John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue (1618)

This edition provides the first complete, modern version of John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue. Norden's text, a series of dialogues between a fictional surveyor and several interlocutors”including a tenant farmer, an aristocrat landowner, a manorial officer, and a socially mobile land buyer”is remarkable for its unique commentary on the agrarian roots of English capitalism. In his extensive introduction, Mark Netzloff situates the text in relation to a number of early modern contexts. He dis