A HISTORY OF ESSEX 



groups under one heading ('the land of the Bishop of London') the 

 manors held by the bishop and by the canons, though those of the 

 bishop precede the others. In Hertfordshire they are ranged under 

 separate headings, and even separated by intervening fiefs. In Essex the 

 headings are again separate, but the canons' lands follow immediately on 

 those of the bishop. 1 Their most important possession was the great 

 soke ' of Eadwulfsness, now represented by ' the Sokens,' as they are 

 familiarly called, Kirby, Thorpe, and Walton-on-the-Naze. Tillingham 

 was another of their ancient manors, the total of which had been aug- 

 mented since the death of the Confessor by the gift of an estate at Nor- 

 ton (Mandeville), the acquisition of others at Navestock and West Lee 

 the former, they alleged, by the king's gift and the annexation or 

 seizure of others at Navestock and Barling. On the other hand their 

 own lands had been encroached on at Chingford and Heybridge by 

 Norman magnates. The value of the canons' estates had either increased 

 or was stationary, while that of the bishop's manors had on the whole 

 decreased. These Domesday values, I may observe, cannot be connected 

 with the firmce rendered to the canons by their manors at or soon after 

 this period. 2 



The other old English foundations holding lands in the county 

 were the monastery of Christchurch, Canterbury, the local nunnery of 

 Barking, the Suffolk abbey of St. Edmund's, and the Cambridgeshire one 

 of Ely. The lands of Christchurch (' Holy Trinity ') precede even 

 those of the Bishop of London in the Survey. This was doubtless due 

 to its close connexion with the primate. They are chiefly remarkable 

 as representing what were afterwards known as his ' peculiars ' in this 

 county, subject to the commissary still known as the Dean of Bocking, 

 Bocking (with Bocking Hall in Mersea) being one of the Christchurch 

 manors. Barking had lost a manor at Benfleet, which the Conqueror, 

 we know not how, had bestowed on Westminster Abbey, and an estate at 

 (Abbess) Roding, which Geoffrey de Mandeville had obtained but seems 

 to have subsequently disgorged ; and it had also suffered the usual petty 

 encroachments at the hands of the newcomers. St. Edmund's had not 

 only lost nothing, but had actually gained, as elsewhere, at the hands of 

 the Conqueror, who had given it a manor at Little Waltham, and 

 possibly the addition to its estate which it had obtained at Harlow. Ely, 

 which had lost his favour by its share in Hereward's rising, became the 

 special prey of the Norman spoiler. Its chief possessions in Essex were 

 Littlebury, said to have been given by King ./Ethelred in 1004, and 

 Rettendon, assigned to the gift, not long before, of Brihtnoth, the famous 

 alderman, and his wife. But it retained, in 1086, some three or four 

 other manors of lesser importance. Domesday however records its 



1 Domesday speaks of the canons' manors as having been held by ' St. Paul,' and applies the same 

 formula to the bishop's manor of Wanstead ; but Archdeacon Hale has observed that ' the bishops of 

 London appear to have possessed their manors in the time of the Anglo-Saxon kings in their own right, 

 for there are no traces of any of the episcopal lands having at any time belonged to the cathedral ' 

 (Domesday of St. PauFs, p. iv.). 



2 See for these firm* Hale's Domesday of St. Pau/'i, p. xxxix. 



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