County town: Chelmsford
Essex takes its name from the East Saxons, whose kingdom was established in the 6th century. It became a shire after the Danish settlement and West Saxon reconquest of the 9th and 10th centuries.
Essex is a county of Thames estuary marshes, river estuaries, and rolling agricultural country inland, with a long North Sea coast. Its proximity to London has shaped its character since the Roman period — Colchester, the first Roman colonia in Britain, lies near its northern border. The county's coastline of creeks and mudflats was a working landscape of fishing, wildfowling, and sea trade. Great medieval monasteries at Waltham, Colchester, and Barking were major landowners. The county's quiet villages and market towns — Thaxted, Saffron Walden, Dedham — retain a character formed by the medieval wool trade and the agricultural prosperity of the east.
Essex was surveyed in the Domesday Book of 1086, William the Conqueror's great census of England. The survey recorded 435 settlements in the county, with details of their lords, landholders, population, and resources.
Browse 435 Domesday settlements in EssexEngland's 39 historic counties, established between the 9th and 12th centuries, are the framework through which English local history, legal records, and landscape have been organised for a thousand years. Most survive today as ceremonial counties, their boundaries deeply embedded in place identity.
This page introduces the historic county of Essex. A full Aubrey report for a location within it pulls together everything the record actually holds about that ground, from the geology beneath it to the last coin dropped in a field:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Read in-depth research reports on notable historical places across the UK — explore →
Essex contains 329 scheduled monuments — sites of national importance protected under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979.
Browse scheduled monuments in EnglandAn Aubrey report for a specific location in Essex draws on historical maps, archaeological records, Domesday data and landscape history to tell the full story of any site in the county.