Identifier: countiesofenglan01ditc (find matches)
Title: The counties of England, their story and antiquities
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Ditchfield, P. H. (Peter Hampson), 1854-1930
Subjects: Great Britain -- History England -- Antiquities
Publisher: London : G. Allen
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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quest were great, as shown by a study ofthe Domesday Survey. The county was at that timedivided into fifteen hundreds, each consisting of a numberof manors, whose owners and their tenants are recordedtogether, with the value of each as it was then and as ithad been in the reign of Edward the Confessor. EarlRoger was the owner—or, strictly, tenant in capite—ofall but a very few manors, which belonged to the Bishopof Chester and Ralph de Mortimer respectively, andthose who held under any of the three, almost withoutexception, bore Norman names. A few were held byecclesiastical bodies. Among the sub-tenants were asmall number who appear from their names to be Saxon,but it is clear that the dispossession of those who hadowned the land in the time of King Edward was verycomplete. It was impossible for this change to take placewithout injustice and hardship of the severest kind atthe time when it was effected, but it had its redeemingfeatures. The Normans were more thrifty and temperate
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The Guildhall, Much Wenlock. 294 Shropshire in their personal habits, more able to adapt themselvesto new circumstances, and to assimilate what was goodin their surroundings, than those whom they dispossessed.The result was that the Normans supplied the elementof organization which the Saxons had lacked, and nolong period elapsed before the two were fused into onepowerful nation. The English tongue and the Englishlaw held their own throughout the realm, and withina century the French baron had become an English lord.^ As regards Shropshire itself, though this gradualfusion was going on underneath, the century whichfollowed the death of the Conqueror was largely one oftrouble and unrest. The reign of Henry I. was disturbedby the rebellion of Robert de Belesme, the eldest sonof Roger de Montgomery, who appears to have inheritedthe bad qualities of his mother, Rogers first wife.Espousing the cause of Robert Curthose on the deathof William Rufus, Belesme raised a formidable rebellionagain

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