Judges as Mapmakers: How to Create an Estate Map in Early-Nineteenth-Century Portugal

Abstract In 1806, High Court judge Luiz Gonzaga de Carvalho e Britto published the first Portuguese manual devoted to making property-register books. In this, he advocated a curious method for surveying and drawing estate maps, one based on his own experience as a mapmaker. Britto’s aim in compiling the manual was to instruct other judges in the map-making techniques needed for registering property. In this article, Britto’s maps and method of map making, as articulated in his manual, offer a window into the practice of estate mapping in early nineteenth-century Portugal. They also convey an idea that was controversial in its time: that judges themselves should be involved in the production of estate maps. While estate mapping was common across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Portugal they were a rare phenomenon, hence the scarcity of these maps in archives, and the uniqueness of Britto’s example.