The Philosophical Breakfast Club (33 page)

Jones was the obvious choice for Drinkwater Bethune to turn to for help; he had published a pamphlet arguing for the “commutation,” or replacement, of tithes with money payments in 1833, at the time of the first Tithe Bill. He also had experience with tithes from his days as the parson in Brasted. As the local vicar, he was owed tithes, and saw firsthand the oppression faced by some farmers due to the tithe system.

Jones and Drinkwater Bethune’s Tithe Bill, which had the support of both the government and the opposition, was passed in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and given the Royal Assent in June of 1836. It called for the conversion of all tithes into cash payments. The amount of the payment the first year would be based on the average value of the tithes over the previous seven years, and the value would fluctuate in later years based on the price movements of the three main arable crops: wheat, barley, and oats. There would be three commissioners
overseeing this conversion, two appointed by the home secretary and one by the Archbishop of Canterbury. As a reward for his work on the bill, Jones was appointed by the archbishop to be the Church’s representative. The commissioners, based in Somerset House, the home of the Royal Society, were paid a salary of £1,500. Jones received special permission to retain his position and salary at Haileybury; so he and his wife, Charley, were suddenly, for the first time, quite well off, with £2,000 between the two jobs.

Herschel wrote Jones from the Cape that he was “delighted” with the news of Jones’s position. “To see your powers rendered efficient and excited with a consciousness of their efficacy in working out good is all that your best friends can possibly desire for you!” he enthused.
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In the same letter he asked Jones and his wife to serve as the godparents for his newest child, John. “If you will let our little cub look up to you for a constant good example and an occasional good precept (or a good whipping as the case may be) the better for him!” (The Herschels had first thought of giving the honor to Whewell, but in the end made him wait until their daughter Amelia was born in 1841).
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The three commissioners hired an army of assistants who would travel to every rural town and village, working out the details of tithes owed on every single parcel of land. Jones drew up skeleton forms and instructions for the use of the assistants.
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The commission attempted to bring the landowners and tithe owners to a mutually acceptable agreement, which made the process much easier: no one needed to gather the seven years’ worth of past receipts showing the value of the tithe. But when the two parties could not agree on a voluntary commutation, the commissioners were charged with making a compulsory determination.

Jones’s time was almost entirely filled up now; he had no free moments to ponder philosophy or to give in to his depression. Jones lectured in Haileybury on Saturday evenings and Monday mornings, taking his turn with the Sunday sermons, and then traveled to London for a busy week’s worth of work at the Tithe Commission. Whewell complained to Herschel that “Jones is so much immersed in Tithe Bills and the like that I can get no general philosophy out of him.”
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As he worked, Jones devised a plan to match the mappings of his two friends with maps of his own.

For each parish district involved in the commutation, maps were needed to show the different parcels of land and their sizes. Jones knew that the maps they had been given already for some of the early voluntary
commutations were terribly inaccurate. In one such map, two fields were represented as nearly the same size, although in reality one was 3.5 acres and the other only .75 acre.
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This was bound to cause problems later on, when the tithe owner or landowner decided to contest the valuation in coming years, or when disputes arose questioning whether certain land was subject to the tithe or not.

Jones and one of his assistant commissioners, Lieutenant R. K. Dawson of the Royal Engineers, saw the need for the tithe maps as an opportunity to conduct a full cadastral survey of the country: a comprehensive and detailed register of all the land boundaries in the nation, showing the location, dimensions, ownership, tenure, cultivation, and value of each and every lot. The Napoleonic cadastral survey—the results of which were calculated by de Prony and his team of computing hairdressers—had been followed by similar surveys in Austria, Bavaria, Savoy, and Piedmont. There were many advantages to such a detailed mapping of a nation: the resolution of boundary disputes, the simplification of property transfer, the identification of the best routes for new roads, canals, and railways, and the pinpointing of zones where government investment in making improvements would be most beneficial. It would also be useful for the administration of the New Poor Law: the maps would indicate clearly how much each landowner owed in poor rates.

