A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE it, under the ' Terra Regis.' Twyford, mentioned above as another Domesday omission, appears in local history as a chapelry of Hurst, but even Hurst itself is not entered in the Survey. Of this the explanation is that it appears under Whistley (Hurst), one of Abingdon Abbey's manors. The present map of Berkshire preserves but trifling traces of men of the Domesday age. Although by no means holding an extensive fief in the county, Ralf de Mortemer has set his stamp more surely than any other of its barons on the Berkshire of to-day. Pinkneys Green commemorates, it is true, that Picard house of Picquigny which had Ghilo for its ancestor, but in ' Mortimer ' Ralf s surname has actually supplanted the Stratfield of which Domesday found him in possession, through the transition stage of Stratfield Mortimer. One of his pre- decessors there was a Hampshire thegn, Cheping, whom he had succeeded, in that county, at many places, his estates in the Hampshire Stratfields touching his Berkshire property. It is interesting to find that Oidelard, his tenant at Peasemore and Hodcott, held under him in no fewer than five other counties including Hampshire. Kingston Bagpuize preserves the name of a Domesday under-tenant, but in all the county there is no such striking survival as at East Garston, where in its present form, an almost inevitable corruption, we may still dis- tinguish the ton held before the Conquest by Esegar, staller and sheriff of Middlesex, Geoffrey de Mandeville's predecessor. 1 It has, indeed, been alleged that ' Ulvritone ' (now represented by Newbury) was a name similarly formed from ' Ulward,' which was that of its previous lord. But the only name from which it could be formed is Wulfric, not Wulfward. Like the rest of England at the time of the Survey, Berkshire had very few sources of wealth, and these were almost exclusively found in land and stream. Traffic there was upon the Thames and along the ancient ways, but trade, which scarcely lay within the province of the Survey, was as yet in its infancy. With monotonous iteration the ploughlands and the ploughs are recorded in entry after entry, nor is there anything special in the features they present to detain us. The character of soils does not change, and probably a great sweep of cornfields extended from Wallingford to the Hanneys, and from Abingdon to the Ilsley downs, where the vast open fields distinctive of the Middle Ages are kept in memory by the names of Milton Field, Harwell Field, Hagbourne Field and the rest. The great plough with its eight oxen toiled across these broad spaces guided, at least on the lord's demesne, by the serfs of whom we read. I have argued that these serfs are normally found in the proportion of two to each demesne plough-team, 2 and to take but one instance, we find that on the lordship of Sonning, although it consisted of scattered manors, there 1 A recent attempt to restore the original name has failed, but its form is well established. It was ' Esegarestone ' in 1 185, and in the thirteenth century (Testa), and ' Esgarton ' so late as 1351. , Worcestershire, vol. i. 275. 302
