Chapter 9 - Another British Domain: The Northern Claylands

Summary

CHAPTER 8 SHOWED HOW the landscape of central Essex was divided up into a series of valley-based early folk territories that were very similar in character to those in southern and eastern districts, suggesting that early folk territories were both an Anglo-Saxon and a British phenomenon. To the north of these central Essex claylands lay the High Boulder Clay Plateau of northern Essex and south-western Suffolk, drained by the rivers Colne and Stour. Here it has proved more difficult to reconstruct early folk territories despite using the same sources and techniques that worked so well further south (and, indeed, as we will see in Chapters 10 and 11, to the west and to the north). While there are numerous linked place-names and detached parcels, very few breaks in this web of territorial connections could be detected across the whole of the Colne and Stour valleys. Indeed, some of the territorial connections and linked placenames cut across the river Stour that later marked the county boundary between Essex and Suffolk. The obvious conclusion is that this was a single – albeit very large – early folk territory that by Domesday was divided into Lexden, Hinckford and Freshwell Hundreds in Essex and Risbridge and Babergh Hundreds in Suffolk. To the east lay a separate early folk territory that was to become the Domesday hundreds of Samford and Cosford (Figures 9.1 and 9.2).

THE COLNE AND STOUR VALLEYS

KEY INFORMATION

Possible folk name: ?

Royal vill(s): Clare, Sudbury/Long Melford, Bures, Nayland

Minster church(s): Stoke-by-Clare, Sudbury/Long Melford, Stoke-by-Nayland

Possible meeting place: Thunderlow

Great estates (into which it fragmented): ‘greater Clare’, ‘greater Sudbury’, ‘greater Bures’, ‘greater Nayland’

Area: 1,149km²

Successor hundreds: Lexden, Hinckford and Freshwell Hundreds in Essex, and Risbridge and Babergh Hundreds in Suffolk

Central northern Essex: Lexden, Hinckford and Freshwell Hundreds

In northern Essex the hundred boundaries appear to have been tenth-century creations that bore little relationship to the earlier territorial geography, often cutting through parishes with linked names and which were presumably once a single vill.