DOMESDAY SURVEY 



Assessment of the county, p. 333 The Crown manors, p. 336 The Church lands, p. 338 

 The barons' fiefs, p. 342 Their English predecessors, p. 351 The stamp of the Conquest, 

 p. 356 The peasantry, p. 359 Rents and values, p. 363 The ploughs and livestock, 

 p. 365 The sheep in the marshes, p. 369 The swine in the woodlands, p. 374 

 Pasture, mills and fisheries, p. 378 Saltpans, vineyards and beehives, p. 380 The 

 clergy and their glebes, p. 383 Towns and their houses, p. 385 Identification of 

 manors, p. 387 Corruption of place names, p. 398 The vill and the parish, p. 400 

 ' Ness ' and ' Thorpe,' p. 405 The Hundreds and their boundaries, p. 406 Duplicate 

 entries, p. 410 Domesday pleas, p. 411 The Domesday volume, p. 413. 



The Survey of Colchester, p. 414 Holders of houses, p. 417 The king's ferm, 

 p. 419 The mint, p. 421 Miscellanea, p. 422. 



I 



position occupied in Domesday Book by the county of 

 Essex is unique. As is, no doubt, generally known, it is one 

 of the three counties surveyed in ' Little Domesday,' that is, 

 in the smaller of the two volumes which enshrine ' the Survey 

 of England.' The record therefore of its lands displays those peculiar 

 features by which this smaller volume is so sharply distinguished from 

 the other, its contracted forms, its inferior workmanship, and its 

 marvellous wealth of detail. On the other hand, although the survey 

 of Essex appears at first sight, for this reason, to resemble those of 

 Norfolk and Suffolk, which are the two other counties comprised in 

 this volume, careful examination soon reveals a system entirely distinct. 

 Essex, as its name implies, was not an Anglian but a Saxon land ; this is 

 a fact which lies at the very root of its history. And it is because it was 

 a Saxon land that we find it in Domesday assessed in ' hides,' like Middle- 

 sex, like Sussex, like the westward counties which formed part of Wessex, 

 and thus proclaiming its affinity with the rest of Saxon England, just as 

 Norfolk and Suffolk, in their own peculiar assessment, preserved, even on 

 the pages of Domesday, the traces of their alien existence as the kingdom 

 of East Anglia. 



It is needful at the very outset to insist on this distinction, for it 

 appears from the words of Professor Cunningham to be occasionally 

 overlooked. Grouping together the three counties, he observes that 



A vast mass of interesting detail has been preserved to us in the parts of Domesday 

 which deal with Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. These Eastern Counties were assessed 

 on an intricate system which was quite different from that prevailing in the rest of 

 England ; its difficulties have been successfully unravelled by Mr. Corbett's careful 

 investigation. Instead of assessing each vill according to the number of hidts, every 



333 



