THE DOMESDAY SURVEY the descent and identification of manors, it has been generally and naturally supposed that he could be safely followed. In spite of the somewhat early date (1768) at which his volumes were published, he enjoyed great advantages in the fruits of his predecessors' labours among the public records, especially in having a complete collection of the Inquisitiones post mortem. His references show that the materials required for this department of his work were as familiar, virtually, to him as to ourselves, while the plea-rolls were even more so. ' I wanted,' he frankly confessed in his Preface, * no materials of any kind, but only the art of digesting them, and how I have executed that part is left to the reader's candour and judgment.' It would be profitless and most unfair to criticize the writer for having failed to utilize records which we our- selves possess in a far more convenient form ; nor would one imitate his somewhat ungenerous mention of his predecessor, Salmon, in speaking of the ' poor use he had made of the excellent materials in his possession.' But as, privately and officially, great reliance has been placed on his identification of manors, it will be necessary to give at some length the reasons for rejecting it in certain cases. Where the proof is a simple one, a note to the text will suffice ; but at times a somewhat elaborate argument is needed to establish an identity, and as all manorial history rests on right identification, no apology is needed for the length of the indispensable demonstrations which will be found below. Morant had a firm grasp of the key to manorial descent, namely the relation of manors to the great feudal ' Honours ' ; but where the descent of an Honour conflicted with his own erroneous identification, he appears to have put it aside. The most frequent error of the older county historians in identifying the names of Domesday manors was that of jumping at some resemblance more or less superficial or remote. It was thus that Morant discovered Pleshey in ' Plesinchou,' Althorne in 'Altenai,' Chigwell in 'Cinguehella,' RifFhams in ' Richeham,' and Beeches in ' Bacheneia.' This erratic guesswork is now, one would hope, obsolete, although we have a startling instance to the contrary in the Red Book of the Exchequer, where ' Alfer- stone ' (p. 505) is identified with perfect confidence by the official editor as Alphamstone (p. 1089), a sheer guess which the tests he claims to have applied to his identifications (pp. ccclxxix. ccclxxx.) would have shown at once to be wrong. One has only to consult the index to Morant to discover that * Alferestuna,' as it is styled in Domesday, was the manor of Bigods in Dunmow, in quite another part of the county. The other extremity of error is reached by those students of ' phonology ' who endeavour to apply to Domesday forms what they term the laws of sound, and thus to connect these forms with the names which now represent them. Essex affords some striking examples of the absolute futility of this method. For instance, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, in 1086, held land at two places, both named ' Torinduna.' One of these is now Thorndon (corruptly Horndon) in the south-west ; the other is Thor- rington in the north-east. Even more remarkable is the snare involved 387
