NOTE The reader should bear in mind that three periods are referred to in the Domesday Survey : (i.) ' The time of King Edward,' which is, nominally at least, the date of his death (Jan. 5, 1066) ; this period is also referred to simply as ' then.' (ii.) ' Afterwards ' or ' when received,' being the time when the estate passed to its new holder, (iii.) ' Now,' that is to say, when the Survey was compiled, 1086. The unit of assessment was the 'hide,' which, it is most important to observe, in Sussex apparently contained 8 'virgates.' The ' ferdinc ' or quarter of the ' virgate ' also occurs. Manors held 'in demesne ' were those retained by the tenant-in-chief in his own hands ; but ' the demesne ' of a manor is the portion which the holder worked as a home farm with the help of labour due from the peasants who held the rest from him. The arable, spoken of simply as ' land,' was calculated in terms of the ploughs which could be em- ployed upon it, each plough being reckoned to have a team of eight oxen. The woodland was not measured in Sussex, but was valued at the num- ber of swine, or their equivalent in money, paid by the villeins for the ' pannage,' or right of feeding swine in the woods. The three classes of the peasantry were, in descending order, villeins, bordars or cottars, and serfs. It must be remembered that the manors, especially before the Conquest, were not always compact estates, and that consequently land ' in ' any manor may be many miles from the place which gives its name to that manor. Thus in many cases portions of the thickly wooded wealden country in the north of the county appear to have been attached to manors on the coast, and this is particularly noticeable in the case of the manors in the neighbourhood of Shoreham. Also when Domesday speaks of A holding B, it does not necessarily mean that A held the whole of it. In 1886 the Sussex Archaeological Society issued a facsimile of the Sussex portion of Domesday, printed from the plates of the Ordnance Survey edition of 1862, with a translation and list of place-names and suggested identifications. The volume is not very accurate or reliable ; references to it in my footnotes are made under the initials S.D.B. 386
