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 DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND 
 
 THREE ESSAYS 
 
 IN THE 
 
 EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
 
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 AI34 
 DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND Ittl 
 
 THKEE ESSAYS 
 
 IN THE 
 
 EAKLY HISTOEY OF ENGLAND 
 
 BT 
 
 FREDERIC WILLIAM MAITLAND, LL.D. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1921
 
 First Edition 1897. 
 Reprinted 1907, 1921.
 
 CD 
 CO 
 CD 
 
 cv 
 
 03 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 rriHE greater part of what is in this book was written m 
 -*- order that it might be included in the History of English 
 Law before the Time of Edward I. which was published by Sir 
 Frederick Pollock and me in the year 1895. Divers reasons 
 dictated a change of plan. Of one only need I speak. I knew 
 that Mr Round was on the eve of giving to the world his 
 Feudal England, and that thereby he would teach me and 
 others many new lessons about the scheme and meaning of 
 Domesday Book. That I was well advised in waiting will be 
 evident to everyone who has studied his work. In its light 
 I have suppressed, corrected, added much. The delay has also 
 enabled me to profit by Dr Meitzen's Siedelung und Agrarwesen 
 der Germanen 1 , a book which will assuredly leave a deep mark 
 upon all our theories of old English history. 
 
 The title under which I here collect my three Essays is 
 chosen for the purpose of indicating that I have followed that 
 retrogressive method 'from the known to the Unknown,' of 
 which Mr Seebohm is the apostle. Domesday Book appears 
 to me, not indeed as the known, but as the knowable. The 
 Beyond is still very dark : but the way to it lies through the 
 Norman record. A result is given to us : the problem is to 
 find cause and process. That in some sort I have been en- 
 deavouring to answer Mr Seebohm, I can not conceal from 
 myself or from others. A hearty admiration of his English 
 
 1 Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Westgermanen und Ostgermanen, der Kelten, 
 Eomer, Finnen und Slawen, von August Meitzen, Berlin, 1895. 
 
 313524
 
 * ** 
 "vi* m . f Preface. 
 
 Village Community is one main source of this book. That the 
 task of disputing his conclusions might have fallen to stronger 
 hands than mine I well know. I had hoped that by this time 
 Prof. Vinogradoff's Villainage in England would have had a 
 sequel. When that sequel comes (and may it come soon) my 
 provisional answer can be forgotten. One who by a few strokes 
 of his pen has deprived the English nation of its land, its 
 folk-land, owes us some reparation. I have been trying to 
 show how we can best bear the loss, and abandon as little as 
 may be of what we learnt from Dr Konrad von Maurer and 
 Dr Stubbs. 
 
 For my hastily compiled Domesday Statistics I have apo- 
 logized in the proper place. Here I will only add that I had 
 but one long vacation to give to a piece of work that would 
 have been better performed had it been spread over many years. 
 Mr Corbett, of King's College, has already shown me how by 
 a little more patience and ingenuity I might have obtained 
 some rounder and therefore more significant figures. But of 
 this it is for him to speak. 
 
 Among the friends whom I wish to thank for their advice 
 and assistance I am more especially grateful to Mr Herbert 
 Fisher, of New College, who has borne the tedious labour of 
 reading all my sheets, and to Mr W. H. Stevenson, of Exeter 
 College, whose unrivalled knowledge of English diplomatics 
 has been generously placed at my service. 
 
 F. W. M. 
 
 20 January, 1897.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE . v ... '. . . . v 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS . vii 
 
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xiv 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 DOMESDAY BOOK. 
 
 Domesday Book and its satellites, 1. Domesday and legal history, 2. 
 Domesday a geld book, 3. The danegeld, 3. The inquest and the geld 
 system, 5. Importance of the geld, 7. Unstable terminology of the 
 record, 8. The legal ideas of century 51. 9. 
 
 1. Plan of the Survey, pp. 9 26. 
 
 The geographical basis, 9. The vill as the unit, 10. Modern and 
 ancient vills, 12. Omission of vills, 13. Fission of vills, 14. The 
 nucleated village and the vill of scattered steads, 15. Illustration by 
 maps, 16. Size of the vill, 17. Population of the vill, 19. Contrasts 
 between east and west, 20. Small vills, 20. Importance of the east, 21. 
 Manorial and non-manorial vills, 22. Distribution of free men and 
 serfs, 23. The classification of men, 23. The classes of men and the 
 geld system, 24. Our course, 25. 
 
 2. The Serfs, pp. 2636. 
 
 The servus of Domesday, 26. Legal position of the serf, 27. Degrees 
 of serfdom, 27. Predial element in serfdom, 28. The serf and criminal 
 law, 29. Serf and villein, 30. The serf of the Leges, 30. Return to 
 the servus of Domesday, 33. Disappearance of servi, 35. 
 
 3. The Villeins, pp. 3666. 
 
 The boors or coliberts, 36. The continental colibert, 37. The 
 English boor, 37. VUlani, bordarii, cotarii, 38. The villein's tenement, 
 
 40. Villeins and cottiers, 41. Freedom and unfreedom of the villani, 
 
 41. Meaning of freedom, 42. The villein as free, 43. The villein as
 
 viii Contents. 
 
 unfree, 45. Anglo-Saxon free-holding, 46. Free-holding and seignorial 
 rights, 47. The scale of free-holding, 49. Free land and immunity, 50. 
 Unfreedom of the villein, 50. Right of recapture, 50. Rarity of flight, 
 51. The villein and seignorial justice, 52. The villein and national 
 justice, 52. The villein and his land, 53. The villein's land and the 
 geld, 54. The villein's services, 56. The villein's rent, 57. The English 
 for villanus, 58. Summary of the villein's position, 60. Depression of 
 the peasants, 61. The Normans and the rustics, 61. Depression of 
 the sokemen, 63. The peasants on the royal demense, 65. 
 
 4. The Sokemen, pp. 6679. 
 
 Sochemanni and liberi homines, 66. Lord and man, 67. Bonds 
 between lord and man, 67. Commendation, 69. Commendation and 
 protection, 70. Commendation and warranty, 71. Commendation and 
 tenure, 71. The lord's interest in commendation, 72. The seignory 
 over the commended, 74. Commendation and service, 74. Land-loans 
 and services, 75. The man's consuetudines, 76. Nature of consuetudines, 
 78. Justiciary consuetudines, 78. 
 
 5. Sake and Soke, pp. 80107. 
 
 Sake and soke, 80. Private jurisdiction in the Leges, 80. Soke in 
 the Leges Henrici, 81. Kinds of soke in the Leges, 82. The Norman 
 kings and private justice, 83. Sake and soke in Domesday, 84: Meaning 
 of soke, 84. Meaning of sake, 84. Soke as jurisdiction, 86. Seignorial 
 justice before the Conquest, 87. Soke as a regality, 89. Soke over 
 villeins, 90. Private soke and hundredal soke, 91. Hundredal and 
 manorial soke, 92. The seignorial court, 94. Soke and the earl's third 
 penny, 95. Soke and house-peace, 97. Soke over houses, 99. Vendible 
 soke, 100. Soke and mund, 100. Justice and jurisdiction, 102. Soke 
 and commendation, 103. Sokemen and 'free men,' 104. Holdings of 
 the sokemen, 106. 
 
 6. The Manor, pp. 107128. 
 
 What is a manor 1 107. Manerium a technical term, 107. Manor and 
 hall, 109. Difference between manor and hall, 110. Size of the maneria, 
 110. A large manor, 11 J. Enormous manors Leomiuster, Berkeley, 
 Tewkesbury, Taunton, 112. Large manors in the Midlands, 114. 
 Townhouses and bere wicks attached to manors, 114. Manor and soke, 
 115. Minute manors in the west, 116. Minute manors in the east, 117. 
 The manor as a peasant's holding, 118. Definition, of a manor, 119. 
 The manor and the geld, 120. Classification of men for the geld, 122. 
 Proofs of connexion of the manor with the geld, 122. Land gelds in a 
 manor, 124. Geld and hall, 124. The lord and the man's taxes, 125. 
 Distinction between villeins and sokemen, 125. The lord's subsidiary 
 liability, 126. Manors distributed to the Frenchmen, 127. Summary, 128. 
 
 7. Manor and Vill, pp. 129 150. 
 
 Manorial and non-manorial vills, 129. The vill of Orwell, 129. The 
 Wetherley hundred of Cambridgeshire, 131. The Wetherley sokemen, 
 134. The sokemen and seignorial justice, 135. Changes in the Wetherley 
 hundred, 135. Manorialism in Cambridgeshire, 136. The sokemen and 
 the manors, 137. Hertfordshire sokemen, 138. The small tnaneria, 138. 
 The Danes and freedom, 139. The Danish counties, 139. The contrast
 
 Contents. 
 
 IX 
 
 between villeins and sokemen, 140. Free villages, 141. Village com- 
 munities, 142. The villagers as co-owners, 142. The waste land of the 
 vill, 143. Co-ownership of mills and churches, 144. The system of 
 virgates in a free village, 144. The virgates and inheritance, 145. The 
 farm of the vill, 146. Eound sums raised from the villages, 147. The 
 township and police law, 1 47. The free village and Norman government, 
 149. Organization of the free village, 149. 
 
 8. The Feudal Superstructure, pp. 150 172. 
 
 The higher ranks of men, 150. Dependent tenure, 151. Feudum, 152. 
 Alodium, 153. Application of the formula of dependent tenure, 154. 
 Military tenure, 156. The army and the land, 157. Feudalism and 
 army service, 158. Punishment for default of service, 159. The new 
 military service, 160. The thegns, 161. Nature of thegnship, 163. 
 The thegns of Domesday, 165. Greater and lesser thegns, 165. The 
 great lords, 166. The king as landlord, 166. The ancient demesne, 167. 
 The comital manors, 168. Private rights and governmental revenues, 
 168. The English state, 170. 
 
 9. The Boroughs, pp. 172219. 
 
 Borough and village, 172. The borough in century xiii., 173. The 
 number of the boroughs, 173. The aid-paying boroughs of century xii, 
 174. List of aids, 175. The boroughs in Domesday, 176. The borough 
 as a county town, 178. The borough on no man's land, 178. Hetero- 
 geneous tenures in the boroughs, 179. Burgages attached to rural 
 manors, 180. The burgess and the rural manor, 181. Tenure of the 
 borough and tenure of land within the borough, 181. The king and 
 other landlords, 182. 
 
 The oldest burh, 183. The king's burh, 184. The special peace of 
 the burh, 184. The town and the burh, 185. The building of boroughs, 
 186. The shire and its borough, 186. Military geography, 187. The 
 Burghal Hidage, 187. The shire's wall-work, 188. Henry the Fowler 
 and the German burgs, 189. The shire thegns and their borough 
 houses, 189. The knights in the borough, 190. Bnrh-b6t and castle- 
 guard, 191. 
 
 Borough and market, 192. Establishment of markets, 193. Moneyers 
 in the burh, 195. Burh and port, 195. Military and commercial 
 elements in the borough, 196. The borough and agriculture, 196. 
 Burgesses as cultivators, 197. Burgage tenure, 198. Eastern and 
 western boroughs, 199. Common property of the burgesses, 200. The 
 community as landholders, 200. Rights of common, 202. Absence of 
 communalism in the borough, 202. The borough community and its 
 lord, 203. The farm of the borough, 204. The sheriff and the farm of 
 the borough, 205. The community and the geld, 206. Partition of 
 taxes, 207. No corporation farming the borough, 208. Borough and 
 county organization, 209. Government of the boroughs, 209. The 
 borough court, 210. The law-men, 211. Definition of the borough, 
 212. Mediatized boroughs, 212. Boroughs on the king's land and 
 other boroughs, 215. Attributes of the borough, 216. Classification of 
 the boroughs, 217. National element in the boroughs, 219.
 
 Contents. 
 
 ESSAY IL 
 ENGLAND BEFORE THE CONQUEST. 
 
 Object of this essay, 220. Fundamental controversies over Anglo- 
 Saxon history, 221. The Romanesque theory unacceptable, 222. Feudal- 
 ism as a normal stage, 223. Feudalism as progress and retrogress, 224 
 Progress and retrogress in the history of legal ideas, 224. The contact 
 of barbarism and civilization, 225. Our materials, 226. 
 
 1. Book-land and the Land-book, pp. 226 244. 
 
 The lands of the churches, 226. How the churches acquired their 
 lands, 227. The earliest land-books, 229. Exotic character of the 
 book, 230. The book purports to convey ownership, 230. The book 
 conveys a superiority, 231. A modern analogy, 232. Conveyance of 
 superiorities in early times, 233. What had the king to give? 234. 
 The king's alienable rights, 234. Royal rights in land, 235. The king's 
 feorm, 236. Nature of the feorm, 237. Tribute and rent, 239. Mixture 
 of ownership and superiority, 240. Growth of the seignory, 241. Book- 
 land and church-right, 242. Book-land and testament, 243. 
 
 2. Book-land and Folk-land, pp. 244258. 
 
 What is folk-land? 244. Folk-land in the laws, 244. Folk-land in 
 the charters, 245. Land booked by the king to himself, 246. The 
 consent of the witan, 247. Consent and witness in the land-books, 
 247. Attestation of the earliest books, 248. Confirmation and at- 
 testation, 250. Function of the witan, 251. The king and the people's 
 land, 252. King's land and crown land, 253. Fate of the king's land 
 on his death, 253. The new king and the old king's heir, 254. 
 Immunity of the ancient demesne, 255. Rights of individuals in 
 national land, 255. The alod, 256. Book-land and privilege, 257. 
 Kinds of land and kinds of right, 257. 
 
 3. Sake and Sake, pp. 258292. 
 
 Importance of seignorial justice, 258. Theory of the modern origin 
 of seignorial justice, 258. Sake and soke in the Norman age, 259. 
 The Confessor's writs, 259. Cnut's writs, 260. Cnut's law, 261. The 
 book and the writ, 261. Diplomatics, 262. The Anglo-Saxon writ, 264. 
 Sake and soke appear when writs appear, 265. Traditional evidence of 
 sake and soke, 267. Altitonantis, 268. Criticism of the earlier books, 
 269. The clause of immunity, 270. Dissection of the words of im- 
 munity, 272. The trinoda necessita, 273. The dngild, 274. The right 
 to wites and the right to a court, 275. The Taunton book, 276. The 
 immunists and the wite, 277. Justice and jurisdiction, 277. The 
 Frankish immunity, 278. Seignorial and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, 279. 
 Criminal justice of the church, 281. Antiquity of seignorial courts, 
 282. Justice, vassalage and tenure, 283. The lord and the accused 
 vassal, 284. The state, the lord and the vassal, 285. The landrica as 
 immunist, 286. The immunist's rights over free men, 288. Sub- 
 delegation of justiciary rights, 289. Number of the immunists, 289. 
 
 Note : The Angild Clause, 290.
 
 Contents. xi 
 
 4. Book-land and Loan-land, pp. 293318. 
 
 The book and the gift, 293. Book-land and service, 294. Military 
 service, 295. Escheat of book-land, 295. Alienation of book -land, 297. 
 The heriot and the testament, 298. The gift and the loan, 299. The 
 precarium, 300. The English land-loan, 301. Loans of church land to 
 the great, 302. The consideration for the loan, 303. S'. Oswald's 
 loans, 303. Oswald's letter to Edgar, 304. Feudalism in Oswald's 
 law, 307. Oswald's riding-men, 308. Heritable loans, 309. Wardship 
 and marriage, 310. Seignorial jurisdiction, 310. Oswald's law and 
 England at large, 311. Inferences from Oswald's loans, 312. Economic 
 position of Oswald's tenants, 312. Loan-land and book-land, 313. 
 Book-land in the dooms, 314. Royal and other books, 315. The gift 
 and the loan, 317. Dependent tenure, 317. 
 
 5. Tlie Growth of Seignorial Power, pp. 318 340. 
 
 Subjection of free men, 318. The royal grantee and the land, 318. 
 Provender rents and the manorial economy, 319. The church and the 
 peasants, 320. Growth of the manorial system, 321. Church-scot and 
 tithes, 321. Jurisdictional rights of the lord, 322. The lord and the 
 man's taxes, 323. Depression of the free ceorl, 324. The slaves, 325. 
 Growth of manors from below, 325. 
 
 Theories which connect the manor with the Roman villa, 326. The 
 Rectititdines, 327. Discussion of the Rectitudines, 328. The Tidenham 
 case, 329. The Stoke case, 330. Inferences from these cases, 332. 
 The villa and the incus, 333. Manors in the land-books, 334. The 
 mansus and the manens, 335. The hide, 336. The strip-holding and 
 the villa, 337. The lord and the strips, 338. The ceorl and the 
 slave, 339. The condition of the Danelaw, 339. 
 
 6. The Village Community, pp. 340 356. 
 
 Free villages, 340. Ownership by communities and ownership by 
 individuals, 341. Co-ownership and ownership by corporations, 341. 
 Ownership and governmental power, 342. Ownership and subordinate 
 governmental power, 343. Evolution of sovereignty and ownership, 
 343. Communal ownership as a stage, 344. The theory of normal 
 stages, 345. 
 
 Was land owned by village communities ? 346. Meadows, pastures 
 and woods, 348. The bond between neighbours, 349. Feebleness of 
 village communalism, 349. Absence of organization, 350. The German 
 village on conquered soil, 351. Development of kingly power, 351. The 
 free village in England, 352. The village meeting, 353. What might 
 have become of the free village, 353. Mark communities, 354. Inter- 
 commoning between vills, 355. Last words, 356.
 
 xii Contents. 
 
 ESSAY IIL 
 THE HIDE. 
 
 What was the hide? 357. Importance of the question, 357. Hide 
 and manse in Bede, 358. Hide and manse in the land-books, 358. 
 The large hide and the manorial arrangement, 360. Our course, 361. 
 
 1. Measures and Fields, pp. 362 399. 
 
 Permanence and change in agrarian history, 362. Rapidity of 
 change in old times, 363. Devastation of villages, 363. Village 
 colonies, 365. Change of field systems, 365. Differences between 
 different shires, 366. New and old villages, 367. 
 
 History of land-measures, 368. Growth of uniform measures, 369. 
 Superficial measure, 370. The ancient elements of land measure, 372. 
 The German acre, 373. English acres, 373. Small and large acres, 374. 
 Anglo-Saxon rods and acres, 375. Customary acres and forest acres, 
 376. The acre and the day's work, 377. The real acres in the fields, 
 379. The culturae or shots, 379. Delimitation of shots, 380. Real and 
 ideal acres, 381. Irregular length of acres, 383. The seliones or beds, 
 383. Acres divided lengthwise, 384. The virgate, 385. Yard and 
 yard-land, 385. The virgate a fraction of the hide, 385. The yard-land 
 in laws and charters, 386. 
 
 The hide as a measure, 387. The hide as a measure of arable, 388. 
 The hide of 120 acres, 389. Real and fiscal hides, 389. Causes of 
 divergence of fiscal from real hides, 390. Effects of the divergence, 392. 
 Acreage of the hide in later days, 393. The carucate and bovate, 395. 
 The ox-gang, 396. The fiscal carucate, 396. Acreage tilled by a plough, 
 397. Walter of Henley's programme of ploughing, 398. 
 
 2. Domesday Statistics, pp. 399 490. 
 
 Statistical Tables, 400403. 
 
 Domesday's three statements, 399. Northern formulas, 404. Southern 
 formulas, 405. Kentish formulas, 406. Relation between the three 
 statements, 406. Introduction of statistics, 407. Explanation of 
 statistics, 407. Acreage, 407. Population, 408. Danegeld, 408. Hides, 
 carucates, sulungs, 408. Reduced hidage, 410. The teamlands, 410. 
 The teams, 411. The values, 411. The table of ratios, 411. Im- 
 perfection of statistics, 412. Constancy of ratios, 413. 
 
 The team, 413. Variability of the caruca, 414. Constancy of the 
 caruca, 414. The villein's teams, 415. The villein's oxen, 416. Light 
 and heavy ploughs, 417. The team of Domesday and other docu- 
 ments, 417. 
 
 The teamland, 418. Fractional parts of the teamland, 418. Land 
 for oxen and wood for swine, 419. The teamland no areal unit, 419. 
 The teamlands of Great and the teams of Little Domesday, 420. The 
 Leicestershire formulas, 420. Origin of the inquiry touching the team- 
 lands, 421. Modification of the inquiry, 423. The potential teams, 423. 
 Normal relation between teams and teamlands, 424. The land of
 
 Contents. xiii 
 
 deficient teams, 425. Actual and potential teamlands, 426. The land 
 of excessive teams, 427. Digression to East Anglia, 429. The teamland 
 no areal measure, 431. Eyton's theory, 431. Domesday's lineal measure, 
 432. Measured teamlands, 433. 
 
 Amount of arable in England, 435. Decrease of arable, 436. The 
 food problem, 436. What was the population? 436. What was the 
 field-system ? 437. What was the acre's yield ? 437. Consumption of 
 beer, 438. The Englishman's diet, 440. Is the arable superabundant? 
 441. Amount of pasturage, 441. Area of the villages, 443. Produce and 
 value, 444. Varying size of acres, 445. The teamland in Cambridge- 
 shire, 445. 
 
 The hides of Domesday, 446. Relation between hides and teamlands, 
 447. Unhidated estates, 448. Beneficial hidation, 448. Effect of 
 privilege, 449. Divergence of hide from teamland, 450. Partition of 
 the geld, 451. Distribution of hides among counties and hundreds, 451. 
 The hidage of Worcestershire, 451. The County Hidage, 455. Its 
 date, 456. The Northamptonshire Geld Koll, 457. Credibility of The 
 County Hidage, 458. Reductions of hidage, 458. The county quotas, 
 459. The hundred and the hundred hides, 459. Comparison of 
 Domesday hidage with Pipe Rolls, 460. Under-rated and over-rated 
 counties, 461 Hidage and value, 462. One pound, one hide, 465. 
 Equivalence of pound and hide, 465. Cases of under-taxation, 466. 
 Kent, 466. Devon and Cornwall, 467. Cases .of over-taxation, 468. 
 Leicestershire, 468. Yorkshire, 469. Equity and hidage, 470. Dis- 
 tribution of hides and of teamlands, 471. Area and value as elements 
 of geldability, 472. The equitable teamland, 473. Artificial valets, 473. 
 The new assessments of Henry II., 473. 
 
 Acreage of the fiscal hide, 475. Equation between hide and acres, 
 475. The hide of 120 acres, 476. Evidence from Cambridgeshire, 476. 
 Evidence from the Isle of Ely, 476. Evidence from Middlesex, 477. 
 Meaning of the Middlesex entries, 478. Evidence in the Geld Inquests, 
 478. Result of the evidence, 480. Evidence from Essex, 480. Acreage 
 of the fiscal carucate, 483. Acreage of the fiscal sulung, 484. Kemble's 
 theory, 485. The ploughland and the plough, 486. The Yorkshire 
 carucates, 487. Relation between teamlands and fiscal carucates, 487. 
 The fiscal hide of 120 acres, 489. Antiquity of the large hide, 489. 
 
 3. Beyond Domesday, pp, 490520. 
 
 The hide beyond Domesday, 490. Arguments in favour of small 
 hides, 490. Continuity of the hide in the land -books, 491. Examples 
 from charters of Chertsey, 492. Examples from charters of Malmesbury, 
 492. Permanence of the hidation, 493. Gifts of villages, 494. Gifts 
 of manses in villages, 495. The largest gifts, 496. The Winchester 
 estate at Chilcombe, 496. The Winchester estates at Downton and 
 Taunton, 498. Kemble and the Taunton estate, 499. Difficulty of 
 identifying parcels, 500. The numerous hides in ancient documents, 
 501. The Burghal Hidage, 502. The Tribal Hidage, 506. Bede's 
 hidage, 508. Bede and the land-books, 509. Gradual reduction of 
 hidage, 510. Over-estimates of hidage, 510. Size of Bede's hide, 511. 
 Evidence from lona, 512. Evidence from Selsey, 513. Conclusion in 
 favour of the large hide, 515. Continental analogies, 515. The German 
 Hufe, 515. The Konigshufe, 516. The large hide on the continent, 
 517. The large hide not too large, 518. The large hide and the 
 manor, 519. Last words, 520. .
 
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. 
 
 B. = Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, London, 1885-7-93. 
 
 D. B. = Domesday Book. 
 
 E.=Earle, Land Charters, Oxford, 1888. 
 
 E. H. R. = English Historical Review. 
 
 H. & S. = Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, 
 
 vol. iii, Oxford, 1871. 
 
 K. = Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Mvi Saxonici, London, 1839-48. 
 T. = Thorpe, Diplomatarium Anglicanum, London, 1865. 
 
 ADDENDUM. 
 
 p. 347, note 4. Instances of the periodic reallotment of the whole land of a 
 vill, exclusive of houses and crofts, seem to have been not unknown in the north 
 of England. Here the reallotment is found in connexion with a husbandry 
 which knows no permanent severance of the arable from the grass-land, but 
 from time to time ploughs up a tract and after a while allows it to become 
 grass-land once more. See P. W. Dendy, The Ancient Farms of Northumber- 
 land, Archaeologia Aeliana, Vol. xvi. I have to thank Mr Edward Bateson for 
 a reference to this paper.
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 DOMESDAY BOOK. 
 
 AT midwinter in the year 1085 William the Conqueror wore Domesday 
 
 Book and 
 
 his crown at Gloucester and there he had deep speech with his its satel- 
 wise men. The outcome of that speech was the mission through- ' es 
 out all England of 'barons,' ' legates ' or 'justices' charged with 
 the duty of collecting from the verdicts of the shires, the 
 hundreds and the vills a descriptio of his new, realm. The out- 
 come of that mission was the descriptio preserved for us in two 
 manuscript volumes, which within a century after their making 
 had already acquired the name of Domesday Book. The second 
 of those volumes, sometimes known as Little Domesday, deals 
 with but three counties, namely Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, 
 while the first volume comprehends the rest of England. Along 
 with these we must place certain other documents that are 
 closely connected with the grand inquest. We have in the 
 so-called Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, a copy, an imperfect 
 copy, of the verdicts delivered by the Cambridgeshire jurors, 
 and this, as we shall hereafter see, is a document of the highest 
 value, even though in some details it is not always very trust- 
 worthy 1 . We have in the so-called Inquisitio Eliensis an 
 account of the estates of the Abbey of Ely in Cambridgeshire, 
 Suffolk and other counties, an account which has as its ultimate 
 source the verdicts of the juries and which contains some 
 
 1 Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, ed. N. E. Hamilton. When, as some- 
 times happens, the figures in this record differ from those given in Domesday 
 Book, the latter Beem to be in general the more correct, for the arithmetic is- 
 better. Also it seems plain that the compilers of Domesday had, even for 
 districts comprised in the Inquisitio, other materials besides those that the 
 Inquisitio contains. For example, that document says nothing of some of the 
 royal manors. [Since this note was written, Mr Round, Feudal England, 
 pp. 10 ff. has published the same result after an elaborate investigation.] 
 
 11. 1
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 particulars which were omitted from Domesday Book 1 . We 
 have in the so-called Exon Domesday an account of Cornwall 
 and Devonshire and of certain lands in Somerset, Dorset and 
 Wiltshire ; this also seems to have been constructed directly or 
 indirectly out of the verdicts delivered in those counties, and it 
 contains certain particulars about the amount of stock upon 
 the various estates which are omitted from what, for distinction's 
 sake, is sometimes called the Exchequer Domesday 2 . At the 
 beginning of this Exon Domesday we have certain accounts 
 relating to the payment of a great geld, seemingly the geld of 
 six shillings on the hide that William levied in the winter of 
 1083-4, two years before the deep speech at Gloucester 3 . 
 Lastly, in the Northamptonshire Geld Roll 4 we have some 
 precious information about fiscal affairs as they stood some few 
 years before the survey 5 . 
 
 Domesday Such in brief are the documents out of which, with some 
 Mstory. small help from the Anglo-Saxon dooms and land-books, from 
 the charters of Norman kings and from the so-called Leges of 
 the Conqueror, the Confessor and Henry I., some future historian 
 may be able to reconstruct the land-law which obtained in the 
 conquered England of 1086, and (for our records frequently 
 speak of the tempus Regis Edwardi) the unconquered England 
 of 1065. The reflection that but for the deep speech at Glou- 
 cester, but for the lucky survival of two or three manuscripts, 
 he would have known next to nothing of that law, will make 
 him modest and cautious. At the present moment, though 
 much has been done towards forcing Domesday Book to 
 yield its meaning, some of the legal problems that are raised 
 by it, especially those which concern the time of King Edward, 
 have hardly been stated, much less solved. It is with some 
 hope of stating, with little hope of solving them that we begin 
 this essay. If only we can ask the right questions we shall 
 
 1 This is printed in D. B. vol. iv. and given by Hamilton at the end of his 
 Inq. Com. Cantab. As to the manner in which it was compiled see .Round, 
 Feudal England, 133 ff. 
 
 3 The Exon Domesday is printed in D. B. vol. iv 
 
 3 Bound, Domesday Studies, i. 91 : ' I am iempted to believe that these geld 
 rolls in the form in which we now have them were compiled at Winchester after 
 the close of Easter 1084, by the body which was the germ of the future 
 Exchequer.' 
 
 4 Printed by Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, i. 184. 
 6 Bound, Feudal England, 147.
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 have done something for a good end. If English history is to 
 be understood, the law of Domesday Book must be mastered. 
 We have here an absolutely unique account of feudalism in 
 two different stages of its growth, the more trustworthy, though 
 the more puzzling, because it gives us particulars and not 
 generalities. 
 
 Puzzling enough it certainly is, and this for many reasons. 
 Our task may be the easier if we state some of those reasons at 
 the outset. 
 
 To say that Domesday Book is no collection of laws or Domesday 
 treatise on law would be needless. Very seldom does it state ^k. 
 any rule in general terms, and when it does so we shall usually 
 find cause for believing that this rule is itself an exception, a 
 local custom, a provincial privilege. Thus, if we are to come by 
 general rules, we must obtain them inductively by a comparison 
 of many thousand particular instances. But further, Domesday 
 Book is no register of title, no register of all those rights and 
 facts which constitute the system of land-holdership. One great 
 purpose seems to mould both its form and its substance ; it is a 
 geld-book. 
 
