There is reason to believe that the principal thoroughfare of the present town—the High Street—existed in the thirteenth century, and probably some centuries earlier. Guildford is a borough by prescription, and therefore may be of any Saxon date, however early. It has paid the castle the fitting compliment of placing it on the borough shield, which bears "on a mount vert, a castle." The town stands in three parishes; St. Mary's, which includes the castle; Trinity; and, on the west bank of the river, St. Nicholas.
The recorded history of Guildford has no ignoble beginning. It was the property of Alfred, and is first mentioned in his will, between 872 and 885. "To Ethelwald, my brother's son," says the great king, "I bequeath the manor at Godalming and at Gyldeford, and at Steyning." On the death of Ethelwald, childless, Guildford reverted to the West Saxon crown. In the following century, in 1036, Guildford was the scene of the capture of Alfred, the elder brother of the Confessor, and of the massacre of his Norman attendants. As to the particulars of the event, and as to the parts played in it by Godwin, Queen Emma, and Harold Harefoot, testimonies differ, but all agree in the mention of Guildford as the place to which the Atheling was conveyed.
When the Conqueror marched northward from Canterbury, he went by the Watling Street, through Rochester, to Southwark, and thence ascending to Wallingford, turned the position of Guildford, and placed himself between it and the Thames. Its name even does not occur till late in the reign, and then only in the General Survey. From that survey it appears that it had remained crown property. No castle is there mentioned, but that it contained a residence is more than probable, both because it had been so long a royal demesne, and from what is stated as to the Atheling's reception there.
In Domesday Book, as now, Guildford was in the Hundred of Woking. The chief of the royal tenants was Ranulph Flambard, afterwards so celebrated both for his rapacity and his magnificence. He was rector of Godalming, and, as such, held lands in Guildford, which were afterwards appended to his Canonry at Salisbury, to be eventually resumed by Henry II., and attached, with the castle, to the
