The 1575 Rental Survey for Great Coggeshall

The Rental Survey entitled “Coggeshall in Essex”, dates from 1574 to 1575. It records various documents connected with the Manors of Great and Little Coggeshall, under the Duchy of Lancaster. The Survey is remarkable in that it not only gives the names of the occupants and a description of their properties, but includes the position of each house within its street and the size of each plot, usually in perches. This makes it possible for an accurate map of the town to be extrapolated.

The document to the left gives a brief description of the whole survey together with the streets covered and the transcribed text for Great Coggeshall. Click on the document to download the file.

The Rental Survey was a key element of the "Discovering Coggeshall" project. A whole series of maps were produced for the Discovering Coggeshall Vol 2 book and for future detailed research. Click on the maps below to enlarge them. 

The Discovering Coggeshall Archive





Standard Map Sets

Maps overlaid onto the Ordinance Survey Master Map held by Essex County Council. 

Maps showing only data from the 1575 Rental Survey in a representative sixteenth century stylised format.

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5

2

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3

7

4

7 Large scale maps combining data from the Rental Survey Data Base onto the OS map.

Bespoke Maps

Maps used for the Discovering Coggeshall Vol 2 book.

Copies of some of these maps especially the larger A0 and A3 series can be viewed in The Coggeshall Museum.

Other Maps

As the books were being written and printed research carried on. 

Three draft maps never made it to print. They show probable development of Coggeshall, especially: 

the organic development of the original market in the C11/12;  





the new planned market in the C13/14; together with 



the identification of a number of previously unknown “back lanes”.

The 1575 Rental Survey Data Base

The data from the survey was converted into a comprehensive data base and embedded by ECC into the OSMM mapping layers. It was also used to produce a comprehensive set of statistics much of which appears in the Discovering Coggeshall Vol 2 book. Click on the notebooks to download the files. You can download Discovering Coggeshall Vol 2 by clicking here.


 This document is a list of names by data base reference number.  





This document is a list of names but by street.

Both enable researchers to cross reference the rental entry with a current the map location.


This document is a spread sheet copy of the original working data base complete with 225 entries, 25 fields and over 5000 individual cells of information. This should continue to be an excellent research tool for the future.


Index of map identities 

This document shows the range of maps produced, including the two categories, scale, description, market aimed at, recommended sheet size and identity reference.

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