 When Duke William became king of the English, he found Danegeid. 
 (so he might well think) among the most valuable of his newly 
 acquired regalia, a right to levy a land-tax under the name of 
 geld or danegeld. A detailed history of that tax cannot be 
 written. It is under the year 991 that our English chronicle 
 first mentions a tribute paid to the Danes 1 ; 10,000 was then 
 paid to them. In 994 the yet larger sum of 16,000 2 was 
 levied. In 1002 the tribute had risen to 24,000 3 , in 1007 to 
 30,000*, in 1009 East Kent paid 3,000 5 ; 21,000 was raised 
 in 1014 6 ; in 1018 Cnut when newly crowned took 72,000 
 besides 11,000 paid by the Londoners 7 ; in 1040 Harthacnut 
 took 21,099 besides a sum of 11,048 that was paid for thirty- 
 two ships 8 . With a Dane upon the throne, this tribute seems to 
 have become an occasional war-tax. How often it was levied 
 we cannot tell ; but that it was levied more than once by the 
 Confessor is not doubtful 9 . We are told that he abolished it 
 
 1 Earle, Two Chronicles, 130-1. a Ibid. 132-3. * Ibid. 137. 
 
 * Ibid. 141. 6 Ibid. 142. Ibid. 151. 7 Ibid. 160-1. 
 
 s Ibid. 167. 
 
 9 There is a valuable paper on this subject, A Short Account of Danegeld [by 
 P. C. Webb] published in 1756. 
 
 12
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 in or about the year 1051, some eight or nine years after his 
 accession, some fifteen before his death. No sooner was William 
 crowned than 'belaid on men a geld exceeding stiff.' In the 
 next year ' he set a mickle geld ' on the people. In the winter 
 of 1083-4 he raised a geld of 72 pence (6 Norman shillings) 
 upon the hide. That this tax was enormously heavy is plain. 
 Taking one case with another, it would seem that the hide was 
 frequently supposed to be worth about 1 a year and there were 
 many hides in England that were worth far less. But grievous as 
 was the tax which immediately preceded the making of the 
 survey, we are not entitled to infer that it was of unprecedented 
 severity. It brought William but 415 or thereabouts from 
 Dorset and 510 or thereabouts from Somerset 1 . Worcestershire 
 was deemed to contain about 1200 hides and therefore, even if 
 none of its hides had been exempted, it would have contributed 
 but 360. If the huge sums mentioned by the chronicler had 
 really been exacted, and that too within the memory of men 
 who were yet living, William might well regard the right to 
 levy a geld as the most precious jewel in his English crown. 
 To secure a due and punctual payment of it was worth a 
 gigantic effort, a survey such as had never been made and a record 
 such as had never been penned since the grandest days of the 
 old Roman Empire. But further, the assessment of the geld 
 sadly needed reform. Owing to one cause and another, owing 
 to privileges and immunities that had been capriciously granted, 
 owing also, so we think, to a radically vicious method of com- 
 puting the geldable areas of counties and hundreds, the old 
 assessment was full of anomalies and iniquities. Some estates 
 were over-rated, others were scandalously under-rated. That 
 William intended to correct the old assessment, or rather to 
 sweep it away and put a new assessment in its stead, seems 
 highly probable, though it has not been proved that either 
 he or his sons accomplished this feat 2 . For this purpose, how- 
 ever, materials were to be collected which would enable the 
 royal officers to decide what changes were necessary in order 
 that all England might be taxed in accordance with a just and 
 uniform plan. Concerning each estate they were to know the 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 26, 489. 
 
 2 In 1194 the tax for Richard's ransom seems, at least in Wiltshire, to have 
 been distributed in the main according to the assessment that prevailed in 1084 ; 
 Bolls of the King's Court (Pipe Boll Soc.) i. Introduction, p. xxiv.
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 number of geldable units (' hides ' or ' carucates ') for which it 
 had answered in King Edward's day, they were to know the 
 number of plough oxen that there were upon it, they were to 
 know its true annual value, they were to know whether that 
 value had been rising or falling during the past twenty years. 
 Domesday Book has well been called a rate book, and the task 
 of spelling out a land law from the particulars that it states 
 is not unlike the task that would lie before any one who 
 endeavoured to construct our modern law of real property out 
 of rate books, income tax returns and similar materials. All 
 the lands, all the land-holders of England may be brought before 
 us, but we are told only of such facts, such rights, such legal 
 relationships as bear on the actual or potential payment of geld. 
 True, that some minor purposes may be achieved by the king's 
 commissioners, though the quest for geld is their one main 
 object. About the rents and renders due from his own demesne 
 manors the king may thus obtain some valuable information. 
 Also he may learn, as it were by the way, whether any of his 
 barons or other men have presumed to occupy, to 'invade,' 
 lands which he has reserved for himself. Again, if several 
 persons are in dispute about a tract of ground, the contest may 
 be appeased by the testimony of shire and hundred, or may be 
 reserved for the king's audience ; at any rate the existence of 
 an outstanding claim may be recorded by the royal commis- 
 sioners Here and there the peculiar customs of a shire or a 
 borough will be stated, and incidentally the services that certain 
 tenants owe to their lords may be noticed. But all this is done 
 sporadically and unsystematically. Our record is no register 
 of title, it is no feodary, it is no custumal, it is no rent roll ; it 
 is a tax book, a geld book. 
 
 We say this, not by way of vain complaint against its The survey 
 meagreness, but because in our belief a care for geld and for all ge i,j sys . 
 that concerns the assessment and payment of geld colours far tem> 
 more deeply than commentators have usually supposed the 
 information that is given to us about other matters. We 
 should not be surprised if definitions and distinctions which at 
 first sight have little enough to do with fiscal arrangements, for 
 example the definition of a manor and the distinction between 
 a villein and a ' free man/ involved references to the apportion- 
 ment and the levy of the land-tax. Often enough it happens 
 that legal ideas of a very general kind are defined by fiscal
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 rules ; for example, our modern English idea of ' occupation ' 
 has become so much part and parcel of a system of assessment 
 that lawyers are always ready to argue that a certain man must 
 be an ' occupier ' because such men as he are rated to the relief 
 of the poor. It seems then a fair supposition that any line that 
 Domesday Book draws systematically and sharply, whether it 
 be between various classes of men or between various classes of 
 tenements, is somehow or another connected with the main 
 theme of that book geldability, actual or potential. 
 Weight of Since we have mentioned the stories told by the chronicler 
 
 the daue- . 1-1 i i -r> 
 
 geld. about the tribute paid to the Danes, we may make a comment 
 upon them which will become of importance hereafter. Those 
 stories look true, and they seem to be accepted by modern 
 historians. Had we been told just once that some large number 
 of pounds, for example 60,000, was levied, or had the same 
 round sum been repeated in year after year, we might well have 
 said that such figures deserved no attention, and that by 
 60,000 our annalist merely meant a big sum of money. 
 But, as will have been seen, he varies his figures from year to 
 year and is not always content with a round number; he 
 speaks of 21,099 and of 11,048 1 . We can hardly therefore 
 treat his statements as mere loose talk and are reluctantly 
 driven to suppose that they are true or near the truth. If this 
 be so, then, unless some discovery has yet to be made in the 
 history of money, no word but ' appalling ' will adequately 
 describe the taxation of which he speaks. We know pretty 
 accurately the amount of money that became due when Henry I. 
 or Henry II. imposed a danegeld of two shillings on the hide. 
 The following table constructed from the pipe rolls will show 
 the sum charged against each county. We arrange the shires 
 in the order of their indebtedness, for a few of the many 
 caprices of the allotment will thus be visible, and our table may 
 be of use to us in other contexts 2 . 
 
 1 The statement in JEthelred, 11. 7 (Schmid, p. 209) as to a payment of 
 22,000 is in a general way corroborative of the chronicler's large figures. 
 
 2 The figures will be given more accurately on a later page.
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 APPROXIMATE CHARGE OF A DANEGELD OF Two SHILLINGS ON THE 
 HIDE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 Somerset 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 Dorset 
 
 Oxford 
 
 Essex 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 Sussex 
 
 Bucks 
 
 Berks 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 S. Hants 
 
 Surrey 
 
 York 
 
 Warwick 
 
 N. Hants 
 
 Salop 
 
 Now be it understood that these figures do not show the The geM of 
 amount of money that Henry I. and Henry II. could obtain by 
 a danegeld. They had to take much less. When it was last 
 levied, the tax was not bringing in 3500, so many were the 
 churches and great folk who had obtained temporary or perma- 
 nent exemptions from it. We will cite Leicestershire for 
 example. The total of the geld charged upon it was almost 
 exactly or quite exactly 100. On the second roll of Henry II.'s 
 reign we find that 25. 7s. Qd. have been paid into the trea- 
 sury, that 22. 8s. 3d. have been ' pardoned ' to magnates and 
 templars, that 51. 8s. 2d. are written off in respect of waste, 
 and that 16s. Qd. are still due. On the eighth roll the 
 account shows that 62. 12s. Id. have been paid and that 
 37. 6s. 9d. have been ' pardoned.' No, what our table displays 
 is the amount that would be raised if all exemptions were 
 disregarded and no penny forborne. And now let us turn 
 back to the chronicle and (not to take an extreme example) 
 read of 30,000 being raised. Unless we are prepared to bring 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 389 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 114 
 
 330 
 
 Derby and Nottingham 
 
 110 
 
 278 
 
 Hertford 
 
 110 
 
 266 
 
 Bedford 
 
 110 
 
 248 
 
 Kent 
 
 105 
 
 242 
 
 Devon 
 
 104 
 
 236 
 
 Worcester 
 
 101 
 
 235 
 
 Leicester 
 
 100 
 
 210 
 
 Hereford 
 
 94 
 
 205 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 85 
 
 202 
 
 Huntingdon 
 
 71 
 
 190 
 
 Stafford 
 
 44 
 
 180 
 
 Cornwall 
 
 23 
 
 177 
 
 Rutland 
 
 12 
 
 160 
 
 Northumberland 
 
 100 
 
 129 
 
 Cheshire 1 
 
 
 
 120 
 
 
 
 
 
 Total 
 
 5198 
 
 118 
 
 
 
 1 Cheshire pays no geld to the king. This loss is compensated by a sum 
 which is sometimes exacted from Northumberland.
 
 8 
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 Unstable 
 
 iurvey> 
 
 against the fathers of English history a charge of repeated, 
 wanton and circumstantial lying, we shall think of the danegeld 
 of JEthelred's reign and of Cnut's as of an impost so heavy that 
 it was fully capable of transmuting a whole nation. Therefore 
 the lines that are drawn by the incidence of this tribute will be 
 deep and permanent; but still we must remember that primarily 
 they will be fiscal lines. 
 
 Then again, we ought not to look to Domesday Book for a 
 settled and stable scheme of technical terms. Such a scheme 
 could not be established in a brief twenty years. About one 
 half of the technical terms that meet us, about one half of the 
 terms which, as we think, ought to be precisely defined, are, we 
 may say, English terms. They are ancient English words, or 
 they are words brought hither by the Danes, or they are Latin 
 words which have long been in use in England and have 
 acquired special meanings in relation to English affairs. On 
 the other hand, about half the technical terms are French. 
 Some of them are old Latin words which have acquired special 
 meanings in France, some are Romance words newly coined in 
 France, some are Teutonic words which tell of the Frankish 
 conquest of Gaul. In the one great class we place scira, 
 hundredum, wapentac, hidd, berewica, inland, haga, soka, saka, 
 geldum, gablum, scotum, heregeat, gersuma, thegnus, sochemannus, 
 bums, coscet ; in the other comitatus, carucata, virgata, bovata, 
 arpentum, manerium, feudum, alodium, homagium, releviiim, 
 baro, vicecomes, vavassor, villanus, bordarius, colibertus, hospes. 
 It is not in twenty years that a settled and stable scheme can 
 be formed out of such .elements as these. And often enough it 
 is very difficult for us to give just the right meaning to some 
 simple Latin word. If we translate miles by soldier or warrior, 
 this may be too indefinite ; if we translate it by knight, this 
 may be too definite, and yet leave open the question whether 
 we are comparing the miles of 1086 with the cniht of uncon- 
 quered England or with the knight of the thirteenth century. 
 If we render vicecomes by sheriff we are making our sheriff too 
 little of a vicomte. When comes is before us we have to choose 
 between giving Britanny an earl, giving Chester a count, or 
 offending some of our cpmites by invidious distinctions. Time 
 will show what these words shall mean. Some will perish in 
 the struggle for existence; others have long and adventurous 
 careers before them. At present two sets of terms are rudely
 
 Plan of the Survey. 
 
 intermixed; the time when they will grow into an organic 
 whole is but beginning. 
 
 To this we must add that, unless we have mistaken the Legal ideas 
 general drift of legal history, the law implied in Domesday 
 Book ought to be for us very difficult law, far more difficult 
 than the law of the thirteenth century, for the thirteenth 
 century is nearer to us than is the eleventh. The grown man 
 will find it easier to think the thoughts of the school-boy than 
 to think the thoughts of the baby. And yet the doctrine that 
 our remote forefathers being simple folk had simple law dies 
 hard. Too often we allow ourselves to suppose that, could we 
 but get back to the beginning, we should find that all was 
 intelligible and should then be able to watch the process 
 whereby simple ideas were smothered under subtleties and 
 technicalities. But it is not so. Simplicity is the outcome of 
 technical subtlety; it is the goal not the starting point. As we 
 go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred; the ideas 
 become fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite. 
 But difficult though our task may be, we must turn to it 
 
 . 1. Plan of the Survey. 
 
 England was already mapped out into counties, hundreds or The geo- 
 wapentakes and vills. Trithings or ridings appear in Yorkshire blsfs. & 
 and Lincolnshire, lathes in Kent, rapes in Sussex, while leets 
 appear, at least sporadically, in Norfolk 1 . These provincial 
 peculiarities we must pass by, nor will we pause to comment at 
 any length on the changes in the boundaries of counties and of 
 hundreds that have taken place since the date of the survey. 
 Though these changes have been many and some few of them 
 have been large 2 , we may still say that as a general rule the 
 political geography of England was already stereotyped. And 
 we see that already there are many curious anomalies, 'de- 
 tached portions ' of counties, discrete hundreds, places that are 
 extra-hundredal 3 , places that for one purpose are in one county 
 
 i D. B. ii. 109 b : ' Hundret de Grenehou 14 letis. ' Ib. 212 b : ' Hundret et 
 Dim. de Clakelosa de 10 leitis.' Bound, Feudal England, 101. 
 
 8 Some of them are mentioned by Ellis, Introduction, i. 34-9. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 184 b : ' Haec terra non geldat nee consuetudinem dat nee in 
 aliquo hundredo iacet ' ; i. 157 ' Haec terra nunquam geldavit nee alicui
 
 10 Domesday Book. 
 
 and for another purpose in another county 1 . We see also that 
 proprietary rights have already been making sport of arrange- 
 ments which in our eyes should be fixed by public law. Earls, 
 sheriffs and others have enjoyed a marvellous power of taking a 
 tract of land out of one district and placing it, or ' making it 
 lie' in another district 2 . Land is constantly spoken of as 
 though it were the most portable of things; it can easily be 
 taken from one vill or hundred and be added to or placed in or 
 caused to lie in another vill or hundred. This ' notional mova- 
 bility ' of land, if we may use such a term, will become of 
 importance to us when we are studying the formation of manors. 
 The vill as For the present, however, we are concerned with the general 
 pblcai unit, truth that England is divided into counties, hundreds or wapen- 
 takes and vills. This is the geographical basis of the survey. 
 That basis, however, is hidden from us by the form of our 
 record. The pla'n adopted by those who fashioned Domesday 
 Book out of the returns provided for them by the king's 
 commissioners is a curious, compromising plan. We may say 
 that in part it is geographical, while in part it is feudal or 
 proprietary. It takes each county separately and thus far it 
 is geographical; but within the boundaries of each county it 
 arranges the lands under the names of the tenants in chief who 
 hold them. Thus all the lands in Cambridgeshire of which 
 Count Alan is tenant in chief are brought together, no matter 
 that they lie scattered about in various hundreds. Therefore 
 it is necessary for us to understand that the original returns 
 reported by the surveyors did not reach the royal treasury in 
 this form. At least as regards the county of Cambridge, we 
 can be certain of this. The hundreds were taken one by one ; 
 they were taken in a geographical order, and not until the 
 
 lumdredo pertinet nee pertinuit ' ; i. 357 b ' Hae duae carucatae non sunt in 
 numero alicuius hundred! neque habent pares in Lincolescyra.' 
 
 1 D. B. i. 207 b : ' Jacet in Bedefordscira set geldum dat in Huntedonscire ' ; 
 i. 61 b ' Jacet et appreciata est in Gratentun quod est in Oxenefordscire et 
 tamen dat scotum in Berchescire' ; i. 132 b, the manor of Weston 'lies in ' Hitchin 
 which is in Hertfordshire, but its wara 'lies in' Bedfordshire, i.e. it pays geld, 
 it ' defends itself ' in the latter county ; i. 189 b, the wara of a certain hide ' lies 
 in ' Hinxton which is in Cambridgeshire, but .the land belongs to the manor of 
 Chesterford and therefore is valued in Essex. D. B. i. 178 : five hides ' geld and 
 plead ' in Worcestershire, but pay their farm in Herefordshire. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 157 b : ' Has [terras in Oxenefordscire] coniunxit terrae suae in 
 Glowecestrescire' ; i. 209 b ' foris misit de hundredo ubi se defendebat T. E. E.'; 
 i. 50 ' et misit foras comitatum et misit in Wiltesire.' See also Ellis, i. 36.
 
 Plan of the Survey. 11 
 
 justices had learned all that was to be known of Staplehow 
 hundred did they call upon the jurors of Cheveley hundred for 
 their verdict. That such was their procedure we might have 
 guessed even had we not been fortunate enough to have a copy 
 of the Cambridgeshire verdicts ; for, though the commissioners 
 seem to have held but one moot for each shire, still it is plain 
 that each hundred was represented by a separate set of jurors 1 . 
 But from these Cambridgeshire verdicts we learn what other- 
 wise we could hardly have known. Within each hundred the 
 survey was made by vills 2 . If we suppose the commissioners 
 charging the jurors we must represent them as saying, not ' Tell 
 us what tenants in chief have lands in your hundred and how 
 much each of them holds,' but ' Tell us about each vill in your 
 hundred, who holds land in it.' Thus, for example, the men of 
 the Armingford hundred are called up. They make a separate 
 report about each vill in it. They begin by stating that the 
 vill is rated at a certain number of hides and then they proceed 
 to distribute those hides among the tenants in chief. Thus, for 
 example, they say that Abington was rated at 5 hides, and that 
 those 5 hides are distributed thus 8 : 
 
 hides virgates 
 
 Hugh Pincerna holds of the bishop of Winchester 2 
 
 The king 
 
 Ralph and Robert hold of Hardouin de Eschalers 1 l 
 
 Earl Roger 1 
 
 Picot the sheriff ^ 
 
 Alwin Hamelecoc the bedel holds of the king 
 
 5 
 
 Now in Domesday Book we must look to several different 
 pages to get this information about the vill of Abington, to 
 one page for Earl Roger's land, to another page for Picot's land, 
 
 1 See Round, Feudal England, p. 118. Mr Round seems to think that tho 
 commissioners made a circuit through the hundreds. I doubt they did more 
 than their successors the justices in eyre were wont to do, that is, they held in 
 the shire-town a moot which was attended by (1) the magnates of the shire who 
 spoke for the shire, (2) a jury from every hundred, (3) a deputation of villani 
 from every township. See the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Clamores (i. 375) 
 where we may find successive entries beginning with (a) Scyra testatur, (b) West- 
 reding testatur, (c) Testatur wapentac. Strikingly similar entries are found on 
 the eyre rolls. As Sir F. Pollock (Eng. Hist. Rev. xi. 213) remarks, it is mis- 
 leading to speak of the Domesday ' survey ' ; Domesday Inquest would be better. 
 
 2 See Round, Feudal England, p. 44. 
 s Inqtu's. Com. Cantab. 60.
 
 12 Domesday Book. 
 
 and we may easily miss the important fact that this vill of 
 Abington has been rated as a whole at the neat, round figure of 
 5 hides. And then we see that the whole hundred of Arming- 
 ford has been rated at the neat, round figure of 100 hides, and 
 has consisted of six vills rated at 10 hides apiece and eight vills 
 rated at 5 hides apiece 1 . Thus we are brought to look upon 
 the vill as a unit in a system of assessment* All this is 
 concealed from us by the form of Domesday Book. 
 Stability of When that book mentions the name of a place, when it 
 says that Roger holds Sutton or that Ralph holds three hides 
 in Norton, we regard that name as the name of a vill ; it may 
 or may not be also the name of a manor. Speaking very 
 generally we may say that the place so named will in after 
 times be known as a vill and in our own day will be a civil 
 parish. No doubt in some parts of the country new vills have 
 been created since the Conqueror's time. Some names that 
 occur in our record fail to obtain a permanent place on the roll 
 of English vills, become the names of hamlets or disappear 
 altogether; on the other hand, new names come to the front. 
 Of course we dare not say dogmatically that all the names 
 mentioned in Domesday Book were the names of vills; very 
 possibly (if this distinction was already known) some of them 
 were the names of hamlets ; nor, again, do we imply that the villa 
 of 1086 had much organization ; but a place that is mentioned 
 in Domesday Book will probably be recognized as a vill in the 
 thirteenth, a civil parish in the nineteenth century. Let us 
 take Cambridgeshire by way of example. Excluding the Isle 
 of Ely, we find that the political geography of the Conqueror's 
 reign has endured until our own time. The boundaries of the 
 hundreds lie almost where they lay, the number of vills has 
 hardly been increased or diminished. The chief changes 
 amount to this : A small tract on the east side of the county 
 containing Exning and Bellingham has been made over to 
 Suffolk ; four other names contained in Domesday no longer 
 stand for parishes, while the names of five of our modern 
 parishes one of them is the significant name of Newton 
 are not found there 2 . But about a hundred and ten vills that 
 
 1 See the table in Round, Feudal England, p. 50. I had already selected 
 this beautiful specimen before Mr Round's book appeared. He has given several 
 others that are quite as neat. 
 
 8 Of course we take no account of urban parishes.
 
 Plan of the Survey. 13 
 
 were vills in 1086 are villa or civil parishes at the present day, 
 and in all probability they then had approximately the same 
 boundaries that they have now. 
 
 This may be a somewhat too favourable example of Omission 
 
 _ . _. ,.11. of vills. 
 
 permanence and continuity. Of all counties Cambridgeshire 
 
 is the one whose ancient geography can be the most easily 
 
 examined ; but wherever we have looked we have come to the 
 
 conclusion that the distribution of England into vills is in the 
 
 main as old as the Norman conquest 1 . Two causes of difficulty 
 
 may be noticed, for they are of some interest. Owing to what 
 
 we have called the ' notional movability ' of land, we never can 
 
 be quite sure that when certain hides or acres are said to be in 
 
 or lie in a certain place they are really and physically in that 
 
 place. They are really in one village, but they are spoken of 
 
 as belonging to another village, because their occupants pay 
 
 their geld or do their services in the latter. Manorial and fiscal 
 
 geography interferes with physical and villar geography. We 
 
 have lately seen how land rated at five hides was comprised, as 
 
 a matter of fact, in the vill of Abington; but of those five 
 
 hides, one virgate ' lay in ' Shingay, a half-hide ' lay in ' 
 
 Litlington while a half- virgate ' lay and had always lain ' in 
 
 Morden 2 . This, if we mistake not, leads in some cases to an 
 
 omission of the names of small vills. A great lord has a 
 
 compact estate, perhaps the whole of one of the small southern 
 
 hundreds. He treats it as a whole, and all the land that he has 
 
 there will be ascribed to some considerable village in which he 
 
 has his hall. We should be rash in supposing that there were 
 
 no other villages on this land. For example, in Surrey there 
 
 is now-a-days a hundred called Farnham which comprises the 
 
 parish of Farnham, the parish of Frensham and some other 
 
 villages. If we mistake not, all that Domesday Book has to 
 
 say of the whole of this territory is that the Bishop of Winchester 
 
 holds Farnham, that it has been rated at 60 hides, that it has 
 
 been worth the large sum of 65 a year and that there are so 
 
 many tenants upon it 3 . We certainly must not draw the 
 
 inference that there was but one vill in this tract. If the 
 
 bishop is tenant in chief of the whole hundred and has become 
 
 1 Eyton's laborious studies have made this plain as regards some counties 
 widely removed from each other ; still, e.g. in his book on Somerset, he has now 
 and again to note that names which appear in D. B. are obsolete. 
 
 * Inq. Com. Cant. GO-1. * D. B. i. 31.
 
 14 Domesday Book. 
 
 responsible for all the geld that is levied therefrom, there is 
 no great reason why the surveyors should trouble themselves 
 about the vills. Thus the simple Episcopus tenet Ferneham 
 may dispose of some 25,000 acres of land. So the same bishop 
 has an estate at Chilcombe in Hampshire ; but clearly the 
 name Ciltecumbe covers a wide territory for there are no less 
 than nine churches upon it 1 . We never can be very certain 
 about the boundaries of these large and compact estates. 
 Fission of A second cause of difficulty lies in the fact that in com- 
 paratively modern times, from the twelfth century onwards, two 
 or three contiguous villages will often bear the same name and 
 be distinguished only by what we may call their surnames 
 thus Guilden Morden and Steeple Morden, Stratfield Saye, 
 Stratfield Turgis, Stratfield Mortimer, Tolleshunt Knights, 
 Tolleshunt Major, Tolleshunt Darcy. Such cases are common ; 
 in some districts they are hardly exceptional. Doubtless they 
 point to a time when a single village by some process of 
 colonization or subdivision become two villages. Now Domes- 
 day Book seldom enables us to say for certain whether the 
 change has already taken place. In a few instances it marks 
 off the little village from the great village of the same name 2 . 
 In some other instances it will speak, for example, of Mordune 
 and Mordune Alia, of Emingeforde and Emingeforde Alia, or 
 the like, thus showing both that the change has taken place, 
 and also that it is so recent that it is recognized only by very 
 clumsy terms. In Cambridgeshire, since we have the original 
 verdicts, we can see that the two Mordens are already distinct ; 
 the one is rated at ten hides, the other at five 3 . ' On the other 
 hand, we can see that our Great and Little Shelford are rated 
 as one vill of twenty hides 4 , our Castle Camps and Shudy 
 Camps as one vill of five hides 5 . Elsewhere we are left to 
 guess whether the fission is complete, and the surnames that 
 many of our vills ultimately acquire, the names of families 
 which rose to greatness in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 
 will often suggest that the surveyors saw but one vill where we 
 see two 6 . However, the broad truth stands out that England 
 
 1 D. B. i. 41. We shall return to this matter hereafter. 
 
 2 A good many cases will be found in Essex and Suffolk. 
 
 3 Inq. Com. Cantab. 51, 53. * Ibid. 47. Ibid. 29. 
 
 6 Maitland, Surnames of English Villages, Archaeological Beview, iv. 233.
 
 Plan of the Survey. 1 5 
 
 was divided into vills and that in general the vill of Domesday 
 Book is still a vill in after days 1 . 
 
 The ' vill ' or ' town ' of the later middle ages was, like the The nucie- 
 ' civil parish ' of our own day, a tract of land with some houses 
 on it, and this tract was a unit in the national system of police 
 and finance 2 But we are not entitled to make for ourselves steads. 
 any one typical picture of the English vill. We are learning 
 from the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which 
 under Dr Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to decipher) 
 that in all probability we must keep at least two types before 
 our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the 
 true village or the nucleated village. In the purest form of 
 this type there is one and only one cluster of houses. It is a 
 fairly large cluster ; it stands in the midst of its fields, of its ter- 
 ritory, and until lately a considerable part of its territory will 
 probably have consisted of spacious ' common fields.' In a country 
 in which there are villages of this type the parish boundaries 
 seem almost to draw themselves 3 . On the other hand, we may 
 easily find a country in which there are few villages of this 
 character. The houses which lie within the boundary of the 
 parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or 
 three, there three or four. These clusters often have names of 
 their own, and it seems a mere chance that the name borne 
 by one of them should be also the name of the whole parish or 
 vill 4 . We see no traces of very large fields. On the face of 
 the map there is no reason why a particular group of cottages 
 should be reckoned to belong to this parish rather than to the 
 next. As our eyes grow accustomed to the work we may 
 arrive at some extremely important conclusions such as those 
 which Meitzen has suggested. The outlines of our nucleated 
 villages may have been drawn for us by Germanic settlers, 
 whereas in the land of hamlets and scattered steads old 
 Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly effaced. 
 
 1 We do not mean to imply that there were not wide stretches of waste land 
 which were regarded as being ' extra- villar,' or common to several vills. 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 547. 
 
 3 This of course would not be true of cases in which the lands of various 
 villages were intermixed in one large tract of common field. As to these 
 discrete vills,' see Hist. Eng. Law, i. 549. 
 
 4 This name-giving cluster will usually contain the parish church and so will 
 enjoy a certain preeminence. But we are to speak of a time when parish 
 churches were novelties.
 
 16 Domesday Book. 
 
 Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way. 
 In the meantime let us remember that a villa of Domesday 
 Book may correspond to one of at least two very different 
 models or may be intermediate between various types. It 
 may be a fairly large and agrarianly organic unit, or it may 
 be a group of small agrarian units which are being held 
 together in one whole merely by an external force, by police 
 law and fiscal law 1 . 
 
