66 THE DOMESDAY INQUEST 



however, agreed by all authorities that when the English con- 

 quered the districts which afterwards became those counties, 

 they spared a large proportion of the original inhabitants, and 

 it has therefore been argued that a hide in these counties 

 represents the original settlement of an English warrior. 



In most counties the hundreds formed compact blocks of 

 territory ; but it would seem that powerful subjects could alter 

 the composition of the hundreds. The triple hundred of 

 Oswaldslaw was composed of detached vills scattered all 

 over Worcestershire, as is shown by the Domesday map of 

 that county in the Victoria County History. As the Bishop 

 of Worcester had jurisdiction over all his men, it was to his 

 interest to secure that all his possessions should be included in 

 one hundred, and that all his tenants should attend the same 

 court. Similarly, the Domesday hundred of Somerley in 

 Sussex was composed of the estates of the Bishop of Chichester 

 at Selsey, Sidlesham, and Wittering, in the west of the county, 

 Ij^^and at Preston, near Brighton, in the centre. Another example 

 of the aggregation of the estates of one owner into one 

 ./i^l hundred is afforded by the hundred of Deerhurst (Glos.) ; it 

 appears that all the property of the Abbey of Deerhurst had 

 been aggregated into a single hundred before the Conquest, 

 and that when its possessions had been divided by the Con- 

 queror between Westminster Abbey and the Church of St. 

 Denys of Paris, the old hundredal arrangements still continued. 

 Little Compton and Wolford, in the extreme east of the county, 

 and now forming part of Warwickshire, are shown by Domes- 

 day Book to have been in the same hundred as Deerhurst and 

 Hard wick, from which they are 20 miles distant 1 



It will not, therefore, be surprising that land was some- 

 times moved from one hundred to another ; that is, that the 

 occupiers of a certain piece of land were transferred from one 

 hundred-moot to another. Windrush (Glos.) wrongly lay in 

 Salmannesberie hundred after the death of Bolle, but in 1086 



1 Taylor, Notes on the Gloucestershire Domesday, 96. 



