BOWES ONE-NAME STUDY

It provides a mapped record of confiscated lands after the Cromwellian war. The divisions used in the survey were the barony, parish and townland, and it is useful in determining land ownership for the period.

The survey was practically destroyed by fire in 1711 and the remainder in the fire of 1922. However, copies survive under the following classifications:

• Copies of parish maps made in 1787 by the Hon. R. Rochfort, Surveyor-General, which are now included in the Reeves Collection in the National Library
  
• a series of barony maps, entitled “Hibernia Regnum”, compiled from the Down Survey parish maps
  
• the Quit Rent Office maps and tracings. [1]

In regard to the designations Civill Survey and Grosse Survey, which occur so frequently, and Down Survey, which more especially has been a subject of conjecture, it will be seen by this work that the Civill Survey was the terrier or list of forfeited lands, prepared under the commissioners appointed by the commission of 1st June, and Act of 26th September, 1653. The Grosse Survey was the designation by which the surveys ordered by the commission above quoted are referred to in the Act. It is, therefore, the name given by Dr. Petty to the surveys made under that Act by his predecessor Mr. Worsley, and others, which furnished only the " grosse surroundes" of the lands surveyed ; and the Down Survey was so called simply to mark its distinction from those former surveys, by its topographic details being all laid down by admeasurement on maps. This is well expressed in the letter from Mr. Weale, already quoted, in which he says : " Childish as the etymon has always sounded in my ears, I am obliged to admit that the Survey obtained its name solely from the continued repetition of the expressions, ' by the survey laid down,' ' laid down by admeasurement,' in contra-distinction to Worsley's surveys, the word Down being so written as often as it occurs in the MS." It must be admitted that the name would have equally applied to the the Strafford Survey, which it is now clear was also laid down on maps, but for the sake of contrasting Dr. Petty's work, by some distinctive cognomen, with the Civil and Grosse Surveys. It was indeed, so far as relates to the name, only carrying out the instructions given by the commissioners to the old surveyors, before the Survey was undertaken as a whole by Dr. Petty, as will be seen by a paper printed in the Appendix (p. 388), where they are ordered to "sett downe" certain boundaries " in a toutch plott." It may also be observed, that the name is still used in Ireland among the country surveyors of the old school, for any survey laid down on a map, as distinguished from a mere list of areas, which they also call a survey. [4; Conversion to plain text at Google Books may have introduced errors.]