and in time a small wooden church may well have stood on the site of the present building. One hundred and forty-four pieces of pottery from the churchyard site dating to between AD 600 and AD 900 show that settlement there continued despite the interruptions of Danish raids and invasions from AD 841. With Danes settled among the previous villagers the hamlet around the church expanded. The churchyard 'dig' revealed over 1000 pottery sherds dating to between AD 900 and AD 1100 together with strap fittings, loom weights, a knife and an arrowhead. The foundation trenches of a house of this period were also excavated. It was a wooden building thirty-six feet by seventeen feet and would have been open to the rafters with an open hearth from which smoke escaped through the thatched roof. About AD 1050 a small church of flints and mortar with a round tower was built. The tower, since heightened, still stands as part of today's church. At the place where the Roman road crossed the marshes of the Hempnall stream the embankment had worn away, leaving a miry morass aptly named Deepwade. This muddy obstacle and its name almost certainly originated in Saxon times when the local administrative area which included Tasburgh was called Depwade Hundred. In AD 1086, twenty years after the Norman conquest of England, the Domesday Book was compiled giving us the first written record of Tasburgh. The village is named Taseburc and its dimensions are given as ten by seven furlongs, there was a watermill and the land was ploughed by five, eight-ox teams. Two hundred and thirty-one acres of arable land are recorded together with eighteen acres of meadowland, but we must bear in mind that Domesday 'acres' probably represented the taxable value of land rather than precise areas. The arable land and meadow were divided into four holdings, each being part of a widespread portfolio of estates held from the king by four magnates. These absentee landlords included Roger Bigod, Sheriff of both Norfolk and Suffolk, and Alan IV, Duke of Brittany, son-in-law of the king. Two small thirty acre holdings seem to be embryo manors, but for the most part the land was farmed by twenty semi-free sub tenants, some called freemen, others known as sokemen. The size of their land varied widely, one man had thirty acres of arable and two acres of meadow while at