ABSTRACT
One important effect of the Civil War upon Wessex was that it greatly weakened the link between Winchester and the monarchy, so that under Henry II Winchester effectively ceased to be a royal capital. All modern research continues to confirm that the arrangement of the Wessex landscape and its administrative divisions and estate boundaries had already been in existence for many centuries before the Norman Conquest, and that many of the settlements in Wessex are much older than was hitherto supposed. By the year 1000 other towns and market-places were also important in Wessex. Many of the favourite hunting places of the Norman kings were in Wessex, and very large areas of the region were given over to royal forests. The Domesday Survey, however, adds little to the knowledge of farming methods, and the figures for the distribution of arable land, plough-teams, pasture and meadow in the region are broadly what might be expected.
