Coley under Anglo-Saxon Rule (c. 800–1066)

The story of Coley before the Norman Conquest is one of landscape and structure rather than named individuals. In the later Anglo-Saxon period Berkshire formed part of a mature estate economy in which kings, earls, bishops and wealthy thegns held large blocks of land with dependent farmsteads and meadow. Coley lay just south-west of the small borough that would become Reading, on land well suited to arable cultivation, meadow and access to the rivers Kennet and Holy Brook.

No surviving charter names "Coley" before the twelfth century, and no specific Anglo-Saxon lord of Coley is known by name. What we can say with some confidence is that, by the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), the area later recognised as Coley formed part of the wider royal and ecclesiastical estates focused on Reading. When Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, it recorded Reading as a modest borough held partly by the king and partly by the Abbot of Battle, with mills and associated lands supplying grain and income to their households. The fields and meadows south-west of the town, though unnamed, belonged to this framework of organised lordship and obligation.

Coley's Anglo-Saxon history therefore has to be read "through the gaps": as a likely component of a larger estate worked by peasant cultivators, paying renders and services to a royal or monastic lord whose identity is now lost. The later manorial and monastic records do not create Coley out of nothing in the twelfth century; they formalise patterns of landholding and use that were already in existence under the last Anglo-Saxon kings.

Further Reading

• F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (3rd ed., Oxford).
• H. R. Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, 500–1087.
• Della Hooke, The Anglo-Saxon Landscape: The Kingdom of the Hwicce.