The map and its numbered holdings
Two coloured versions of a map of East Mersea manor survive from about 1650, together with lists that match landholders and acreages to numbered plots. The manor records are catalogued at Essex Record Office as D/DU 555/18. A later tracing, D/DU 555/19, survives without its numbered key. Without that key, names cannot reliably be assigned to every field on the tracing.
The manor book was compiled in the 1650s for John Handford of Mitcham, Surrey, who had inherited East Mersea manor from his father, Sir Humphrey Handford. Alongside the maps it preserved earlier surveys, details of freehold and customary tenants, and the estate land retained by the lord of the manor.
Field names and acreages
An earlier East Hall estate survey, copied into the manor book, identifies a group of enclosed fields. It places Walbrooks, eight acres, on the east side of the manor house, and gives Dovehouse Field as 16 acres, Churchfield as 30 acres and Coatfield as 26 acres. Middlefield, also called Newfield, contained 22 acres; Hoefield measured 30 acres; and four adjoining Eadlands fields totalled 43 acres.
The same survey describes the manor house as ruinous and records a kitchen, kilnhouse, bolting house, barn, stable and haybarn. These details come from an early-seventeenth-century survey reproduced in the later manuscript, not from a proven identification of each numbered parcel on the coloured 1650 map. The transcription of the East Hall demesne survey gives the original field names and measurements.
A land transaction in 1614
A deed signed on 26 November 1614 records a £780 transaction between John Sotherton and William Mott of Colchester, with Thomas Eliott, Christopher Sotherton, John Wotton and Thomas Allen also parties to the conveyance. Among the holdings conveyed were Martells (25 acres and adjoining marsh), Stanes Land (11 acres), Bromans (14 acres), Berry Land (ten acres) and Westland (two acres). It also named Cobbes (five acres) and a half-acre saffron garden. Thomas Keys or his subtenants occupied the group of properties described in the deed.
William Mott already held land called Girdlers, Stone Acre, Warwards and Cockmans, occupied by John Stephens or his subtenants. The conveyance dealt with the transition from customary holdings under the manor to freehold ownership. A transcription of the 1614 indenture survives under Essex Record Office reference D/DU 555/24. Its names and acreages show the kind of property recorded by the estate, but the deed predates the coloured map by several decades.
Landholders and field boundaries around 1650
The surviving lists name holdings associated with Lord Compton alongside smaller tenancies. The map shows enclosed fields rather than medieval open-field strips. Land was measured in acres, roods and perches: four roods to an acre and forty perches to a rood.
The coloured maps, seventeenth-century estate surveys and 1614 conveyance are related evidence, but they are different records. A field named in the earlier deed cannot be placed on a particular map number without a matching, legible entry in the numbered holdings list.
The 1841 tithe survey
East Mersea’s 1841 tithe map and award record a later landscape of fields, owners and occupiers. Two hundred years of conveyances, drainage and boundary changes separate them from the manor map. The comparison is most reliable where map outlines, parcel numbers and written names can be checked together, rather than matching names alone.