The map {13} represents the Hundred of Mutford and Lothingland (then
called the two half hundreds of Mutford and Lothingland) as it is now
divided into parishes. Nearly all these parishes are mentioned in
Domesday under their present names (though of course not spelt precisely
in the same way). Many, if not all, of them had probably existed under
the same name, and with much the same boundaries some 300 years before,
under the Saxon and Danish kings of East Anglia. They appear in Domesday
as the known areas in which the estates reported upon were situated, but
the parishes themselves were not the subject of the survey, nor does the
term “parish” appear either in English or Latin. The word “Villa” is
frequently used to denote these areas, just as “Town” was commonly used
as an equivalent for “parish” in much later times. The book is written
in a sort of Latinised English, but the names of places retain the
vernacular form. As they are spelt very differently in different
entries, Domesday is no authority for the correct spelling of any of our
parish names. But the form they bear in Domesday throws much light on
their etymological origin. To what extent the estates mentioned in
Domesday were contained in the parishes to which they are allocated is
doubtful. In a few cases the several manors returned as being situated
in a particular parish would appear to require a larger area than the
parish now contains, but in nearly all cases the amount of land reported
upon as being under tillage in a parish is very much less than the land
now under cultivation.
In his history of the Norman Conquest Mr. Freeman says of
Domesday:—“Domesday teaches better than any other witness of those times
can teach us, that the England of the 11th century and the England of the
19th are one and the same thing.” We will now see what it teaches us
about Lowestoft.
LOWESTOFT IN DOMESDAY BOOK.
In the return of the King’s estates in the Half-hundred of Lothingland
(Ludingland as it was written) we have a rather long account of the
King’s Manor of Gorleston, which appears to have been the headquarters
from which the royal estates in Lothingland were administered for several
hundred years. It states that “Gurth (Earl Gurth, the brother of Harold,
killed at the battle of Hastings) held Gorleston in King Edward’s time,
and after giving the details of his property in Gorleston,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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