By the Rev. W. H. Jones. 25 
remarks, “The Domesday Survey gives us some indications that the 
cultivation of the Church lands, was much superior to that of any 
other order of society. They have much less wood upon them, and 
less common of pasture: and what they had appears often in smaller 
and more irregular pieces; while their meadow was more abundant, 
and in more numerous distributions.”’! 
The meadow and pasture land is reckoned at about four hundred 
acres; the wood at about one hundred and forty acres. The small 
amount of the former is perhaps accounted for by the fact of there 
being in these early times a very large portion of common land 
unenclosed and uncultivated, which is not included in the Domes- 
day reckoning. The latter calculation may relate principally, if 
not entirely, to what is now called Bradford Wood, and does not 
include many pieces of wood-land or coppice, that even to this day 
remain. Ifso, Bradford Wood, which is now seventy acres in ex- 
tent, must formerly have been double that size, by no means an 
improbable supposition, as, in a survey of 1785 it is described as 
“about 105 acres,” and within the memory of many now living, 
parts of it have been grubbed up and tilled. Indeed, nothing is 
more evident than that in olden times there was a much larger 
extent of wood-land than now. This is true of comparatively mo- 
dern days. In a schedule of lands and tenements leased out under 
the manor in the eighth year of Charles I., hardly more than 200 
years ago, there was one tenement described as being in “ Pepitt 
street, near Bradford wood.” The wood alluded to must have 
come right down almost into the middle of the town.? 
We may from the Domesday return, form a tolerable conjecture 
as to the population of our parish, or manor, as it would have been 
1 ‘History of Anglo-Saxons,’ vol. ii. p. 552 (8vo edition, 1836.) See also on 
this subject Hallam’s ‘Europe in the Middle Ages,’ vol. iii. p. 360. 
2 In 1840, the estimated quantity of land then cultivated as arable, meadow 
or pasture land, or as wood-land, or common land, was as follows:— 
PA PRDIOUIANG | eect. vis /e\e% orate cd x Dx 4362 acres, 
Meadow or Pasture land. ...... 5956, 
OOO LAN Oe itaie & alelela ayn e.disin o's Ohian 399 iy. 
OMIMOW ANG is cte oniselee's «sta 209 ,, 
Since that time, however, 201 acres of common land have been enclosed and 
brought into cultivation. 
