i86 THE DOMESDAY INQUEST 



were eleven named vills; churches were recorded in seven 

 of these Felpham, Walberton, Barnham, Middleton, Stoke, 

 Slindon, and Eastergate, and there was a church in an un- 

 named manor, possibly Yapton ; * but there were no recorded 

 churches in Binsted, Tortington, Bilsham, or Offham. Sir 

 Henry Ellis indexes twenty-one references to churches of 

 manors, and only eight to churches of vills ; but in some 

 of these cases it is clear that the manor and the vill were 

 coterminous. Although the absence of recorded churches in 

 a whole county or a whole hundred is no evidence of the 

 entire absence of the churches, yet it is probably different 

 when we find records of churches in the majority of vills in 

 a hundred. In the latter case it may be argued that the 

 jurors felt it to be their duty to make a return of the existing 

 churches, and that where no church is recorded in such 

 hundreds, none existed. 



By a " parish church" we mean, in this twentieth century, 

 the church to which the inhabitants of a certain district, 

 called " the parish," resort for public worship and for baptisms, 

 marriages, and funerals, and to the minister of which they 

 pay some or all of their tithes. Approaches towards this 

 system are found in Domesday Book ; it is a cause of com- 

 plaint that Nigel, a serjeant of Count Robert of Mortain, had 

 taken away twelve sokemen, who, although they lived in 

 Cambas, used to be " parishioners " (parochiani) in the church 

 of Stow, and had placed them in the church of Cambas. 2 At 

 Thorney there was a dispute between the King and Hugh 

 of Montfort 



" T. R. E. the church of Thorney held one carucate of free land : 

 but Hugh has 23 acres of this carucate, and claims that they belong 

 to a certain chapel, which four brothers, freemen of his, have built 

 on their own land close to the cemetery of the mother church ; and 

 they were inhabitants (manentes) of the parish of the mother church 

 which could not take the whole parish. This mother church has the 



1 V. C. ff., Sussex, i. 433. 2 D. B., II. 291 b. 





