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A HISTORY OF ESSEX left it in doubt, pointing out that ' Morant, without explanation, refers it to East Tilbury and then to Tilbury-by-Clare.' But its ' pasture for fifty sheep ' decides the question in favour of Tilbury-on-the-Thames. And we can go further than this. Domesday assigns to Geoffrey de Mandeville a large and valuable, but nameless estate in the Hundred of Barstable The entry suggests that it probably adjoined Suain's manor of West Tilbury and states that it contained 'pasture for 300 sheep.' Now East Tilbury has extensive marshes ; it contained, says Morant, five manors which we cannot account for in Domesday ; and its manors were held of the Honour of Mandeville, Geoffrey's heir, Humfrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, holding there 3 knights' fees in 1372. And, as if to clinch the proof, we even find its five manors re- presented by the ' 5 knights ' who held this nameless estate of Geoffrey de Mandeville in Domesday. It is time that we should turn from the sheep to the swine, from the rich marshes on the coast to the forest and the woodland tracts. As the marshland was valued in Domesday for the feed it afforded for sheep, so was the woodland, not for its use for hunting, for firing, for building and fencing, but as its most important purpose for the mast it yielded for the swine who then fed within it. The ' pork and beans,' which now forms the staple diet of the Canadian lumberman, were all-important among ourselves in that of the twelfth century. 1 In Essex, a forest county, the swine, as might be expected, meet us at every turn. ' Forest ' however is a term which needs to be defined at the outset. In spite of the ' deer forests ' of Scotland existing still to remind us of the true historical meaning of the word, it is difficult to overcome the conviction that a forest is all woodland. ' Antiently,' wrote the historian of Essex, ' the whole county was in a manner one continued forest.' It is probable that Morant here used the word in its legal sense, but others, after him, seem to have imagined that, because the whole county was at one time ' within the forest,' it was much in the same condition as Epping Forest to-day. The history of ' the forest of Essex ' will be given in another section, but it is to Domesday that we owe our earliest historic information on the distribution of the actual woodland, as shown by the number of swine for which it could supply feed. There are three points which call for notice in the Domesday entries of Essex woodland. The first, as I have said, is the light they throw on its distribution at the time. The second is their reckoning, occasionally, its extent, not by the swine it could feed, but in ' hides ' and ' acres.' The third is the evidence they contain on a matter some- what overlooked the destruction of woodland here and there between 1066 and 1086. 1 'Et pro quater xx. Baconibus . . . Et pro xx. summis fabarum' (Pipe Roll, 19 Henry II. p. 23). ' Et pro Ix. baconibus viii. libras. Et pro xx. summis fabarum et pisarum xxxiii. sol et iiij. den ' (ibid, p. 81), etc., etc. In the next century Bowers Gifford (north of Canvey Island) was held by the serjeanty of ' scalding the king's hogs ' (Red Book of the Exchequer, pp. 457, 507) or as the jurors found at Chelmsford in 1255 'of making the king's lard or bacon wherever he might be in England' (Morant). 374