 ^ wo li^le fragments of 'the original one inch ordnance 
 map ' will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of 
 written discourse. The one pictures a district on the border 
 between Oxfordshire and Berkshire cut by the Thames and 
 the main line of the Great Western Railway ; the other a 
 district on the border between Devon and Somerset, north of 
 Collumpton and south of Wiveliscombe. Neither is an extreme 
 example. True villages we may easily find. Cambridgeshire, 
 for instance, would have afforded some beautiful specimens, for 
 many of the ' open fields ' were still open when the ordnance 
 map of that county was made. But throughout large tracts of 
 England, even though there has been an ' inclosure ' and there 
 are no longer any open fields, our map often shows a land of 
 villages. When it does so and the district that it portrays is a 
 purely agricultural district, we may generally assume without 
 going far wrong that the villages are ancient, for during at 
 least the last three centuries the predominant current in our 
 agrarian history has set against the formation of villages and 
 towards the distribution of scattered homesteads. To find the 
 purest specimens of a land of hamlets we ought to go to Wales 
 or to Cornwall or to other parts of ' the Celtic fringe ' ; very 
 fair examples might be found throughout the west of England. 
 Also we may perhaps find hamlets rather than villages wherever 
 there have been within the historic period large tracts of forest 
 land. Very often, again, the parish or township looks on our 
 map like a hybrid. We seem to see a village with satellitic 
 hamlets. Much more remains to be done before we shall be 
 able to construe the testimony of our fields and walls and 
 hedges.; but at least two types of vill must be in our eyes when 
 we are reading Domesday Book 2 . 
 
 1 See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen, especially ii. 
 119 ff. 
 
 * When the hamlets bear names with such ancient suffixes as -ton, -ham, -by,
 
 Plan of the Survey. 17 
 
 To say that the villa of Domesday Book is in general the Size of the 
 vill of the thirteenth century and the civil parish of the nine- 
 teenth is to say that the areal extent of the villa varied widely 
 from case to case. More important is it for us to observe that 
 the number of inhabitants of the villa varied widely from case 
 to case. The error into which we are most likely to fall will 
 be that of making our vill too populous. Some vills, especially 
 some royal vills, are populous enough; a few contain a hundred 
 households; but the average township is certainly much smaller 
 than this 1 . Before we give any figures, it should first be 
 observed that Domesday Book never enables us to count heads. 
 It states the number of the tenants -of various classes, soche- 
 manni, villani, bordarii, and the like, and leaves us to suppose 
 that each of these persons is, or may be, the head of a house- 
 hold. It also states how many servi there are. Whether we 
 ought to suppose that only the heads of servile households are 
 reckoned, or whether we ought to think of the servi as having 
 no households but as living within the lord's gates and being 
 enumerated, men. women and able-bodied children, by the 
 head this is a difficult question. Still we may reach some 
 results which will enable us to compare township with town- 
 ship. By way of fair sample we may take the Armingford 
 hundred of Cambridgeshire, and all persons who are above the 
 rank of servi we will include under the term 'the non-servile 
 population 2 / 
 
 ARMINGFORD HUNDRED. 
 
 
 Non-servile 
 
 
 
 
 population 
 
 Servi 
 
 Total 
 
 Abington 
 
 19 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 Bassingbourn 
 
 35 
 
 3 
 
 38 
 
 Clapton 
 
 19 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 Croydon 
 
 29 
 
 
 
 29 
 
 -worth, -wick, -thorpe, this of course is in favour of their antiquity. On the 
 other hand, if they are known merely by family names such as Styles's, Nokes'x, 
 Johnson's or the like, this, though not conclusive evidence of, is compatible with 
 their modernity. Meitzen thinks that in Kent and along the southern shore the 
 German invaders founded but few villages. The map does not convince me that 
 this inference is correct. 
 
 1 When more than five-and-twenty team-lands or thereabouts are ascribed to 
 a single place, we shall generally find reason to believe that what is being 
 described is not a single vill. See above, p. 13. 
 
 2 Inq. Com. Cant. 51 fol. In a few cases our figures will involve a small 
 element of conjecture. 
 
 M. 2
 
 18 Domesday Book. 
 
 Hatley 
 
 18 
 
 3 
 
 21 
 
 Litlington 
 
 37 
 
 6 
 
 43 
 
 Melbourn 
 
 62 
 
 1 
 
 63 
 
 Meldreth 
 
 44 
 
 7 
 
 51 
 
 Morden 
 
 43 
 
 11 
 
 54 
 
 Morden Alia 
 
 50 
 
 
 
 50 
 
 Shiugay 
 
 18 
 
 
 
 18 
 
 Tadlow 
 
 27 
 
 4 
 
 31 
 
 Wendy 
 
 12 
 
 4 
 
 16 
 
 Whaddon 
 
 44 
 
 6 
 
 50 
 
 Total 457 45 502 
 
 Here in fourteen vills we have an average of thirty-twc 
 non-servile households for every vill. Now even in our own 
 day a parish with thirty-two houses, though small, is not 
 extremely small. But we should form a wrong picture of the 
 England of the eleventh century if we filled all parts of it with 
 such vills as these. We will take at random fourteen vills in 
 Staffordshire held by Earl Roger 1 . 
 
 Non-servile 
 population Servi Total 
 
 Claverlege 45 '45 
 
 Nordlege 909 
 
 Alvidelege 13 13 
 
 Halas 40 2 42 
 
 Chenistelei 11 11 
 
 Otne 718 
 
 Nortberie 20 1 21 
 
 Erlide 8 2 10 
 
 Gaitone 16 16 
 
 Cressvale 808 
 
 Dodintone 303 
 
 Modreshale 505 
 
 Almentoue 808 
 
 Metford 718 
 
 Total 200 7 207. 
 
 Here for fourteen vills we have an average of but fourteen 
 non-servile households and the servi are so few that we may 
 neglect them. We will next look at a page in the survey of 
 Somersetshire which describes certain vills that have fallen to 
 the lot of the bishop of Coutances 2 . 
 
 1 D. B. i. 248. We have tried to avoid vills in which it is certain or probable 
 that some other tenant in chief had an estate. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 88. We have tried to make sure that no tenant in chief save the
 
 Plan of the Survey. 19 
 
 
 Non- servile 
 
 
 
 
 population 
 
 Servi 
 
 Total 
 
 Winemeresham 
 
 8 
 
 3 
 
 11 
 
 Chetenore 
 
 3 
 
 1 
 
 4 
 
 Widicumbe 
 
 21 
 
 6 
 
 27 
 
 Harpetrev 
 
 10 
 
 2 
 
 12 
 
 Hotune 
 
 11 
 
 
 
 11 
 
 Lilebere 
 
 6 
 
 1 
 
 7 
 
 Wintreth 
 
 4 
 
 2 
 
 6 
 
 Aisecome 
 
 11 
 
 7 
 
 18 
 
 Clutone 
 
 22 
 
 1 
 
 23 
 
 Temesbare 
 
 7 
 
 3 
 
 10 
 
 Nortone 
 
 16 
 
 3 
 
 19 
 
 Cliveham 
 
 15 
 
 1 
 
 16 
 
 Ferenberge 
 
 13 
 
 6 
 
 19 
 
 Cliveware 
 
 6 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Total 
 
 153 
 
 36 
 
 189 
 
 Here we have on the average but eleven non-servile house- 
 holds for each village, and even if we suppose each servus to 
 represent a household, we have not fourteen households. Yet 
 smaller vills will be found in Devonshire, many vills in which 
 the total number of the persons mentioned does not exceed ten 
 and near half of these are servi. In Cornwall the townships, 
 if townships we ought to call them, are yet smaller ; often we 
 can attribute no more than five or six families to the vill even 
 if we include the servi. 
 
 Unless our calculations mislead us, the density of the Population 
 population in the average vill of a given county varies some- 
 what directly with the density of the population in that county ; 
 at all events we can not say that where vills are populous, vills 
 will be few. As regards this matter no precise results are 
 attainable; our document is full of snares for arithmeticians. 
 Still if for a moment we have recourse to the crude method of 
 dividing the number of acres comprised in a modern county by 
 the number of the persons who are mentioned in the survey of 
 that county, the outcome of our calculation will be remarkable 
 and will point to some broad truth 1 . For Suffolk the quotient 
 
 bishop had land in any of these vills, and this we think fairly certain, except as 
 regards Harptree and Norton. There are now two Harptrees, East and West, 
 and four or more Nortons. 
 
 1 We take the figures from Ellis, Introduction, ii. 417 flf. 
 
 22
 
 20 
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 Contrast 
 between 
 east and 
 west. 
 
 Small vill.- 
 
 is 46 or thereabouts ; for Norfolk but little larger 1 ; for Essex 
 61, for Lincoln 67 ; for Bedford, Berkshire, Northampton, 
 Leicester, Middlesex, Oxford, Kent and Somerset it lies between 
 70 and 80, for Buckingham, Warwick, Sussex, Wiltshire and 
 Dorset it lies between 80 and 90 ; Devon, Gloucester, Wor- 
 cester, Hereford are thinly peopled, Cornwall, Stafford, Shropshire 
 very thinly. Some particular results that we should thus attain 
 would be delusive. Thus we should say that men were sparse 
 in Cambridgeshire, did we not remember that a large part of 
 our modern Cambridgeshire was then a sheet of water. Per- 
 manent physical causes interfere with the operation of the 
 general rule. Thus Surrey, with its wide heaths has, as we 
 might expect, but few men to the square mile. Derbyshire has 
 many vills lying waste; Yorkshire is so much wasted that it 
 can give us no valuable result; and again, Yorkshire and 
 Cheshire were larger than they are now, while Rutland and 
 the adjacent counties had not their present boundaries. For 
 all this however, we come to a very general rule : the density 
 of the population decreases as we pass from east to west. With 
 this we may connect another rule : land is much more valuable 
 in the east than it is in the west. This matter is indeed hedged 
 in by many thorny questions ; still whatever hypothesis we may 
 adopt as to the mode in which land was valued, one general 
 truth comes out pretty plainly, namely, that, economic arrange- 
 ments being what they were, it was far better to have a 
 team-land in Essex than to have an equal area of arable 
 land in Devon. 
 
 Between eastern and western England there were differences 
 visible to the natural eye. With these were connected unseen 
 and legal differences, partly as causes, partly as effects. But 
 for the moment let us dwell on the fact that many an English 
 vill has very few inhabitants. We are to speak hereafter of 
 village communities. Let us therefore reflect that a community 
 of some eight or ten householders is not likely to be a highly 
 organized entity. This is not all, for these eight or ten house- 
 
 1 Very possibly this figure is too low. There is reason to think that some of 
 the free men and sokemen of these counties get counted twice or thrice over 
 because they hold land under several different lords. On the other hand Ellis 
 (Introduction, ii. 491) would argue that the figure is too high. But the words 
 Alii ibi tenent which occur at the end of numerous entries mean, we believe, not 
 that there are in this vill other unenumerated tillers of the soil, but that the vill 
 is divided between several tenants in chief.
 
 Plan of the Survey. 21 
 
 holders will often belong to two, three or four different social 
 and economic, if not legal, classes. Some may be sokemen, 
 some villani, bordarii, cotarii, and besides them there will be a 
 few servi. If a vill consists, as in Devonshire often enough it 
 will, of some three villani, some four bordarii and some two 
 servi, the 'township-moot,' if such a moot there be, will be a 
 queer little assembly, the manorial court, if such a court there 
 be, will not have much to do. These men can not have many 
 communal affairs ; there will be no great scope for dooms or for 
 by-laws ; they may well take all their disputes into the hundred 
 court, especially in Devonshire where the hundreds are small. 
 Thus of the visible vill of the eleventh century and its material 
 surroundings we may form a wrong notion. Often enough in 
 the west its common fields (if common fields it had) were not 
 wide fields; the men who had shares therein were few and 
 belonged to various classes. Thus of two villages in Gloucester- 
 shire, Brookthorpe and Harescombe, all that we can read is 
 that in Brostrop there were two teams, one villanus, three 
 bordarii, four servi, while in Hersecome there were two teams, 
 two bordarii and five servi 1 . Many a Devonshire township can 
 produce but two or three teams. Often enough our ' village 
 community' will be a heterogeneous little group whose main 
 capital consists of some 300 acres of arable land and some 
 20 beasts of the plough. 
 
 On the other hand, we must be careful not to omit from our Impor- 
 view the rich and thickly populated shires or to imagine or to the east. 
 speak as though we imagined that a general theory of English 
 history can neglect the East of England. If we leave Lincoln- 
 shire, Norfolk and Suffolk out of account we are to all appear- 
 ance leaving out of account not much less than a quarter of the 
 whole natio*n 2 . Let us make three groups of counties : (1) a 
 South- Western group containing Devon, Somerset, Dorset and 
 Wiltshire: (2) a Mid- Western group containing the shires of 
 Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Salop, Stafford and Warwick : 
 (3) an Eastern group containing Lincolnshire, Norfolk and 
 Suffolk. The first of these groups has the largest ; the third 
 the smallest acreage. In Domesday Book, however, the figures 
 which state their population seem to be these 3 : 
 
 1 D. B. i. 162 b. 
 
 2 Ellis's figures are : England 283, 242 : the three counties 72,883. 
 8 We take these figures from Ellis.
 
 22 Domesday Book. 
 
 South-Western Group: 49,155 
 
 Mid-Western Group: 33,191 
 
 Eastern Group: 72,883 
 
 These figures are so emphatic that they may cause us for a 
 moment to doubt their value, and on details we must lay no 
 stress. But we have materials which enable us to check the 
 general effect. In 1297 Edward I. levied a lay subsidy of a 
 ninth 1 . The sums borne by our three groups of counties were 
 
 these : 
 
 
 
 South-Western Group: 4,038 
 
 Mid-Western Group : 3,514 
 
 Eastern Group: 7,329 
 
 There is a curious resemblance between these two sets of figures. 
 Then in 1377 and 1381 returns were made for a poll-tax 2 . The 
 number of polls returned in our three groups were these : 
 
 1377 1381 
 
 South-Western Group : 183,842 106,086 
 
 Mid- Western Group : 158,245 115,679 
 
 Eastern Group : 255,498 182,830 
 
 
 
 No doubt all inferences drawn from medieval statistics are 
 exceedingly precarious ; but, unless a good many figures have 
 conspired to deceive us, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were 
 at the time of the Conquest and for three centuries afterwards 
 vastly richer and more populous than any tract of equal area 
 in the West. 
 
 Manorial Another distinction between the eastern counties and the 
 
 manorial rest of England is apparent. In many shires we shall find that 
 the name of each vill is mentioned once and no more. This is 
 so because the land of each vill belongs in its entirety to some 
 one tenant in chief. We may go further : we may say, though 
 at present in an untechnical sense, that each vill is a manor. 
 Such is the general rule, though there will be exceptions to it. 
 On the other hand, in the eastern counties this rule will become 
 the exception. For example, of the fourteen vills in the 
 Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire there is but one of 
 
 1 Lay Subsidy, 25 Edw. I. (Yorkshire Archaeological Society), pp. xxxi-xxxv. 
 Fractions of a pound axe neglected. 
 
 2 Powell, The Rising in East Anglia, 120-3. The great decrease between 
 1377 and 1381 in the number of persons taxed, we must not try to explain.
 
 Plan of the Survey. 23 
 
 which it is true that the whole of its land is held by a single 
 tenant in chief. In this county it is common to find that three 
 or four Norman lords hold land in the same vill. This seems true 
 not only of Cambridgeshire but also of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, 
 Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, and some parts of Yorkshire. 
 Even in other districts of England the rule that each vill has a 
 single lord is by no means unbroken in the Conqueror's day 
 and we can see that there were many exceptions to it in the 
 Confessor's. A careful examination of all England vill by vill 
 would perhaps show that the contrast which we are noting is 
 neither so sharp nor so ancient as at first sight it seems to be : 
 nevertheless it exists. 
 
 A better known contrast there is. The eastern counties are The distri- 
 the home of liberty 1 . We may divide the tillers of the soil fremen 
 into five great classes ; these in order of dignity and freedom and serfs ' 
 are (1) liberi homines, (2) sochemanni, (3) villani, (4) bordarii, 
 cotarii etc., (5) servi. The two first of these classes are to be 
 found in large numbers only in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, 
 Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. We 
 shall hereafter see that Cambridgeshire also has been full of 
 sokemen, though since the Conquest they have fallen from their 
 high estate. On the other hand, the number of servi increases 
 pretty steadily as we cross the country from east to west. It 
 reaches its maximum in Cornwall and Gloucestershire; it is 
 very low in Norfolk, Suffolk, Derby, Leicester, Middlesex, 
 Sussex ; it descends to zero in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. 
 This descent to zero may fairly warn us that the terms with 
 which we are dealing may not bear precisely the same meaning 
 in all parts of England, or that a small class is apt to be reckoned 
 as forming part of a larger class. But still it is clear enough 
 that some of these terms are used with care and express real 
 and important distinctions. 
 
 Of this we are assured by a document which seems to The cinssi- 
 reproduce the wording of the instructions which defined the mea^ 
 duty of at least one party of royal commissioners 2 . We are 
 about to speak of the mode in which the occupants of the soil 
 are classified by Domesday Book, and therefore this document 
 
 1 See the serviceable maps in Seebohm, Village Community, 86. But they 
 seem to treat Yorkshire unfairly. It has 5 - 5 per cent, of sokemen. 
 
 2 This is found at the beginning of the Inquisitio Eliensis ; D. B. iv. 497 ; 
 Hamilton, Inquisitio, 97. See Round, Feudal England, 133 ff.
 
 24 Domesday Boole, 
 
 deserves our best attention. It runs thus : The King's barons 
 inquired by the oath of the sheriff of the shire and of all the 
 barons and of their Frenchmen and of the whole hundred, the 
 priest, reeve and six villani of every vill, how the mansion 
 (mansid) is called, who held it in the time of King Edward, 
 who holds it now, how many hides, how many plough-teams on 
 the demesne, how many plough-teams of the men, how many 
 villani, how many cotarii, how many servi, how many liberi 
 homines, how many sochemanni, how much wood, how much 
 meadow, how much pasture, how many mills, how many 
 fisheries, how much has been taken away therefrom, how much 
 added thereto, and how much there is now, how much each 
 liber homo and sochemannus had and has : All this thrice over, 
 to wit as regards the time of King Edward, the time when 
 King William gave it, and the present time, and whether more 
 can be had thence than is had now 1 . 
 
 Basis of Five classes of men are mentioned and they are mentioned 
 
 tion. in an order that is extremely curious : villani, cotarii, servi, 
 liberi homines, sochemanni. It descends three steps, then it 
 leaps from the very bottom of the scale to the very top and 
 thence it descends one step. A parody of it might speak of the 
 rural population of modern England as consisting of large 
 farmers, small farmers, cottagers, great landlords, small landlords. 
 But a little consideration will convince us that beneath this 
 apparent caprice there lies some legal principle. We shall 
 observe that these five species of tenants are grouped into two 
 genera. The king wants to know how much each liber homo, 
 how much each sochemannus holds ; he does not want to know 
 how much each villanus, each cotarius, each servus holds. 
 Connecting this with the main object of the whole survey, we 
 shall probably be brought to the guess that between the soke- 
 man and the villein there is some broad distinction which 
 concerns the king as the recipient of geld. May it not be 
 this : the villein's lord is answerable for the geld due from the 
 land that the villein holds, the sokeman's lord is not answerable, 
 
 1 We must not hastily draw the inference that every party of com- 
 missioners received the same set of instructions. Perhaps, for example, 
 carucates, not hides, were mentioned in the instructions given to those 
 commissioners who were to visit the carucated counties. Perhaps the non- 
 appearance of servi in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire may be due to no deeper 
 cause.
 
 Plan of the Survey. 25 
 
 at least he is not answerable as principal debtor for the geld 
 due from the land that the sokeman holds ? If this be so, the 
 order in which the five classes of men are mentioned will not 
 seem unnatural. It proceeds outwards from the lord and his 
 mansio. First it mentions the persons seated on land for the 
 geld of which he is responsible, and them it arranges in an 
 ' order of merit.' Then it turns to persons who, though in some 
 way or another connected with the lord and his mansio, are 
 themselves tax-payers, and concerning them the commissioners 
 are to inquire how much each of them holds. Of course we 
 can not say that this theory is proved by the statement that lies 
 before us ; but it is suggested by that statement and may for 
 a while serve us as a working hypothesis. If this theory be 
 sound, then we have here a distinction of the utmost importance. 
 For one mighty purpose, the purpose that is uppermost in King 
 William's mind, the villanus is not a landowner, his lord is the 
 landowner ; on the other hand the sochemannus is a landowner, 
 and is taxed as such. We are not saying that this is a purely 
 fiscal distinction. In legal logic the lord's liability for the geld 
 that is apportioned on the land occupied by his villeins may be 
 rather an effect than a cause. A lawyer might argue that the 
 lord must pay because the occupier is his villanus, not that the 
 occupier is a villanus because the lord pays. And yet, as we 
 may often see in legal history, there will be action and reaction 
 between cause and effect. The geld is no trifle. Levied at 
 that rate of six shillings on the hide at which King William 
 has just now levied it, it is a momentous force capable of 
 depressing and displacing whole classes of men. In 1086 this 
 tax is so much in everybody's mind that any distinction as to 
 its incidence will cut deeply into .the body of the law. 
 
 Now this classification of men we will take as the starting Our course, 
 point for our enterprise. If we could define the liber homo, 
 sochemannus, villanus, cotarius, servus, we should have solved 
 some of the great legal problems of Domesday Book, for by the 
 way we should have had to define two other difficult terms, 
 namely manerium and soca. It would then remain that we 
 should say something of the higher strata of society, of earls 
 and sheriffs, of barons, knights, thegns and their tenures, of 
 such terms as alodium and feudum, of the general theory of 
 landownership or landholdership. We will begin with the 
 lowest order of men, with the servi, and thence work our way
 
 26 Domesday Book. 
 
 upwards. But our course can not be straightforward. There 
 are so many terms to be explained that sometimes we shall be 
 compelled to leave a question but partially answered while we 
 are endeavouring to find a partial answer for some yet more 
 difficult question. 
 
 2. The Serfs. 
 
 The serfs The existence of some 25,000 serfs is recorded. In the 
 thirteenth century servus and villanus are, at least among 
 lawyers, equivalent words. The only unfree man is the ' serf- 
 villein' and the lawyers are trying to subject him to the curious 
 principle that he is the lord's chattel but a free man in relation 
 to all but his lord 1 . It is far otherwise in Domesday Book. In 
 entry after entry and county after county the servi are kept 
 well apart from the villani, bordarii, cotarii. Often they are 
 mentioned in quite another context to that in which the villani 
 are enumerated. As an instance we may take a manor in 
 Surrey 2 : 'In demesne there are 5 teams and there are 25 
 villani and 6 bordarii with 14 teams. There is one mill of 
 2 shillings and one fishery and one church and 4 acres of 
 meadow, and wood for 150 pannage pigs, and 2 stone-quarries 
 of 2 shillings and 2 nests of hawks in the wood and 10 servi.' 
 Often enough the servi are placed between two other sources of 
 wealth, the church and the mill. In some counties they seem 
 to take precedence over the villani ; the common formula is ' In 
 dominio sunt a carucae et b servi et c villani et d bordarii cum 
 e carucis.' But this is delusive; the formula is bringing the 
 servi into connexion with the demesne teams and separating 
 them from the teams of the tenants. We must render it thus 
 ' On the demesne there are a teams and b servi ; and there are 
 c villani and d bordarii with e teams.' Still we seem to see a 
 gently graduated scale of social classes, villani, bordarii, cotarii, 
 servi, and while the jurors of one county will arrange them in 
 one fashion, the jurors of another county may adopt a different 
 scheme. Thus in their classification of mankind the jurors will 
 sometimes lay great stress on the possession of plough oxen. 
 In Hertfordshire we read : ' There are 6 teams in demesne and 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398. s D. B. i. 34, Limenesfeld.
 
 The Serfs. 27 
 
 41 villani and 17 bordarii have 20 teams... there are 22 cotarii 
 and 12 servi 1 .' 'The priest, 13 villani and 4 bordarii have 
 6 teams... there are two cotarii and 4 servi' 2 .' 'The priest and 
 24 villani have 13 teams... there are 12 bordarii, 16 cotarii and 
 11 servi 3 .' A division is in this instance made between the 
 people who have oxen and the people who have none ; villani 
 have oxen, cotarii and servi have none ; sometimes the bordarii 
 stand above this line, sometimes below it. 
 
 Of the legal position of the servus Domesday Book tells us Legal posi- 
 little or nothing ; but earlier and later documents oblige us to serf. f 
 think of him as a slave, one who in the main has no legal 
 rights. He is the theow of the Anglo-Saxon dooms, the servus 
 of the ecclesiastical canons. But though we do right in calling 
 him a slave, still we might well be mistaken were we to think 
 of the line which divides him from other men as being as sharp 
 as the line which a mature jurisprudence will draw between thing 
 and person. We may well doubt whether this principle ' The 
 slave is a thing, not a person' can be fully understood by a 
 grossly barbarous age. It implies the idea of a person, and in 
 the world of sense we find not persons but men. 
 
 Thus degrees of servility are possible. A' class may stand, Degrees of 
 as it were, half-way between the class of slaves and the class se 
 of free men. The Kentish law of the seventh century as it 
 appears in the dooms of ^Ethelbert 4 , like many of its conti- 
 nental sisters, knows a class of men who perhaps are not free 
 men and yet are not slaves; it knows the last as well as the 
 the6w. From what race the Kentish Icet has sprung, and how, 
 when it comes to details, the law will treat him these are 
 obscure questions, and the latter of them can not be answered 
 unless we apply to him what is written about the laeti, liti and 
 lidi of the continent. He is thus far a person that he has a 
 small wergild but possibly he is bound to the soil. Only in 
 ^Ethelbert's dooms do we read of him. From later days, until 
 Domesday Book breaks the silence, we do not obtain any 
 definite evidence of the existence of any class of men who 
 are not slaves but none the less are tied to the land. Of men 
 who are bound to do heavy labour services for their lords we do 
 hear, but we do not hear that if they run away they can be 
 
 * D. B. i. 132 b, Hiz. 2 D. B. i. 132 b, Waldenei. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 136, Sandone. 4 JBthelb. 26.
 
 28 Domesday Book. 
 
 captured and brought back. As we shall see by and by, 
 Domesday Book bears witness to the existence of a class of 
 buri, burs, coliberti, who seem to be distinctly superior to the 
 servi, but distinctly inferior to the villeins, bordiers and cottiers. 
 It is by no means impossible that they, 'without being slaves, 
 are in a very proper and intelligible sense unfree men, that they 
 have civil rights which they can assert in courts of law, but that 
 they are tied to the soil. The gulf between the seventh and the 
 eleventh centuries is too wide to allow of our connecting them 
 with the Icet of ^Ethelbert's laws, but still our documents are 
 not exhaustive enough to justify us in denying that all along 
 there has been a class (though it can hardly have been a large 
 class) of men who could not quit their tenements and yet were 
 no slaves. As we shall see hereafter, liberty was in certain 
 contexts reckoned a matter of degree ; even the villanus, even 
 the sochemannus was not for every purpose liber homo. When 
 this is so, the thedw or servus is like to appear as the unfreest of 
 persons rather than as no person but a thing. 
 
 Predial In the second place, we may guess that from a remote time 
 
 serfage. there has been in the condition of the thedw a certain element 
 of praediality. The slaves have not been worked in gangs nor 
 housed in barracks 1 . The servus has often been a servus casatus, 
 he has had a cottage or even a manse and yardland which de 
 facto he might call his own. There is here no legal limitation of 
 his master's power. Some slave trade there has been ; but on the 
 whole it seems probable that the the6w has been usually treated 
 as annexed to a tenement. The duties exacted of him from 
 year to year have remained constant. The consequence is that 
 a free man'in return for a plot of land may well agree to do all 
 that a thedw usually does and see in this no descent into slavery. 
 Thus the slave gets a chance of acquiring what will be as a 
 matter of fact a peculium. In the seventh century the church 
 tried to turn this matter of fact into matter of law. ' Non licet 
 homini,' says Theodore's Penitential, ' a servo tollere pecuniam, 
 quam ipse labore suo adquesieritV We have no reason for 
 thinking that this effort was very strenuous or very successful, 
 
 1 Tacitus, Germ. c. 25 : ' Caeteris servis non in nostrum morem, descriptis 
 per familiam ministeriis, utuntur. Suam quisque sedem, suos penates regit. 
 Frumenti modum dominus aut pecoris aut vestis ut colouo iniungit, et servus 
 hactenus paret.' 
 
 2 Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, iii. 202.
 
 The Serfs. 29 
 
 or that the law of the eleventh century allowed the servus any 
 proprietary rights ; and yet he might often be the occupier of 
 land and of chattels with which, so long as he did his customary 
 services, his lord would seldom meddle. 
 
 In the third place, we may believe that for some time past The serf in 
 police law and punitive law have been doing something to i aw . 
 conceal, if not to obliterate, the Jine which separates the slave 
 from other men. A mature jurisprudence may be able to hold 
 fast the fundamental principle that a slave is not a person but 
 a 'thing, while at the same time it both limits the master's 
 power of abusing his human chattel and guards against those 
 dangers which may arise from the existence of things which have 
 wills, and sometimes bad wills, of their own. But an immature 
 jurisprudence is incapable of this exploit. It begins to play fast 
 and loose with its elementary notions. It begins to punish the 
 criminous slave without being quite certain as to how far it is 
 punishing him and how far it is punishing his master. Confusion 
 is easy, for if the slave be punished. by death or mutilation, his 
 master will suffer, and a pecuniary mulct exacted from the slave 
 is exacted from his master. Learned writers have come to the 
 most opposite opinions as to the extent to which the Anglo- 
 Saxon dooms by their distribution of penalties recognize the 
 personality of the theow. But this is not all. For a long time 
 past the law has had before it the difficult problem of dealing 
 with crimes and delicts committed by poor and economically 
 dependent free men, men who have no land of their own, who are 
 here to-day and gone to-morrow, ' men from whom no right can 
 be had.' It has been endeavouring to make the lords answerable 
 to a certain extent for the misdeeds of their free retainers. If 
 a slave is charged with a crime his master is bound to produce 
 him in court. But the law requires that the lord shall in very 
 similar fashion produce his free ' loaf eater,' his mainpast, nay, 
 it has been endeavouring to enforce the rule that every free man 
 who has no land of his own shall have a lord bound to produce 
 him when he is accused. Also it has been fostering the growth 
 of private justice. The lord's duty of producing his men, bond 
 and free, has been becoming the duty of holding a court in 
 which his men, free and bond, will answer for themselves. 
 How far this process had gone in the days of the Confessor 
 is a question to which we shall return 1 . 
 
