Barstable Hundred
ancient subdivision of Essex, England
Barstable was a Hundred in the English County of Essex. Both the hundred and the manor with the same name are mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. Several parishes in the western part of the Barstable Hundred are now in Thurrock.
Location
Barstable is bordered on the east by Rochford hundred; on the north by Chelmsford hundred; on the north-west by the Ongar hundred; on the west by Chafford hundred (with the boundary in part following the Mardyke) and on the south by the river Thames. The parish boundary between Grays Thurrock and Little Thurrock is also the hundred boundary between Barstable and Chafford. The interlocking boundary between these parishes suggests the existence of a common pasture originally shared, prior to the establishment of the hundred boundary.
Name
The name of the hundred was normally that of its meeting place. Barstable hundred takes its name from a location or settlement that is now in Basildon, a new town. This is mentioned as the manor of Barstable Hall, as Little Barstable Hall, and as Barstable Hall, alias Basildon Hall. Ernest Godman, writing in Home Counties magazine quotes the historian Philip Morant as saying the name "appears to have been taken from the place now called Barstable Hall, in Langdon and Basildon ...
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Barstable Hundred” as ancient subdivision of Essex, England. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as ancient subdivision of Essex, England. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4865020. Authority coordinates are 51.550, 0.400. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1086.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barstable Hundred” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.