The order in which the Domesday Hundreds is given above is that in
which they appear to have stood on the original returns [1] for the county.
These returns were made at the Survey, Hundred by Hundred and vill
by vill, and from them the compilers of Domesday Book extracted the
constituents of each fief and arranged them under the name of the
baron who held it.
The ascertainment of the sequence of Hundreds is often of importance for identifying doubtful manors where the scribe has omitted the name of the Hundred to which they belong. It is therefore satis- factory to find that Mr. Ragg and Mr. Morley Davies,[2] who examined it independently, have arrived at the same conclusions. Mr. Davies, whose map is here reproduced, suggests, in his valuable paper, that ' the grouping in threes was already established at the time of Domesday Book,' and considers that this view is supported by the relative position of the groups.[3] So far back as 1887, at the Domesday Commemoration, the late Canon Isaac Taylor drew attention to this grouping of the Buckinghamshire Hundreds, and compared it with the similar grouping in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where eighteen Domesday Hundreds may be roughly said, according to him, to have been rearranged, by Edwardian times, in six groups, each of which contained three of them, five of which were styled Wapentakes, while the sixth consisted of Liberties ; and he suggested that this grouping might be connected with the navipletio or provision of one ship from three Hundreds.[4] The evidence, however, of such grouping of Hundreds for this pur- pose is very slight.[5]
The Domesday Hundreds retained their names unchanged for a long period, but the grouping system had been introduced even be- fore their disuse. For in 1316 the ' Nomina Hundredorum ' shows us the two co-existent, [6] though in 1346 the Domesday names alone are given.[7]
In studying the Domesday Survey we have to be always on the watch for the appearance under one county of a place belonging to another. The accounts of some manors seem to have gone astray, but in other cases the apparent discrepancy is accounted for by the fact of a manor which lay geographically in one county belonging territorially to another. Such ' islands,' or detached portions of counties, usually retained to our own time the same peculiar posi- tion that they are found occupying in Domesday. Caversfield, for
- ↑ 'The ancient Hundreds of Buckinghamshire,' by Morley Davies, in The Home Counties Magazine vi. 134-44-
- ↑ Mr. Ragg has elaborately tabulated the Hundreds for the purpose of the History, and has kindly allowed me the use of his tables. He considers that it is possible to establish not only the sequence of the Hundreds, but even that of the vills within each Hundred. The discovery of the latter has enabled him to identify some doubtful manors.
- ↑ Home Counties Magazine, vi. p. 136.
- ↑ * See his paper on ' Wapentakes and Hundreds ' in Domesday Studies, pp. 72-6.
- ↑ For the triple Hundred of Oswaldslow, Worcestershire, see Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 268.
- ↑ Feudal Aids, i. 107-8, where each group is styled 'The three hundreds of . . .'
- ↑ Ibid. pp. 116 et seq.
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