Dawson estimated—probably underestimated—that a full cadastral survey would take five years, at a total cost of £1.5 million (at 9 pence per acre for the land survey and 3 pence per acre for the valuation). The maps would be at a scale of 26.7 inches to a mile, drawn by triangulation using fixed lines between tall edifices—churches, windmills, obelisks. The maps would be coded with symbols to show at a glance how the land was used: hops, wheat, or oat fields, orchards, pasture, and woodland would all be clearly visible.
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As Whewell’s cotidal maps did for the world’s oceans, and Herschel’s star maps did for the skies, the tithe maps as envisioned by Jones and Dawson would allow a viewer to take in, with a single look, a complete understanding of the whole extent of the rural land of England and Wales.
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It soon became obvious, however, that neither the landowners nor the Church would be willing to pay for this nationwide mapping endeavor. The tithe commissioners wrote to Thomas Spring Rice, the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent to our treasury secretary), requesting that the government defray some of the costs. Spring Rice appointed a
parliamentary committee in March 1837, which reported two months later that the extensive mapping was not required. It was a blow to Jones, but he was not surprised: he had seen Babbage struggle with the attempt to get the government to fund a project whose motivation was greater accuracy, and he had taken note of the lukewarm response. Once again the government was unwilling to pay for increased precision, this time precision in mapping the British nation.

The commissioners were told instead that they must accept all maps that they were given in cases of voluntary commutation, even if these were known to be inaccurate. For the contested cases, more-accurate maps would be drawn up, but these need not be full cadastral survey maps. The commissioners decided that even if they had to accept second-rate maps, they would affix their official seal only to the first-rate, cadastral survey maps. In the end, 11,800 tithe maps were drawn up and given to the Tithe Commission; only 2,300 of these were sealed. Those tithe maps drawn to the cadastral scale covered as much as ten square meters for large parish districts. Had all of England and Wales been mapped this way, the outcome would have measured 6.5 acres. It would not be until one hundred years later that England would map itself in as much detail as Jones and Dawson had wanted.
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Nevertheless, the nearly twelve thousand tithe maps that were drawn up constituted the first systematic mapping of England and Wales.

The commutation of the tithes was viewed as one of the most successful public enterprises in the nineteenth century. For such a sweeping reform—resulting in payments of over £4 million in tithes a year by the 1850s—it was accomplished within a remarkably short period, and with remarkably little complaint by those paying or receiving the tithes. The success of the endeavor was generally acknowledged to be due to the “energy, promptness and clearness of view” of Jones, who had finally found something he could do both well and with ease.
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The time he spent on the Tithe Commission would be the happiest time of Jones’s life since leaving Cambridge so many years before.

S
TARS, SEA
, and land were mapped by the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club. When they began these projects, large swaths of nature were unknown and uncharted; when they finished, more of the world was mapped and understood. Before their work, maps of the stars of the
southern hemisphere, the tides of the ocean, and England and Wales themselves were like the maps we associate with earlier eras, maps with large, empty zones filled with fanciful monsters representing unexplored continents: “Here there be dragons!” Herschel, Whewell, and Jones captured parts of nature that had previously been unexplored, like the continents of centuries before; they filled in wide gaps in the knowledge of the world.

In doing so, they literally illustrated their shared Baconian belief that knowledge is power. By mapping these realms, Herschel, Whewell, and Jones brought new parts of nature under man’s control. More specifically, they brought portions of the natural world under the control of the British crown. The ships of the British Empire could now more safely sail the world’s seas, even in the southern hemisphere, aiding exploration, trade, and naval defenses. And the ruler of Britain—first King William IV, then the young Queen Victoria—could glance at a set of maps and understand clearly, for the first time, the extent of the land under his or her domain. The Philosophical Breakfast Club had accomplished part of what they had planned at their meetings in Cambridge: “to leave the map of knowledge,” as Jones had put it, “a little in advance of where we found [it].”
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