-ley and -hurst that would tell (as in West Cambs and N.E. Essex) of men
hewing out clearings in the remaining wildwood. And there is not that other
mark of late colonization, the secondary settlements formed as exclaves of
distant parishes, seen in the Forest of Neroche (Somerset) (41) or in Essex in
Canvey and Wallasea Islands (57).
Domesday Book
The great survey of 1086 shows a well-established agricultural landscape.
Essex as a whole, and the south-west in particular, had a density of population
near the average for England. Domesday records some 40 manors around and
between what were to be Epping and Hainault Forests (Fig. 7); there were
undoubtedly other villages and hamlets which belonged administratively to the
giant manors of Waltham and Barking and are not recorded separately.
The area of woodland can be estimated only very roughly. Essex, un-
fortunately, is a county in which Domesday records woodland in terms of "wood
for x swine". As I have shown elsewhere (39), this appears to refer to the
practice of fattening pigs on acorns in autumn, but since acorns are a very
erratic crop it is impossible to tell what equation between pigs and area the
supplier of the information had in mind. We cannot tell whether a wood for a
small number of swine is a small wood, a hornbeam wood (not producing
acorns), or a coppice wood (wanted for another purpose).
Domesday Book records some woodland for 76% of the settlements in
Essex; by comparison with other counties for which woods are recorded by
measurement, I conjecture that the proportion of woodland in the whole county
was near or slightly above the national average of about 15% of the land area.
In S. W. Essex, every settlement (though not every manor) had some woodland;
the density of swine-units per square mile of country was above average for the
county, though equalled in much of mid-Essex.
Table 4 gives the swine-units attributed to places which later were to have
shares in Epping and Hainault Forests. The Hainault parishes had wood for a
total of 2540 swine, which, we may conjecture, seems reasonable for the 5000
acres of the later Hainault Forest. The Epping parishes had wood for a total of
7642 swine, which seems rather too many for the 6000 acres of the later Epping
Forest. But these are swine of the imagination, and it is most unlikely that
anything like this number ever walked the woods; Domesday records only 613
real pigs.
Table 4 also gives the number of ploughs in Domesday. It is generally
supposed that a plough represents at least 120 acres of arable. In 1066 the
Epping parishes had had a total of 1471/2 ploughs, implying at least 18,000
acres of arable out of a total area of some 39,000 acres. The Hainault parishes
had 1151/2 ploughs, implying at least 14,000 acres of arable out of a total of
28,500 acres. There was also a total of 831 acres of meadow, mainly in the Lea
valley but some of it fringing the Roding.
25