A HISTORY OF SURREY 



in the Surrey Survey, the present church is very confidently dated by 

 archaeologists as pre-Conquest, but is not named in Domesday. No 

 church is named in Guildford. Even if the present fabric of St. Mary s 

 does not date from the Confessor's reign it is extremely unlikely that 

 there was no church in the most populous place in the county in 1086. 

 Nor is a church mentioned at Ewell, the subsequent head of a rural 

 deanery, but, as suggested above, Letherhead Church may represent the 

 ancient centre of worship here. It would be rash to affirm that these 

 churches, with their subordinate chapels, represented exactly a parochial 

 organization, and that the clergy, usually several in each, who served all 

 these, had in every case an exact local sphere of duty, and received the 

 tithes and offerings from that district. A century was to elapse before 

 the parochial system was finally and completely organized by the Lateran 

 Council of 1179-80. But the assumption which was accepted in the 

 twelfth century, that the parish church had a right to the local offerings 

 • unless specific grants to another corporation had been lawfully made, was 

 based upon the commonly existing and recognized state of things, and 

 implied that a parochial organization and endowment was already the 

 rule. Even in 1086, therefore, we may suppose that the churches 

 enumerated in Surrey were generally, to all intents, parish churches. 



We may be sure that the ecclesiastical territories, great and small, 

 originated in civil arrangements. As the dioceses represented kingdoms, 

 so the parishes represented either settlements, villages or manors. No 

 ecclesiastical authority ever fixed, as districts conveniently grouped round 

 a central church, the boundaries of Godalming parish, for instance, with 

 long straggling limbs like a polypus ; nor the long narrow strip of Wot- 

 ton parish, over six miles long and in places only half a mile broad. Some 

 accident of settlement, dependent upon soil and water, some ancient poli- 

 tical boundary, established their limits, as those also of the other parishes. 



The arrangement of parish boundaries in accordance with the natu- 

 ral features which determined the position of settlements, is especially 

 noticeable along the line of the chalk hills which intersect Surrey from 

 west to east, from Farnham to Tatsfield. The southern face of the chalk 

 forms a bold escarpment, running in a wonderfully true line from west to 

 east, with the narrow Upper Greensand and Gault, the generally wider 

 Lower Greensand, and then the Wealden Clay, in that order, to the 

 south of it. The villages are with few exceptions a little below the 

 Chalk escarpment, where springs abound, and where the soil is fairly 

 dry and fairly fertile ; the Upper Greensand, the Gault and the edges of 

 the Lower Greensand being the best land. The parish boundaries here 

 run up the chalk hills, including what was open land, arable on the lower 

 slopes and good grazing land above. They reach southward over the 

 Greensand, and where that formation is growing narrower, from Albury 

 eastward, they generally reach over the Greensand down into the Wealden 

 Clay, the old forest country. Where the Greensand is wide, there are 

 parishes to the south entirely upon it, or partly upon it and partly 

 reaching down to the Clay. The exceptions in Surrey to these arrange- 



