Introduction by Michael Behrend (August 2012)

Sir Montagu Sharpe (1856–1942) was Chairman of Middlesex County Council, a senior magistrate, a Freemason, and a historian of Middlesex. A biography of Sharpe was published in 2007 by the late Diana Willment of Brentford (note 1).

Sharpe is perhaps best remembered for his book Middlesex in British, Roman and Saxon Times, which was first published in 1919, with a second edition in 1932. This work is of interest in the history of ley-hunting because it anticipates in some ways the theories of Alfred Watkins. The resemblance is emphasized by Guy Ragland Phillips in his article on Sharpe in The Ley Hunter. There is no evidence (as far as I know) that Watkins ever met Sharpe, but it’s interesting that Watkins and his wife Marion Cross were married at Brentford, close to Sharpe’s home at Hanwell. Although Watkins does not mention Sharpe’s work, it was discussed by members of the Straight Track Club (note 2) and is briefly mentioned in F.C. Tyler’s book The Geometrical Arrangement of Ancient Sites.

As Guy Ragland Phillips notes in his article, Sharpe’s Middlesex book is based on a series of booklets published from about 1906 to 1917. A printed slip bound with the copies in Cambridge University Library (note 3) lists them as follows (publication dates are from the booklets themselves):

• Some Antiquities of Middlesex in British, Roman and Saxon Times [1905/1906]
• The Catuvellauni. A Powerful British Tribe in the Middlesex District  [1911]
• The Ancient Forests of Middlesex  [1907, 2nd edition 1914]
• The Middlesex District in Roman Times (Parts I and II, paginated separately)  [1913]
• The Accuracy of the Domesday Land Measures in Middlesex and their Roman Origin  [1914]
• Middlesex in Saxon Times  [1916]
• Parish Churches on the Sites of Romano-British Chapels  [1909]

Of these, Part II of The Middlesex District in Roman Times seems of particular interest from a ley-hunting point of view, and is republished here. The fold-out map was drawn by a professional cartographer (note 4) and is larger and more detailed than those in the later book, which were drawn by Sharpe himself.

In 1918, in reply to criticisms from Professor Francis Haverfield, Sharpe published a summary of his theories about centuriation in Middlesex, and the evidence on which they were based.

Archaeologists have been on the whole skeptical about Sharpe’s centuriation theories, whilst allowing that some of his findings may be valid. Professor Oswald Dilke wrote (note 5):

As to Sharpe’s scheme, he started off on the wrong foot by being ignorant of Latin. Thus we are surprised to read: ‘A possessa was the square block of land contained within four quintarial limites. … Its superficial area measured 1,300 iugera.’ This, of course, is nonsense; there is no such noun as a possessa. The whole scheme is based on a total misunderstanding of Hyginus, De limitibus: ‘legimus in quibusdam locis ab uno mille et trecenta iugera fuisse possessa’, ‘we have read that in some places 1,300 iugera were occupied (with squatter’s rights) by one man’. … Sharpe then proceeded to contrast these 1,300 iugera, wrongly conceived as a regular measure, with the extent of a saltus, which he took to be 1,250 iugera, and provided for the extra space by allowing for limites. For this saltus he quoted Siculus Flaccus, who says it is 25 ‘centuries’, but in the context of a regular ‘century’ of 200 iugera, since it is only in the following paragraph that he goes on to irregular ones. So Siculus Flaccus thought of a saltus in the surveying sense as 25 × 200 = 5,000 iugera, and no other writer in the Corpus contradicts him. … On the other hand, if Sharpe discovered on one road between the upper Colne and the Lea five crossways in succession at intervals of 10 actus, this is surely more than a coincidence. We may dismiss the majority of his conclusions and question the existence of centuriation in Middlesex without discarding such evidence as seems interesting.

Similarly, John Peterson of the University of East Anglia criticized Sharpe’s system of orientation as follows (note  6):

He interpreted this as four slightly separated grids of 50 × 50 actus subdivided into 10 × 10 actus blocks, an idea which was rightly rejected by Dilke (1971) on the grounds that Sharpe had misunderstood his Latin source. The reason for separating the grids seems to have been to make them a better fit with Parish churches, which Sharpe regarded as the successors of supposed Roman wayside chapels, and with other features such as stones or even supposed -stone placenames. It is remarkable how few of Sharpe’s rural ways actually fit his grids … However there is one obvious exception. The present A409/A404 from Harrow Weald to Sudbury, passing Wealdstone, Greenhill and Sudbury Stone, forms the western boundary of one of the grids …

In this Web version of Sharpe’s booklet, the many footnotes have been moved into a separate Web page and identified by page numbers, so that e.g. footnote (3) on page 12 appears here as (12.3).