Again, the civil unit as well as the ecclesiastical, the village, like the parish, may often prove misleading. It is, indeed, very doubtful whether we have ever sufficiently distinguished the manor and the village. If we construct for ourselves a county map from Domesday, we shall miss the names of several villages, although often of antiquity; but, on the other hand, shall meet with the names of important manors, often extending into several parishes, often suggesting by their forms a name as old as the migration, yet now represented at most by some obscure manor, and perhaps only by a solitary farm, or even, it may be, a field. In Sussex, for instance, the ‘Basingham’ of Domesday cannot now be identified; its ‘Belingeham’ is doubtful; its ‘Clotinga’ is now but a farm, as is ‘Estockingeham.’ ‘Sessingham’ and ‘Wiltingham’ are manors. In Essex ‘Hoosenga’ and ‘Hasingha’ occur together in Domesday, and are unidentified. Nor have I yet succeeded in identifying ‘Plesingho,’ a manor not only mentioned in Domesday, but duly found under Henry III. Morant, followed by Chisenhale-Marsh, identified it wrongly with Pleshy. Such names as these, eclipsed by those of modern villages, require to be disinterred by archæological research. Another point on which light is thrown by the contrast of Essex and Sussex is the theory tentatively advanced by Mr. Maitland in the ‘Archæological Review,’ that the Hundred and the township may, in the beginning, have been represented by the same unit.[21] Broadly speaking, he adduced in support of this hypothesis the originally large township of Essex, proved by the existence of a group of villages bearing the same name, comparing it with the small Hundreds characteristic of Sussex. But in Sussex, I think, the small Hundreds were coincident with those many small townships; while in Essex the scattered townships are coincident with larger Hundreds. And this leads me to suggest that the Saxon settlements in Sussex lay far thicker on the ground than those found in Essex, and that we possibly find here some explanation of the admitted silence as to the East-Saxon settlement contrasting with the well-known mention of that in Sussex. It seems to me highly probable that Essex, in those remote times, was not only bordered and penetrated by marshes, but largely covered with forest. It is, perhaps, significant that in the district between Westham and Boreham, some twenty-five miles across as the crow flies, there is not a _ham_ to be found. From this I turn to the opposite extreme, that group of _hams_ on the ‘Rother’ and its tributaries, thirty-seven in number. Isolated alike from _ings_ and _tons_, and hemmed in by the spurs of the Andredswald, it is, perhaps, unique in character. Nowhere have I lighted on a group of _hams_ so illustrative of the character of these settlements, or affording a test so admirable of the alleged connection between this suffix and the _villa_ of the Roman Empire.