 1 See on the one hand Alaurer, K. U. i. 410, on the other a learned essay
 
 30 Domesday Book. 
 
 Serf and f or Q\\ this however, we may say with certainty that in the 
 
 eleventh century the servi were marked off from all other men 
 by definite legal lines. What is more, we may say that every 
 man who was not a theow was in some definite legal sense a 
 free man. This sharp contrast is put before us by the laws of 
 Cnut as well as by those of his predecessors. If a freeman 
 works on a holiday, he pays for it with his healsfang; if a 
 theowman does the like, he pays for it with his hide or his 
 hide-geld 1 . Equally sharp is the same distinction in the Leges 
 Henrici, and this too in passages which, so far as we know, are 
 not borrowed from Anglo-Saxon documents. For many purposes 
 ' aut servus aut liber homo ' is a perfect dilemma. There is no 
 confusion whatever between the villani and the servi. The 
 villani are ' viles et inopes personae ' but clearly enough they 
 are liberi homines. So also in the Quadripartitus, the Latin 
 translation of the ancient dooms made in Henry I.'s reign, there 
 is no confusion about this matter; the thedwman becomes a 
 servus, while villanus is the equivalent for ceorl. The Norman 
 writers still tell how according to the old law of the English 
 the villanus might become a thegn if he acquired five hides of 
 land 2 ; at times they will put before us villani and thaini or 
 even villani and barones as an exhaustive classification of free 
 men 3 . 
 
 The serf of Let us learn what may be learnt of the servus from the 
 
 the Leges. _ .._. ... T <7 . 
 
 Leges Hennci. Every man is either a liber homo or a servus 4 . 
 Free men are either two-hundred-men or twelve-hundred-men; 
 
 by Jastrow, Zur strafrechtlichen Stellung der Sklaven, in Gierke's Unter- 
 suchungen zur Deutsche Geschichte, vol. i. Maurer holds that the Anglo- 
 Saxon slave is in the main a chattel, that e.g. the master must answer for the 
 delicts of his slave in the same way that the owner answers for damage done by 
 his beasts, and that this liability can be clearly marked off from the duty of the 
 lord of free retainers who is merely bound to produce them in court. Jastrow, 
 on the contrary, thinks that even at a quite early time the Anglo-Saxon slave is 
 treated as a person by criminal law ; he has a wergild ; he can be fined ; his 
 trespasses are never compared to the trespasses of beasts ; the lord's duty, if 
 one of his men is charged with crime, is much the same whether that man be 
 free or bond. Any theory involves an explanation of several passages that are 
 obscure and perhaps corrupt. 
 
 1 Cnut, n. 45-6. 
 
 8 Schmid, Appendix v. . (Of Banks); Pseudoleges Canuti, 60 (Schmid, 
 p. 431). 
 
 3 Leg. Hen. 76 7 : ' Differentia tainen weregildi inultu est in Cantia viilan- 
 oium et baronum.' 
 
 * Leg. Hen. 76 2.
 
 The Serfs. 31 
 
 perhaps we ought to add that there is also a class of six- 
 hundred-men 1 . A serf becomes such either by birth or by 
 some event, such as a sale into slavery, that happens in his 
 lifetime 2 . Servile blood is transmitted from father to child ; 
 some lords hold that it is also transmitted by mother to child 3 . 
 If a slave is to be freed this should be done publicly, in court, 
 or church or market, and lance and helmet or other the arms of 
 free men should be given him, while he should give his lord 
 thirty pence, that is the price of his skin, as a sign that he is 
 henceforth 'worthy of his hide.' On the other hand, when a 
 free man falls into slavery then also there should be a public 
 ceremony. He should put his head between his lord's hands 
 and should receive as the arms of slavery some bill-hook or 
 the like 4 . Public ceremonies are requisite, for the state is 
 endangered by the uncertain condition of accused criminals; the 
 lords will assert at one moment that their men are free and at 
 the next moment that these same men are slaves 5 . The descent 
 of a free man into slavery is treated as no uncommon event; 
 the slave may well have free kinsfolk 6 . But, to come to the 
 fundamental rule, the villanus, the meanest of free men, is a 
 two-hundred-man, that is to say, if he be slain the very 
 substantial wergild of 200 Saxon shillings or 4 must be paid 
 to his kinsfolk 7 , while a man-b<5t of 30 shillings is paid to his 
 lord 8 . But if a servus be slain his kinsfolk receive the com- 
 paratively trifling sum of 40 pence while the lord gets the 
 man-b<5t of 20 shillings 9 . That the serf's kinsfolk should 
 receive a small sum need not surprise us. Germanic law has 
 
 i Leg. Hen. 76 3. 2 Ibid. 76 3. / 
 
 8 Ibid. 77 ; see Hist. Eng. Law, i. 405. 
 
 4 Ibid. 78 2. The difficult strublum we leave untouched. 
 
 5 Ibid. 78 2 from Cnut, n. 20. On this see Jastrow's comment, op. cit. 
 p. 80. 
 
 6 Ibid. 70 5. 7 Ibid. 70 1 ; 76 4. 8 Ibid. 69 2. 
 
 9 Ibid. 70 4: 'Si liber servuiu occidat similiter reddat parentibus 40 den. et 
 duas mufflas et unum pullum [al. billum] mutilatum.' The mujftae are thick 
 gloves. Compare Ancient Laws of Wales, i. 239, 511 ; the bondman has no 
 galanas (wergild) but if injured he receives a saraad ; ' the saraad of a bondman 
 is twelve pence, six for a coat for him, three for trousers, one for buskins, one 
 for a hook and one for a rope, and if he be a woodman let the hook-penny be for 
 an axe.' If we read billum instead of pullum the English rule may remind us 
 of the Welsh. His hedger's gloves and bill-hook are the arms appropriate to 
 the serf, ' servitutis arma ' ; cf. Leg. Hen. 78 2. As to the man-b6t see Lieber- 
 mann, Leg. Edwardi, p. 71.
 
 32 Domesday Book. 
 
 never found it easy to carry the principle that the slave is a 
 chattel to extreme conclusions; but the payment seems trifling 
 and half contemptuous ; at any rate the life of the villein is 
 worth the life of twenty-four serfs 1 . Then again, it is by no 
 means certain that a lord can not kill his serf with impunity. 
 ' If,' says our text, ' a man slay his own serf, his is the sin and 
 his is the loss ' : we may interpret this to mean that he has 
 sinned but sinned against himself 2 . Then again, for the evil 
 deeds of his slave the master is in some degree responsible. 
 If my slave be guilty of a petty theft not worthy of death, I 
 am bound to make restitution ; if the crime be a capital one 
 and he be taken handhaving, then he must 'die like a free 
 man 3 .' If my slave be guilty of homicide, my duty is to set 
 him free and hand him over to the kindred of the slain, but 
 apparently I may purchase his life by a sum of 40 shillings, a 
 sum much less than the wer of the slain man 4 . We must not 
 be too hard on the owners of delinquent slaves. There are 
 cases, for example, in which, several slaves having committed 
 a crime, one of them chosen by lot must suffer for the sins of 
 all 6 . Our author is borrowing from the laws of several different 
 centuries and does not arrive at any neat result ; nor must we 
 wonder at this, for the problems presented to jurisprudence by 
 the crimes and delicts of slaves are very intricate. Then again, 
 we have the rule that if free men and serfs join in a crime, the 
 whole guilt is to be attributed to the free: he who joins 
 with a slave in a theft has no companion 6 . On the whole, 
 though the slave is likely to have as a matter of fact a 
 peculium of his own, a peculium out of which he may be able 
 to pay for his offences and even perhaps to purchase his 
 liberty 7 , the servus of our Leges seems to be in the main a 
 rightless being. We look in vain for any trace of that idea of 
 the relativity of servitude which becomes the core of Bracton's 
 
 1 In Leg. Hen. 81 3 (a passage which seems to show that by his master's 
 favour even the servus may sometimes sue for a wrong done to him) we have 
 this sum : villanus : cothsetus : servus : : 30 : 15 : 6. 
 
 2 Ibid. 75 4 : ' suum peccatum est et dampnum.' See also 70 10, an 
 exceedingly obscure passage. 
 
 3 Ibid. 59 23. 
 
 4 Ibid. 70 5 ; but for this our author has to go back as far as Ine. 
 8 Ibid. 59 25. 
 
 6 Ibid. 59 24 ; 85 4 : ' solus furatur qui cum servo furatur.' 
 ' Ibid. 78 3 ; 59 25.
 
 The Serfs. 33 
 
 doctrine 1 . At the same time we observe that many, perhaps 
 most, of the rules which mark the slavish condition of the 
 serf are ancient rules and rules that are becoming obsolete. 
 In the twelfth century the old system of wer and hot is 
 already vanishing, though an antiquarian lawyer may yet 
 try to revivify it. When it disappears altogether before the 
 new law, which holds every grave crime to be a felony, and 
 punishes almost every felony with death 2 , many grand differ- 
 ences between the villein and the serf will have perished. The 
 gallows is a great leveller. 
 
 If now we recur to the days of the Conquest, we cannot doubt Return to 
 that the law knew a definite class of slaves, and marked them 
 off by many distinctions from the villani and cotarii, and even day- 
 from the coliberti. Sums that seem high were being paid for 
 men whose freedom was being purchased 3 . At Lewes the toll 
 paid for the sale of an ox was a halfpenny ; on the sale of a 
 man it was fourpence 4 . In later documents we may sometimes 
 see a distinction well drawn. Thus in the Black Book of 
 Peterborough, compiled in 1127 or thereabouts, we may read 
 how on one of his manors the abbot has eight herdsmen 
 (bovarii), how each of them holds ten acres, has to do labour 
 services and render loaves and poultry. And then we read that 
 each of them must pay one penny for his head if he be a free 
 man (liber homo), while he pays nothing if he be a servus*. 
 This is a well-drawn distinction. Of two men whose economic 
 position is precisely the same, the one may be free, the other a 
 slave, and it is the free man, not the slave, who has to pay a 
 head-penny. Now when the Conqueror's surveyors, or rather 
 the jurors, call a man a servus they are, so it seems to us, 
 thinking rather of his legal status than of his position in the 
 economy of a manor. At any rate we ought to observe that the 
 economic stratification of society may cut the legal stratification, 
 We are accustomed perhaps to suppose that while the villani 
 have lands that are in some sense their own, while they support 
 themselves and their families by tilling those lands, the servus 
 has no land that is in any sense his own, but is fed at his lord's 
 board, is housed in his lord's court, and spends all his time in 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398, 402. a Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 457. 
 
 3 See the Bath manumissions, Kemble, Saxons, i. 507 ff. Sometimes & 
 pound or a hall-pound is paid. 
 
 * D. B. i. 26. Chron. Petrob. 163. 
 
 M. 3
 
 34 Domesday Book. 
 
 the cultivation of his lord's demesne lands. Such may have 
 been the case in those parts of England where we hear of but 
 few servi ; those few may have been inmates of the lord's house 
 and have had no plots of their own. But such can hardly have 
 been the case in the south-western counties ; the servi are too 
 many to be menials. Indeed it would seem that these servi 
 sometimes had arable plots, and had oxen, which were to be 
 distinguished from the demesne oxen of their lords not indeed 
 as a matter of law, but as a matter of economic usage 1 . It is 
 plain that the legal and the economic lines may intersect one 
 another; the menial who is fed by the lord and who must give 
 his whole time to the lord's work may be a free man ; the slave 
 may have a cottage and oxen and a plot of arable land, and 
 labour for himself as well labouring for his lord. Hence a 
 perplexed and uncertain terminology : the servus who has land 
 and oxen may be casually called a villanus*, and we cannot be 
 sure that no one whom our record calls a servus has the wer- 
 gild of a free man. Nor can we be sure that the enumeration 
 of the servi is always governed by one consistent principle. In 
 the shires of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester we read of 
 numerous ancillae in Worcestershire of 677 servi and 101 
 ancillae 3 and this may make us think that in this district all 
 the able-bodied serfs are enumerated, whether or no they have 
 cottages to themselves 4 . We may strongly suspect that the 
 king's commissioners were not much interested in the line that 
 separated the villani from the servi, since the lord was as directly 
 answerable for the geld of any lands that were in the occu- 
 pation of his villeins as he was for the geld of those plots that 
 were tilled for him by his slaves. That there should have been 
 
 1 D. B. i. 105 b, Devon : ' Eolf tenet de [alduino] Boslie... Terra est 8 carucis. 
 In dominio est 1 caruca et dimidia et 7 servi cum 1 caruca.' D. B. iv. 265 : 
 Balduinus habet 1 mansionem quae vocatur Bosleia...hanc possunt arare 8 
 carrucae et modo tenet earn Boffus de Balduino. Inde habet B. 1 ferdinum et 
 1 carrucam et dimidiam in dominio et villani tenent aliam terrain et habent ibi 
 1 carrucam. Ibi habet B. 7 servos.' In the Exeter record these seven serfs seem 
 to get reckoned as being both servi and villani. So in the account of Bentis, 
 D. B. iv. 204-5, the lord is said to have one quarter of the arable in demesne 
 and two oxen, while the villani are said to have the rest of the' arable and one 
 team ; but the only villani are 8 coliberti and 4 servi. 
 
 2 See last note. 8 Ellis, Introduction, ii. 504-6. 
 
 4 See, for example, the following Herefordshire entry, D. B. i. 180 b : In 
 dominio sunt 2 carucae et 4 villani et 8 bordarii et prepositus et bedellus. Inter 
 omnes habent 4 carucas. Ibi 8 inter servos et ancillas et vaccarius et daia.'
 
 The Serfs. 35 
 
 never a the6w in all Yorkshire and Lincolnshire is hardly credible, 
 and yet we hear of no servi in those counties. 
 
 This being so, we encounter some difficulty if we would put Disappear- 
 
 ELI1C6 of 
 
 just the right interpretation on a remarkable fact that is visible em '. 
 in Essex. The description of that county tells us not only how 
 many villani, bordarii and servi there are now, but also how 
 many there were in King Edward's day, and thus shows what 
 changes have taken place during the last twenty years. Now 
 on manor after manor the number of villeins and bordiers, if of 
 them we make one class, has increased, while the number of 
 servi has fallen. We take 100 entries (four batches of 25 
 apiece) and see that the number of villani and bordarii has 
 risen from 1486 to 1894, while the number of servi has fallen 
 from 423 to 30 We make another experiment with a hundred 
 entries. This gives the following result : 
 
 1066 1086 
 
 Villani 1273 1247 
 
 Bordarii 810 1241 
 
 Servi 384 312 
 
 This decrease in the number of servi seems to be pretty evenly 
 distributed throughout the county 1 . We shall not readily 
 ascribe the change to any mildheartedness of the lords. They 
 are Frenchmen, and in all probability they have got the most 
 they could out of a mass of peasantry made malleable and 
 manageable by the Conquest. We may rather be entitled to 
 infer that there has been a considerable change in rural 
 economy. For the cultivation of his demesne land the lord 
 begins to rely less and less on the labour of serfs whom he feeds, 
 more and more upon the labour of tenants who have plots of 
 their own and who feed themselves. From this again we may 
 perhaps infer that the labour services of the villani and bordarii 
 are being augmented. But at any rate it speaks ill of their 
 fate, that under the sway of foreigners, who may fairly be sus- 
 pected of some harshness and greed, their inferiors, the true 
 
 1 Mr Bound has drawn attention to the great increase of bordarii : Antiquary 
 {1882) vi. 9. In the second of our two experiments the cases were taken from the 
 royal demesne and the lands of the churches. The surveys of Norfolk and 
 Suffolk profess to enumerate the various classes of peasants T. B. E. ; but 
 commonly each entry reports that there has been no change. Without saying 
 that we disbelieve these reports, we nevertheless may say that a verdict which 
 asserts that things have always (semper) been as they now are may easily be the 
 outcome of nescience. 
 
 32
 
 36 Domesday Boole. 
 
 servi, are somewhat rapidly disappearing. However, it is by no 
 means impossible that with a slavery so complete as that of the 
 English ihedw the Normans were not very familiar in their own 
 country 1 . 
 
 3. The Villeins. 
 
 The boors Next above the servi we see the small but interesting class 
 f bvri, burs or coliberti. Probably it was not mentioned in the 
 writ which set the commissioners their task, and this may well 
 be the reason why it appears as but a very small class. It has 
 some 900 members; still it is represented in fourteen shires: 
 Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, 
 Cornwall, Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, 
 Warwick, Shropshire in short, in the shires of Wessex and 
 western Mercia. Twice over our record explains a piece of 
 rare good fortune that buri and coliberti are all one 2 . In 
 general they are presented to us as being akin rather to the 
 servi than to the villani or bordarii, as when we are told, ' In 
 demesne there is one virgate of land and there are 3 teams and 
 11 servi and 5 coliberti, and there are 15 villani and 15 bordarii 
 with 8 teams 3 .' But this rule is by no means unbroken; some- 
 times the coliberti are separated from the servi and a precedence 
 over the cotarii or even over the bordarii is given them. Thus 
 of a Wiltshire manor it is written, 'In demesne there are 8 
 teams and 20 servi and 41 villani and 30 bordarii and 7 coliberti 
 and 74 cotarii have among them all 27 teams 4 .' Again of a 
 Warwickshire manor, ' There is land for 26 teams ; in demesne 
 are 3 teams and 4 servi and 43 villani and 6 coliberti and 10 
 bordarii with 16 teams 5 .' A classification which turns upon 
 legal status is cut by a classification which turns upon economic 
 condition. The colibertus we take to be an unfreer man (how 
 there come to be degrees of freedom is a question to be asked 
 by and by) than the cotarius or the bordarius, but on a given 
 manor he may be a more important person, for he may have 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 53-4. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 38, Coseham : ' 8 burs i. coliberti.' Ib. 38 b Dene : ' et coliberti 
 [vel bures interlined}.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 65, Wintreburne. 4 D. B. i. 75, Bridetone et Bere. 
 5 D. B. i. 239 b, Etone.
 
 The Villeins. 37 
 
 plough beasts while the cotarius has none, he may have two 
 oxen while the bordarius has but an ox. 
 
 In calling him a colibertus the Norman clerks are giving him The Conti- 
 a foreign name, the etymological origin of which is very dark 1 ; 
 but this much seems plain, that in the France of the eleventh 
 century a large class bearing this name had been formed out 
 of ancient elements, Roman coloni and Germanic liti, a class 
 which was not rightless (for it could be distinguished from the 
 class of servi, and a colibertus might be made a servus by way of 
 punishment for his crimes) but which yet was unfree, for the 
 colibertus who left his lord might be pursued and recaptured 2 . 
 As to the Englishman upon whom this name is bestowed we 
 know him to be a gebtir, a boor, and we learn something of him 
 from that mysterious document entitled 'Kectitudines Singu- 
 larum PersonarumV His services, we are told, vary from The En- 
 place to place ; in some districts he works for his loud two g lsl 
 days a week and during harvest-time three days a week; he 
 pays gafol in money, barley, sheep and poultry; also he has 
 ploughing to do besides his week-work; he pays hearth- 
 penny ; he and one of his fellows must between them feed a 
 dog. It is usual to provide him with an outfit of two oxen, one 
 cow, six sheep, and seed for seven acres of his yardland, and also 
 to provide him with household stuff; on his death all these 
 chattels go back to his lord. Thus the boor is put before us 
 as a tenant with a house and a yardland or virgate, and two 
 plough oxen. He will therefore play a more important part in 
 the manorial economy than the cottager who has no beasts. 
 But he is a very dependent person ; his beasts, even the poor 
 furniture of his house, his pots and crocks, are provided for him 
 by his lord. Probably it is this that marks him off from the 
 ordinary mllanus or ' townsman/ and brings him near the serf. 
 In a sense he may be a free man. We have seen how the law, 
 whether we look for it to the code of Cnut or to the Leges 
 Henrici, is holding fast the proposition that every one who 
 
 1 Gue'rard, Cartulaire de L'Abbaye de S. Pere de Chartres, voL i. p. xlii. 
 
 2 The position of the coliberti is discussed by Guerard, loc. cit., and by 
 Lamprecht, Geschichte des Franzosischen Wirthsohaftslebens (in Schmolier's 
 Forschungen, Bd i.), p. 81. Guerard says, ' Les coliberts peuvent se placer a peu 
 pres indifferemment ou au dernier des homines libres, ou a la tSte des hommes 
 engages dans les liens de la servitude.' 
 
 3 Schmid, App. in. c. 4. 
 
 313524
 
 38 Domesday Book. 
 
 is not a tlie6wman is a free man, that every one is either a 
 liber homo or a servus. We have no warrant for denying to 
 the boor the full wergild of 200 shillings. He pays the hearth- 
 penny, or Peter's penny, and the document that tells us this 
 elsewhere mentions this payment as the mark of a free man 1 . 
 And yet in a very true and accurate sense he may be unfree, 
 unfree to quit his lord's service. All that he has belongs to his 
 lord; he must be perpetually in debt to his lord; he could 
 hardly leave his lord without being guilty of something very 
 like theft, an abstraction of chattels committed to his charge. 
 Very probably if he flies, his lord has a right to recapture him. 
 On the other hand, so dependent a man will be in a very strict 
 sense a tenant at will. When he dies not only his tenement 
 but his stock will belong to the lord ; like the French colibert 
 he is mainmortable. At the same time, to one familiar with the 
 cartularies of the thirteenth century the rents and services 
 that this boor has to pay and perform for his virgate will not 
 appear enormous. If we mistake not, many a mllanus of 
 Henry III.'s day would have thought them light. Of course 
 any such comparison is beset by difficulties, for at present 
 we know all too little of the history of wages and prices. 
 Nevertheless the intermediation of this class of buri or coliberti 
 between the serfs and the villeins of Domesday Book must 
 tend to raise our estimate both of the legal freedom and of the 
 economic welfare of that great mass of peasants which is now to 
 come before us 2 . 
 
 vuiani. That great mass consists of some 108,500 villani, some 
 
 cotani. ' 82,600 bordarii, and some 6,800 cotarii and coscets*. Though 
 in manor after manor we may find representatives of each of 
 these three classes, we can see that for some important purpose 
 they form but one grand class, and that the term villanus may 
 be used to cover the whole genus as well as to designate one of 
 
 1 Kectitudines, c. 3. 
 
 2 Occasionally the coliberti of D. B. are put before us as paying rents in 
 money or in kind. Thus D. B. i 38, Hants : ' In Coseham sunt 4 hidae quae 
 pertinent huic manerio ubi T. B. E. erant 8 burs i. coliberti cum 4 carucis 
 reddentes 50 sol. 8 den. minus.' D. B. i. 179 b, Heref. : ' Villani dant de 
 consuetudine 13 sol. et 4 den. et [sex] coliberti reddunt 3 sextarios frumenti et 
 ordei et 2 oves et dimidiam cum agnis et 2 den. et unuin obolum.' D. B. i. 165 : 
 'et in Glouucestre 1 burgensis reddens 5 den. et 2 coliberti reddentes 34 den.' In 
 a charter coming from Bishop Denewulf (K. 1079) we read of three wite-the6w- 
 men who were boor-born and three who were the6w-born. 
 
 3 Ellis, Introduction, ii. 511-14.
 
 The Villeins. 39 
 
 its three species. In the Exon Domesday a common formula, 
 
 having stated the number of hides in the manor and the number 
 
 of teams for which it can find work, proceeds to divide the land 
 
 and the existing teams between the demesne and the villani 
 
 the villani, it will say, have so many hides and so many teams. 
 
 Then it will state how many villani, bordarii, cotarii there are. 
 
 But it will sometimes fall out that there are no villani if that 
 
 term is to be used in its specific sense, and so, after having been 
 
 told that the villani have so much land and so many teams, we 
 
 learn that the only villani on this manor are bordarii 1 . The 
 
 lines which divide the three species are, we may be sure, much 
 
 rather economic than legal lines. Of course the law may 
 
 recognise them upon occasion 2 , but we can not say that the 
 
 bordarius has a different status from that of the villanus. In 
 
 the Leges both fall under the term villani ; indeed, as hereafter 
 
 will be seen, that term has sometimes to cover all men who are 
 
 not servi but are not noble. Nor must we suppose that the 
 
 economic lines are drawn with much precision or according to 
 
 any one uniform pattern. Of villani and bordarii we may read 
 
 in every county ; cotarii or coscets in considerable numbers are 
 
 found only in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex, Wiltshire, Dorset, 
 
 Somerset, Berkshire, Hertford and Cambridge, though they are 
 
 not absolutely unknown in Buckingham, in Devon, in Hereford, 
 
 Worcester, Shropshire, Yorkshire. We can not tell how the 
 
 English jurors would have expressed the distinction between 
 
 bordarii and cotarii, for while the cot is English, the borde is 
 
 French. If we are entitled to draw any inference from the 
 
 distribution of the cottiers, it would be that the smallest of 
 
 small tenements were to be found chiefly along the southern 
 
 shore ; but then there are no cotarii in Hampshire, plenty in 
 
 Sussex, Surrey, Wiltshire and Dorset. Again, in the two shires 
 
 last mentioned some distinction seems to be taken between the 
 
 coscets and the cotarii, the former being superior to the latter 3 . 
 
 Two centuries later we find a similar distinction among the 
 
 tenants of Worcester Priory. There are colmanni whose rents 
 
 1 For examples see D. B. iv. 211 and the following pages. 
 
 2 Leg. Hen. 81, 3 : ' Quidam villani qui stint eiusmodi leierwitam et 
 blodwitam et huiusmodi minora forisfacta emerunt a dominis suis, vel quomodo 
 meruerunt de suis et in suos, quorum fletgefoth vel overseunessa eat 30 den. ; 
 cothseti 15 den. ; servi 6 den.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 71, Haseberie : ' 5 villani et 13 coscez et 2 cotarii.' Ibid. 80 b ; 
 Chinestanestone : ' 18 villani et 14 coscez et 4 cotarii.'
 
 40 Domesday Book. 
 
 and services are heavier, and whose tenements are presumably 
 larger than those of the cotarii, though the difference is not 
 very great 1 . 
 
 Size of the The vagueness of distinctions such as these is well illustrated 
 tenement, by the failure of the term bordarius (and none is more prominent 
 in Domesday Book) to take firm root in this country 2 . The suc- 
 cessors of the bordarii seem to become in the later documents 
 either villani with small or cottiers with large tenements. 
 Distinctions which turn on the amount of land that is possessed 
 or the amount of service that is done cannot be accurately 
 formulated and forced upon a whole country. Perhaps in 
 general we may endow the villanus of Domesday Book with a 
 virgate or quarter of a hide, while we ascribe to the bordarius 
 a less quantity and doubt whether the cotarius usually had 
 arable land. But the survey of Middlesex, which is the main 
 authority touching this matter, shows that the villanus may on 
 occasion have a whole hide 3 , that is four virgates, and that often 
 he has but half a virgate; it shows us that the bordarius, 
 though often he has but four or five acres, may have a half 
 virgate, that is as much as many a villanus* ; it shows us that 
 the cotarius may have five acres, that is as much as many a 
 bordarius 6 , though he will often have no more than a croft 6 . 
 In Essex we hear of bordarii who held no arable land 7 . Nor 
 dare we lay down any stern rule about the possession of plough 
 beasts. It would seem as if sometimes the bordarius had oxen, 
 while sometimes he had none 8 . The villanus might have two 
 
 1 Worcester Register, 59 b (Sedgebarrow) : four cotmanni, each of whom pays 
 20d. or works one day a week and two in autumn ; two cottarii, each of whom 
 pays 12d. or works one day a week. Ibid. 69 b (Shipston) : two cotmanni, each 
 of whom pays 3s. or works like a virgater ; two cottarii, each of whom pays 13d. 
 Ibid. 76 a (Cropthorn) : two cotmanni, each of whom pays 2s. or works like a 
 cottarius ; two cottarii, each of whom pays 18d. or works one day a week. 
 
 2 Vinogradoff, Villainage, 149, gives a few instances of its occurrence ; but it 
 seems to be very rare. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 127 b, Fuleham : Ibi 5 villani quisque 1 hidam.' There are a 
 good many other instances. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 130, Hamntone ; ' et 4 bordarii quisque de dimidia virga.' 
 
 5 D. B. i. 127, Herges : ' et 2 cotarii de 13 acris.' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 127 b, Fuleham : ' et 22 cotarii de dimidia hida et 8 cotarii de suis 
 hortis.' 
 
 7 D. B. ii. 75 b : ' et 5 bordarii super aquam qui non tenent terrain.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 163 b, Turneberie : ' et 42 villani et 18 radchenistre cum 21 carucis 
 et 23 bordarii et 15 servi et 4 coliberti.' Ibid. 164, Hechanestede : ' et 5 villani 
 et 8 bordarii cum 6 carucis ; ibi 6 servi.'
 
 The Villeins. 41 
 
 oxen, but he might have more or less. We may find that in 
 Cornwall a single team of eight is forthcoming where there are 1 
 
 3 villani, 4 bordarii, 2 servi 
 
 2 2 3 
 
 5 2 
 
 1 5 1 
 
 2 5 4 
 
 2 3 1 
 
 3 6 3 
 
 In some Gloucestershire manors every villein seems to have a 
 full plough team 2 . Merely economic grades are essentially 
 indefinite. Who could have defined a ' cottage ' in the eleventh 
 century ? Who can define one now* ? 
 
 In truth the vast class of men that we are examining Villeins 
 
 , I'll -KT 1 aU< * C t" 
 
 must have been heterogeneous to a high degree. Not only tiers, 
 were some members of it much wealthier than others, but 
 in all probability some were economically subject to others. 
 So it was in later days. In the thirteenth century we may 
 easily find a manor in which the lord is paying hardly any 
 wages. He gets nearly all his agricultural work done for 
 him by his villeins and his cottiers. Out of his cottiers how- 
 ever he will get but one day's work in the week. If then we 
 ask what the cottiers are doing during the rest of their time, 
 the answer surely must be that they are often working as hired 
 labourers on the villein's virgates, for a cottier can not have 
 spent five days in the week over the tillage -of his poor little 
 tenement. It is a remarkable feature of the manorial arrange- 
 ment that the meanest of the lord's nativi are but rarely working 
 for him. Thus if we were to remove the lord in order that the 
 village community might be revealed, we should still see not 
 only rich and poor, but employers and employed, villagers and 
 ' undersettles.' 
 
