A HISTORY OF ESSEX groups under one heading ('the land of the Bishop of London') the manors held by the bishop and by the canons, though those of the bishop precede the others. In Hertfordshire they are ranged under separate headings, and even separated by intervening fiefs. In Essex the headings are again separate, but the canons' lands follow immediately on those of the bishop. 1 Their most important possession was the great soke ' of Eadwulfsness, now represented by ' the Sokens,' as they are familiarly called, Kirby, Thorpe, and Walton-on-the-Naze. Tillingham was another of their ancient manors, the total of which had been aug- mented since the death of the Confessor by the gift of an estate at Nor- ton (Mandeville), the acquisition of others at Navestock and West Lee the former, they alleged, by the king's gift and the annexation or seizure of others at Navestock and Barling. On the other hand their own lands had been encroached on at Chingford and Heybridge by Norman magnates. The value of the canons' estates had either increased or was stationary, while that of the bishop's manors had on the whole decreased. These Domesday values, I may observe, cannot be connected with the firmce rendered to the canons by their manors at or soon after this period. 2 The other old English foundations holding lands in the county were the monastery of Christchurch, Canterbury, the local nunnery of Barking, the Suffolk abbey of St. Edmund's, and the Cambridgeshire one of Ely. The lands of Christchurch (' Holy Trinity ') precede even those of the Bishop of London in the Survey. This was doubtless due to its close connexion with the primate. They are chiefly remarkable as representing what were afterwards known as his ' peculiars ' in this county, subject to the commissary still known as the Dean of Bocking, Bocking (with Bocking Hall in Mersea) being one of the Christchurch manors. Barking had lost a manor at Benfleet, which the Conqueror, we know not how, had bestowed on Westminster Abbey, and an estate at (Abbess) Roding, which Geoffrey de Mandeville had obtained but seems to have subsequently disgorged ; and it had also suffered the usual petty encroachments at the hands of the newcomers. St. Edmund's had not only lost nothing, but had actually gained, as elsewhere, at the hands of the Conqueror, who had given it a manor at Little Waltham, and possibly the addition to its estate which it had obtained at Harlow. Ely, which had lost his favour by its share in Hereward's rising, became the special prey of the Norman spoiler. Its chief possessions in Essex were Littlebury, said to have been given by King ./Ethelred in 1004, and Rettendon, assigned to the gift, not long before, of Brihtnoth, the famous alderman, and his wife. But it retained, in 1086, some three or four other manors of lesser importance. Domesday however records its 1 Domesday speaks of the canons' manors as having been held by ' St. Paul,' and applies the same formula to the bishop's manor of Wanstead ; but Archdeacon Hale has observed that ' the bishops of London appear to have possessed their manors in the time of the Anglo-Saxon kings in their own right, for there are no traces of any of the episcopal lands having at any time belonged to the cathedral ' (Domesday of St. PauFs, p. iv.). 2 See for these firm* Hale's Domesday of St. Pau/'i, p. xxxix. 340
