, writes Barry Shurlock
DURING the last hundred years many small countries have experienced the withdrawal of a colonial power. More often than not, a long period of chaos is endured before order is regained. More than 1,500 years ago Hampshire was in a similar situation, as the Romans left and Saxons took their place.
The first coherent snapshot of the organisation of the country is the Domesday Book. It was compiled nearly 700 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire and a generation after the Norman Conquest. It shows a county divided into ‘hundreds’, with some names that make little sense to modern eyes.