 Now all these people are in a sense unfree, while yet in some Freedom 
 other sense they are free. Let us then spend a short while in freedom of 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 215-223 ; on p. 223 there are two villani with one ox. 
 
 a D. B. i. 164, Tedeneham : ' Ibi erant 38 villani habentes 38 carucas.' Ibid. 
 164 b, Nortune, ' 15 villani cum 15 carucis ; Stanwelle, 5 villani cum 5 carucis.' 
 
 3 Maiden, Domesday Survey of Surrey (Domesday Studies, ii.) 469, says that 
 in Surrey ' bordarii and cotarii only occur once together upon the same manor, 
 and very seldom in the same hundred There are three hundreds, Godalming, 
 Wallington and Elmbridge, where the cotarii are nearly universal to the exclusion 
 of bordarii. In the others the bordarii are nearly or quite universal, to the 
 exclusion of the cotarii.'
 
 42 Domesday Book. 
 
 discussing the various meanings that freedom may have in a 
 legal classification of the sorts and conditions of men. When 
 we have put out of account the rightless slave, who is a thing, 
 it still remains possible to say that some men are unfree, while 
 others are free, and even that freedom is a matter of degree. 
 But we may use various standards for the measurement of 
 liberty. 
 
 Meaning of Perhaps in the first place we shall think of what German 
 writers call Freizugigkeit, the power to leave the master whom 
 one has been serving. This power our ancestors would perhaps 
 have called ' fare- worthiness 1 .' If the master has the right to 
 recapture the servant who leaves his service, or even if he has 
 the right to call upon the officers of the state to pursue him 
 and bring him back to his work, then we may account this 
 servant an unfree man, albeit the relation between him and his 
 master has been created by free contract. Such unfreedom is 
 very distinct from rightlessness. As a freak of jurisprudence 
 we might imagine a modern nobleman entitled to reduce 
 by force and arms his fugitive butler to well-paid and easy 
 duties, while all the same that butler had rights against all 
 the world including his master, had access to all courts, and 
 could even sue for his wages if they were not punctually paid. 
 If we call him unfree, then freedom will look like a matter of 
 degree, for the master's power to get back his fugitive may be 
 defined by law in divers manners. May he go in pursuit and 
 use force ? Must he send a constable or sheriff's officer ? Must 
 he first go to court and obtain a judgment, ' a decree for specific 
 performance ' of the contract of service ? The right of recapture 
 seems to shade off gradually into a right to insist that a breach 
 of the contract of service is a criminal offence to be punished by 
 fine or imprisonment. 
 
 Then, again, there may seem to us to be more of unfreedom 
 in the case of one who was born a servant than in the case of 
 one who has contracted to serve, though we should note that 
 one may be born to serve without being born rightless. 
 
 More to the point than these obvious reflections will be the 
 remark that in the thirteenth century we learn to think of 
 various spheres or planes of justice. A right good in one 
 
 1 Thorpe, Diplomatarium, 623. King Eadwig declares that a certain church- 
 ward of Exeter is free and fare-worthy.'
 
 The Villeins. 43 
 
 sphere may have no existence in another. The rights of the 
 villeins in their tenements are sanctioned by manorial justice ; 
 they are ignored by the king's courts. Here, again, the ideas of 
 freedom and unfreedom find a part to play. True that in the 
 order of legal logic freedom may precede royal protection ; a 
 tenure is protected because it is free ; still men are soon arguing 
 that it is free because it is protected, and this probably discloses 
 an idea which lies deep 1 : the king's courts, the national courts, 
 are open to the free ; we approach the rightlessness of the slave 
 if our rights are recognized only in a court of which our lord is 
 the president. 
 
 The thirteenth century will also supply us with the notion 
 that continuous agricultural service, service in which there is a 
 considerable element of uncertainty, is unfree service. Where 
 from day to day the lord's will counts for much in determining 
 the work that his tenants must do, such tenants, even if they 
 be free men, are not holding freely. But uncertainty is a 
 matter of degree, and therefore unfreedom may easily be re- 
 garded as a matter of degree 2 . 
 
 Then, again, in the law books of the Norman age we see 
 distinct traces of a usage which would make liber or liberalis an 
 equivalent for our noble, or at least for our gentle. The common 
 man with the wergild of 200 shillings, though indubitably he 
 is no servus, is not liberalis homo 3 . 
 
 Lastly, in our thirteenth century we learn that privileges 
 and exceptional immunities are 'liberties' and 'franchises.' 
 What is our definition of a liberty, a franchise ? A portion of 
 royal power in the hands of a subject. In Henry III.'s day we 
 do not say that the Earl of Chester is a freer man, more of a 
 liber homo, than is the Earl of Gloucester, but we do say that 
 he has more, greater, higher liberties. 
 
 Therefore we shall not be surprised if in Domesday Book 
 what we read of freedom, of free men, of free land is sadly 
 obscure. Let us then observe that the villanus both is and is 
 not a free man. 
 
 According to the usual terminology of the Leges, everyone The villein 
 who is above the rank of a servus, but below the rank of a ^ 
 thegn, is a villanus. The villanus is the non-noble liber homo. 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 341 ff. 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 354-8. 
 
 8 Liebermann, Instituta Cuuti, Transact. Boy. Hist. Soc. vii. 93.
 
 44 Domesday Book. 
 
 All those numerous sokemen of the eastern counties whom 
 Domesday ranks above the villani, all those numerous liberi 
 homines whom it ranks above the sokemen, are, according to 
 this scheme, villani if they be not thegns. And this scheme is 
 still of great importance, for it is the scheme of bot and wer. 
 By what have been the most vital of all the rules of law, all 
 these men have been massed together ; each of them has a wer 
 of two hundred shillings 1 . This, we may remark in passing, 
 is no trivial sum, though the shillings are the small Saxon 
 shillings of four pence or five pence. There seems to be a good 
 deal of evidence that for a long time past the ox had been 
 valued at 30 pence, the sheep at 5 pence 2 . At this rate the 
 ceorl's death must be paid for by the price of some twenty-four 
 or thirty oxen. The sons of a villanus who had but two oxen 
 must have been under some temptation to wish that their 
 father would get himself killed by a solvent thegn. Very rarely 
 
 1 Leg. Will. Conq. i. 8 : 'La were del them 20 lib. in Merchenelahe, 25 lib. 
 in Westsexenelahe. La were del vilain 100 sol. en Merchenelahe e ensement 
 en Westsexene.' Leg. Henr. 70, 1 : 'In Westsexa quae caput regni est et 
 legum, twyhindi, i.e. villani, wera est 4 lib. ; twelfhindi, i.e. thaini, 25 lib.' 
 Ibid. 76, 2 : ' Omnis autem wera liberorum est aut servorum... liberi alii 
 twylundi, alii syxhindi, alii twelfhindi'; 6, twihindus = cyrliscus= villanus. 
 As to the 100 shillings in the first of these passages, see Schmid, p. 676. There 
 is some other evidence that the equation, 1 Norman shilling = 2 English shillings, 
 was occasionally treated as correct enough. As to the six-hynde man, see 
 Schmid, p. 653 ; we may doubt whether he existed in the eleventh century, but 
 according to the Instituta Cnuti the-radchenistres of the west may have been 
 six-hynde. We must not draw from Alfred's treaty with the Danes (Schmid, 
 p. 107) the inference that the normal ceorl was seated on gafol-land. This 
 international instrument is settling an exceptionally high tariff for the main- 
 tenance of the peace. Every man, whatever his rank, is to enjoy the handsome 
 wergild of 8 half-marks of pure gold, except the Danish lysing and the English 
 ceorl who is seated on gafol-land ; these are to have but the common wer of 
 200 shillings. The parallel passage in Jilthelred's treaty (Schmid, p. 207) sets 
 30 on every free man if he is killed by a man of the other race. See Schmid, 
 p. 676. 
 
 2 Ine, 55 : a sheep with a lamb until a fortnight after Easter is worth 
 1 shilling, -33thelstan, vi. 6 : a horse 120 pence, an ox 30 pence, a cow 20, a 
 sheep 1 shilling (5 pence). Ibid. 8, 5 : an ox 30 pence. Schmid, App. i. c. 7 : 
 a horse 30 shillings, a mare 20 shillings, an ox 30 pence, a cow 24 pence, a swine 
 8 pence, a sheep 1 shilling, a goat 2 pence, a man (i.e. a slave) 1 pound. 
 Schmid, App. iii. c. 9 : a sheep or 3 pence. D. B. i. 117 b : an ox or 30 pence. 
 D. B. i. 26 : Tolls at Lewes ; for a man 4 p'ence, an ox a halfpenny. This 
 preserves the equation that we have already seen, namely, 1 slave = 8 oxen. Thus 
 the full team is worth one pound. On the twelfth century Pipe Bolls the ox 
 often costs 3 shillings ( = 36 pence) or even more.
 
 The Villeins. 45 
 
 indeed do the Leges notice the sokeman or mention liberi 
 homines so as to exclude the villani from the scope of that 
 term 1 . Domesday Book also on occasion can divide mankind 
 into slaves and free men. It does so when it tells us that on a 
 Gloucestershire manor there were twelve servi whom the lord 
 had made free 2 . It does so again when it tells us that in the 
 city of Chester the bishop had eight shillings if a free man, 
 four shillings if a serf, did work upon a festival 8 . So in a 
 description of the manor of South Perrott in Somerset we 
 read that a certain custom is due to it from the manor of 
 'Cruche' (Crewkerne), namely, that every free man must render 
 one bloom of iron. We look for these free men at ' Cruche ' and 
 see no one on the manor but villani, bordarii, coliberti and 
 servi*. Of the Count of Mortain's manor of Bickenhall it is 
 written that every free man renders a bloom of iron at the 
 king's manor of Curry ; but at Bickenhall there is no one above 
 the condition of a villanus 5 . Other passages will suggest that 
 the villanus sometimes is and sometimes is not liber homo. On 
 a Norfolk manor we find free villeins, liberi villani 6 . 
 
 For all this, however, there must be some very important The villein 
 sense in which the villanus is not free. In the survey of the as 
 eastern counties he is separated from the liberi homines by the 
 whole class of sochemanni. 'In this manor,' we are told, 
 ' there was at that time a free man with half a hide who has 
 now been made one of the villeins 7 .' At times the word 
 
 1 In Leg. Will. Conq. i. 16, we hear of the forisfacturae (probably the 
 'insult fines') due to archbishops, bishops, counts, barons and sokemen ; the 
 baron has 10 shillings, the sokeman 40 pence. In the same document, c. 20, 
 2, we read of the reliefs of counts, barons, vavassors and villeins. Leg. Edw. 
 Conf. 12, 4, speaks of the maribdt due in the Danelaw; on the death of a 
 villanus or a socheman 12 ores are paid, on the death of a liber homo 3 marks. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 167 b, Heile : ' ibi erant 12 servi quos Willelmus liberos fecit.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 263 : ' Si quis liber homo facit opera in die feriato inde episcopus 
 habet 8 solidos. De servo autem vel ancilla feriatum diem infringente, habet 
 cpiscopus 4 solidos.' Compare Cnut, u. 45. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 86 : ' Huic manerio reddebatur T. B. E. de Cruche per annum 
 consuetude, hoc est 6 oves cum agnis totidera, et quisque liber homo i. blomam 
 ferri.' South Perrott had belonged to the Confessor, Crewkerne to Edith, 
 probably ' the rich and fair.' For the description of Cruche see D. B. i. 86 b. 
 As to the ' bloom ' of iron see Ellis, Introduction, i. 136. 
 
 9 D. B. i. 92. See also p. 87 b, the account of Seveberge. 
 D. B. ii. 145. 
 
 7 D. B. ii. 1 : ' In hoc manerio erat tune temporis quidani liber homo da 
 dimidia hida qui modo effectus est anus de villanis.'
 
 46 Domesday Booh 
 
 francus is introduced so as to suggest for a moment that, 
 though the villein may be liber homo, he is not francus*. But 
 this suggestion, even if it be made, is not maintained, and 
 there are hundreds of passages which implicitly deny that the 
 villein is liber homo. But then these passages draw the line 
 between freedom and unfreedom at a point high in the legal 
 scale, a point far above the heads of the villani. At least for 
 the main purposes of Domesday Book the free man is a man who 
 holds land freely. Let us observe what is said of the men who 
 have been holding manors. The formula will vary somewhat 
 from county to county, but we shall often find four phrases used 
 as equivalent, ' X tenuit et liber homo fuit,' ' X tenuit ut liber 
 homo,' ' X tenuit et cum terra sua liber fuit,' ' X tenuit libere 2 .' 
 But this freeholding implies a high degree of freedom, freedom 
 of a kind that would have shocked the lawyers of a later age. 
 Anglo- With some regrets we must leave the peasants for a while 
 
 Saxon . ii-i 
 
 'free- in order that we may glance at the higher strata of society. 
 We may take it as certain that, at least in the eyes of 
 William's ministers, the ordinary holder of a manor in the 
 time of the Confessor had been holding it under (sub) some 
 lord, if not of (de) some lord. But then the closeness of the 
 connexion between him and his lord, the character of the 
 relation between lord, man and land, had varied much from 
 case to case. Now these matters are often expressed in terms 
 of a calculus of personal freedom. But let us begin with some 
 phrases which seem intelligible enough. The man can, or he 
 can not, ' sell or give his land ' ; he can, or he can not, ' sell or 
 give it without the licence of his lord ' ; he can sell it if he has 
 first offered it to his lord 3 ; he can sell it on paying his lord two 
 shillings 4 . This seems very simple : the lord can, or (as the 
 
 1 Thus D. B. i. 127, Mid. : ' inter francos et villanos 45 carucae 1 ; Ibid. 
 70, Wilts: ' 4 villani et 3 bordarii et unus francus cum 2 carucis' ; Ibid. 241, 
 Warw. : ' Ibi sunt 3 francones homines cum 4 villanis et 3 bordariis. ' Sometimes 
 francus maybe an equivalent forfrancigena; e.g. i. 254 b, where in one entry we 
 have units francigena and in the next unus francus homo. But an Englishman 
 may be francus ; ii. 54 b ' accepit 15 acras de uno franco teigno et misit cum 
 terra sua.' However, it is not an insignificant fact that the very name of 
 Frenchman (francigena) must have suggested free birth. 
 
 2 For examples see the surveys of Warwick, Stafford and Shropshire. 
 
 3 D. B. ii. 260 : ' et 7 homines qui possent vendere terrain suam si earn prius 
 obtulissent domino suo.' 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 278 b : 'si veil cut recedere daret quisque 2 solidos.' Ibid. 207 : 
 * et possent recedere si darent 2 solidos.'
 
 The Villeins. 47 
 
 case may be) can not, prevent his tenant from alienating the 
 land ; he has a right of preemption or he has a right to exact 
 a fine when there is a change of tenants. But then come 
 phrases that are less in harmony with our idea of feudal tenure. 
 The man can not sell his land ' away from ' his lord 1 , he can not 
 give or sell it ' outside ' a certain manor belonging to his lord 2 , 
 or, being the tenant of some church, he can not ' separate ' his 
 land from the church 3 , or give or sell it outside the church 4 . 
 
 We have perhaps taken for granted under the influence of Freehold- 
 later law that, an alienation will not impair the lord's rights, thf fold's 
 and will but give him a new instead of an old tenant. But it is n s hts - 
 not of any mere substitution such as this that these men of the 
 eleventh century are thinking. They have it in their minds 
 that the man may wish, may be able, utterly to withdraw his 
 land from the sphere of his lord's rights. Therefore in many 
 cases they note with "some care that the man, though he can 
 give or sell his land, can not altogether put an end to such 
 relation as has existed between this land and his lord. He can 
 sell, but some of the lord's rights will ' remain,' in particular 
 the lord's ' soke ' over the land (for the present let us say his 
 jurisdiction over the land) will remain 8 . The purchaser will 
 not of necessity become the 'man' of this lord, will not of 
 necessity owe him any servitium or consuetudo, but will come 
 under his jurisdiction 6 . Interchanging however with these 
 phrases 7 , we have others which seem to point to the same set 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 435: 'Et super Vlnoht habuit commendationem antecessor 
 B. Malet, teste hundredo, et non potuit vendere nee dare de eo terram suam.' 
 Ibid. 397 : ' viderunt earn iurare quod non poterat dare [vel] vendere terram 
 suam ab antecessore Bicardi.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 145 : ' Hoc manerium tenuit Aluuinus homo Estan, non potuit 
 dare nee vendere extra Brichelle manerium Estani.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 133 : ' Hanc terram tenuit Aluric Blac 2 hidas de Abbate Westmon- 
 asterii T. B. E.: non poterat separare ab aecclesia.' 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 216 b : .' Ita est in monasterio quod nee vendere nee forisfacere 
 potest extra ecclesia.' 
 
 8 For example, D. B. i. 201 : ' terram suam vendere potuerunt, soca vero 
 remansit Abbati.' D. B. ii. 78: ' et poterant vendere terram set soca et saca 
 remanebat antecessori Alberici.' Ibid. ii. 92 b : unus sochemannus fuit in hac 
 terra de 15 acris quas poterat vendere, set soca iacebat in Warleia terra S. Pauli.' 
 
 6 But the consuetudo, rent or the like, may 'remain': D. B. ii. 181 b : 'et 
 possent vendere terram suam set consuetudo remanebat in manerio.' And so 
 the commendatio may ' remain '; ii. 357 b : ' Hi poterant dare et vendere terram, 
 set saca et soca et commendatio remanebant Sancto [Eadmundo].' 
 
 7 For example, D. B. i. 201 : ' Homines Abbatis de Ely fuerunt et 4 terram
 
 48 Domesday Book. 
 
 of distinctions, but to express them in terms of personal free- 
 dom. The man can, or else he can not, withdraw from his lord, 
 go away from his lord, withdraw from his lord's manor ; he can 
 or he can not withdraw with his land ; he can or can not go to 
 another lord, or go wherever he pleases 1 . Some of these 
 phrases will, if taken literally, seem to say that the persons of 
 whom they are used are tied to the soil ; they can not leave 
 the land, or the manor, or the soke. Probably in some of 
 these cases the bond between man and lord is a perpetual bond 
 of homage and fealty, and if the man breaks that bond by 
 refusing the due obedience or putting himself under another 
 lord, he is guilty of a wrong 2 . But of pursuing him and 
 capturing him and reducing him to servitude there can be 
 no talk. Many of these persons who ' can not recede ' are men 
 of wealth and rank, of high rank that is recognized by law, 
 they are king's thegns or the thegns of the churches, they are 
 ' twelve-hundred men 3 .' However, it is not the man's power to 
 leave his lord so much as the power to leave his lord and take 
 his land with him, that these phrases bring to our notice ; 
 or rather the assumption is made that no one will want to 
 leave his lord if he must also leave his land behind him. And 
 then this power of taking land from this lord and bringing it 
 under another lord is conceived as an index of personal freedom. 
 Thus we read : ' These men were so free that they could go 
 
 suarn vendere potuerunt, soca vero remansit Abbati, et quartos 1 virgam et dimi- 
 diam habuit et recedere non potuit.' See the important evidence produced by 
 Bound, Feudal England, 24, as to the equivalence of these phrases. 
 
 1 One of the commonest terms is recedere 'potuit recedere' 'non potuit 
 recedere' ; i. 41, 'non potuit cum terra recedere ad alium dominum ' ; i. 56 b, '10 
 liberi homines T. K. E. tenebant 12 hidas et dimidiam de terra eiusdem manerii 
 Bed inde recedere non poterant'; ii. 19 b, 'non poterant recedere a terra sine 
 licentia Abbatis ' ; ii. 57 b, ' non poterant recedere ab illo manerio ' ; ii. 66, 'non 
 poterant removere ab illo manerio ' ; ii. 41, ' non poterant recedere a soca Wisgari' ; 
 ii. 41 b, ' nee poterant abire sine iussu domini'; i. 66 b, ' qui tenuit T. B. E. non 
 poterat ab aecclesia diverti [separari] ' ; ii. 116, ' unus [burgensis] erat ita domini- 
 cus ut non posset recedere nee homagium facere sine licentia [Stigandi]'; ii. 119, 
 ' de istis hominibus erant 36 ita dominice Begis Edwardi ut non possent essc 
 homines cuiuslibet sed semper tamen consuetudo regis remanebat preter herigete.' 
 A remarkable form is, ii. 57 b, ' non potuit istam terram mittere in aliquo loco 
 nisi in abbatia. ' Then 'potuit ire quo voluit,' 'non potuit ire quolibet'are 
 common enough. 
 
 2 Ine, c. 39 : He who leaves his lord without permission pays sixty shillings 
 to his lord. 
 
 8 For example, D. B. i. 41 : ' Tres taini tenuerunt de episcopo et non potuerunt 
 ire quolibet. 1
 
 The Villeins. 49 
 
 where they pleased 1 ,' and again, ' Four sokemen held this land, 
 of whom three were free, while the fourth held one hide but 
 could not give or sell it 2 .' Not that no one is called a liber 
 homo unless he has this power of ' receding ' from his lord ; far 
 from it ; all is a matter of degree ; but the free man is freer if 
 he can 'go to what lord he pleases,' and often enough the 
 phrases 'X tenuit et liber homo fait,' ' X tenuit libere,' 'X 
 tenuit ut liber homo ' seem to have no other meaning than this, 
 that the occupant of the land enjoyed the liberty of taking it 
 with him whithersoever he would. Therefore there is no 
 tautology in saying that the holder of the land was a thegn 
 and a free man, though of course there is a sense, there are 
 many senses, in which every thegn is free 3 . All this talk of 
 the freedom that consists in choosing a lord and subjecting land 
 to him may well puzzle us, for it puzzled the men of the 
 twelfth century. The chronicler of Abingdon abbey had to 
 explain that in the old days a free man could do strange 
 things 4 . 
 
 Comparisons may be instituted between the freedom of one The s<!aie 
 free man and that of another : ' Five thegns held this land of holding. 
 Earl Edwin and could go with their land whither they would, and 
 below them they had four soldiers, who were as free as them- 
 selves 5 .' A high degree of liberty is marked when we are told 
 that, ' The said men were so free that they could sell their land 
 with soke and sake wherever they would 6 .' But there are yet 
 higher degrees of liberty. Of Worcestershire it is written, 
 ' When the king goes upon a military expedition, if anyone who 
 is summoned stays at home, then if he is so free a man that he 
 has his sake and soke and can go whither he pleases with his 
 land, he with all his land shall be in the king's mercy 7 .' The 
 
 1 D. B. i. 35 b, Tornecrosta. a D. B. i. 212 b, Stanford. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 249 b : ' Tres taini tenuerant et liberi homines fuerunt ' ; 256, 
 ' Ipsi taini liberi erant ' ; 259 b, ' Quatuor taini tenuerant ante eum et liberi 
 fuerunt.' 
 
 4 Chron. Abingd. i. 490: 'Nam quidam dives, Turkillus nomine, sub Haroldi 
 comitis tcstimonio et consultu, de se cum sua terra quae Eingestun dicitur, 
 ecclesiae Abbendonensi et abbati Ordrico homagium fecit ; licitum quippe libero 
 cuique, illo in tempore, sic agere erat.' 
 
 5 D. B. i. 180 b: 'et poterant ire cum terra quo volebant, et habebant sub se 
 4 milites, ita liberos ut ipsi erant.' 
 
 D. B. ii. 59. 
 
 7 D. B. i. 172: 'si ita liber homo est ut habeat socam suam et sacam et cum 
 terra sua possit ire quo voluerit.' 
 
 4
 
 50 Domesday Book. 
 
 free man is the freer if he has soke and sake, if he has juris- 
 diction over other men. Exceptional privileges, immunities 
 from common burdens, are already regarded as ' liberties.' This 
 is no new thing; often enough when the Anglo-Saxon land 
 books speak of freedom they mean privilege. 
 
 Free land. The idea of freedom is equally vague and elastic if, instead 
 of applying it to men, we apply it to land or the tenure of land. 
 Two bordarii are now holding a small plot ; ' they themselves 
 held it freely in King Edward's day 1 .' Here no doubt there 
 has been a fall ; but how deep a fall we can not be sure. To 
 say that a man's land is free may imply far more freedom than 
 freehold tenure implies in later times ; it may imply that the 
 bond between him and his lord, if indeed he has a lord, is of a 
 purely personal character and hardly gives the lord any hold 
 over the land 2 . But this is not all. Perfect freedom is not 
 attained so long as the land owes any single duty to the state. 
 Often enough but exactly how often it were no easy task to tell 
 
 the libera terra of our record is land that has been exempted 
 
 even from the danegeld; it is highly privileged land 8 . Let 
 us remember that at the present day, though the definition of 
 free land or freehold land has long ago been fixed, we still speak 
 as though free land might become freer if it were ' free of land- 
 tax and tithe rent-charge.' 
 
 Theunfree- If now we return to the villanus and deny that he is liber 
 
 villein. homo and deny also that he is holding freely, we shall be saying 
 little and using the laxest of terms. There are half-a-dozen 
 questions that we would fain ask about him, and there will be 
 no harm in asking them, though Domesday Book is taciturn. 
 
 Can the Jg ne free to quit his lord and his land, or can he be pursued 
 
 villein be 
 
 pursued ? 
 
 1 D. B. i. 84 b. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 213 : ' Hanc terram calumpniatnr esse liberam Vlchitel homo 
 Hermeri, quocunque modo iudicetur, vel bello vel iudicio, et alias est praesto 
 probare eo modo quod iacuit ad ecclesiam [S. Adeldredae] die quo rex Edwardus 
 obiit. Set totus hundretus testatur earn fuisse T. B. E. ad S. Adeldredam.' 
 
 8 See in particular the survey of Gloucestershire; D. B. i. 165 b: 'Hoc 
 manerium quietum est a geldo et ab omni forensi servitio praeter aecclesiae ' ; 
 Ibid. ' Haec terra libera fuit et quieta ab omni geldo efc regali servitio ' ; 170, 
 ' Una hida et dimidia libera a geldo.' When after reading these passages we 
 come upon the following (167 b), ' Isdem W. tenet Tatinton: Ulgar tenuit de 
 rege Edwardo : haec terra libera est,' and when we observe that the land is not 
 hidated, we shall probably infer that ' This land is free ' means ' This land is 
 exempt from geld, and (perhaps) from all other royal service.'
 
 The Villeins. 51 
 
 and captured ? No one word can be obtained in answer to this 
 question. We can only say that in Henry II.'s day the ordinary 
 peasant was regarded by the royal officials as ascriptitius ; the 
 land that he occupied was said to be part of his lord's demesne ; 
 his chattels were his lord's 1 . But then this was conceived to be, 
 at least in some degree, the result of the Norman Conquest and 
 subsequent rebellions of the peasantry 2 . To this we may add 
 that in one of our sets of Leges, the French Leis of William the 
 Conqueror, there are certain clauses which would be of great im- 
 portance could we suppose that they had an authoritative origin, 
 and which in any case are remarkable enough. The nativus 
 who flies from the land on which he is born, let none retain him 
 or his chattels; if the lords will not send back these men to 
 their land the king's officers are to do it 3 . On the other hand, 
 the tillers of the soil are not to be worked beyond their proper 
 rent ; their lord may not remove them from their land so long 
 as they perform their right services 4 . Whether or no we 
 suppose that in the writer's opinion the ordinary peasant was a 
 nativus (of nativi Domesday Book has nothing to say) we still 
 have law more favourable to the peasant than was the common 
 law of Bracton's age : a tiller who does his accustomed service 
 is not to be ejected ; he is no tenant at will. 
 
 Hereafter we shall show that the English peasants did suffer Rarity of 
 by the substitution of French for English lords. But the question lg *' 
 that we have asked, so urgent, so fundamental, as it may seem 
 to us, is really one which, as the history of the Roman coloni 
 might prove, can long remain unanswered. Men may become 
 economically so dependent on their lords, on wealthy masters 
 and creditors, that the legal question whether they can quit 
 their service has, no interest. Who wishes to leave his all and 
 go forth a beggar into the world ? On the whole we can 
 find no evidence whatever that the men of the Confessor's 
 day who were retrospectively called villani were tied to the 
 soil. Certainly in Norman times the tradition was held that 
 
 1 Dialogue, i. c. 11 ; ii. c. 14. 2 Dialogus, i. c. 10. 
 
 3 Will. Conq. i. 30, 31 : 'Si les seignurages ne facent altri gainurs venir a 
 lour terre, la justise le facet.' The Latin version is ridiculous : ' Si domini 
 terrarum non procurent idoneos cultores ad terras suas colendas, iustitiarii hoc 
 faciant.' The translator seems to have been puzzled by the word altri or 
 autrui. 
 
 * Ibid. 29. 
 
 42
 
 52 Domesday Book. 
 
 according to the old law the villanus might acquire five hides 
 of land and so ' thrive to thegn-right 1 .' 
 
 The villein Our next question should be whether he was subject to 
 
 noriaf ig seignorial justice. This is part of a much wider question that 
 
 justice. we must face hereafter, for seignorial justice should be treated 
 
 as a whole. We .must here anticipate a conclusion, the proof of 
 
 which will come by and by, namely, that the villanus sometimes 
 
 was and sometimes was not the justiciable of a court in which 
 
 his lord or his lord's steward presided. All depended on the 
 
 answer to the question whether his lord had ' sake and soke.' 
 
 Hie lord might have justiciary rights over all his tenants, 
 
 or merely over his villani, or he might have no justiciary rights, 
 
 for as yet ' sake and soke ' were in the king's gift, and the mere 
 
 fact that a lord had 'men' or tenants did not give him a juris- 
 
 . diction over them. 
 
