ABSTRACT
By the year 1000 central-southern England, the heartland of the kingdom of Wessex, was already an ancient, settled land, where the long centuries of work by prehistoric settlers, the efficiency of Romano-British farmers, Roman landsurveyors and road builders, and the efforts of Saxon pioneers had laid out the landscape with a framework of estates and villages, towns and parishes, administrative boundaries and ecclesiastical divisions. The roots of much of this framework are to be sought in Roman or even earlier estate boundaries and administrative units; many parish boundaries in Wessex correspond to the bounds of Anglo-Saxon land grants, and modern research increasingly shows the antiquity of manorial, parish, township and other divisions, and the persistence of land-units from prehistoric times (Gelling 1978: 191-214). Wessex had already been divided into shires, with a system of local administration through hundreds, before the end of the eighth century. Somerset was the territory of the people who were referred to by The AngloSaxon Chronicle in 845 as the Sumorsaete, who looked to Somerton as their administrative and military centre; Dorset had its centre at the old Roman provincial capital of Dorchester; Wiltshire was dependent upon Wilton, then the most important town in the shire with its wealthy Benedictine nunnery founded by King Alfred; Hamwic, the Saxon predecessor of Southampton, was the capital of Hampshire. The only one of the central-southern counties not to be named after the people of its principal town was Berkshire, which, according to Asser, the Welsh monk who wrote a biography of King Alfred and who was to become Bishop of Sherborne, was ‘called Bearrocscire, which district is so called from the Berroc wood where the box-tree grows most abundantly’. Wallingford, at a major crossing-point of the Thames, was for long the chief urban centre of Berkshire, although the Saxon shire court met in the open on a mound by the Ridgeway at Scutchamer Knob in East Hendred, high up on the Berkshire Downs.
