Anciently the town stood almost on the edge of the Wooland or Woodland district, in contradistinction to the Feldon, which was less thickly afforested. At even so late a period as the times of the poet Camden speaks of the greater part of the district as thickly wooded, although possessing tracts of pasture and land given over to corn. Probably the immediate neighbourhood very closely resembled the more thickly–wooded portions of the New Forest of the present day. The first record of the existence of a place of any importance is the entry in the Domesday Book where, in 1085, is given a valuation of the manor; that then appears to have consisted of barely 2000 acres, which land was in the occupation of men who were to all intents and purposes villeins. The lord of the manor, at the time of the Survey, was the Bishop of Worcester, to whose see the town belonged, King Ethelred of Mercia having given the monastery in 691 to Egwin, the third bishop of the diocese. This monastery is generally supposed to have been founded by the river side on that exquisite site now occupied by Holy Trinity Church. Unhappily the history of this monastic foundation, which one may well believe would have been of supreme interest, is almost untraceable. But that it was not an altogether tranquil one may be inferred from the records which state that strife between the succeeding Bishops of Worcester and the Kings of Mercia for its possession and that of the town was not infrequent. Both the town and the monastery undoubtedly in those early times were interdependent, and the first houses, of which there were apparently about two score at the time of the Conquest, were probably near the site of the monastery and river, and were in the neighbourhood of the thoroughfare now known as the Old Town. The manorial mill, at which the inhabitants ground their corn, was situated below the ford, and for this privilege they paid the usual fee taken by the lord of the manor for such convenience. In those early days of Stratford’s existence, before grave and scandalous monastic abuses ate into the heart of the system of religious foundations, the countryfolk looked to their ecclesiastical neighbours for active assistance in their labours and lives. This was undoubtedly the case with the old–time inhabitants of Stratford. Soon the town not only grew within its own borders, but spread its influence into the surrounding district, where clearings were made in the forest, or spaces already open were put under cultivation and homesteads began to spring up.