In this charter of Offa, we see one of the examples of those first separations of land, which afterwards became what we call a parish. What we now call a parish, is not an invention or institution by Archbishop Honorius, or Archbishop Theodore, nor of any individual genius; any more than shires and hundreds were invented by King Alfred. Our parishes are the natural and exigent result of the variety of causes that have planted churches; to the use of which, and to the privileges of the cures vested in them, neighbours have acquired customary or other rights. Territorial parishes are definitions and ratifications of these emergent rights, that pre-existed, as other political results do pre-exist, such confirmations of them. Their multiplication may have been promoted, more or less, by different men in different ages, including our own age. We shall presently see, that it is most likely that Offa founded the church at Cliffe; and this charter no doubt fixes the date of it. Higham must have been separated from it, into another parish, at a later time. The Archbishop of Canterbury continued to be the owner of Cliffe until K. Henry VIII.; and the rectory is still in the gift of the Archbishop, and exempt from Rochester which encompasses it. As Johnson of Cranbrook himself admits, “It is indeed a parish most singularly exempt; for the incumbent is the Archbishop’s immediate surrogate.” * * * * * But there is a much later Mercian council, which deserves to be noticed; not for its intrinsic importance, but on account of the place from which it is dated.[83] It is a sale of two bits of land at Canterbury to the Archbishop, A.D. 823, by Ceoluulf, “rex merciorum seu etiam cantwariorum.” The price seems to have been, a pot of gold and silver money, by estimation five pounds and-a-half (or ? four and-a-half); more portable and convenient to Ceoluulf under Beornuulf’s usurpation of Mercia. This was just when Mercia was waning, and Wessex ascendant. The date is “in uillo regali, qui dicitur werburging wic.” It will be remembered what was the business that first called us to the Kentish Hoo: the finding one of our St. Werburgh dedications there.