Privately published (?), Brentford, Middlesex, 1913
This is one of several booklets that formed the basis of Sharpe’s well-known book Middlesex in British, Roman and Saxon Times. It is of interest in the history of ley-hunting because, as Guy Ragland Phillips points out in the article also republished here, Sharpe anticipated in some ways the theories of Alfred Watkins.
Sharpe’s theories about centuriation have not been generally accepted, and in particular it seems clear that his supposed unit of area called a possessa never existed (see the criticism by O.A.W. Dilke).
For convenience in this Web version, the booklet has been divided into three sections and the footnotes have been moved to a separate Web page.
The digitized version contains the following Web pages:
| EXTRA |
|---|
| Introduction by Michael Behrend (2012) |
| Montagu Sharpe, “Centuriation in Middlesex” (1918) [Summary of his theories] |
| Guy Ragland Phillips, “Sharpe’s network of rectangles” (1976) [Watkins’s debt to Sharpe] |
