55 
bours. Such a topography is as the history of an island, and the 
advantage of this mode of treatment is so obvious that you may 
be surprised to hear that any other should be in use. 
Yet so it is: Rudders’ edition of Atkyns’s Gloucestershire, 
for instance, is an alphabetical list of parishes. Under this system 
it is difficult and always unsatisfying to deal with lordships which 
embrace several parishes. There must be either perpetual 
references or repetitions. I feel, in examining such a book, as one 
of your naturalists might feel with regard to an alphabetical 
account of plants and animals compiled quite irrespectively of 
genera and species. Other topographers have attempted a 
political subdivision into Hundreds and Townships, and this is 
the plan adapted by Hoare, Blomefield, Hutchins, Collinson and 
Phelps. These divisions are of very early date, but they bear, as 
I believe, no relation to the history of a place or the succession of 
lords. A Hundred has been for centuries a mere geographical 
expression, except in matters connected with the constabulary and 
the militia ; some of the Hundreds are lost and the boundaries of 
many are changed, and above all is the objection that the Town- 
ship is no development from out of the Hundred but the Hundred 
rather a subsequent compound of Townships. Again a large 
proportion of our topographers have been from among the resident 
clergy, and they have naturally sometimes attempted an ecclesias- 
tical subdivision into Rural Deaneries, Parishes and Chapelries, 
and to this there is less objection, as a certain expansion from the 
great mother churches can sometimes, though rarely, be traced. 
Still, the history of the local development of the church is not 
the history of the country ; the remarkable actions were those 
not of the curate but of the lord, and the ecclesiastical history of 
the village, beyond a mere list of incumbents and patrons, has 
(except, perhaps, the first alienation of the tithe) no salient events 
and is best related as part of the history of the diocese or great 
abbey to which the church belonged. In nine cases out of ten 
where there was a lay patron he was also the lord, and when in 
