THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 



the descent and identification of manors, it has been generally and 

 naturally supposed that he could be safely followed. In spite of the 

 somewhat early date (1768) at which his volumes were published, he 

 enjoyed great advantages in the fruits of his predecessors' labours among 

 the public records, especially in having a complete collection of the 

 Inquisitiones post mortem. His references show that the materials required 

 for this department of his work were as familiar, virtually, to him as 

 to ourselves, while the plea-rolls were even more so. ' I wanted,' he 

 frankly confessed in his Preface, * no materials of any kind, but only the 

 art of digesting them, and how I have executed that part is left to the 

 reader's candour and judgment.' It would be profitless and most unfair 

 to criticize the writer for having failed to utilize records which we our- 

 selves possess in a far more convenient form ; nor would one imitate his 

 somewhat ungenerous mention of his predecessor, Salmon, in speaking 

 of the ' poor use he had made of the excellent materials in his possession.' 

 But as, privately and officially, great reliance has been placed on his 

 identification of manors, it will be necessary to give at some length the 

 reasons for rejecting it in certain cases. Where the proof is a simple 

 one, a note to the text will suffice ; but at times a somewhat elaborate 

 argument is needed to establish an identity, and as all manorial history 

 rests on right identification, no apology is needed for the length of the 

 indispensable demonstrations which will be found below. Morant had 

 a firm grasp of the key to manorial descent, namely the relation of 

 manors to the great feudal ' Honours ' ; but where the descent of an 

 Honour conflicted with his own erroneous identification, he appears to 

 have put it aside. 



The most frequent error of the older county historians in identifying 

 the names of Domesday manors was that of jumping at some resemblance 

 more or less superficial or remote. It was thus that Morant discovered 

 Pleshey in ' Plesinchou,' Althorne in 'Altenai,' Chigwell in 'Cinguehella,' 

 RifFhams in ' Richeham,' and Beeches in ' Bacheneia.' This erratic 

 guesswork is now, one would hope, obsolete, although we have a startling 

 instance to the contrary in the Red Book of the Exchequer, where ' Alfer- 

 stone ' (p. 505) is identified with perfect confidence by the official editor 

 as Alphamstone (p. 1089), a sheer guess which the tests he claims to 

 have applied to his identifications (pp. ccclxxix. ccclxxx.) would have 

 shown at once to be wrong. One has only to consult the index to 

 Morant to discover that * Alferestuna,' as it is styled in Domesday, was 

 the manor of Bigods in Dunmow, in quite another part of the county. 

 The other extremity of error is reached by those students of ' phonology ' 

 who endeavour to apply to Domesday forms what they term the laws 

 of sound, and thus to connect these forms with the names which now 

 represent them. Essex affords some striking examples of the absolute 

 futility of this method. For instance, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, in 1086, 

 held land at two places, both named ' Torinduna.' One of these is now 

 Thorndon (corruptly Horndon) in the south-west ; the other is Thor- 

 rington in the north-east. Even more remarkable is the snare involved 



387 



