A Map of the Elizabethan Court of Requests

TNA REQ 2 Pleadings by English and Welsh counties, 1558-1603

The Court of Requests

The Court of Requests operated from 1485 to 1642 “to provide easy access for poor men and women to Royal justice and equity. A cheap and simple procedure attracted many suitors, not all of them poor but a significant number of them women”. It dealt primarily with small-scale civil cases, including property and inheritance disputes, marriage contracts and settlements, and occasionally criminal matters.

Daniel Gosling has recently finished a project to catalogue the court’s Pleadings (petitions):

My Court of Requests pleadings (REQ 2/16-424) project is now complete. Over 28,000 items dating from c.1547-c.1625 (Edw VI to Jas I) now searchable online.

I could see the data included locations and thought this would make a good excuse to practise some mapping techniques using Leaflet. In particular, I wanted to try out making a choropleth of counties.

I chose to confine the map to Elizabethan cases because they comprise the bulk of the catalogued cases; there aren’t that many before 1558 and (as I understand it) the majority of post-1603 cases haven’t been catalogued. So Elizabeth’s reign provides a goodly chunk of data to play with. I’ve also restricted it to England and Wales as those represent the vast majority of identified locations. 22204 locations in 18878 cases could be mapped, using the Historic County Borders Project data.

More problematic was the normalisation of raw case numbers, ie calculating rates relative to county populations in the same period. There are several problems with this, including the inherent uncertainties of early modern demographics, the difficulty of sourcing comparable data for England and Wales (see Notes below for the gruesome details), as well as the artificiality of using snapshots of population counts when the cases cover almost half a century. It’s really a terrible idea!

So I’m not sure I trust the population data enough, for example, to make much of the apparent differences between north and south Wales. But it’s even worse not to do it, because using the raw case numbers in a map can be highly misleading. For example, Buckinghamshire and Lincolnshire are referenced in similar numbers of cases (544 and 550). But the 1600 population estimates are c.175,200 for Lincolnshire and c.56,700 for Buckinghamshire. So in fact people in Buckinghamshire were roughly three times as likely as Lincolnshire inhabitants to be involved in Court of Requests cases.

And that difference appears to reflect a more general pattern: the map clearly suggests that travel represented a significant barrier to accessing the central courts, even when court costs were relatively low.

Finally, I’ve added an interactive table to enable a little exploration of the data, with links to the catalogue for full details.

ojsReq2EngWales = transpose(ojs_req2_engwales)
ojsReq2Counties = transpose(ojs_req2_counties)
//ojsReq2Counts = transpose(ojs_req2_counts)
ojsHcpReq2Geo = transpose(ojs_hcp_req2_geo)

// function for multipolygon data (will prob work for non-multi polygons as well...)
// reminder:
// curly braces make an Object. geometry=Object.
// square braces make an Array. coordinates = (nested) Array

// "hcs_county": "Anglesey", "abbr": "Angle", "hcs_name": "Anglesey", "hcs_code": "AGL", "hcs_number": 2, "county": "Anglesey", "region": "Wales" }, 

function createPolyData(data) {
  const geoData = {
    type: 'FeatureCollection',
    crs: {type: 'name', properties: {name: 'urn:ogc:def:crs:OGC:1.3:CRS84'}},
    features: []
  };
  data.map(h => {
    geoData.features.push({
      type: 'Feature',
      properties: {
        //id: h.id,
        county: h.county,
        region: h.region,
        n: h.cases, 
        p: h.p,
        cp: h.cp
      },
      geometry: {
        type: h.geometry.type,
        coordinates: h.geometry.coordinates
      }
    });
  });
  return geoData;
}

ojsHcpReq2Poly = createPolyData(ojsHcpReq2Geo)

Map

(hover over the map to see county names and counts)

mapHcp = {
  // Make a container in the Observable DOM to hold the map
  // can i change dimensions of this to work better for map? yes!
  // removed width as it seems to conflict with column: 
  let parent = DOM.element('div', { style: `height:700px` });
  // Make sure Observable renders the parent container so Leaflet can figure out its size
  yield parent;
  
  // 
  let map = L.map(parent)
      .setView([52.9221, -1.4729], 7); // ggl derby. still could be a bit further W? // higher numbers are more zoomed in.
  
  // osm is a bit *busy*
 let osmTileLayer = L.tileLayer( 'http://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
      attribution: '&copy; <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a>; <a href="https://www.county-borders.co.uk">Historic County Borders Project</a>',
      maxZoom: 9,
      minZoom: 6
  })
  .addTo(map); 
  
  // i like this! from ggl ai search but looks fine. light_all / voyager (more colour)
  // hmm suddenly get "API KEY REQUIRED" messages... wonder if it's exceeded a limit... well, easily fixed
  /*let cartoTileLayer = L.tileLayer('https://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/rastertiles/light_all/{z}/{x}/{y}{r}.png', { 
    maxZoom: 9,
    minZoom: 6,
    attribution: '&copy; <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors &copy; <a href="https://carto.com">CARTO</a>; <a href="https://www.county-borders.co.uk">Historic County Borders Project</a>' 
    })
    .addTo(map);*/
  


  

 // make a lookup table indexed by county, so we can go from that ID to the count
 // let countsByGeoId = new Map(ojsHcpReq2Geo.map(row => [row['county'], row]));
  
  let styleGenerator = feature => {
    let style = {
      "color": "rgb(100, 100, 100)",
      //"fillColor": req2ColorScale(countsByGeoId.get(feature.properties.county).cp),