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In countries bearing fewer marks of Roman occupation, many researchers focused on medieval agrarian landscape structures. In 1895, August Meitzen, a professor of statistics and economics at the University of Berlin, posited that a type of land division that he had observed on cadastral plans was, in fact, the imprint of legal land plots established in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (Meitzen 1895). Meitzen’s analytical method was widely disseminated, and historians began to pay increasing attention to cadastral plans as source materials. Inspired by Meitzen’s work, F.W. Maitland (1850–1906), professor of law at the University of Cambridge, began to study the origin of the grouped villages in the open field system and the dispersal of the English bocage. He stated: “Two little fragments of the original one-inch ordnance map will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse” (Maitland 1987, p. 16). Maitland’s work gave rise to a new tradition of research in historical topography in Great Britain, first based on map analysis, and later on aerial photography (Darby and Williams 2002, p.18).