NOTE 



The reader should bear in mind that three periods are referred 

 to in the Domesday Survey : (i.) ' The time of King Edward,' 

 which is, nominally at least, the date of his death (Jan. 5, 1066) ; 

 this period is also referred to simply as ' then.' (ii.) ' Afterwards ' 

 or ' when received,' being the time when the estate passed to its new 

 holder, (iii.) ' Now,' that is to say, when the Survey was compiled, 

 1086. The unit of assessment was the 'hide,' which, it is most 

 important to observe, in Sussex apparently contained 8 'virgates.' 

 The ' ferdinc ' or quarter of the ' virgate ' also occurs. Manors 

 held 'in demesne ' were those retained by the tenant-in-chief in his 

 own hands ; but ' the demesne ' of a manor is the portion which the 

 holder worked as a home farm with the help of labour due from the 

 peasants who held the rest from him. The arable, spoken of simply 

 as ' land,' was calculated in terms of the ploughs which could be em- 

 ployed upon it, each plough being reckoned to have a team of eight oxen. 

 The woodland was not measured in Sussex, but was valued at the num- 

 ber of swine, or their equivalent in money, paid by the villeins for 

 the ' pannage,' or right of feeding swine in the woods. The three 

 classes of the peasantry were, in descending order, villeins, bordars 

 or cottars, and serfs. 



It must be remembered that the manors, especially before the 

 Conquest, were not always compact estates, and that consequently 

 land ' in ' any manor may be many miles from the place which gives 

 its name to that manor. Thus in many cases portions of the thickly 

 wooded wealden country in the north of the county appear to have been 

 attached to manors on the coast, and this is particularly noticeable in 

 the case of the manors in the neighbourhood of Shoreham. Also 

 when Domesday speaks of A holding B, it does not necessarily mean 

 that A held the whole of it. 



In 1886 the Sussex Archaeological Society issued a facsimile 

 of the Sussex portion of Domesday, printed from the plates of the 

 Ordnance Survey edition of 1862, with a translation and list of 

 place-names and suggested identifications. The volume is not very 

 accurate or reliable ; references to it in my footnotes are made 

 under the initials S.D.B. 



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