The map { 13} represents the Hundred of Mutford and Lothingland (then called the two half hundreds of Mutford and Lothingland) as it is now divided into parishes. Nearly all these parishes are mentioned in Domesday under their present names (though of course not spelt precisely in the same way). Many, if not all, of them had probably existed under the same name, and with much the same boundaries some 300 years before, under the Saxon and Danish kings of East Anglia. They appear in Domesday as the known areas in which the estates reported upon were situated, but the parishes themselves were not the subject of the survey, nor does the term “parish” appear either in English or Latin. The word “Villa” is frequently used to denote these areas, just as “Town” was commonly used as an equivalent for “parish” in much later times. The book is written in a sort of Latinised English, but the names of places retain the vernacular form. As they are spelt very differently in different entries, Domesday is no authority for the correct spelling of any of our parish names. But the form they bear in Domesday throws much light on their etymological origin. To what extent the estates mentioned in Domesday were contained in the parishes to which they are allocated is doubtful. In a few cases the several manors returned as being situated in a particular parish would appear to require a larger area than the parish now contains, but in nearly all cases the amount of land reported upon as being under tillage in a parish is very much less than the land now under cultivation.
In his history of the Norman Conquest Mr. Freeman says of Domesday:—“Domesday teaches better than any other witness of those times can teach us, that the England of the 11th century and the England of the 19th are one and the same thing.” We will now see what it teaches us about Lowestoft.
In the return of the King’s estates in the Half-hundred of Lothingland (Ludingland as it was written) we have a rather long account of the King’s Manor of Gorleston, which appears to have been the headquarters from which the royal estates in Lothingland were administered for several hundred years. It states that “Gurth (Earl Gurth, the brother of Harold, killed at the battle of Hastings) held Gorleston in King Edward’s time, and after giving the details of his property in Gorleston,