Loughton before the Conquest.
It is not always that the story of a parish reaches back to a period beyond Domesday Book, but that of Loughton begins for us in the reign of the Confessor. In the year 1062, four years before the coming of the Conqueror, King Edward, with the assent of his Witan, or wise men, confirmed to the Monastery at Waltham a great gift of lands which had been made to the Canons by their founder, Harold, the son of Godwin. The different estates are enumerated in the document, and the boundaries of several are given—not in Latin, the language of the rest of the document, but in Anglo-Saxon. Among them are three—Lukinton, Tippedene, and Ælwartun, which are incontestably to be identified with the places we now know as Loughton, Debden, and Alderton. The boundaries of Lukinton, or Loughton, are unfortunately wanting. Not, of course, that it would be any longer possible to trace them; even in the case of Debden, where the natural features are mentioned, it is doubtful of what extent the manor was; in the case of Alderton none of the boundaries can be connected with any names occurring in documents of a later date.