 The villein With this question is connected another, namely, whether 
 aT justice?" the villani had a locus standi in the national courts. We have 
 seen six villani together with the priest (undoubtedly a free 
 man) and the reeve of each vill summoned to swear in the great 
 inquest 2 . One of the most famous scenes recorded by our book 
 is that in which William of Chernet claimed a Hampshire manor 
 on behalf of Hugh de Port and produced his witnesses from 
 among the best and eldest men of the county ; but Picot, the 
 sheriff of Cambridgeshire, who was in possession, replied with 
 the testimony of villeins and mean folk and reeves, who were 
 willing to support his case by oath or by ordeal*. Again, in 
 Norfolk, Roger the sheriff claimed a hundred acres and five 
 villani and a mill as belonging to the royal manor of Branfort, 
 and five villani of the said manor testified in his favour and 
 
 1 Schmid, App. v.; vn., 2, 9-11; Pseudoleges Canuti, 60-1 (Schmid, 
 p. 431). 
 
 a D. B. iv. 497. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 44 b: <Istam terram calumpniatur Willelmus de Chernet, dicens 
 pertinere ad manerium de Cerneford feuduna Hugonis de Port per hereditatem 
 sui antecessoris et de hoc suum testimonium adduxit de melioribus et antiquis 
 hominibus totius comitatus ethundredi; et Picot contraduxit suum testimonium 
 de -villains et vili plebe et de prepositis, qui volunt defendere per sacramentum 
 vel del iudicium, quod ille qui tenuit terram liber homo fuit et potuit ire cum 
 terra sua quo voluit. Sed testes Willelmi iiolunt accipere legem nisi regis 
 Edwardi usque dum diffiniatur per regem.' It seems possible that William's 
 witnesses wished to insist on the ancient rule that the oath of one thegn would 
 countervail the oaths of six ceorls. This was the old English law (lex Edwardi) 
 on which they relied.
 
 The Villeins. 53 
 
 offered to make whatever proof anyone might adjudge to them, 
 but the half-hundred of Ipswich testified that the land belonged 
 to a certain church of S*. Peter that Wihtgar held, and he offered 
 to deraign this 1 . Certainly this does not look as if villani were 
 excluded from the national moots. But a rule which valued the 
 oath of a single thegn as highly as the oath of six ceorls would 
 make the ceorl but a poor witness arid tend to keep him out of 
 court 2 . The men who are active in the communal courts, who 
 make the judgments there, are usually men of thegnly rank; 
 but to go to court as a doomsman is one thing, to go as a 
 litigant is another 3 . 
 
 We may now approach the question whether, and if so in The villein 
 what sense, the land that the villanus occupies is his land, 
 Throughout Domesday Book a distinction is sedulously main- 
 tained between the land of the villeins (terra villanorum) and 
 the land that the lord has in dominio. Let us notice this phrase. 
 Only the demesne land does the lord hold in dominio, in owner- 
 ship. The delicate shade of difference that Bracton would see 
 between dominicum and dominium is not as yet marked. In 
 later times it became strictly correct to say that the lord held 
 in demesne (in dominico sno) not only the lands which he occu- 
 pied by himself or his servants, but also the lands held of him 
 by villein tenure 4 . This usage appears very plainly in the 
 Dialogue on the Exchequer. ' You shall know,' says the writer, 
 'that we give the name demesnes (dominica) to those lands 
 that a man cultivates at his own cost or by his own labour, and 
 also to those which are possessed in his name by his ascriptitii ; 
 for by the law of this kingdom not only can these ascriptitii be 
 removed by their lords from the lands that they now possess 
 and transferred to other places, but they may be sold and 
 dispersed at will ; so that rightly are both they and the lands 
 which they cultivate for the behalf of their lords accounted to 
 be dominia 6 ' Far other is the normal, if not invariable, usage 
 01 Domesday Book. The terrae villanorum, the silvae villanorum, 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 393 : 'et 5 villani de eodern manerio testantur ei et offerunt legem 
 qualem quis iudicaverit ; set dimidium huudret de Gepeswiz testantur quod boo 
 iacebat ad ecclesiam T. R. E. et Wisgarus tenebat et offert derationari.' 
 
 2 Schmid, App. vi.; Leg. Hen. 64 2: 'thaini iusiurandum contravalet 
 iusiurandum sex villanorum.' 
 
 Leg. Hen. 29, 1. Hist. Eng. Law, i. 344. 
 
 5 Dialogus, i. c. 11.
 
 54 Domesday Book. 
 
 the piscariae villanorum, the molini villanorum for the villeins 
 have woods and fisheries and mills these the lord does not hold 
 in dominio 1 . Then again the oxen of the villeins are carefully 
 distinguished from the oxen of the demesne, while often enough 
 they are not distinguished from the oxen of those who in every 
 sense are free tenants 2 . Now as regards both the land and the 
 oxen we seem put to the dilemma that either they belong to 
 the lord or else they belong to the villeins. We cannot avoid 
 this dilemma, as we can in later days, by saying that according 
 to the common law the ownership of these things is with the 
 lord, while according to the custom of the manor it is with the 
 villeins, for we believe that a hall-moot, a manorial court, is still 
 a somewhat exceptional institution. 
 
 On the whole we can hardly doubt that both in their land 
 and in their oxen the villeins have had rights protected by law. 
 Let us glance once more at the scheme of bot and wer that has 
 been in force. A villein is slain; the manbot payable to his 
 lord is marked off from the much heavier wergild that is payable 
 to his kindred. If all that a villein could have belonged to his 
 lord such a distinction would be idle. 
 
 The vU- Still we take it that for one most important purpose the 
 
 and the villein's land is the lord's land : the lord must answer for the 
 geld that is due from it. Not that the burden falls ultimately 
 on the lord. On the contrary, it is not unlikely that he makes 
 his villeins pay the geld that is due from his demesne land ; it 
 is one of their services that they must 'defend their lord's 
 
 1 D. B. i. 67 b : ' De terra villanorum dedit abbatissa uni militi 3 hidas et 
 dimidiam.' Ibid. 89: 'tenet Johannes de episcopo 2 hidas de terra villanorum.' 
 Ibid. i. 169 : 'unus francigena tenet terram unius villani.' Ibid. 164: 'In Sauerna 
 11 piscariae in dominio et 42 piscariae villanorum.' Ibid. 230 : ' Silva dominica 
 1 leu. long, et dim. leu. lat. Silva villanorum 4 quarent. long, et 3 quarent. 
 lat.' Ibid. 7 b : ' 5 molini villanorum. ' We have not seen dominicum used as a 
 substantive ; but in the Exon. D. B. iv. 75 we have dominicatus Regis, for the 
 king's demesne. There is already a slight ambiguity about the term dominium. 
 We may say that a church has a manor in dominio, meaning thereby that the 
 manor as a whole is held by the church itself and is not held of it by any 
 tenant; and then we may go on to say that only one half of the land com- 
 prised in this manor is held by the church in dominio. Of. Hist. Eng. Law, 
 ii. 126. 
 
 2 lor example, D. B. i. 159: 'Nunc in dominio 3 carucae et 6 servi, efc 26 
 villani cum 3 bordariis et 15 liberi homines habent 30 carucas.' Ibid. 165: 'In 
 dominio 2 carucae et 9 villani et 6 bordarii et presbyter et unus rachenistre cum 
 10 carucis.' Ibid. 258 b : ' et 3 villani et 2 bordarii et 2 francigenae cuni 2 
 carucis.' But such entries are common enough.
 
 The Villeins. 55 
 
 inland ' against the geld. But over against the state the lord 
 represents as well the land of his villeins as his own demesne 
 land. From the great levy of 1084 the demesne lands of the 
 barons had been exempted 1 , but no doubt they had been 
 responsible for the tax assessed on the lands held by their 
 villani. We much doubt whether the collectors of the geld 
 went round to the cottages of the villeins and demanded here 
 six pence and there four pence ; they presented themselves at 
 the lord's hall and asked for a large sum. Nay, we believe that 
 very often a perfectly free tenant paid his geld to his lord, or 
 through his lord 2 . Hence arrangements by which some hides 
 were made to acquit other hides; such, for example, was the 
 arrangement at Tewkesbury ; there were fifty hides which had 
 to acquit the whole ninety-five hides from all geld and royal 
 service 3 . And then it might be that the lord, enjoying a 
 special privilege, was entitled to take the geld from his tenants 
 and yet paid no geld to the king; thus did the canons of 
 S*. Petroc in Cornwall 4 and the monks of S*. Edmund in Suffolk 8 . 
 But as regards lands occupied by villeins, the king, so it seems 
 to us, looks for his geld to the lord and he does not look behind 
 the lord. This is no detail of a fiscal system. A potent force 
 has thus been set in motion. He who pays for land, it is but 
 fair that he should be considered the owner of that land. We 
 have a hint of this principle in a law of Cnut : ' He who has 
 " defended " land with the witness of the shire, is to enjoy it with- 
 out question during his life and on his death may give or sell it 
 to whom he pleases 8 .' We have another hint of this principle 
 in a story told by Heming, the monk of Worcester : in Cnut's 
 time but four days of grace were given to the landowner for 
 
 1 Bound, Domesday Studies, i. 97. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 28: 'Ipse Willelmus de Braiose tenet Wasingetune....De hac terra 
 tenet Gislebertus dim. hidam, Kadulfus 1 hidam, Willelmus 3 virgas, Leuuinus 
 dim. bidam qui potuit recedere cum terra sua et dedit geldum domino suo 
 et dominus suus nichil dedit. ' * 
 
 3 D. B. i. 163, 163 b. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 121: 'Omnes superius descriptas terras tenebant T. B. E. 
 S. Petrocns ; huius sancti terrae nunquam reddiderunt geldum nisi ipsi aeccle- 
 siae.' D. B. iv. 187 : ' Terrae S. Petrochi nunquam reddiderunt gildum nisi 
 sancto.' 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 372: 'Et quando in hundreto solvitur ad geldum 1 libra tune inde 
 exeunt 60 denarii ad victum monacborum.' 
 
 6 Cnut, n. 79 : ' And se J>e land gewerod heebbe be scire gewitnisse....' The 
 A.-S. werian is just tbe Latin defendere.
 
 56 Domesday Book. 
 
 the payment of the geld ; when these had elapsed, anyone who 
 paid the geld might have the land 1 . It is a principle which, if 
 it is applied to the case of lord and villein, will attribute the 
 ownership of the land to the lord and not to the villein. 
 Thevil- And then we would ask: What services do the villeins 
 
 vices'. Sei render? A deep silence answers us, and as will hereafter be 
 shown, there are many reasons why we should not import the 
 information given us by the monastic cartularies, even such 
 early cartularies as the Black Book of Peterborough, into the 
 days of the Confessor. No doubt the villeins usually do some 
 labour upon the lord's demesne lands. In particular they help 
 to plough it. A manor, we can see, is generally so arranged 
 that the ratio borne by the demesne oxen to the demesne land 
 will be smaller than that borne by the villeins' oxen to the 
 villeins' land. Thus, to give one example out of a hundred, in 
 a Somersetshire manor the lord has four hides and three teams, 
 the villeins have two hides and three teams 2 . But then the 
 lord gets some help in his agriculture from those who are 
 undoubtedly free tenants. The teams of the free tenants are 
 often covered by the same phrase that covers the teams of the 
 villeins 3 . Radknights who are liberi homines plough and harrow 
 at the lord's court 4 . The very few entries which tell us of the 
 labour of the villeins are quite insufficient to condemn the whole 
 class to unlimited, or even to very heavy work. On a manor in 
 Herefordshire there are twelve bordiers who work one day in 
 the week 6 . On the enormous manor of Leominsber there are 
 238 villani and 85 bordarii. The villani plough and sow with 
 their own seed 140 acres of their lord's land and they pay 
 
 1 Heming, Cartulary, i. 278; Bound, Domesday Studies, i. 89. Compare 
 the story in D..B. i. 216 b : Osbern or Osbert the fisherman claims certain land 
 as having belonged to his ' antecessor ' ; ' sed postquam rex Willelmus in 
 Angliam venit, ille gablum de hac terra dare noluit et Eadulfus Taillgebosc 
 gablum dedit et pro forisfacto ipsam terrain sumpsit et cuidam suo militi 
 tribuit.' 
 
 2 D. B. iv. 245, Cruca. 
 
 a See above p. 54, note 2. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 163 : ' Ibi erant villani 21 et 9 rachenistres habentes 26 carucas 
 et 5 coliberti et unus bordarius cum 5 carucis. Hi racheuistres arabant et 
 herciabant ad curiam domini.' Ibid. ' Ibi 19 liberi homines rachenistres 
 habentes 48 carucas cum suis hominibus.' Ibid. 166 : ' De terra huius manerii 
 tenebant radchenistres, id est liberi homines, T. R. E., qui tamen omnes ad opus 
 domini arabant et herciabant et falcabant et metebant.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 186, Ewias.
 
 The Villeins. 57 
 
 11 pounds and 52 pence 1 . On the manor ot Marcle, which 
 also is in Herefordshire, there are 36 villani and 10 bordarii 
 with 40 teams. These villani plough and sow with their own 
 seed 80 acres of wheat and 71 of oats 2 . At Kingston, yet 
 another manor in the same county, 'the villani who dwelt 
 there in King Edward's day carried venison to Hereford and 
 did no other service, so says the shire 3 .' On one Worcestershire 
 manor of t Westminster Abbey 10 villeins and 10 bordiers with 
 6 teams plough 6 acres and sow them with their own seed ; on 
 another 8 villeins and 6 bordiers with 6 teams do the like by 
 4 acres 4 . This is light work. Casually we are told of burgesses 
 living at Tamworth who have to work like the other villein^ of 
 the manor of Drayton to which they are attached 5 , and we are 
 told of men on a royal manor who do such works for the king as 
 the reeve may command 6 ; but, curiously enough, it is not of any 
 villeins but of the Bishop of Worcester's riding men (radmanni) 
 that it is written ' they do whatever is commanded them 7 .' 
 
 With our thirteenth century cartularies before us, we might Money 
 
 ., * ,,',. rents paid 
 
 easily underrate the amount of money that was already being by villeins. 
 paid as the rent of land at the date of the Conquest. In several 
 counties we come across small groups of censarii, censores, 
 gablatores who. pay for their land in money, of cervisarii 
 and mellitarii who bring beer and honey. Renders in kind, 
 in herrings, eels, salmon are not uncommon, and sometimes 
 they are ' appreciated,' valued in terms of money. The pannage 
 pig or the grass swine, which the villeins give in return for mast, 
 and herbage, is often mentioned. Throughout Sussex it seems 
 to be the custom that the lord should have ' for herbage ' one 
 pig from every villein who has seven pigs 8 . But money will be 
 taken instead of swine, oxen or fish 9 . The gersuma, the tailla, 
 
 1 D. B. i. 180. a D. B. i. 179 b. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 179 b. * D. B. i. 174 b. 
 
 5 D. B. i; 246 b. So the burgesses of Steyning (i. 17) 'ad curiam operabantur 
 sicut villani T. B. E.' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 219. 
 
 7 D. B. i. 174 b : ' Ipsi radmans secabant una die in anno et omne servitium 
 quod eis iubebatur faciebant.' The position of these tenants will be discussed . 
 hereafter in connexion with S*. Oswald's charters. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 16 b : ' De herbagio, unus porous de unoquoque villano qui habet 
 septem porcos.' In the margin stands ' Similiter per totum Sussex.' 
 
 9 D. B. i. 12 b: 'Ibi tantum silvae undo exeunt de pasnagio 40 porci aut 
 54 denarii et uuus obolus.' Ibid. 191 b: ' De presentacione piscium 12 solidi et 
 9 denarii.' Ibid. 117 b : ' aut unum bovem aut 30 denarios.'
 
 58 Domesday Book. 
 
 the theoretically free gifts of the tenants, are sums of money. 
 But often enough the villanus is paying a substantial money 
 rent. We have seen how at Leominster villeins plough and 
 sow 140 -acres for their lord and pay a rent of more than 11 1 . 
 At Lewisham in Kent the Abbot of Gand has a manor valued 
 at 30 ; of this 2 is due to the profits of the port while two 
 mills with 'the gafol of the rustics "bring in 8. 12s. 2 Such 
 entries as the following are not uncommon there is one villein 
 rendering 30c. 8 there is one villein rendering 10s. 4 46 cotarii 
 with one hide render 30 shillings a year 6 the villeins give 
 13s. 4id. by way of consuetudo 6 . No doubt it would be somewhat 
 rare to find a villein discharging all his dues in money this is 
 suggested when we are told how on the land of S*. Augustin one 
 Wadard holds a large piece 'de terra villanorum' and yet 
 renders no service to the abbot save 30s. a year 7 . At least 
 in one instance the villeins seem to be holding the manor 
 in farm, that is to say, they are farming the demesne land and 
 paying a rent in money or in provender 8 . We dare not represent 
 the stream of economic history as flowing uninterruptedly from 
 a system of labour services to a system of rents. We must 
 remember that in the Conqueror's reign the lord very often had 
 numerous serfs whose whole time was given to the cultivation 
 of his demesne. In the south-western counties he will often 
 have two, three or more serfs for every team that he has on his 
 demesne, and, while this is so, we can not safely say that his 
 husbandry requires that the villeins should be labouring on his 
 land for three or four days in every week. 
 
 The Eng- As a last question we may ask : What was the English for 
 villanus ? It is a foreign word, one of those words which came 
 in with the Conqueror. Surely, we may argue, there must have 
 been some English equivalent for it. Yet we have the greatest 
 difficulty in finding the proper term. True that in the Quadri- 
 partitus and the Leges villanus generally represents ceorl ; ceorl 
 when it is not rendered by villanus is left untranslated in some 
 such form as cyrliscus homo. But then ceorl must be a wider 
 
 1 See above p. 56. 2 D. B. i. 12 b. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 11 b, Hamestede. * D. B. i. 117 b, Colun. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 127, Stibenhede. D. B. i. 179 b, Lene. 
 
 7 D. B. i. 12 b, Norborne. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 127 b: 'Wellesdone tenent canonic! S. Pauli....Hoc manerium 
 tenent villani ad firmam canonicorum. In dominio nil habetur.'
 
 The Villeins. 59 
 
 word than the villanus of Domesday Book, for it has to cover 
 all the non-noble free men ; it must comprehend the numerous 
 sochemanni and liberi homines of northern and eastern England. 
 This in itself is not a little remarkable ; it makes us suspect 
 that some of the lines drawn by Domesday Book are by no 
 means very old; they can not be drawn by any of those 
 terms that have been current in the Anglo-Saxon dooms or 
 which still are current in the text-books that lawyers are 
 compiling. To suppose that villanus is equivalent to gebtir 
 is impossible; we have the best warrant for saying that the 
 Latin for gebur is not villanus but colibertus 1 . Nor can we 
 hold that the villanus is a geneat. In the last days of the old 
 English kingdom the geneat, the 'companion,' the 'fellow/ 
 appears as a horseman who rides on his lord's errands; we 
 must seek him among the radmanni and rachenistres and 
 drengi of Domesday Book 2 . We shall venture the guess that 
 when the Norman clerks wrote down villanus, the English 
 jurors had said ttinesman. As a matter of etymology the two 
 words answer to each other well enough ; the villa is the tim, 
 and the men of the villa are the men of the tti/n. In the 
 enlarged Latin version of the laws of Cnut, known as Instituta 
 Cnuti, there is an important remark : tithes are to be paid both 
 from the lands of the thegn and from the lands of the villeins 
 ' tarn de dominio liberalis hominis, id est J>egenes, quam de terra 
 villanorum, id est tuumannes (corr. tunmannes) 3 .' Then in a 
 collection of dooms known as the Northumbrian Priests' Law 
 there is a clause which orders the payment of Peter's pence. 
 If a king's thegn or landlord (landrica) withholds his penny, 
 he must pay ten half-marks, half to Christ, half to the king; 
 but if a ttinesman withholds it, then let the landlord pay it and 
 take an ox from the man 4 . A very valuable passage this is. 
 It shows us how the lord is becoming responsible for the man's 
 taxes: if the tenant will not pay them, the lord must. It is 
 then in connexion with this responsibility of the lord that the 
 term townsman meets us, and, if we mistake not, it is the lord's 
 responsibility for geld that is the chief agent in the definition 
 
 1 See above p. 36. 
 
 2 This matter will be discussed when we deal with S*. Oswald's charters. 
 
 3 Schmid, p. 263 (note). This document is Dr Liebermann'a Instituta 
 Cnuti (Trans. Boy. Hist. Soc. vii. 77). 
 
 4 Schmid, App. n. 57-9.
 
 60 Domesday Book. 
 
 of the class of villani. The pressure of taxation, civil and 
 ecclesiastical, has been forming new social strata, and a new 
 word, in itself a vague word, is making its way into the 
 vocabulary of the law 1 . 
 
 Summary. The class of villeins may well be heterogeneous. It may 
 well contain (so we think) men who, or whose ancestors, have 
 owned the land under a political supremacy, not easily to be 
 distinguished from landlordship, that belongs to the king ; and, 
 on the other hand, it may well contain those who have never in 
 themselves or their predecessors been other than the tenants of 
 another man's soil. In some counties on the Welsh march there 
 are groups of hospites who in fact or theory are colonists whom 
 the lord has invited onto his land 2 ; but this word, very common 
 in France, is not common in England. Our record is not 
 concerned to describe the nature or the origin of the villein's 
 tenure; it is in quest of geld and of the persons who 
 ought to be charged with geld, and so it matters not whether 
 the lord has let land to the villein or has acquired rights over 
 land of which the villein was once the owner. Therefore 
 we lay down no broad principle about the rights of the villein, 
 but we have suggested that taken in the mass the villani of 
 the Confessor's reign were far more ' law- worthy ' than were the 
 villani of the thirteenth century. We can not treat either the 
 legal or the economic history of our peasantry as a continuous 
 whole ; it is divided into two parts by the red thread of the 
 Norman Conquest. That is a catastrophe. William might do 
 his best to make it as little of a catastrophe as was possible, to 
 insist that each French lord should have precisely the same 
 rights that had been enjoyed by his English antecessor ; it may 
 even be that he endeavoured to assure to those who were 
 becoming villani the rights that they had enjoyed under King 
 Edward 3 . Such a task, if attempted, was impossible. We 
 hear indeed tha,t the English 'redeemed their lands,' but 
 probably this refers only to those English lords, those thegns 
 or the like, who were fortunate enough to find that a ransom 
 would be accepted 4 . We have no warrant for thinking that 
 
 1 For the rest, the word tunesman appears in Edgar rv. 8, 13, in connexion 
 with provisions against the theft of cattle. 
 - D. B. i. 259, 259 b. 
 
 3 Leg. Will. i. 29. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 360 b : 'Hanc terrain habet Abbas in vadimonio pro duabus marcis
 
 The Villeins. 61 
 
 the peasants, the common ' townsmen/ obtained from the king 
 any covenanted mercies. They were handed over to new lords, 
 who were very free in fact, if not in theory, to get out of them 
 all that could be got without gross cruelty. 
 
 We are not left to speculate about this matter. In after Depression 
 days those who were likely to hold a true tradition, the great villeins, 
 financier of the twelfth, the great lawyer of the thirteenth 
 century, believed that there had been a catastrophe. As a 
 result of the Conquest, the peasants, at all events some of the 
 peasants, had fallen from their free estate ; free men, holding 
 freely, they had been compelled to do unfree services 1 . But if 
 we need not rely upon speculation, neither need we rely upon 
 tradition. Domesday Book is full of evidence that the tillers 
 of the soil are being depressed. 
 
 Here we may read of a free man with half a hide who The Nor- 
 has now been made one of the villeins 2 , there of the holder the pea- 
 of a small manor who now cultivates it as the farmer of a sa 
 French l^rd graviter et miserabiliter 3 , and there of a sokeman 
 who has lost his land for not paying geld, though none was 
 due 4 ; while the great Richard of Tonbridge has condescended 
 to abstract a virgate from a villein or a villein from a virgate 8 . 
 But, again, it is not on a few cases in which our record states 
 that some man has suffered an injustice that we would rely. 
 Rather we notice what it treats as a quite common event. 
 
 auri concessu Engelrici quando redimebant Anglici terras suas.' Sometimes 
 the Englishman gets back his land as a bedesman: i. 218, 'Hanc terram tenuit 
 pater huius hominis et vendere poterit T. B. E. Hanc rex Willelmus in elemosina 
 eidem concessit'; i. 211, 'Hanc terram tenuit Avigi et potuit dare cui voluit 
 T. R. E. Hanc ei postea rex Willelmus concessit et per breve B. Talleboso 
 commendavit ut eum servaret ' ; i. 218 b, a similar case. 
 
 1 Dialogus, i. c. 10; Bracton, f. 7. On both passages see Vinogradoff, 
 Villainage, p. 121. 
 
 2 D. B. i;. 1 : 'In hoc manerio erat tune temporis quidam liber homo...qui 
 modo effectus est unus de villanis.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 148 b : 'In Merse tenet Ailric de Willelmo 4 hidas pro uno 
 manerio.... Istemet tenuit T. B. E. sed modo tenet ad liriuam de Willelmo 
 graviter et miserabiliter.' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 141 : ' Hanc terram sumpsit Petrus vicecomes de isto sochemanno 
 Begis Willelmi in manu eiusdem Begis pro forisfactura de gildo Regis se non 
 reddidisse ut homines sui dicunt. Sed homines de scira non portant vicecomiti 
 testimonium, quia semper fait quieta de gildo et de aliis erga Begem quamdiu 
 tenuit, testante hundret.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 30: 'Bicardus de Tonebrige tenet de hoc manerio unam virgatam 
 cum silva unde abstulit rusticum qui ibi manebat.'
 
 62 Domesday Book. 
 
 Free men are being ' added to ' manors to which they did not 
 belong. Thus in Suffolk a number of free men have been 
 added to the manor of Montfort ; they pay no ' custom ' to it 
 before the Conquest, but now they pay 15 ; ^Elfric who was 
 reeve under Roger Bigot set them this custom 1 . Hard by 
 them were men who used to pay 20 shillings, but this same 
 .^Elfric raised their rent to 100 shillings 2 . 'A free man held 
 this land and could sell it, but Waleran father of John has 
 added him to this manor 8 ' : Entries of this kind are common. 
 The utmost rents are being exacted from the farmers: this 
 manor was let for three years at a rent of 12 and a yearly 
 gift of an ounce of gold, but all the farmers who took it were 
 ruined 4 that manor was let for 3. 15s. but the men were 
 thereby ruined and now it is valued at only 45s. 5 About 
 these matters French and English can not agree : this manor 
 renders 70 by weight, but the English value it at only 60 by 
 tale 6 the English fix the value at 80, but the French at 
 100 7 Frenchmen and Englishmen agree that it is worth 50, 
 but Richard let it to an Englishman for 60, who thereby lost 
 10 a year, at the very least 8 . ' It can not pay,' 'it can hardly 
 pay,' ' it could not stand ' the rent, such are the phrases that we 
 hear. If the lord gets the most out of the farmer to whom he 
 has leased the manor, we may be sure that the farmer is 
 making the most out of the villeins. 
 
 Depression But the most convincing proof of the depression of the 
 sokemen. peasantry comes to us from Cambridgeshire. The rural 
 population of that county as it existed in 1086 has been 
 classified thus 9 : 
 
 sochemanni 213 
 
 villain 1902 
 
 bordarii 1428 
 
 cotarii 736 
 
 servi 548 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 282 b : 'et istam consuetudinem constituit illis Alnricus prepositns 
 in tempore E. Bigot.' 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 284 b. 3 D. B. ii. 84 b. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 353 b: 'omnes fuerunt confusi.' , 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 440 b : ' sed homines inde fuerunt confusi.' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 65, Aldeborne. 7 D. B. ii. 18, Berdringas. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 38 b, Tachesteda. 
 
 9 Ellis, Introduction, ii. 428. We give Ellis's figures, but think that he has 
 exaggerated the number of sokemen who were to be found in 1086.
 
 The Villeins. 63 
 
 But we also learn that the Cambridgeshire of the Confessor's 
 day had contained at the very least 900 instead of 200 
 sokemen 1 . This is an enormous and a significant change. Let 
 us look at a single village. In Meldreth there is a manor ; it 
 is now a manor of the most ordinary kind; it is rated at 3 hides 
 and 1 virgate, but contains 5 team-lands ; in demesne are half 
 a hide and one team, and 15 bordarii and 3 cotarii have 4 teams, 
 and there is one servus. But before the Conquest this land was 
 held by 15 sokemen ; 10 of them were under the soke of the 
 Abbey of Ely and held 2 hides and half a virgate ; the other 
 5 held 1 hide and half a virgate and were the men of Earl 
 ^Elfgar 2 . What has become of these fifteen sokemen? They 
 are now represented by fifteen bordiers and five cottiers ; and 
 the demesne land of the manor is a new thing. The sokemen 
 have fallen, and their fall has brought with it the consolidation 
 of manorial husbandry and seignorial power. At Orwell Earl 
 Roger has now a small estate; a third of it is in demesne, while 
 the residue is held by 2 villeins and 3 bordiers, and there is a 
 serf there. This land had belonged to six sokemen, and those 
 six had been under no less than five different lords; two 
 belonged to Edith the Fair, one to Archbishop Stigand, one 
 to Robert Wi marc's son, one to the king, and one to Earl 
 ^Elfgar 8 . Displacements such as this we may see in village 
 after village. No one can read the survey of Cambridgeshire 
 without seeing that the freer sorts of the peasantry have been 
 thrust out, or rather thrust down. 
 
 Evidence so cogent as this we shall hardly find in any part Further 
 of the record save that which relates to Cambridgeshire and tSn^of 
 Bedfordshire. But great movements of the kind that we are de P ression - 
 examining will hardly confine themselves within the boundaries 
 of a county. A little variation in the formula which tells us 
 who held the land in 1066 may hide from us the true state of 
 the case. We can not expect that men will be very accurate 
 in stating the legal relationships that existed twenty years ago. 
 Since the day when King Edward was alive and dead many 
 things have happened, many new words and new forms of 
 thought have become familiar. But taking the verdicts as we 
 
 1 We make considerably more than 900 by counting only those who are 
 expressly described as sokemen and excluding the many persons who are simply 
 described as homines capable of selling their land. 
 
 - Hamilton, Inquisitio, 65. 3 Hamilton, Inquisitio, 77.
 
