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.