![]() ‘ In Brachings (Braughing) Hundred, the same bishop holds Storteford. This is the entry in the Victoria County History for Hertfordshire describing what Maurice, Bishop of London, held at the time of Domesday Book. ![]() Domesday quite simply means: ‘ When men face the record from which there is no appeal.’ It was a survey of England, known to contemporaries as The Survey of England. In 1086, twenty years after the Conquest, King William wanted to know exactly what his new realm consisted of, basically for taxation purposes, and commissioned the Domesday Book. Hides were then divided into boroughs, intermediate boroughs, manors and parishes. The Hundred was further divided into 100 hides, one hide generally measuring 120 acres, but this could vary from district to district as the acre was no exact measurement. The term ‘hundred’ remained in use until the 19th century. The Normans later split the land into counties (a French term), but shire continued in popular use and remains to this day – as in Hertfordshire. The term ‘hundred’ had been established long before it first appeared in the laws of King Edmund (939–946) and was, primarily, a unit of measure used by local government to assess the liability of the shire for taxation purposes and military draft. Both Bishop’s Stortford and Thorley were recorded as lying in the Braughing Hundred. South of the Humber, England was divided into shires and further divided into sections of land called hundreds. Before the Norman Conquest, laws, boundaries and land ownership were pretty well defined under the Saxons.
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