 64 Domesday Book. 
 
 find them, there is still no lack of evidence. In Essex we may 
 see the liberi homines disappearing 1 . But we need not look 
 only to the eastern counties. At Bromley, in Surrey, Bishop 
 Odo has a manor of 32 hides, 4 of which had belonged to ' free 
 men ' who could go where they pleased, but now there are only 
 villeins, cottiers, and serfs 2 . We turn the page and find Odo 
 holding 10 hides which had belonged to ' the alodiaries of the 
 vill 3 .' In Kent Hugh de Port is holding land that was held by 
 6 free men who could go whither they would ; there are now 
 6 villeins and 14 bordiers there, with one team between them 4 . 
 Students of Domesday were too apt to treat the antecessores of 
 the Norman lords as being in all cases lords of manors. Lords 
 of manors, or rather holders of manors, they often were, but as 
 we shall see more fully hereafter, when we are examining the 
 term manerium, such phrases are likely to deceive us. Often 
 enough they were very small people with very little land. For 
 example these six free men whom Hugh de Port represents had 
 only two and a half team-lands. We pass by a few pages 
 and find Hugh de Montfort with a holding which comprises but 
 one team-land and a half; he has 4 villeins and 2 bordiers 
 there. His antecessores were three free men, who could go 
 whither they would 5 . They had need for but 12 oxen; they 
 had no more land than they could easily till, at all events with 
 the help of two or three cottagers or slaves. To all appearance 
 they were no better than peasants. They or their sons may 
 still be tilling the land as Hugh's villeins. When we look 
 for such instances we very easily find them. The case is not 
 altered by the fact that the term 'manor' is given to the 
 holdings of these antecessores. In Sussex an under-tenant of 
 Earl Roger has an estate with four villeins upon it. His 
 antecessores were two free men who held the land as two 
 manors. And how much land was there to be divided between 
 the two ? There was one team-land. Such holders of maneria 
 were tillers of the soil, peasants, at best yeomen 6 . If they were 
 of thegnly rank, this again does not alter the case. When in 
 the survey of Dorset we read how four thegns held two 
 
 1 Thus e.g. D. B. ii. 87 b : ' Hidingham tenet Garengerus de Bogero pro 
 25 acris quas tenuerunt 15 liberi homines T. R. E.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 31. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 31 b: ' Et 10 Judas tenebant alodiarii villae.' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 10 b. 6 D. B. i. 13, Essella. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 24.
 
 The Villeins. 65 
 
 team-lands, how six thegns held two team-lands, eight thegns 
 two team-lands, nine thegns four team-lands, eleven thegns four 
 team-lands 1 , we can not of course be certain that each of these 
 groups of co-tenants had but one holding ; but thegnly rank is 
 inherited, and if a thegn will have nine or ten sons there will 
 soon be tillers of the soil with the wergild of twelve hundred 
 shillings. Now if these things are being done in the middling 
 strata of society, if the sokemen are being suppressed or 
 depressed in Cambridgeshire, the alodiaries in Sussex, what 
 is likely to be the fate of the poor ? They will have to till 
 their lord's demesne graviter et miser dbiliter. He can afford to 
 dispense with serfs, for he has villeins. 
 
 A last argument must be added. What we see in the thir- The pea- 
 teenth century of the ancient demesne of the crown 2 might the royal 
 lead us to expect that in Domesday Book ' the manors of demesue - 
 S*. Edward ' would stand out in bold relief. Instead of a popu-" 
 lation mainly consisting of villeins shall we not find upon them 
 large numbers of sokemen, the ancestors of the men who in 
 after days will be protected by the little writ of right and the 
 Monstraverunt ? Nothing of the kind. The royal manor differs 
 in no such mode as this from any other manor. If it lies in a 
 county in which other manors have sokemen, then it may or 
 may not have sokemen. If it lies in a county in which other 
 manors have no sokemen, it will have none. Cambridgeshire 
 is a county in which there are some, and have been many, 
 sokemen; there is hardly a sokeman upon the ancient demesne. 
 In after days the men of Chesterton, for example, will have all 
 the peculiar rights attributed by lawyers to the sokemen of 
 S fc . Edward. But S fc . Edward, if we trust Domesday Book, had 
 never a sokeman there; he had two villeins and a number of 
 bordiers and cottiers 3 . It seems fairly clear that from an early 
 time, if not from the first days of the Conquest onwards, the 
 king was the best of landlords. The tenants of those manors 
 that were conceived as annexed to the crown, those tenants one 
 and all, save the class of slaves which was disappearing, got a 
 better, a more regular justice than that which the villeins of 
 other lords could hope for. It was the king's justice, and there- 
 fore for the king's public and private capacities were hardly 
 
 1 D. B. 83, 83 b. 
 
 2 Vinogradoff, Villainage, 89 ff. ; Hist. Engl. Law, i. 366 ff. 
 8 D. B. i. 189 b.
 
 66 Domesday Book. 
 
 to be distinguished it was public justice, and so became formal 
 justice, denned by writs, administered in the last resort by the 
 highest court, the ablest lawyers. And so sokemen disappear from 
 private manors. Some of them as tenants in free socage may 
 maintain their position; many fall down into the class of tenants 
 in villeinage. On the ancient demesne the sokemen multiply ; 
 they appear where Domesday knew them not; for those who 
 are protected by royal justice can hardly (now that villeinage 
 implies a precarious tenure) be called villeins, they must be 
 'villein sokemen' at the least. Whether or no we trust the 
 tradition which ascribes to the Conqueror a law in favour of the 
 tillers of the soil, we can hardly doubt that the villani and 
 bordarii whom Domesday Book shows us on the royal manors 
 are treated as having legal rights in their holdings. And if 
 this be true of them, it should be true of their peers upon other 
 manors. Yes, it should be true ; the manorial courts that are 
 arising should do impartial justice even between lord and 
 villeins ; but who is to make it true ? 
 
 4. The SoTcemen. 
 
 Now of a large part of England we may say that all the 
 occupiers of land who are not holding ' manors 1 ' will belong to 
 some of those classes of which we have already spoken. They 
 will be villeins, bordiers, cottiers, 'boors' or serfs. Here and 
 there we may find a few persons who are described as liberi 
 homines. In some of the western counties, Gloucester, Wor- 
 cester, Hereford, Shropshire, there are rachenistres or radmans ; 
 between the Ribble and the Mersey we may find a party of 
 drengs. Still it is generally true that two of those five classes 
 that seem to have been mentioned in King William's writ 2 , 
 the sochemanni and the liberi homines, are largely represented 
 only in certain counties. They are to be seen in Essex, yet 
 more thickly in Suffolk and Norfolk. In Lincolnshire nearly 
 half of the rural population consists of sokemen, though there is 
 no class of persons described as liberi homines. There are some 
 
 1 We shall see hereafter that some of these so-called ' manors ' are but small 
 plots and their holders small folk. 
 
 2 See above p. 24.
 
 The Sokemen. 67 
 
 sokemen in Yorkshire, but they are not very numerous and 
 there are hardly any liberi homines. We have seen how in 
 Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire the sokemen have fared ill; 
 but still some are left there. Traces of them may be found in 
 Hertford and Buckingham; they are thick in Leicester, Notting- 
 ham and Northampton ; there are some in Derbyshire. There 
 have been sokemen in Middlesex 1 and in Surrey 2 ; but they 
 have been suppressed; a few remain in Kent 8 ; so we should 
 be rash were we to find anything characteristically Scandinavian 
 in the sokemen. Even in Suffolk they are suffering ill at the 
 hands of their new masters 4 , while in Cambridgeshire, Bedford- 
 shire, Hertfordshire they have been suppressed or displaced. 
 
 We have now to enter on a difficult task, a discussion of Lord and 
 the relation which exists between these sochemanni and liberi 
 homines on the one hand and their lord upon the other. The 
 character of this relation varies from case to case. We may 
 distinguish three different bonds by which a man may be 
 "bound to a lord, a personal bond, a tenurial bond, a juris- 
 dictional or justiciary bond. But the language of Domesday 
 Book is not very patient of this analysis. However in the 
 second volume we very frequently come upon two ideas which 
 are sharply contrasted with each other ; the one is expressed by 
 the term commendatio, the other by the term soca s . To these 
 we must add the great vague term consuetudo, and we shall 
 also have to consider the phrases which describe the various 
 degrees of that freedom of ' withdrawing himself with his land ' 
 that a man may enjoy. Bonds be- 
 
 In order that we may become familiar with the use made an a man . 
 of these terms and phrases we will transcribe a few typical 
 entries : 
 
 1 D. B. i. 128 b, 129, 129 b. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 34, 35 b. 3 D. B. i. 13. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 287. There are free men, apparently 120 in number, of whom it 
 is written : ' Hii liberi homines qui tempore regis Eduardi pertinebant in soca de 
 Bercolt, unusquisque gratis dabat preposito per annum 4 tantum denarios, et 
 reddebat socam sicut lex ferebat, et quando Bogerius Bigot prius habuit vice- 
 comitatum statuerunt ministri sui quod redderent 15 libras per annum, quod 
 non faciebant T. B. E. Et quaudo Kobertus Malet habuit vicecomitatum sui 
 ministri creverunt illos ad 20 libras. Et quando Rogerius Bigot eos rehabuit 
 dederunt similiter 20 libras. Et modo tenet eos Aluricus Wanz tali consuetu- 
 dine qua erant T. B. E.' This is a rare instance of a reestablishment of the 
 status quo ante conquestum. 
 
 6 Compare Bound, Feudal England, 33. 
 
 52
 
 68 Domesday Book. 
 
 Two free men, of whom JSlfwin had not even the commen- 
 dation 1 . 
 
 Of these men Harold had not even the commendation 2 . 
 
 Thus commendation seems put before us as the slightest bond 
 that there can be between lord and man. Very often we are 
 told that the lord had the commendation and nothing more 3 . 
 Thus it is contrasted with the soke : 
 
 His predecessor had only the commendation of this, and 
 Harold had the soke 4 . 
 
 Of these six free men St Benet had the soke, and of one of 
 them the commendation 5 . 
 
 And the commendation is contrasted with the 'custom,' the 
 consuetude, perhaps we might say the 'service': 
 
 Of the said sokeman Ralph Peverel had a custom of 3 shillings 
 a year, but in the Confessor's time his ancestor had only the 
 commendation 6 . 
 
 R. Malet claims 18 free men, 3 of them by commendation, 
 and the rest for all custom 7 . 
 
 And the soke is contrasted with the consuetude : 
 
 To this manor belong 4 men for all custom, and other 4 for 
 soke only 8 . 
 
 In a given case all these bonds may be united : 
 
 There are 7 sokemen who are the Saint's men with sake and 
 soke and all custom 9 . 
 
 Over this man the Saint has sake and soke and commendation 
 with all custom 10 . 
 
 Then if the man ' withdraws/ or gives or sells his land, we often 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 187 b : ' Ex his non habuit Ailwinus suus antecessor etiam com- 
 mendationem.' 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 287 : 'De his hominibus...non habuit Haroldus etiam cominenda- 
 tionem.' 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 153 b : ' Unde suus antecessor habuit commendationem tantum.* 
 Ibid. 154 : ' Alstan liber homo Edrici commend[atione] tantum.' 
 4 D. B. ii 161 b. D. B. ii. 244. 
 
 6 D. B. ii. 6 : ' De predicto sochemano habuit Kad. Piperellus consuetudinem 
 in unoquoque anno per 3 solidos, set in T..B. E. non habuit eius antecessor nisi 
 tantum modo commendationem. ' 
 
 7 D. B. ii. 171 b : ' Calumpniatur R. Malet 18 liberos homines, 3 commenda- 
 tione et alios de omni consuetudine. ' 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 250 b : ' Huic manerio adiacent semper 4 homines de omni con- 
 euetudine et alii 4 ad socham tantum.' 
 
 -D. B. ii. 356 b. w D. B. ii. 357.
 
 The Sokemen. 69 
 
 read of the soke ' remaining ' ; we sometimes read of the com- 
 mendation, the custom, the service ' remaining.' 
 
 These free men could sell or give their land, but the commen- 
 dation and the soke and sake would remain to St Edmund 1 . 
 
 These men could sell their land, but the soke would remain to 
 the Saint and the service (servitium), whoever might be the buyer 2 . 
 
 They could give and sell their land, but the soke and the com- 
 mendation and the service would remain to the Saint 3 . 
 
 
 
 But after all, these distinctions are not maintained with rigour, 
 for the soke is sometimes spoken of as though it were a species 
 of consuetude. We have a tangled skein in our hands. 
 
 The thread that looks as if it would be the easiest to Commen- 
 unravel, is that which is styled 'mere commendation.' The 
 same idea is expressed by other phrases 'he committed 
 himself to Bishop Herman for his defence 4 ' 'they submitted 
 themselves with their land to the abbey for defence 5 ' 'he 
 became the man of Goisfrid of his own free will" 'she put 
 herself with her land in the hand of the queen 7 .' ' Homage ' is 
 not a common term in Domesday Book, but if, when speaking 
 of the old time, it says, as it constantly does, that one person 
 was the man of another, no doubt it is telling us of a relation- 
 ship which had its origin in an oath and a symbolic ceremony 8 . 
 'She put herself into the hands of the queen* we should take 
 these words to mean just what they say. An Anglo-Saxon 
 oath of fealty (hylddft) has been preserved 9 . The swearer 
 promises to be faithful and true to his lord, to love all that 
 his lord loves and eschew all that his lord eschews. He makes 
 no distinct reference to any land, but he refers to some compact 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 353 b. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 362 : ' set soca remaneret sancto et servitium quicunque terrain 
 emeret.' 
 
 3 D. B, ii. 358. 
 
 * D. B. i. 58 : ' Pater Tori tenuit T. R. E. et potuit ire quo voluit sed pro sua 
 defensione se commisit Hermanno episcopo et Tori Osmund o episcopo similiter.' 
 5 D. B. i. 32 b : ' set pro defensione se cam terra abbatiae summiserunt.' 
 8 D. B. ii. 62 b : ' et T. E. W. effectus est homo Goisfridi sponte sua.' 
 
 7 D. B. i. 36 b : ' T. B. W. femina quae bane terrain teoebat misit se cum ea 
 in ruanu rcginae.' Ibid. 36 : ' Quidam liber homo bane terrain tenens et quo 
 vellet abire valens commisit se in defensione Walterii pro defensione sua.' 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 172 : ' Hos calumpniatnr Drogo de Befrerere pro homagio tantum." 
 This seems equivalent to the common ' commendatione tantum.' D. B. i. 225 b : 
 ' fuerunt homines Burred et iccirco G. epiecopus clamat hominationem eorum.' 
 
 ' Schmid, App. z.
 
 70 Domesday Boole. 
 
 which exists between him and his lord: He will be faithful 
 and true on condition that his lord treats him according to his 
 deserts and according to the covenant that has been established 
 between them. 
 
 Commen- To all seeming there need not be any land in the case ; 
 
 protection. an d, if the man has land, the act of commendation will not give 
 the lord as a matter of course any rights in that land. Cer- 
 tainly Domesday Book seems to assume that in general every 
 owner or holder of land must have had a lord. This assumption 
 is very worthy of notice. A law of ^thelstan 1 had said that 
 lordless men ' of whom no right could be had ' were to have 
 lords, but this command seems aimed at the landless folk, 
 not at those whose land is a sufficient surety for their good 
 behaviour. The law had not directly commanded the landed 
 men to commend themselves, but it had supplied them with 
 motives for so doing 2 . What did a man gain by this act of 
 submission ? Of advantages that might be called ' extra-legal ' 
 we will say nothing, though in the wild days of ^Ethelred the 
 Unready, and even during the Confessor's reign, there was 
 lawlessness enough to make the small proprietor wish that he 
 had a mightier friend than the law could be. But there were 
 distinct legal advantages to be had by commendation. In the 
 first place, the life of the great man's man was protected not 
 only by a wer-gild, but by a man-bdt : a man-b6t due to one 
 who had the power to exact it ; and if, as one of our authorities 
 assures us, the amount of the man-bdt varied with the rank of 
 the lord 3 , this would help to account for a remarkable fact 
 disclosed by Domesday Book, namely, that the chosen lord was 
 usually a person of the very highest rank, an earl, an archbishop, 
 the king. Then, again, if the man got into a scrape, his lord 
 might be of service to him. Suppose the man accused of theft : 
 in certain cases he might escape with a single, instead of a 
 triple ordeal, if he had a lord who would swear to his good 
 character 4 . In yet other cases his lord would come forward as 
 his compurgator ; perhaps he was morally bound to do so ; and, 
 
 1 Atheist, n. 2. 
 
 2 Also it had declared that every man must have a pledge, and probably the 
 easiest way of fulfilling this command was to place oneself under a lord who 
 would put one into a tithing. 
 
 3 Leg. Edw. Conf. 12, 5 ; but this is contradicted by Leg. Hear. 87, 4. 
 
 4 .Ethelr. i. 1, 2 ; compare JEthelr. in. 3, 4.
 
 The Sokemen. 71 
 
 being a man of high rank, would swear a crushing oath. And 
 within certain limits that we can not well define the lord might 
 warrant the doings of his man, might take upon himself the task 
 of defending an action to which his man was subjected 1 . What 
 the man has sought by his submission is defensio, tuitio; the 
 lord is his defensor, tutor, protector, advocatus, in a word, his 
 warrantor 2 . 
 
 Of warranty we are accustomed to think chiefly in connexion Commen- 
 with the title to land : the feoffor warrants the feoffee in his warranty, 
 enjoyment of the tenement. But to all appearance in the 
 eleventh century it is rather as lord than as giver, seller or 
 lender, that the vouchee comes to the defence of his man. If 
 the land is conceived as having once been the warrantor's land, 
 this may be but a fiction : the man has given up his land and 
 then taken it again merely in order that he may be able to say 
 with some truth that he has it by his lord's gift. But we can 
 not be sure that as yet any such fiction is necessary. ' I will 
 defend any action that is brought against you for this land ' : 
 as yet men see no reason why such a promise as this, if made 
 with due ceremony, should not be enforced. A certain amount 
 of * maintenance ' is desirable in their eyes and laudable. 
 
 Though we began with the statement that where there is Commen- 
 commendation there may yet be no land in the case, we have tenure. 41 " 
 none the less been already led to the supposition that often 
 enough land does get involved in this nexus between man and 
 lord. No doubt a landless man may commend himself and get 
 no land in return for his homage ; but with such an one Domes- 
 day Book is not concerned. The cases in which it takes an 
 interest are those in which a landholder has commended 
 himself. Now we dare not say that a landholder can never 
 commend himself without commending his land also*. Howbeit, 
 the usual practice certainly is that a man who submits or 
 commits himself for 'defence' or 'protection* shall take his 
 land with him; he 'goes with his land' to a lord. Very 
 
 1 Leg. Hen. 82, 6 ; 85, 2. 
 
 a D. B. ii. 18 b : ' inde vocat dominum snnm ad tutorem.' Ibid. 103 : ' vocavit 
 Ilbodonem ad tutorem et postea non adduxit tutorem.' Ibid. 31 b : ' revocat earn 
 ad defensorem.' D. B. i. 141 b : 142 : ' sed Harduinus reclamat Petrum vicecomi- 
 tem ad protectorem.' Ibid. 227 b : ' et dicit regem suum advocatum esse.' 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 71 b : ' Phenge tenet idem Serlo de E[anulfo Piperello] quod 
 tenuit liber homo...qui T. E. W. effectus est homo antecessoris Rannlfi Piperelli, 
 set terrain suarn sibi non dedit.' This however is notTjuite to the point.
 
 72 Domesday Book. 
 
 curious are some of the instances which show how large a 
 liberty men have enjoyed of taking land wherever they please. 
 'Tostig bought this land from the church of Malmesbury for 
 three lives ' : in this there is nothing strange ; leases for three 
 lives granted by churches to thegns have been common. But 
 of course we should assume that during the lease the land could 
 have no other lord than the church of Malmesbury. Not so, 
 however, for during his lease Tostig ' could go with that land 
 to whatever lord he pleased 1 .' In Essex there was before the 
 Conquest a man who held land; that land in some sort belonged 
 to the Abbey of Barking, and could not be separated from the 
 abbey ; but the holder of it was the man (' merely the man ' 
 say the jurors) of one Leofhild the predecessor of Geoffrey de 
 Mandeville 2 . In this last case we may satisfy ourselves by 
 saying that a purely personal relation is distinguished from a 
 tenurial relation; the man of Leofhild is the tenant of the 
 abbey. But what of Tostig's case ? Land that he holds of the 
 church of Malmesbury, and that too by no perpetual tenure, he 
 can commend to another lord. From the man's point of view, 
 protection, defence, warranty, is the essence of commendation, 
 and the warranty that he chiefly needs is the warranty of his 
 possession, of the title by which he holds his land. It can not 
 but be therefore that the lord to whom he commends himself 
 and his land, should be in some sort his landlord. 
 
 The lord's Not that he need pay rent, or perform other services in 
 cpmmenda- return for the land. The land is his land ; he has not obtained 
 it from his lord ; on the contrary he has carried it to his lord. 
 Mere commendation is therefore distinguished by a score of 
 entries from a relation that involves the payment of consue- 
 tudines. Doubtless however the lord obtains 'a valuable 
 consideration ' for all that he gives. Part of this will probably 
 lie without the legal sphere. He has a sworn retainer who will 
 fight whenever he is told to tight. But even the law allows the 
 man to go great lengths in his lord's defence". In a rough age 
 
 1 D. B. i. 72 : ' Toti emit earn T. B. E. de aecclesia Malmesburiensi ad 
 etatem trium hominum et infra hunc terminum poterat ire cum ea ad quern 
 vellet dominum.' 
 
 z D. B. ii. 57 b : ' Et haec terra quam modo tenet G. fuit in abbatia de 
 Berchingis sicuti hundret testatur ; set ille qui tenuit hanc terrain fuit tantum 
 modo homo [Leuild] antecessoris Goisfridi et noii potuit istam ten-am mittere 
 in aliquo loco nisi in abbatia.' 
 
 8 Leg. Hen. 82, 3.
 
 The Sokemen. 73 
 
 happy is the lord who has many sworn to defend him. When 
 at a later time we see that the claimant of land must 
 offer proof 'by the body of a certain free man of his,' we are 
 taught that the lords have relied upon the testimony and the 
 strong right arms of their vassals. That in all cases the lord 
 got more than this we can not say, though perhaps commen- 
 dation carried with it the right to the heriot, the horse and 
 armour of the dead man 1 . The relation is often put before us 
 as temporary. Numerous are the persons who ' can seek lords 
 where they choose* or who can 'go with their land wherever 
 they please.' How large a liberty these phrases accord to lord 
 and man it were hard to tell. We can not believe that either 
 party to the contract could dissolve it just at the moment when 
 the other had some need to enforce it ; but still at other times 
 the man might dissolve it, and we may suppose that the lord 
 could do so too. But the connexion might be of a more 
 permanent kind. Perhaps in most cases in which we are told 
 that a man can not withdraw his land from his lord the bond 
 between them is regarded as something other than commenda- 
 tion there is commendation and something more. But this is 
 no universal truth. You might be the lord's man ' merely by 
 commendation ' and yet be unable to sell your land without the 
 lord's leave 2 . At any rate, in one way and another ' the com- 
 mendation ' is considered as capable of binding the land. The 
 commended man will be spoken of as holding the land under 
 (aub) his lord, if not of (de) his lord 3 . In many cases if he sells 
 the land ' the commendation will remain to his lord ' by which 
 is meant, not that the vendor will continue to be the man of 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 118 b : 'In burgo [de Tetfort] autem erant 943 burgenses T. E. E. 
 De his habuit Eex omnem consuetudinem. De istis hominibus erant 36 ita 
 dominice Regis E. at non possent esse homines alicuius sine licentia Begis. 
 Alii omnes poterant esse homines cuiuslibet set semper tamen consuetude Regis 
 remanebat prefer herigete.' Compare D. B. i. 336 b, Stamford : ' In his custodiis 
 sunt 72 mansi sochemanorum, qui habent terras suas in dominio, et qui petunt 
 dominos ubi volunt, super quos Rex nichil aliud habet nisi emendationem 
 forisfacturae eorum et heriete et theloneum. ' In this case commendation would 
 not carry the heriot with it. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 201 : ' Liber homo de 80 acris terrae Almari episcopi et Alwoldi 
 abbatis commend[atione] tantum, et hie homo erat ita in monasterio quod non 
 potuit dare terram suam nee vendere.' See another entry of the same kind on 
 the same page. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 50 b : ' Hie Alwinus tenuit hanc terram T. R. E. sub Wigoto pro 
 tuitione ; modo tenet earn sub Milone.'
 
 74 Domesday Book. 
 
 that lord (for the purposes of the Domesday Inquest this would 
 be a matter of indifference) but that the lord's rights over the 
 land are not destroyed. The purchaser comes to the land and 
 finds the commendation inhering in it 1 . 
 
 Thesei- And so, again, the lord's rights under the commendation 
 
 fte com- seem to constitute an alienable and heritable seignory. It is 
 aen e . ^ nus ^ na we ma y \) QS ^ explain the case, very common in East 
 Anglia, in which a man is commended half to one and half to 
 another lord 2 . Thus we read of a case in which a free man was 
 commended, as to one-third to Wulfeige, and as to the residue to 
 Wulfsige's two brothers 3 . In this instance it seems clear that 
 the commendation has descended to three co-heirs. In other 
 cases a lord may have made over his rights to two religious 
 houses ; thus we hear of a man who is common to the Abbots 
 of Ely and S*. Edmund's 4 . In some cases a man may, in others 
 he may not, be able to prevent himself being transferred from 
 lord to lord, or from ancestor to heir. What passes by alienation 
 or inheritance may be regarded rather as a right to his commen- 
 dation than as the commendation itself 6 . Of course there is 
 nothing to hinder one from being the man of several different 
 lords. ^Elfric Black held lands of the Abbot of Westminster 
 which he could not separate from the church, but for other 
 lands he was the man of Archbishop Stigand 6 . Already a lofty 
 edifice is being constructed; B, to whom C is commended, is 
 himself commended to A ; and in this case a certain relation 
 exists between C and A ; C is ' sub-commended ' to A 7 . 
 
 ^ & g* ven case * ne somewhat vague obligation of the 
 
 1 p or exam pi 6) pj. B. ii. 353 b : ' Hii poterant dare et vendere terrain suam 
 T. E. E. set commend[atio] et soca et saca remanebat S. Edmundo.' 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 182 b : ' Ulchetel habuit dimidiam commendationem de illo T. R. E. 
 ct de uxore ipsius totam commendationem.' Ibid. 249 b : Medietas istius hominis 
 fuit antecessoris Baingnardi commendatione tantum et alia medietas 8. Edmundi 
 cum dimidia terra.' The contrast between dimidii homines and integri homines 
 is common enough. See D. B. ii. 309 : one man has a sixth and another five- 
 sixths of a commendation. 
 
 3 D. B. ii. 333 b. 4 D. B. ii. 125 b. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 58. Tori ' committed himself for defence ' to Bp. Herman ; Tori's 
 son has done the same to Osmund, the successor of Herman. 
 
 D. B. i. 133 : ' Bed pro aliis terris homo archiepiscopi Stigandi fuit.' 
 7 On the whole this seems to be the meaning of ' sub-commendation.' We 
 read a good deal of men who were sub-commended to the antecessor of Eobert 
 Malet. This seems to be explained by such an entry as the following (ii. 313 b) : 
 ' Eadric holds two free men who were commended to Eadric, who himself was 
 commended to (another) Eadric, the antecessor of Robert Malet.'
 
 The Sokemen. 75 
 
 commended man may be rendered definite by a bargain which 
 imposes upon him the payment of rent or the performance of 
 some specified services. When this is so, we shall often find 
 that the land is moving, if we may so speak, not from the man 
 but from the lord. The man is taking land from the lord to 
 hold during good behaviour 1 , or for life 2 , or for lives. A form 
 of lease or loan (l&ri) which gives the land to the lessee and to 
 two or three successive heirs of his, has from of old been 
 commonly used by some of the great churches 3 . Also we 
 see landowners giving- up their land to the churches and 
 taking it back again as mere life tenants. During their 
 lives the church is to have some ' service,' or at least some 
 ' recognition ' of its lordship, while after their deaths the church 
 will have the land in demesne 4 . This is something different 
 from mere commendation. We see here the feuda oblata or 
 beneficia oblata which foreign jurists have contrasted with/eucfo 
 or beneficia data. The land is brought into the bargain by the 
 man, not by the lord. But often the land comes from the lord, 
 and the tenancy is no merely temporary tenancy; it is herit- 
 able. The king has provided his thegns with lands ; the earls, 
 the churches have provided their thegns with lands, and these 
 thegns have heritable estates, and already they are conceived 
 as holding them of (de) the churches, the earls, the king. But 
 we must not as yet be led away into any discussion about the 
 architecture of the very highest storeys of the feudal or vassalic 
 edifice. It must at present suffice that in humbler quarters 
 there has been much letting and hiring of land. The leases, if 
 we choose to call them so, the gifts, if we choose to call them so, 
 have created heritable rights and perdurable relationships. 
 
 There is no kind of service that can not be purchased by a Land-loans 
 grant or lease of land. Godric's wife had land from the king 
 
 1 D. B. i. 45 b : ' Quidam frater Edrici tenuit tali conventione, quod quamdiu 
 bene se haberet erga earn [Edricum] tamdia terrain de eo teneret, et si veudere 
 vellet, non alicui nisi ei de quo tenebat vendere vel dare liceret.' 
 
 2 Cases of life tenancies will be found in D. B. i. 47, Stantune; 67 b, Newetone 
 80, Catesclive ; 177 b, Witune ; ii. 373, 444 b. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 46 b, 66 b, 72, 175. We shall return to this when in the next essay 
 we speak of loanland. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 67 b : ' Hanc terrain reddidit sponte sua aecclesiae Hardingus qui in 
 vita sua per conventfionem] debebat tenere.' See also the case in i. 177 b. 
 Again, ii. 431 : ' terrain qnam cepit cum uxore sua...misit in ecclesia concedente 
 muliere tali conventione quod non potuit vendere nee dare de aecclesia.' For a 
 ' recognitio ' see i. 175, Persore. 
 
 and ser- 
 vices.
 
