The NACo website sets out its perception of the history of county government in the USA, tracing it to Anglo-Saxon England, Anglo-Norman feudalism, and the increasingly "plural executive structure" commissioned by his successors to the royal throne of England to defend the peace and enforce the complex of chivalric, common, and statutory laws of England up to the time of the first county government established in America. This triad of origins is fundamental to understanding the organisation role that county surveying plays in the administration and development of the real estate of many states and nations around the world, even though sometimes it goes by other names. It was the framework that the King of England applied to his colonies in America and sufficiently successful as to have since been adopted by many other states.
Chapter V 'The Development of an Extra-Legal Constitution', of 'English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Parish and The County' by Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter Web, describes the increasing chaos that began to prevail within this same period on the 'county surveying' front in England and Wales. Eventually, the military defence component of county surveying in the UK began to separate from the civil in 1791, with the Crown's 'Board of Ordnance' being commissioned to carry out a comprehensive survey of the South Coast of England which, as a result of 'the last invasion of Britain 1797', at Fishguard in South West Wales ultimately extended to all of the UK. With that shift in emphasis, county surveying began to concentrate more on its civil engineering and civic architecture roles, producing the historically famous British county surveyors such as Thomas Telford, John Loudon McAdam and John Nash; the expression, "county surveyor", became a UK statutory title ; and, in England and Wales, its incumbents were appointed by elected councils as of the coming into effect of the Local Government Act 1888 rather than being Crown-appointed by justices of the peace. The UK equivalent of NACS, the County Surveyors Society founded in 1885, was subsumed into the pluralistic Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport in 2010.
