Ralph Agas

During his visits he is known to have lodged at inns: in 1596 at the "Flower de Luce", next to the "Sun" near Fleet Bridge; and in 1606 at the sign of the "Helmet" in Holborn, at the end of Fetter Lane.

He was one of the first estate surveyors to move beyond the traditional practice of compiling purely written descriptions of landed property, and to consider supplementing these with measured maps.

[1][7] An estate map he drew of Toddington, Bedfordshire, dated 1581, includes what Paul Harvey has described as "the best picture we have of a small Elizabethan country market-town".

A verse inscribed on the 1588 engraving of Agas's map of Oxford included a claim to the effect that for ten years past he had been hoping to undertake a survey of London, but had not done so.

On the dubious evidence of this statement, a link with the Woodcut map was first made by the late 17th-century engraver of a copy of it on pewter sheets; and in 1737–8 George Vertue attributed it confidently and unambiguously to Agas.

The longest is a published 20-page pamphlet entitled A Preparative to Platting of Landes and Tenements for Surveigh (1596), in which he advertises his methods of surveying (including the use of the theodolite), defends the practical advantages to the landlord of having a map of his property, and condemns the less scientific techniques of untrained surveyors.

Agas asserts that he has more than forty years experience in survey work, a perfect knowledge of customary tenures and titles of all kinds, and that he is a good penman and well acquainted with old records.

Here Agas claims, besides his knowledge of surveying, the ability to read old records, to restore any that are worn, "obliterated, or dimmed," and to make calendars of them.

He is clever at arithmetic, and skilled "in writing smaule, after the skantelinge & proportion of copiynge the Oulde & New Testamentes seven tymes in one skinne of partchmente, without anie woorde abbreviate or contracted, which maie also serve for drawinge discriptions of contries into volumes portable in verie little cases".

In another letter to Burghley of 1597, Agas writes of his labours in the Fens of eastern England, and states how he had plotted out the ground, gauged the quantity of the waters, the ebbs and flows, and the daily abuses of the landholders.

[2] Another manuscript, dated 1606, comprises an opinion given by Agas to the commissioners appointed to inquire into the question of concealed lands belonging to the Crown.

[22] In 1595 he distributed copies of a document in which he aired his grievances in this matter to several influential members of the county community, but found himself indicted before the Court of Star Chamber on a charge of issuing seditious pamphlets.

[23] In 1598, he was again brought before Star Chamber, in connection with a dispute over the inheritance of the estates of a neighbour, John Payne, in which he sought to establish the Crown's rights of wardship.

The outcome of the case is again not known, but Agas appears to have escaped long-term imprisonment through the intervention of Thomas Browne, the royal farmer of Payne's lands, who wrote to Robert Cecil (son of Lord Burghley) on his behalf.