DOMESDAY SURVEY 



as within its own borders. One small and unidentified place seems to 

 be the only one in the county that held an ambiguous position. This 

 was ' Lonchelei,' of which we read that it belonged to ' Gratentun ' in 

 Oxfordshire, and was valued with that manor, though it lay in Reading 

 Hundred and paid its ' scot ' (i.e. geld) in Berkshire. As Miles Crispin 

 was its lord, we must see in ' Gratentune ' that ' Gadintone ' now 

 Gathampton opposite Basildon which heads the list of his Oxfordshire 

 manors, but ' Lonchelei ' has not been found. 



The county's borders were well defined from Windsor to Lechlade 

 by the river, but on the south and south-east, at the time of the Great 

 Survey, the wild heath districts must have made them somewhat 

 uncertain. 1 Bagshot, for instance, on the Surrey side, lay across the 

 border, and so, on the Hampshire border, did the Stratfield estates of 

 Ralf de Mortemer, Stratfield Mortimer and Stratfield Saye being, both 

 of them, traversed by the boundary, which here indents Berkshire. 

 In such cases we should keep our eyes on both sides of the county 

 boundary. The Hampshire Stratfields are represented by five entries 

 in all, recording an original assessment of 24 hides ; the Berkshire 

 Stratfield was originally assessed at 6 hides. Here we can hardly be 

 wrong in holding that the Stratfields were originally assessed, as a whole, 

 at 30 hides, an assessment which at once vindicates ' the five hide 

 unit,' " and suggests that, like the parish boundaries, it is older than the 

 county limits. 



We must now pass to the Wiltshire border, of which the com- 

 paratively late origin is even more manifest. Starting from the south, 

 the parish of Shalbourne is partly in Berks and partly in Wilts, while 

 West Shalbourne, a chapelry thereof, is wholly in Wilts. A projection 

 of the Berkshire portion, comprising Oxenwood, straggled down into 

 Wilts as a small outlyer. In Domesday there are surveys of portions 

 of Shalbourne under both counties. To the north of it Hungerford 

 was always divided between the two, as was Chilton Foliat just above 

 it. At the northern extremity of this western border Inglesham and 

 Coleshill both lie partly in Berks and partly in Wilts. We will first 

 take the case of Inglesham. The ancient lordship of Faringdon, Berks, 

 assessed in Domesday at 30 hides, was eminently what it is now the 

 fashion to call ' discrete ' ; that is to say, it was composed of scattered 

 estates. Among them were the Berkshire portion of Inglesham (with 

 the church but not the bulk of the parish), the parish of Little Far- 

 ingdon with the Berkshire portion of Langford adjoining it, and the 

 Berkshire portion of Shilton (with the bulk of the parish but not the 

 church). The last three, though forming two 'islands' in Oxfordshire, 

 were in the county of Berks and Hundred of Faringdon until trans- 

 ferred to Oxfordshire in the days of William IV. 3 It is difficult to 



1 Even so late as the days of George I, Defoe could describe the Bagshot Heath and Windsor 

 Forest district as ' a vast tract of land, . . . quite sterile, given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful 

 to look on, . . . good for nothing, . . . the great black desert.' 2 See p. 286. 



3 Our knowledge as to the limits of the lordship is derived from John's grants to his Abbey of 

 Beaulieu, as set forth in the evidences of that house, which is consequently found in possession in the 



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