A HISTORY OF ESSEX 



left it in doubt, pointing out that ' Morant, without explanation, refers it 

 to East Tilbury and then to Tilbury-by-Clare.' But its ' pasture for 

 fifty sheep ' decides the question in favour of Tilbury-on-the-Thames. 

 And we can go further than this. Domesday assigns to Geoffrey de 

 Mandeville a large and valuable, but nameless estate in the Hundred of 

 Barstable The entry suggests that it probably adjoined Suain's manor 

 of West Tilbury and states that it contained 'pasture for 300 sheep.' 

 Now East Tilbury has extensive marshes ; it contained, says Morant, 

 five manors which we cannot account for in Domesday ; and its manors 

 were held of the Honour of Mandeville, Geoffrey's heir, Humfrey de 

 Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, holding there 3 knights' fees in 

 1372. And, as if to clinch the proof, we even find its five manors re- 

 presented by the ' 5 knights ' who held this nameless estate of Geoffrey 

 de Mandeville in Domesday. 



It is time that we should turn from the sheep to the swine, from the 

 rich marshes on the coast to the forest and the woodland tracts. As the 

 marshland was valued in Domesday for the feed it afforded for sheep, so 

 was the woodland, not for its use for hunting, for firing, for building and 

 fencing, but as its most important purpose for the mast it yielded for 

 the swine who then fed within it. The ' pork and beans,' which now 

 forms the staple diet of the Canadian lumberman, were all-important 

 among ourselves in that of the twelfth century. 1 In Essex, a forest 

 county, the swine, as might be expected, meet us at every turn. ' Forest ' 

 however is a term which needs to be defined at the outset. 



In spite of the ' deer forests ' of Scotland existing still to remind 

 us of the true historical meaning of the word, it is difficult to overcome 

 the conviction that a forest is all woodland. ' Antiently,' wrote the 

 historian of Essex, ' the whole county was in a manner one continued 

 forest.' It is probable that Morant here used the word in its legal sense, 

 but others, after him, seem to have imagined that, because the whole 

 county was at one time ' within the forest,' it was much in the same 

 condition as Epping Forest to-day. The history of ' the forest of Essex ' 

 will be given in another section, but it is to Domesday that we owe our 

 earliest historic information on the distribution of the actual woodland, 

 as shown by the number of swine for which it could supply feed. 



There are three points which call for notice in the Domesday 

 entries of Essex woodland. The first, as I have said, is the light they 

 throw on its distribution at the time. The second is their reckoning, 

 occasionally, its extent, not by the swine it could feed, but in ' hides ' 

 and ' acres.' The third is the evidence they contain on a matter some- 

 what overlooked the destruction of woodland here and there between 

 1066 and 1086. 



1 'Et pro quater xx. Baconibus . . . Et pro xx. summis fabarum' (Pipe Roll, 19 Henry II. p. 23). 

 ' Et pro Ix. baconibus viii. libras. Et pro xx. summis fabarum et pisarum xxxiii. sol et iiij. den ' (ibid, 

 p. 81), etc., etc. In the next century Bowers Gifford (north of Canvey Island) was held by the 

 serjeanty of ' scalding the king's hogs ' (Red Book of the Exchequer, pp. 457, 507) or as the jurors found 

 at Chelmsford in 1255 'of making the king's lard or bacon wherever he might be in England' 

 (Morant). 



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