"....... Belchamp Walter had 11 acres of vineyards, at this time this was the second largest vineyard in England, its location is not known but the logical place would be on the south facing slopes north of the church."

In Essex, if not in all England, the most interesting vineyard is that of Suain at Rayleigh. ' (There is) now,' we read, ' a park and six arpents of vineyard, and it yields 20 muids (modios) of wine in a good season. ' Here both the park and the vineyard were new, new as the castle which Suain had raised,1 and this appears to be the only instance in which Domesday mentions a vineyard's yield.
Next in interest, and of the same size, is the vineyard at Castle Hedingham, which affords, I think, presumptive evidence that Aubrey de Vere had already made it a seat of his famous house.
And here, less, it would seem, than two centuries ago, there were visible ' wild vines bearing red grapes,' the still lingering descendants of the vineyard of its Domesday lord. But Aubrey had also planted another and a larger vineyard, some 4 miles away, on his manor of Belchamp Walter, where he had, I think, another residence.
Only one of its eleven ' arpents' had as yet come into bearing. Aubrey seems to have been fond of vineyards, for we find that he had one at Lavenham, across the Suffolk border, and another on his Middlesex manor of Kensington. Next in size to the Belchamp vineyard was that at Great Waltham, which points, I think, to Geoffrey de Mandeville, the lord of that manor, having made the adjoining stronghold at Pleshey his seat already. Next in importance are the vineyards planted by Ranulf Peverel at Debden and at Stebbing. At both these places, which follow one another in Domesday, the vineyards were new, so new indeed that only half was in bearing at either place. There remain only the small vineyards of the two dapiferi, Eudo and Hamo, of whom the former had planted, at Mundon, two arpents since the Conquest, and the latter one arpent at Stambourne or Toppesfield.2

Among the live stock mentioned in the second volume of Domesday are the bees, whose importance then was far greater than now. There are numerous entries of rents paid partly in honey in the other volume of Domesday, especially on Crown demesne.3 ' Bee-culture reached, to all appearances, a high state of cultivation among the Anglo-Saxons, and was held in peculiar regard by the people as the chief element in a favourite drink.'* But it was not only for mead that bees had to be kept. From them was obtained also wax for the church, and the only substitute then available for our own sugar. A careful analysis of the entries suggests no conclusions save that hives appear to have been far more common in the north than in the south of the county. Their numbers fluctuated, we find, greatly ; but this may have been sometimes due to mere shifting of the hives, as where we read of Prating and St. Osyth, which had the same under-tenant, that there were six hives at Prating where there had been none, and none at St. Osyth's where there had been six (fo. 75^).