39), an outstanding copy in its original binding, and extremely rare thus. Benese's Maner of Measurynge All Maner of Lande marks an epoch, the widespread idea of land as private property. "If there is a single date when the idea of land as private property can be said to have taken hold, it is 1538. In that year a tiny volume was published with a long title that began, This boke sheweth the maner of measurynge of all maner of lande. In it, the author, Sir Richard Benese, described for the first time in English how to calculate the area of a field or an entire estate ... [T]his interest in exact measurement was also new. Until then, what mattered was how much land would yield, not its size ... Accurate measurement became important in 1538… Read More