LO 



The Twenty 'Seventh Annual Meeting. 



period, it is in miniature a history of the progress of the whole 

 country. I have been ferretting out, with the aid of far more 

 skilful workmen than I am myself, the history of my own parish, 

 and I give it because it is the only such history I am acquainted 

 with, and because I have no doubt it is in its way typieal of other 

 such histories. I find that we had neither a local habitation nor a 

 name until the time of Domesday, A.D. 1086. Then we were the 

 property of a King's Thane, a Saxon nobleman, and we had a popu- 

 lation made up of so many servi, bordarii, and villani, perhaps 

 seventy souls in all, reckoning five to each family. I suppose that 

 at this time the whole community was practically in a state of 

 personal servitude to the lord, but still there were elements of 

 freedom in the status of the villani and the bordarii, who held their 

 lands and tenements subject only to certain customary services. 

 Our Saxon nobleman, however, soon fell a victim to what we may 

 now call the land-hunger of certain of the Conqueror's barons and 

 our lands passed to the trusted family of the Bohuns, and they, for 

 the repose of their only too rapacious souls, transferred them to the 

 Priory of St. Pancras at Lewes, who founded upon them the 

 Clugniac Priory, which was long established amongst us. Then 

 some two hundred years later, or in the year 1294, we hear once 

 more of our progress, and under the evidently gentle and industrious 

 rule of the Priory we have materially thriven. The Servi, or actual 

 Slave element, have entirely disappeared, their places are now oc- 

 cupied by families of libere tenentes, the villains are still flourishing, 

 the population is about the same, but the number of acres under 

 cultivation has greatly increased, especially in the matter of pasture 

 lands. In 1535, or some two hundred and forty years later still, 

 we hear of ourselves again, and there is happily the same tale of 

 progress in freedom and prosperity. We have a chief house and 

 curtilage, a garden and a pigeonry ; we have an addition of no less 

 than twenty-one coterelli or cottagers to our population, and our 

 Priory is possessed, in a home farm, of herds of cattle and flocks of 

 sheep, of horses, mules, pigs, wheat, barley, oats, hay, and other 

 dead stock in the shape of agricultural implements. But our very 

 progress rang the knell of our master's ruin. By the returns of 



