A HISTORY OF ESSEX 



We have here only the relics of a system under which a number of 

 ' vills ' had rights in a common pasture, but these marshes can now be 

 added to similar vestiges in other parts. Professor Maitland has drawn 

 attention to two parallel districts in the west and in the east of 

 Norfolk : 



In the Marshland Fen there is a considerable tract of ground which consists of 

 ' detached portions ' of these and other villages. 1 Each has been given a block there, 

 a fairly rectangular block. At one point the partition is minute. A space of less 

 than 36 acres has been cut up so that six villages shall have a piece, a rectangular 

 piece of it. It seems very possible that this fen has at some time been common 

 ground for all these villages, and, as already said, it is in this quarter that we may 

 perhaps find traces of something that resembled the ' marks ' of Germany. 8 



So important, from the standpoint of institutional history, are these 

 standing witnesses to the practice of a remote past that allusion may be 

 made to the fenland on the border of Cambridgeshire and Hunts. In 

 her learned monograph on Economic conditions on the manors of Ramsey 

 Abbey^ Miss Neilson has observed that 



the boundaries in the fens were very uncertain, and hence the pasture rights were 

 the cause of many disputes. The many difficulties arising from the frequent inter- 

 commoning of Ramsey and neighbouring monasteries seem to point back to a time 

 when the fen was held as common land, and the cattle of all the men of the region 

 fed there ' horn under horn.' In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries rights 

 of common were being differentiated and boundaries established, and innumerable 

 disputes resulted (pp. 623). 



Professor Maitland tells us that c traces of what might have become 

 " the mark system " may perhaps be found in England ; but not where 

 they have been usually sought.' : He finds them in that Domesday 

 ' tract in Suffolk,' just across the Stour, ' which is common pasture for 

 the whole hundred of Coleness,' in Tilney Smeeth in Norfolk, and in 

 ' the intercommoning of vills ' in Epping Forest. 4 But he knew not of 

 that most interesting example, Tiptree Heath in Essex, on which some 

 sixteen parishes, lying in four different hundreds, enjoyed ' common of 

 pasture.' 6 Nor did he know of the traces found in the marshes in the 

 south-east of the county, to the discussion of which I now return. 



which are inland to the north-west, Little Warley (in Chafford Hundred) lying some ten miles away. 

 Barstable Hundred, it should be remembered, lies between that of Chaffbrd to the west and Rochford 

 to the east. 



The boundaries of these detached portions of parishes in the marshes are usually formed by the 

 partition ditches which separate the marshes from one another. Thus these portions represent normally 

 separate marshes, as in Wallasea Island, which must be presumed to represent a commutation for rights 

 in the common pasture. On Tiptree Heath and in Epping Forest the rights remained unapportioned. 



Canvey Island was made a civil and ecclesiastical parish in 1881. 



1 In the extreme west of Norfolk. 



8 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 367-8. The example in the east of Norfolk given by Prof. 

 Maitland is 'near Yarmouth along the banks of the Waveney,' where we find a mosaic of 'detached 

 portions ' as at Canvey Island. Lincolnshire, I may add, affords examples along the banks of the river 

 Witham to the north-west of Boston and in Deeping Fen near the Cambridgeshire border. 



3 Ibid. p. 355. 



4 Ibid. p. 356, note. This intercommoning is well and fully described in Fisher's forest of Essex, 

 pp. 265, 274-6, 289. 



See Morant's Essex, ii. 141-3, where most valuable information is given on this subject. 



370 



