NOTE The date of the Domesday Survey is 1086, and the two previous periods referred to are King Edward's time (T.R.E.), which is usually the time of his death, and the time at which the manor was acquired by the Norman holder. The ' hide ' is the unit of assessment to the ' geld,' and the ' virgate ' its quarter ; thirty (geld) acres went to a virgate. The caruca. was a plough drawn by eight oxen, and the arable land was reckoned by the number of ploughs required to till it ; ' land for half a plough ' (or ' for four oxen ' ) merely means half a plough land. The term ' de- mesne ' is used both of those manors which a lord kept in his own hands (instead of enfeoffing a tenant therein), and of that portion of a manor which was kept in hand (as a kind of home farm), the peasantry holding the rest of it under the lord. The ' bordars ' were a class of peasants interme- diate between the villeins and the serfs. Most of the identifications in the following translation are due to the Rev. P. H. Ditchfield, some to Mr. H. T. E. Peake, but the translator has worked through the reasons for identification in all cases and has given in notes the result independently arrived at. In some cases he has felt it necessary to adopt other identifications, and some few he has abandoned without having alternatives to propose. The identification of holdings in this county is beset with difficulties through the absence of any fixed rotation in the taking of the Hundreds and Vills to tabulate them under holders in the Domesday Text, and through the alterations which at different periods have been made in the Hundreds and their boundaries which amount to more than simple grouping or re-grouping, or change of name while retaining old boundaries. These difficulties are not lessened by the duplication of the same name and the subsequent divisions of vills into East and West and so forth, and by the usual formula of the entries, which is, e.g. ' The King holds Cheneteberie ' even if the king's holding was but a small part of Cheneteberie. In Herts, Beds and Bucks the usual formula in such a case would be ' The King holds x hides in Cheneteberie.' Each separate owner in a vill, even when the vill was a divided vill, is thus entered in the Berks Text as if he held the whole vill. And the separate holdings of the different owners, even when they comprised a large pro- portion of the vill, do not always appear to coincide with the subsequent divisions of the vill, as they not seldom seem to do elsewhere. The identifications are thus to be understood generally as not more than marking the places in which the holdings lay. For the notes initialled (J.H.R.) Mr. Round is responsible. 323
