Monday, February 7, 2011

Plan B

Well there I was working away on hex gridding over the map of Doomsday England, a pet project to try and figure how many villages actually fit in a five mile hex (from the overlay it looks to be 7-9, you can read more ideas about division of land at Redwald). Suddenly it occurred to me it was probably in poor taste and perhaps a violation of copyright to publish a map taken from a couple of figures from someone else's book, even if I had smashed them together and overlaid a grid upon them. Although the book author seems unlikely to be checking my web site, my status as a someday want-to-be author and game publisher always leaves me leery of violating intellectual property rights. After all, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you want to check out the base maps look on pages 38-39 of H. C. Darby's Domesday England, Cambridge University Press 1977 (I have the 1986 paper back edition. Its a reasonable read for a scholarly introduction to the data in the Domesday Book, a Norman survey of the land and loot they got when they took over England {for tax purposes of course}). From the book I gleaned Redwalds division into Hides, Tithings, and Hundreds leaves out many other land divisions in use in near Anglo-Saxon times including wapentakes, ridings, lathes, and rapes. Real life is seldom simple. Never-the-less I am no longer planning on posting my five mile hex map of Domesday England this week. I will not be posting my Domesday map until I find a source for the basic information in open source. As a result this weeks offering to the web will be a bit later than my usual target of near the weekend. I am working on a fine old map and adventure from the 1980's (Hope to have it done later today or tomorrow).

4 comments:

  1. You should contact the authors and explain what you're up to. They might give you permission.

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  2. It's possible but I wouldn't hold my breath. Of course it might be fun to make the attempt.

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  3. Interesting stuff. I hope you find a way to do the map. I simplified stuff for Redwald for ease of use. I prefered Wapentakes to Hundred (both are the same) as it's much more evocative. Unfortunately it's Old Norse so was a no go for Redwald. Riding is another Viking loan word, and Lathe I think was only used by the men of Kent (Jutes) and might be specific to royal land, eitherway a Lathe is close enough to a shire for me to not use it in Redwald.

    By the way, any reason you don't just slap a hex grid on a generic map of england and then use the data from the books (other than time?) to fill out your own map?

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  4. Redwald if you look at the Feb 11th post you'll see something close to the approach you suggest.

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