Page:VCH Essex 1.djvu/475

 THE DOMESDAY SURVEY the eighteenth century. Domesday distinguishes also between ' Great ' and ' Little ' Stanford (Rivers), but this distinction cannot, it seems, be traced subsequently ; part of Colne Engaine is distinguished as ( Little ' Colne in the Survey ; but of such distinctions there are no more. The villages distinguished by ' other ' (alia) are only Fyfield, Navestock and Melesham (if rightly identified) in Great Lees. It is a curious and significant fact that in no one of the three cases do we find any trace of two villages of the name. Here then, it seems, is a further warning against attaching much importance to the terms employed in Domesday or endeavouring to build theories thereon. The case of Stanway is one which caused me much perplexity, because of the difficulty of fixing its locality on the Domesday map. Morant wrote of it as follows : There is great reason to believe that this district, in the earliest times, was divided into two distinct parishes. For here are not only two churches partly still standing ; but we frequently meet in records with the names of Stanwey magna and Stanwey parva, Great and Little Stanway ; the former being the southern part of the present parish, and the latter that which is by the London road. But if they were distinct, it must have been before the year 1366. For, from that time, the church hath been presented to by the name of Great Stanway, with the chapel of Albright, or of Little Stanway, annexed. And for a long time these two names have been considered only as the names of two different hamlets (ii. 190). There is however in Domesday only one ' Stanewega.' As Stanway is obviously so called from the old Roman highway passing through its northern portion, it is natural to suppose that the original village stood near that highway, where indeed the chapel of St. Albright (^Ethelbricht) must, from its invocation, have stood before the Conquest. And Morant, indeed, observes that ' the manor-house of Stanway stands on the south side of the London road, near the brook.' On the other hand, his history of the parish appears to confuse the two Stanways, and leaves us in utter doubt as to which of them represents the original village. 1 Before leaving this important subject, it may be well to explain that the ' two types,' as I have termed them, of Essex parish must not be confused with the ' two types ' which Meitzen, Professor Maitland writes, has taught us to look for. ' The nucleated village and the vill of scattered homesteads,' as he describes them, 1 are characteristic respec- tively of the east and the west of England, of the Celtic and of the Saxon land, as we gather from his pages.* The type to which I have endeavoured to draw attention in Essex, that in which two or more vills named as distinct in Domesday are now represented by one ' parish,' owes its form, as it seems to me, more probably to an ecclesiastical than to any other cause. The one and only discoverable feature which imposed unity on the area was the ' parish ' or mother church. The 1 Having begun his account of ' the manor of Stanway ' by describing its manor-house as above, he ends by telling us that ' Stanway Hall,' adjoining ' Great ' Stanway church in the south of the parish, ' stands pleasantly on an eminence by the side of the road from Colchester to Maldon,' and finally speaks of this seat as ' Stanway manor-house.' Possibly the ' London road ' of the passage quoted in the text was a slip for ' Maldon road.' 403
 * Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 15. s Ibid.