THE DOMESDAY SURVEY than that in which a single name is borne by a whole group of parishes. ' The science of village morphology,' Professor Maitland has observed, 'is still very young'; but its fascination and its importance for the early history of our race have led him to devote special attention to this second and more familiar type, of which he found remarkable examples in the eastern counties and especially in Essex. 1 It will be best to give in his own words the Professor's observations on the subject : Very often we find two or more contiguous townships bearing the same names and distinguished only from each other by what we call their surnames. Cases in which there are two such townships are in some parts of England so extremely common as to be the rule rather than the exception. If, for example, we look at the map of Essex, we everywhere see the words Great and Little serving to distinguish two neighbouring villages. Cases in which the same name is borne by three or more adjacent townships are rarer. . . . Essex is particularly rich in such groups ; close to Layer Marney, Layer de la Hay and Layer Breton are Tolleshunt Knights, Tolleshunt Major and Tolleshunt Darcy. In the same county are High Laver, Little Laver and Magdalen Laver ; Theydon Gernon, Theydon Mount, Theydon Bois ; also (and this is perhaps the finest example) High Roding, Roding Aythorpe, Leaden Roding, White Roding, Margaret Roding, Abbots (sic) Roding, Roding Beauchamp and Berners Roding. . . . In general, where two neighbouring modern villages have the same name, Domesday does not treat them as two. Let us look at the very striking case of the various Rodings and Roothings, which lie in the Dunmow hundred of Essex.* Already six lords have a manor apiece ' in Rodinges ' ; but Domeiday has no sur- names for these manors ; they all lie ' in Rodinges.' It is so with the various Tolleshunts in the Thurstable Hundred : there are many manors ' in Tolleshunta ' (Archieological Review, iv. 2368). It is a matter of detail and of no great consequence that Domesday does not, as here alleged, uniformly employ the phrases * in Rodinges ' or ' in Tolleshunta.' Out of sixteen entries relating to ' Rodinges ' (or ' Roinges,') only one has the prefix c in ' ; and out of twelve relating to
- Toleshunta,' only one has that prefix. But this has at least some
bearing on the argument. The important thing, however, is the Pro- fessor's conclusion. He thinks that these examples ' suggest that in a very large number of cases the territory which was once the territory of a single township or cultivating community has, in course of time, perhaps before, perhaps after the Norman Conquest, become the territory of several different townships.' This would made us ' think of the township . . . of very ancient times as being in many cases much larger than the vill or township of the later middle ages, or our own " civil " parish,' and would even ' make the vill approach the size of a Hundred.' Therefore, he suggests, ' as we look backwards, we seem to see a con- vergence between the size of the township and the size of the Hundred,' century,' that ' in general the vill of Domesday Book is still a vill in after days,' and that ' the villa of Domesday Book is in general the vill of the thirteenth century and the civil parish of the nineteenth ' (Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 9-17). 1 See the paragraphs on ' Fission of vills,' ' Village colonies ' and ' New and old villages ' in his Domeiday Book and Beyond, pp. 14, 365, 367 ; and his paper on 'The Surnames of English Villages' in Archeeohgual Review, iv. 233-40. 1 This is an error. It is important to observe that the Rodings are divided between the Hundreds of Dunmow and of Ongar. I 401 51
