DOMESDAY SURVEY as within its own borders. One small and unidentified place seems to be the only one in the county that held an ambiguous position. This was ' Lonchelei,' of which we read that it belonged to ' Gratentun ' in Oxfordshire, and was valued with that manor, though it lay in Reading Hundred and paid its ' scot ' (i.e. geld) in Berkshire. As Miles Crispin was its lord, we must see in ' Gratentune ' that ' Gadintone ' now Gathampton opposite Basildon which heads the list of his Oxfordshire manors, but ' Lonchelei ' has not been found. The county's borders were well defined from Windsor to Lechlade by the river, but on the south and south-east, at the time of the Great Survey, the wild heath districts must have made them somewhat uncertain. 1 Bagshot, for instance, on the Surrey side, lay across the border, and so, on the Hampshire border, did the Stratfield estates of Ralf de Mortemer, Stratfield Mortimer and Stratfield Saye being, both of them, traversed by the boundary, which here indents Berkshire. In such cases we should keep our eyes on both sides of the county boundary. The Hampshire Stratfields are represented by five entries in all, recording an original assessment of 24 hides ; the Berkshire Stratfield was originally assessed at 6 hides. Here we can hardly be wrong in holding that the Stratfields were originally assessed, as a whole, at 30 hides, an assessment which at once vindicates ' the five hide unit,' " and suggests that, like the parish boundaries, it is older than the county limits. We must now pass to the Wiltshire border, of which the com- paratively late origin is even more manifest. Starting from the south, the parish of Shalbourne is partly in Berks and partly in Wilts, while West Shalbourne, a chapelry thereof, is wholly in Wilts. A projection of the Berkshire portion, comprising Oxenwood, straggled down into Wilts as a small outlyer. In Domesday there are surveys of portions of Shalbourne under both counties. To the north of it Hungerford was always divided between the two, as was Chilton Foliat just above it. At the northern extremity of this western border Inglesham and Coleshill both lie partly in Berks and partly in Wilts. We will first take the case of Inglesham. The ancient lordship of Faringdon, Berks, assessed in Domesday at 30 hides, was eminently what it is now the fashion to call ' discrete ' ; that is to say, it was composed of scattered estates. Among them were the Berkshire portion of Inglesham (with the church but not the bulk of the parish), the parish of Little Far- ingdon with the Berkshire portion of Langford adjoining it, and the Berkshire portion of Shilton (with the bulk of the parish but not the church). The last three, though forming two 'islands' in Oxfordshire, were in the county of Berks and Hundred of Faringdon until trans- ferred to Oxfordshire in the days of William IV. 3 It is difficult to 1 Even so late as the days of George I, Defoe could describe the Bagshot Heath and Windsor Forest district as ' a vast tract of land, . . . quite sterile, given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful to look on, . . . good for nothing, . . . the great black desert.' 2 See p. 286. 3 Our knowledge as to the limits of the lordship is derived from John's grants to his Abbey of Beaulieu, as set forth in the evidences of that house, which is consequently found in possession in the 319
