Term : Township or Vill
The Township or Vill (in medieval Latin) was the basic territorial unit in Northumberland, instead of the ecclesiastical parish. The term vill can be defined in two ways, on the one hand as a territorial community, which may be labelled the territorial vill, and on the other as the basic unit of civil administration in medieval England, the administrative vill. The two units were related and they could indeed be cover identical territorial divisions, but this was not always the case and they must therefore be carefully distinguished.