ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



ments are very few. They are Wanborough, an ancient liberty and 

 settlement but not an ancient parish, where the church stands to the 

 north of the Chalk, on the border between the Chalk and the Woolwich 

 and Reading Beds, and the parish boundaries reach southward right across 

 the narrow chalk of the Hog's Back on to the Greensand. Perhaps St. 

 Nicholas, Guildford, is a similar case. In the east of the county, the 

 villages of Chaldon and Tatsfield stand on the Chalk, and their parish 

 boundaries run down the Chalk escarpment on to the Greensand. But 

 generally the church and village are below the Chalk, with a part of the 

 parish, to the north, upon it. The geological and geographical conditions 

 enter here into ecclesiastical history, showing how ecclesiastical parishes 

 owe their boundaries to other than ecclesiastical reasons. 



This arrangement is not a convenient one for access to a central 

 church. It often produces very long and narrow parishes like Albury, 

 Abinger, Wotton, Godstone, Tandridge and Oxted. But it does give 

 each village a share of each sort of soil. Settlements, grouped fairly 

 closely together from west to east on the best land, extended their bound- 

 aries far to the north and south, over the bare downs on the one side 

 and into the uncleared forest on the other, and became ecclesiastical as 

 well as social divisions. A sketch map will illustrate the parochial 

 arrangement of twenty-one parishes out of twenty-five in a line across 

 the county from west to east. 



Somewhat similar conditions on the northern side of the chalk hills, 

 where the Chalk, though with a much less bold escarpment, runs in a 

 distinct range from south-west to north-east, from Guildford to Croydon, 

 produced a similar arrangement of parishes. The same long narrow 

 form is consequently marked in many of them ; in East Horsley, Effing- 

 ham, both the Bookhams, Ewell, Cuddington, Cheam, Sutton and Car- 

 shalton especially. All these places north and south of the Chalk are 

 named in Domesday,^ and twenty-seven churches are there mentioned in 

 twenty-five of the forty-five places. Ancient common fields existed till 

 about a hundred years ago in the whole range of parishes on the northern 

 face of the downs. The general probability is strongly in favour of their 

 having all been ancient settlements, which existed before they were con- 

 stituted as parishes in the ecclesiastical sense. 



In the wild heaths of the Greensand to the south-west, and in 

 the Weald, which was anciently forest, the settlements were of late and 

 the parishes were probably of still later formation.^ The settlements 

 were often parts of manors, the central body of which lay in the more 

 anciently inhabited districts. But the outlying parts of these manors 

 were at some time formed into new parishes. Sometimes the date 

 at which the parishes in the Weald were constituted is known, or is 

 approximately recoverable. The very large parishes, whose original 



• Except Puttenham ; but a manor in Puttenham parish, Redessolham (Rodsell), is named. 



^ These places seem to have been occupied after the common law right of the parson to tithes of 

 woodland elsewhere had been established. Woodland in the Weald does not pay tithe unless a specific 

 grant can be shown. See under Frcnsham parish, in topographical section. 



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