DOMESDAY SURVEY dentally, under Sonning, that Roger the priest had there a church which should have belonged to this manor. When studying the great survey we have always to remember that we have to consider at least three distinct local divisions, which we may term for convenience sake, the administrative, the seigneurial, and the ecclesiastical. The first of these was the vill, the second the manor, the third the parish or chapelry. In the actual survey the units were the vills grouped under their hundreds ; in Domesday Book, which forms its record, the units are the manors grouped under their tenants-in- chief ; in neither do we find the modern unit, that of the 'parish.' In some regions vills and parishes might be normally coterminous ; in others the vill may be represented by two or more parishes, or the parish may include within its borders two or more vills. Again, the vill as was more usual might contain two or more manors, or a great royal or ecclesiastical manor might contain several distinct vills. Berk- shire is one of the counties in which, as the result of this complex system, there is a great apparent discrepancy between the local nomen- clature as shown on the Domesday map and that which meets us on a modern one. On the one hand we find in the former names now forgotten or obscure; on the other we miss in it those of many well-known parishes, and even such places as Hungerford, Newbury, Abingdon, Wokingham, and Twyford. Of the places here named Hungerford and Newbury are cases of towns which, as sometimes happened, outgrew and supplanted the names of the manors to which they belonged ; but the cases of Woking- ham and Twyford are of another kind. Wokingham was a part of that ancient lordship belonging to the bishop of Salisbury then the diocesan of the county of which Sonning was the head. In Domesday, there- fore, this great lordship, formerly assessed at sixty hides, is entered merely as ' Soninges ' although it included, as we elsewhere learn, 1 not only Ruscombe to the east, Wokingham and even Sandhurst to the south- east, but also Arborfield to the south, which accounts for none of these places being named in Domesday and also probably explains its assigna- tion to Sonning of such extensive woodland as is implied by the number of 300 swine. The record also somewhat mysteriously alleges that twenty hides in Ilsley (' Hildeslei ') belonged to the bishop's
- manor ' of Sonning. Domesday seems to account under Ilsley for 2 1
hides in all, but we cannot connect any of these entries with the bishop of Salisbury's tenure. 2 A further puzzle is afforded by the name of * Albericus de Coci ' in this passage. He was a Yorkshire tenant-in- chief, and if, as has been suggested, he was identical with that * Earl Aubrey' of the North, whose fief had escheated to the King before Domesday, we should expect to find his holding, if the bishop had lost 1 Feudal Aids, i. 47 ; Testa de Nevill (Rec. Com.), 124, 126. So well recognized was this that Henry III granted to the bishop (23 March, 1227) a weekly market 'in manerio suo de Sunninge apud Wokingham ' (Sarum Charters, p. 181). See also Register of S. Osmund (Rolls Series), I. 304-311. 2 It is, however, remarkable that by bull of 26 Nov. 1146 Pope Eugenius III confirmed to the abbey inter alia ' Hildeslega ' (Sarum Charters, p. 13). 301
