DOMESDAY SURVEY 



dentally, under Sonning, that Roger the priest had there a church which 

 should have belonged to this manor. 



When studying the great survey we have always to remember that 

 we have to consider at least three distinct local divisions, which we may 

 term for convenience sake, the administrative, the seigneurial, and the 

 ecclesiastical. The first of these was the vill, the second the manor, the 

 third the parish or chapelry. In the actual survey the units were the 

 vills grouped under their hundreds ; in Domesday Book, which forms 

 its record, the units are the manors grouped under their tenants-in- 

 chief ; in neither do we find the modern unit, that of the 'parish.' In 

 some regions vills and parishes might be normally coterminous ; in 

 others the vill may be represented by two or more parishes, or the 

 parish may include within its borders two or more vills. Again, the 

 vill as was more usual might contain two or more manors, or a great 

 royal or ecclesiastical manor might contain several distinct vills. Berk- 

 shire is one of the counties in which, as the result of this complex 

 system, there is a great apparent discrepancy between the local nomen- 

 clature as shown on the Domesday map and that which meets us on a 

 modern one. On the one hand we find in the former names now forgotten 

 or obscure; on the other we miss in it those of many well-known parishes, 

 and even such places as Hungerford, Newbury, Abingdon, Wokingham, 

 and Twyford. 



Of the places here named Hungerford and Newbury are cases of 

 towns which, as sometimes happened, outgrew and supplanted the 

 names of the manors to which they belonged ; but the cases of Woking- 

 ham and Twyford are of another kind. Wokingham was a part of that 

 ancient lordship belonging to the bishop of Salisbury then the diocesan 

 of the county of which Sonning was the head. In Domesday, there- 

 fore, this great lordship, formerly assessed at sixty hides, is entered 

 merely as ' Soninges ' although it included, as we elsewhere learn, 1 not 

 only Ruscombe to the east, Wokingham and even Sandhurst to the south- 

 east, but also Arborfield to the south, which accounts for none of these 

 places being named in Domesday and also probably explains its assigna- 

 tion to Sonning of such extensive woodland as is implied by the 

 number of 300 swine. The record also somewhat mysteriously alleges 

 that twenty hides in Ilsley (' Hildeslei ') belonged to the bishop's 

 * manor ' of Sonning. Domesday seems to account under Ilsley for 2 1 

 hides in all, but we cannot connect any of these entries with the 

 bishop of Salisbury's tenure. 2 A further puzzle is afforded by the name 

 of * Albericus de Coci ' in this passage. He was a Yorkshire tenant-in- 

 chief, and if, as has been suggested, he was identical with that * Earl 

 Aubrey' of the North, whose fief had escheated to the King before 

 Domesday, we should expect to find his holding, if the bishop had lost 



1 Feudal Aids, i. 47 ; Testa de Nevill (Rec. Com.), 124, 126. So well recognized was this that Henry 

 III granted to the bishop (23 March, 1227) a weekly market 'in manerio suo de Sunninge apud 

 Wokingham ' (Sarum Charters, p. 181). See also Register of S. Osmund (Rolls Series), I. 304-311. 



2 It is, however, remarkable that by bull of 26 Nov. 1146 Pope Eugenius III confirmed to the abbey 

 inter alia ' Hildeslega ' (Sarum Charters, p. 13). 



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