THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 



the eighteenth century. Domesday distinguishes also between ' Great ' 

 and ' Little ' Stanford (Rivers), but this distinction cannot, it seems, be 

 traced subsequently ; part of Colne Engaine is distinguished as ( Little ' 

 Colne in the Survey ; but of such distinctions there are no more. The 

 villages distinguished by ' other ' (alia) are only Fyfield, Navestock and 

 Melesham (if rightly identified) in Great Lees. It is a curious and 

 significant fact that in no one of the three cases do we find any trace of 

 two villages of the name. Here then, it seems, is a further warning 

 against attaching much importance to the terms employed in Domesday 

 or endeavouring to build theories thereon. The case of Stanway is one 

 which caused me much perplexity, because of the difficulty of fixing its 

 locality on the Domesday map. Morant wrote of it as follows : 



There is great reason to believe that this district, in the earliest times, was 

 divided into two distinct parishes. For here are not only two churches partly still 

 standing ; but we frequently meet in records with the names of Stanwey magna and 

 Stanwey parva, Great and Little Stanway ; the former being the southern part of 

 the present parish, and the latter that which is by the London road. But if they 

 were distinct, it must have been before the year 1366. For, from that time, the 

 church hath been presented to by the name of Great Stanway, with the chapel of 

 Albright, or of Little Stanway, annexed. And for a long time these two names have 

 been considered only as the names of two different hamlets (ii. 190). 



There is however in Domesday only one ' Stanewega.' As Stanway is 

 obviously so called from the old Roman highway passing through its 

 northern portion, it is natural to suppose that the original village stood 

 near that highway, where indeed the chapel of St. Albright (^Ethelbricht) 

 must, from its invocation, have stood before the Conquest. And Morant, 

 indeed, observes that ' the manor-house of Stanway stands on the south 

 side of the London road, near the brook.' On the other hand, his 

 history of the parish appears to confuse the two Stanways, and leaves us 

 in utter doubt as to which of them represents the original village. 1 



Before leaving this important subject, it may be well to explain 

 that the ' two types,' as I have termed them, of Essex parish must not be 

 confused with the ' two types ' which Meitzen, Professor Maitland 

 writes, has taught us to look for. ' The nucleated village and the vill 

 of scattered homesteads,' as he describes them, 1 are characteristic respec- 

 tively of the east and the west of England, of the Celtic and of the 

 Saxon land, as we gather from his pages.* The type to which I have 

 endeavoured to draw attention in Essex, that in which two or more vills 

 named as distinct in Domesday are now represented by one ' parish,' 

 owes its form, as it seems to me, more probably to an ecclesiastical than 

 to any other cause. The one and only discoverable feature which 

 imposed unity on the area was the ' parish ' or mother church. The 



1 Having begun his account of ' the manor of Stanway ' by describing its manor-house as above, he 

 ends by telling us that ' Stanway Hall,' adjoining ' Great ' Stanway church in the south of the parish, 

 ' stands pleasantly on an eminence by the side of the road from Colchester to Maldon,' and finally speaks 

 of this seat as ' Stanway manor-house.' Possibly the ' London road ' of the passage quoted in the text 

 was a slip for ' Maldon road.' 



* Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 15. s Ibid. 



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