The making of surveys was always important to those who governed England. Collecting and processing information had long been a tried and trusted governing strategy, and medieval manorial record-keeping, with its lengthy surveys of tenants, holdings and obligations, provided solid grounding for later times. But beyond doubt, the practice of surveying became more vital in all government fields in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and information cultures and systems became more sophisticated and widespread with the emergence of what Peter Burke calls the ‘paper state’.

Deep-seated, long-lasting change made the difference. The English state was transformed by the start of the eighteenth century. The apparatus of governance had to adapt, alter and grow in response to the seismic shifts of the two centuries after 1500: a population boom, religious revolution, economic and commercial transformations in town and country, empire, and root-and-branch reforms of financing and administering the state (to name just five). The precise nature of the ‘Tudor revolution in government’ remains debatable, but this sustained scope and scale of information use by the state had not been seen before. A full list might fill a short book, but we can start with Henrician muster counts; the mountain of paperwork in fiscal returns to the Great Subsidy (1524–5); Wolsey's corn surveys; enclosure commissions; a nationwide system to register births, marriages and deaths (1538); the Valor Ecclesiasticus, which took stock of Church wealth in the wake of Henry VIII's royal supremacy (1535); and a string of state-sponsored surveys in later decades.