 76 Domesday Book. 
 
 because she fed his dogs 1 . ^Elfgyfu the maiden had land from 
 Godric the sheriff that she might teach his daughter orfrey 
 work 3 . The monks of Pershore stipulate that their dominion 
 shall be recognized by ' a day's farm ' in every year, that is, that 
 the lessee shall once a year furnish the convent with a day's 
 victual 3 . The king's thegns between the Kibble and the Mersey 
 have ' like villeins ' to make lodges for the king, and fisheries and 
 deer-hays, and must send their reapers to cut the king's crops at 
 harvest time*. The radmen and radknights of the west must 
 ride on their lord's errands and make themselves generally use- 
 ful ; they plough and harrow and mow, and do whatever is 
 commanded them 6 . 
 
 The man's But we would here speak chiefly of the lowly ' free men ' 
 dines. and sokemen of the eastern counties. Besides having their 
 commendation and their soke, the lord very often has what 
 is known as their consuetudo or their consuetudines. Often 
 they are the lord's men de omni consuetudine. In all probability 
 the word when thus e'mployed, when contrasted with commen- 
 dation on the one hand and with soke on the other, points to 
 payments and renders to be made in money and in kind and to 
 services of an agricultural character. Of such services only one 
 stands out prominently ; it is very frequently mentioned in the 
 survey of East Anglia ; it is fold-soke, soca faldae. The man 
 must not have a fold of his own; his sheep must lie in the 
 lord's fold. It is manure that the lord wants ; the demand for 
 manure has played a large part in the history of the human race. 
 Often enough this is the one consuetudo, the one definite service, 
 that the lord gets out of his free men 6 . And then a man who is 
 consuetus ad faldam, tied to his lord's fold, is hardly to be con- 
 sidered as being in all respects a ' free ' man. Those who are 
 
 1 D. B. i. 57 b. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 149 : 'De his tenuit Aluuid puella 2 hidas...et de dominica firma 
 Eegis Edwardi habuit ipsa dimidiam hidam quam Godricus vicecomes ei con- 
 cessit quamdiu vicecomes esset, ut ilia doceret filiam ejus aurifrisium operari.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 175 : ' Hanc emit quidam Godricus teinus regis Edwardi vita trium 
 haeredum et dabat in anno monachis unam firmam pro recognitione. ' 
 
 * D. B. i. 269 b. 
 
 6 See above p. 56. Their tenure will be discussed hereafter in connexion 
 \vith St. Oswald's land-loans. 
 
 6 D. B. ii. 187 b : ' In Carletuna 27 liberi homines et dimidius sub Olfo 
 commendatione tantum et soca falde...!5 liberi homines sub Olfo soca falde et 
 commendatione tantum.'
 
 The Sokemen. 77 
 
 not 'fold-worthy' are to be classed with those who are not 
 ' moot- worthy ' or ' fyrd- worthy.' We are tempted to say that 
 a man's caput is diminished by his having to seek his lord's fold, 
 just as it would be diminished if he were excluded from the 
 communal courts or the national host 1 . From the nature of this 
 one consuetudo and from the prominence that is given to it, we 
 may guess the character of the other consuetudines. Suit to the 
 lord's mill would be analogous to suit to his fold 2 . Of ' mill-soke ' 
 we read nothing, but often enough a surprisingly large part of 
 the total value of a manor is ascribed to its mill, and we may 
 argue that the lord has not invested capital in a costly under- 
 taking without making sure of a return. We may well suppose 
 that like the radmen of the west the free men and sokemen of 
 the east give their lord some help in his husbandry at harvest 
 time. From a document which comes to us from the abbey of 
 Ely, and which is slightly older than the Domesday Inquest, we 
 learn that certain of S fc . Etheldreda's sokemen in Suffolk had 
 nothing to do but to plough and thresh whenever the abbot 
 required this of them ; others had to plough and weed and reap, 
 to carry the victual of the monks to the minster and furnish 
 horses whenever called upon to do so 3 . This seems to point 
 rather to ' boon-days ' than to continuous ' week- work,' and we 
 observe that the sokemen of the east like the radmen of the 
 west have horses. Occasionally we learn that a sokeman has to 
 pay an annual sum of money to his lord; sometimes this looks 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 203 b : ' In eadem villa 12 homines 6 quorum erant in soca falde 
 et alii 6 erant liberi.' Ibid. 361 b: '70 liberi... super hos homines habet et 
 semper habuit sacam et socam et omnem consuetudinem et ad faldam pertinent 
 omnes preter 4.' Ibid. ii. 207 : ' 17 liberi homines consneti ad faldam et com- 
 mendati.' The term ' fold-worthy ' occurs in a writ of Edward the Confessor ; 
 he gives to St. Benet of Eamsey soke over such of the men of a certain district as 
 are moot-worthy, fyrd-worthy, and fold- worthy : Earle, Land Charters, p. 343 ; 
 Kemble, iv. p. 208. 
 
 2 In later extents of East Anglian manors the fold-soke plays an important 
 part. Cart. Bams. iii. 267 : ' B. tenuit unarn carucatam terrae cum falda sua 
 pro octo solidis. A. dabat pro terra sua quadraginta denarios et oves eius erant 
 in falda Abbatis. . .H. triginta acras pro quatnor solidis et oves eius sunt in manu 
 domini....' 
 
 3 See the document printed by Hamilton at the end of the Inquisitio Com. 
 Cantabr. p. 192. ' Isti solummodo arabunt et contererent messes eiusdem loci 
 quotienscunque abbas preceperit. ..." ' Ita proprie sunt abbati ut quotienscunque 
 ipse preceperit in anno arabunt suain terrain, purgabunt et colligent segetes, 
 portabunt victum monachorum ad monasterium, equos eorum in suis necessita- 
 tibus semper habebit. ' For more of this matter see Bound, Feudal England, 30.
 
 78 Domesday Book. 
 
 like a substantial rent, sometimes like a mere 'recognition'; 
 but the words that most nearly translate our ' rent,' redditus, 
 census, gablum are seldom used in this context. All is con- 
 suetudo. 
 
 Nature of It is an interesting word. We perhaps are eager to urge 
 dines. the dilemma that in these cases the land must have been brought 
 into the bargain either by the lord or by the tenant: either the 
 lord is conceived as having let land to the tenant, or the theory 
 is that the tenant has commended land to the lord. But the 
 dilemma is not perfect. It may well be that this relationship 
 is thought of as having existed from all time ; it may well be 
 that this relationship, though under slowly varying forms, has 
 really existed for several centuries, and has had its beginning in 
 no contract, in no bargain. In origin the rights of the lord may 
 be the rights of kings and ealdormen, rights over subjects rather 
 than rights over tenants. The word consuetudo covers taxes as 
 well as rents, and, if the sokeman has to do work for his lord, 
 very often, especially in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, he 
 has to do work for the king or for the sheriff also. If he has to 
 do carrying service for the lord, he has to do carrying service 
 (avera) for the sheriff also or in lieu thereof to pay a small sum 
 of money 1 . And another aspect of this word consuetudo is 
 interesting to us. Land that is burdened with customs is 
 customary land (terra consuetudinaria)*. As yet this term 
 does not imply that the tenure, though protected by custom, is 
 not protected by law ; there is no opposition between law and 
 custom ; the customary tenant of Domesday Book is the tenant 
 who renders customs, and the more customs he renders the more 
 customary he is 8 . 
 
 Justiciary This word consuetudo is the widest of words. Perhaps we 
 nn d the best equivalent for consuetudines in our own vague 
 'dues 4 .' It covers what we should call rents; it covers what we 
 
 1 D. B. i. 141 : there are four sokemen who are men of JSthelmaBr and who 
 can not sell their land without his consent ; but they are under the king's sake 
 and soke and jointly provide the sheriff with one avera every year or four pence. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 249 : ' Haec terra fuit consuetudinaria solummodo de theloneo regis 
 sed aliam socam habebat.' 
 
 * D. B. ii. 273 b : ' In eadem 8 consuetudinarii ad faldam sui antecessoris.' 
 Ibid. 215 : ' 8 homines consuetudinaries ad hoc manerium. ' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 280 : ' Duae partes Begis et tercia comitis de censu et theloneo et 
 forisfactura et de omni consuetudine.' Ibid. 42 : ' Unam aecclesiam et 6 capellas 
 cum omni consuetudine vivorum et inortuoruru.'
 
 The Sokemen. 79 
 
 should call rates and taxes; but further it covers what we 
 should call the proceeds and profits of justice. Let us construe 
 a few entries. At Roraney there are burgesses who in return 
 for the service that they do on the sea are quit of all customs 
 except three, namely, larceny, peace-breach and ambush 1 . In 
 Berkshire King Edward gave to one of his foresters half a hide 
 of land free from all custom, except the king's forfeiture, such as 
 larceny, homicide, ham-fare and peace-breach 3 . In what sense 
 can a crime be a custom ? In a fiscal sense. A crime is a source 
 of revenue. In what sense should we wish to have our land free 
 of crimes, free even, if this be possible, of larceny and homicide ? 
 In this sense : we should wish that no money whatever should 
 go out of our land, neither by way of rent, nor by way of tax, 
 rate, toll, nor yet again by way of forisfactura, of payment for 
 crime committed. We should wish also that our land with the 
 tenants on it should be quit or quiet (quietd) from the incursions 
 of royal and national officers, whether they be in search of taxes 
 or in search of criminals and the fines due from criminals, and 
 we should also like to put those fines in our own pockets. Justice 
 therefore takes its place among the consuetudines : ' larceny ' is a 
 source of income 8 . A lord who has ' his customs,' is a lord who 
 has among other sources of revenue, justice or the profits of 
 justice 8 . ' Justice or the profits of justice,' we say, for our record 
 does not care to distinguish between them. It is thinking of 
 money while we are engaged in questioning it about the 
 constitution and competence of tribunals. It gives us but 
 crooked answers. However, we must make the best that can 
 be made of them, and in particular must form some opinion 
 about the consuetudines known as sake and soke. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 10 b : ' et sunt quieti pro servitio mans ab omni consuetudine 
 preter tribus, latrocinio, pace infracts, et forestel.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 61 b : ' solutam ab omni consuetudine propter forestam custodiendam 
 excepta forisfactura Regis, sicut est latrocinium, et homicidiuui, et heinfara, et 
 fracta pax.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 52 : 'Hi infrascripti habent in Han tone consuetud[ines] domorum 
 suarum.' Ibid. 249 : ' Haec terra fuit oonsuetudinaria solummodo de thcloueo 
 Eegis sed socam aliam babebat.'
 
 80 Domesday Book. 
 
 5. Sake and soke. 
 
 Sake and We may best begin our investigation by recalling the law 
 of later times. In the thirteenth century seignorial justice, that 
 is, justice in private hands, has two roots. A certain civil juris- 
 diction belongs to the lord as such ; if he has tenants enough to 
 form a court, he is at liberty to hold a court of and for his 
 tenants. This kind of seignorial justice we call specifically 
 feudal justice. But very often a lord has other and greater 
 powers than the feudal principle would give him ; in particular 
 he has the view of frankpledge and the police justice that the 
 view of frankpledge implies. All such powers must in theory 
 have their origin in grants made by the king ; they are fran- 
 chises. With feudal justice therefore we contrast ' franchisal ' 
 justice 1 . 
 
 Private Now if we go back to the Norman period we shall begin to 
 
 tionWthe doubt whether the feudal principle the principle which as a 
 eges. matter of course gives the lord justiciary powers over his 
 tenants is of very ancient origin 2 . The state of things that 
 then existed should be revealed to us by the Leges Henrici; 
 for, if that book has any plan at all, it is a treatise on the law 
 of jurisdiction, a treatise on 'soke.' To this topic the writer 
 constantly returns after many digressions, and the leading 
 theme of his work is found in the following sentence : ' As to 
 the soke of pleas, there is that which belongs properly and 
 exclusively to the royal fiscus; there is that which it partici- 
 pates with others ; there is that which belongs to the sheriffs 
 and royal bailiffs as comprised in their ferms; there is that 
 which belongs to the barons who have soke and sake 3 .' But, 
 when all has been said, the picture that is left on our minds is 
 that of a confused conflict between inconsistent and indefinite 
 principles, and very possibly the compiler in giving us such a 
 picture is fulfilling the duty of a faithful portrayer of facts, 
 though he does not satisfy our demand for a rational theory. 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 558. The terms here used were adopted when the 
 Introduction to the Selden Society's Select Pleas in Manorial Courts (1888) was 
 being written. M. Esmein in his Cours d'histoire du droit francais, ed. 2 (1895), 
 p. 259, has insisted on the same distinction but has used other and perhaps 
 apter terms. According to him ' la justice rendue par les seigneurs ' (my 
 seignorial justice) is either 'la justice seigneuriale ' (my franchisal justice) or 
 ' la justice feodale ' (my feudal justice). 
 
 a See Liebermann, Leges Edwardi, p. 88. * Leg. Hen. 9, 9.
 
 Sake and Soke. 81 
 
 On the one hand, it seems plain that there is a seignorial Sokeinthe 
 justice which is not ' franchisal.' Certain persons have a certain 
 ' soke ' apart from any regalities which may have been expressly 
 conceded to them by the king. But it is not clear that the 
 legal basis of this soke is the simple feudal principle stated 
 above, namely, that jurisdiction springs from the mere fact of 
 tenure. An element of which we hear little in later days, is 
 prominent in the Leges, the element of rank or personal status. 
 ' The archbishops, bishops, earls and other ' powers ' (potestates) 
 have sake and soke, toll, team and infangenethef in their own 
 lands 1 .' Here the principle seems to be that men of a certain 
 rank have certain, jurisdictional powers, and the vague term 
 potestates may include in this class all the king's barons. But 
 then the freeholding vavassores have a certain jurisdiction, they 
 have the pleas which concern wer and wite (that is to say 
 ' emendable ' pleas) over their own men and their own property, 
 and sometimes over another man's men who have been arrested 
 or attached in the act of trespass 2 . Whatever else we may think 
 of these vavassores, they are not barons and probably they are 
 not immediate tenants of the king 8 . It is clear, however, that 
 there may be a ' lord ' with ' men ' who yet has no sake or soke 
 over them 4 . We are told indeed that every lord may summon 
 his man to stand to right in his court, and that if the man be 
 resident in the remotest manor of the honour of which he holds, 
 he still must go to the plea 5 . Here for a moment we seem to 
 have a fairly clear announcement of what we call the simple 
 feudal principle, unadulterated by any element of personal rank ; 
 still our text supposes that the lord in question is a great man, 
 he has no mere manor but an honour or several honours. On 
 the whole, our law seems for the time to be taking the shape 
 that French law took. If we leave out of sight the definitely 
 granted franchisal powers, then we may say that a baron or the 
 holder of a grand fief has ' high justice,' or if that term be too 
 technical, a higher justice, while the vavassor has ' low justice ' 
 or a lower justice. But in this province, as in other provinces, 
 of English law personal rank becomes of less and less import- 
 ance. The rules which would determine it and its consequences 
 are never allowed to become definite, and in the end a great 
 
 1 Leg. Henr. 20 2. a Leg. Henr. 27. 
 
 3 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 532. Leg. Henr. 57 8. Cf. 69 19. 
 
 8 Leg. Henr. 55.
 
 82 Domesday Book. 
 
 generalization surmounts all difficulties: every lord has a 
 certain civil justice over his tenants; whatsoever powers go 
 beyond this, are franchises. 
 Kinds of As to the sort of jurisdiction that a lord of our Leges has, 
 
 soke in the J 
 
 Leges. we can make no statement in general terms. Such categories 
 as ' civil ' and ' criminal ' are too modern for use. We must of 
 course except the pleas of the crown, of which a long and un- 
 generalized list is set before us 1 . We must except the pleas of 
 the church. We must except certain pleas which belong in 
 part to the king and in part to the church 2 . Then we observe 
 that the justice of an archbishop, bishop or earl, probably the 
 justice of a baron also, extends as high as infangenethef, while 
 that of a vavassor goes no higher than such offences as are 
 emendable. The whole matter however is complicated by royal 
 grants. The king may grant away a demesne manor and retain 
 not only ' the exclusive soke ' (i.e. the soke over the pleas of the 
 crown), but also ' the common soke ' in his hand 3 , and a great 
 man may by purchase acquire soke (for example, we may 
 suppose, the hundredal soke) over lands that are not his own 4 . 
 Then again, we may suspect that what is said of 'soke' in 
 general does not apply to any jurisdiction that a lord may 
 exercise over his servi and villani. As to the servi, very possibly 
 the lord's right over them is still conceived as proprietary 
 rather than jurisdictional, while for his villani (serf and villein 
 are not yet convertible terms) the lord, whatever his rank may 
 be, will probably hold a i hallmoot 5 ' and exercise that ' common 
 soke' which does not infringe the royal preserves. On the 
 whole, the law of the thirteenth century seems to evolve itself 
 somewhat easily out of the law of these Leges, the process of 
 development being threefold: (1) the lord's rank as bishop, 
 abbot, earl, baron, becomes unimportant; (2) the element of 
 tenure becomes all-important; the mere fact that the man 
 holds land of the lord makes him the lord's justiciable ; thus a 
 generalization becomes possible which permits even so lowly a 
 person as a burgess of Dunstable to hold a court for his tenants 6 ; 
 (3) the obsolescence of the old law of wite and wer, the growth 
 
 1 Leg. Henr. 10 1. 
 
 8 Leg. Henr. 11 1. This explains the participatio ' of 9 9. 
 
 8 Leg. Henr. 19. 4 Leg. Henr. 20 2. 
 
 6 Leg. Henr. 9 4 ; 20 2; 57 8 ; 78 2. 
 
 6 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 574.
 
 Sake and Soke. 83 
 
 of the new law of felony, the emergence in Glanvill's book of 
 the distinction between criminal and civil pleas as a grand 
 primary distinction, the introduction of the specially royal 
 processes of presentment and inquest, bring about a new appor- 
 tionment of the field of justice and a rational demarcation of 
 feudal from franchisal powers. Still when we see the lords, 
 especially the prelates of the church, relying upon prescription 
 for their choicest franchises 1 , we may learn (if such a lesson be 
 needed) that new theories could not master all the ancient 
 facts. 
 
 Whether the Conqueror or either of his sons would have The Nor- 
 admitted that any justice could be done in England that was 
 not his justice, we may fairly doubt. They issued numerous 
 charters which had no other object than that of giving or 
 confirming to the donees ' their sake and soke,' and, so far as we 
 can see, there is no jurisdiction, at least none over free men, 
 that is not accounted to be ' sake and soke.' Occasionally it is 
 said that the donees are to have ' their court.' However far the 
 feudalization of justice had gone either in Normandy or in 
 England before the Conquest, the Conquest itself was likely to 
 conceal from view the question whether or no all seignorial 
 jurisdiction is delegated from above; for thenceforward every 
 lay tenant in chief, as no mere matter of theory, but as a plain 
 matter of fact, held his land by a title derived newly and 
 immediately from the king. Thus it would be easy for the 
 king to maintain that, if the lords exercised jurisdictional powers, 
 they did so by virtue of his grant, an expressed grant or an 
 implied grant. Gradually the process of subinfeudation would 
 make the theoretical question prominent and pressing, for 
 certainly the Norman nobles conceived that, even if their justice 
 was delegated to them by the king, no rule of law prevented 
 them from appointing sub-delegates. If they claimed to give 
 away land, they claimed also to give away justice, and no 
 earnest effort can have been made to prevent their doing this 8 . 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 571. 
 
 2 See e.g. Geoffrey Clinton for Kenilworth, Monast. vi. 221 : ' Concede... ut 
 habeant curiam suam...ita libere...sicat ego meam curiam...ex concessu regis 
 melius et firmius habeo." Robert of Ouilly for Osney, ibid. p. 251 : ' Volo...qnod 
 babeant curiam ipsorum liberam de suis hominibus de omnimodis transgres- 
 sionibus et defaltis, et quieti sint tarn ipsi quam eorum teneutes de omnimodis 
 curiae meae sectis.' 
 
 62
 
 84 Domesday Book. 
 
 Sake and Returning from this brief digression, we must consider sake 
 
 Domesday and soke as they are in Domesday Book. For a moment we will 
 attend to the words themselves 1 . Of the two soke is by far the 
 commoner; indeed we hardly ever find sake except in connexion 
 with soke, and when we do, it seems just an equivalent for soke- 
 We have but an alliterative jingle like 'judgment and justice 2 .' 
 Apparently it matters little or nothing whether we say of a 
 lord that he has soke, or that he has sake, or that he has soke 
 and sake. But not only is soke the commoner, it is also the 
 wider word; we can not substitute sake for it in all contexts. 
 Thus, for example, we say that a man renders soke to his lord 
 or to his lord's manor ; also we say that a piece of land is a soke 
 of such and such a manor ; no similar use is made of sake. 
 
 Meaning of Now as a matter of etymology sake seems the easier of the 
 two words. It is the Anglo-Saxon sacu, the German Sache, a 
 thing, a matter, and hence a ' matter ' or ' cause ' in the lawyer's 
 sense of these terms, a ' matter ' in dispute between litigants, a 
 ' cause ' before the court. It is still in use among us, for though 
 we do not speak of a sake between two persons, we do speak of 
 a man acting for another's sake, or for God's sake, or for the sake 
 of money 8 . In Latin therefore sake may be rendered by 
 placitum : ' Roger has sake over them ' will become ' Rogerius 
 habet placita super eos 4 '; Roger has the right to hold plea 
 over them. Thus easily enough sake becomes the right to have 
 a court and to do justice. 
 
 Meaning of As to soke, this has a very similar signification, but the 
 route by which it attains that signification is somewhat doubt- 
 ful. We must start with this that soke, socna, soca, is the 
 Anglo-Saxon s6cn and has for its primary meaning a seeking. 
 It may become connected with justice or jurisdiction by one or 
 by both of two ways. One of these is explained by a passage 
 x 
 
 1 See Liebermann, Leg. Edw. p. 91. 
 
 2 Thus in D. B. ii. 409 we find two successive entries, the ' in saca regis et 
 comitis ' of the one, being to all seeming an equivalent for the ' in soca regis et 
 comitis ' of the other. D. B. ii. 416 : ' de omnibus habuit antecessor Kannulfi 
 commendationem et sacam excepto uno qui est in soca S. Edmundi.' Ibid. ii. 
 391 b : 'liberi homines Wisgari cum saca. ..liber homo. ..sub Witgaro cum soca.' 
 In the Inquisitio Eliensis (e.g. Hamilton, p. 109) saca is sometimes used instead 
 of soca in the common formula ' sed soca remansit abbati.' In D. B. ii. 264 b, a 
 scribe having written ' sed habet sacam' has afterwards substituted an o for the 
 a ; we have noted no other instance of such care. 
 
 8 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 566. * D. B. i. 184, Ewias.
 
 Sake and Soke. 85 
 
 in the Leges Henrici which says that the king has certain 
 causes or pleas 'in socna i.e. quaestione sua.' The king 
 has certain pleas within his investigation, or his right to 
 investigate. A later phrase may help us: the king is 
 entitled to 'inquire of, hear and determine' these matters 1 . 
 But the word might journey along another path which would 
 lead to much the same end. It means seeking, following, 
 suing, making suit, sequi, sectam facere. The duty known 
 as soca faldae is the duty of seeking the lord's fold. Thus 
 soca may be the duty of seeking or suing at the lord's court 
 and the correlative right of the lord to keep a court and exact 
 suit. Without denying that the word has traversed the first of 
 the two routes, the route by way of ' investigation ' in the face 
 of the Leges Henrici we can hardly deny this we may confi- 
 dently assert that it has traversed the second, the route by way 
 of ' suit.' There are several passages which assure us that sake 
 is a genus of which fold-soke is a species. Thus : ' Of these 
 men Peter's predecessor had fold-soke -and commendation and 
 Stigand had the other soke 2 .' In a document which is very 
 closely connected with the great survey we find what seems 
 to be a Latin translation of our word. The churches of 
 Worcester and Evesham were quarrelling about certain lands 
 at Hamton. Under the eye of the king's commissioners they 
 came to a compromise, which declared that the fifteen hides 
 at Hamton belonged to the bishop of Worcester's hundred of 
 Oswaldslaw and ought to pay the king's geld and perform the 
 king's services along with the bishop and ought 'to seek the 
 said hundred for pleading ' : requirere ad placitandum, this is 
 the main kind of ' seeking ' that soke implies 8 . If we look back 
 
 1 Leg. Henr. 20 1. The author of Leg. Edw. Conf., c. 22, also attempts to 
 connect soke with seeking, but his words are exceedingly obscure : ' Soche est 
 quod si aliquis quaerit aliquid in terra sua, etiam furtum, sua est iustitia, si 
 inventum sit an non.' On the whole we take this nonsense to mean that my 
 right of soke is my right to do justice in case any one seeks (by way of legal 
 proceedings) anything in my land, even though the accusation that he brings 
 be one of theft, and even though the stolen goods have not been found on the 
 thief. Already the word is a prey to the etymologist. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 256. 
 
 3 Heming Cart. i. 75-6 : 'quod illae 15 hidae iuste pertinent ad Osuualdeslaue 
 hundredum episcopi et debent cum ipso episcopo censum regis solvere et omnia 
 alia servitia ad regem pertinentia et inde idem requirere ad placitandum.' 
 Another account of the same transaction, ibid. 77, says 'et [episcopus] deracio- 
 cinavit socani et sacarn de Hamtona ad suum hundred Osuualdeslauue quod ibi
 
 86 Domesday Book. 
 
 far enough in the Anglo-Saxon dooms, there is indeed much to 
 make us think that the act of seeking a lord and placing oneself 
 under his protection, and the consequences of that act, the 
 relation between man and lord, the fealty promised by the one, 
 the warranty due from the other, have been known as s6cn l . 
 If so, then there may have been a time when commendation 
 and soke were all one. But this time must be already ancient, 
 for although we do not know what English word was represented 
 by commendatio, still there is no distinction more emphatically 
 drawn by Domesday Book than that between commendatio and 
 soca. 
 Soke as Now when we meet with soca in the Leges Henrici we 
 
 jurisdic- ., . ..",.. 
 
 tion. naturally construe it by some such terms as 'jurisdiction, 
 'justice,' 'the right to hold a court.' We have seen that the 
 author of that treatise renders it by the Latin quaestio. We 
 also meet the following phrases which seem clear enough : 
 ''Every cause shall be determined in the hundred, or in the 
 county, or in the hallnioot of those who have soke, or in the 
 courts of the lords 2 '; ' ...according to the soke of pleas, which 
 some have in their own land over their own men, some over 
 their own men and strangers, either in all causes or in some 
 causes 3 ' :...'grithbrice or hams<5cn or any of those matters which 
 exceed their soke and sake 4 ' : ' in capital causes the soke is the 
 king's 5 .' So again our author explains that though a baron has 
 soke this will not give him a right to justice over himself; no 
 
 ,. one, he says, can have his own forfeiture ; no one has a soke of 
 
 impunity: 'nullus enim socnam habet impune peccandi 6 .' 
 The use that Domesday Book makes of the word may not 
 be quite so clear. Sometimes we are inclined to render it by 
 suit, in particular when fold-soke is contrasted with ' other soke.' 
 But very generally we must construe it by justice or by justiciary 
 
 debent placitare et geldttm et expeditionem et cetera legis servitia de illis 15 hidis 
 secum debent persolvere.' 
 
 1 Schmid, Glossar. s. v. sticen. The word, it would seem, first makes its 
 way into the vocabulary of the law as describing the act of seeking a sanctuary 
 and the protection that a criminal gains by that act. A forged charter of Edgar 
 for Thorney Abbey, Eed Book of Thorney, Camb. Univ. Lib., f. 4, says that the 
 word is a Danish word ' Eegi vero pro consensu et eiusdem mercimonii licentia 
 ac pro reatus emendatione quam Dani scene usitato nominant vocabulo, centum 
 dedit splendidissimi auri mancusas.' 
 
 8 Leg. Henr. 9 4. s Ibid. Ibid. 22. 
 
 6 Ibid. 20 3. 6 Ibid. 24.
 
 Sake and Sake. 87 
 
 rights, though we must be careful not to introduce the seignorial 
 court where it does not exist, and to remember that a lord may 
 be entitled to receive the wites or fines incurred by his criminous 
 men without holding a court for them. Those men may be tried 
 and condemned in a hundred court, but the wite will be paid 
 to their lord. Then the word is applied to tracts of land. A 
 tract over which a lord has justiciary power, or a wite-exacting 
 power, is his soke, and very often his soke is contrasted with 
 those other lands over which he has rights of a more definitely 
 proprietary kind. But we must turn from words to law. 
 
 Already before the Conquest there was plenty of seignorial Seignorial 
 justice in England. The greatest of the Anglo-Saxon lords had fore the 
 enjoyed wide and high justiciary rights. Naturally it is of onqne! 
 the rights of the churches that we hear most, for the rights that 
 they had under King Edward they still claim under King 
 William. Foremost among them we may notice the church 
 of Canterbury. On the great day at Penenden Heath, Lan- 
 franc proved that throughout the lands of his church in Kent 
 the king had but three rights; all other justice was in the hands 
 of the archbishop 1 . In Warwickshire the Archbishop of York 
 has soke and sake, toll and team, church-scot and all other 
 ' forfeitures ' save those four which the king has throughout the 
 whole realm 2 . These- four forfeitures are probably the four 
 reserved pleas of the crown that are mentioned in the laws 
 of Cnut mundbryce, hdmsdcn, forsteal and fyrdwite 3 . But 
 even these rights though usually reserved to the king may 
 have been made over to the lord. In Yorkshire neither king 
 nor earl has any ' custom ' within the lands of S*. Peter of York, 
 S fc . John of Beverley, S*. Wilfrid of Ripon, S'. Cuthbert of 
 Durham and the Holy Trinity. We are asked specially to 
 note that in this region there are four royal highways, three 
 by land and one by water where the king claims all forfeitures 
 even when they run through the land of the archbishop or of 
 the earl 4 . Within his immense manor of Taunton the Bishop 
 
 1 Selden's Eadmer, p. 197 ; Bigelow, Placita Anglo-Norman, p. 7. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 238 b, Alvestone. 
 
 3 Cnut, n. 12. We may construe these terms by breach of the king's special 
 peace, attacks on houses, ambush, neglect of the summons to the host. In 
 Hereford, D. B. i. 179, the king is accounted to have three pleas, breach of his 
 peace, hamfare, which is the same as hamsocn, and forsteal ; and besides this 
 he receives the penalty from a man who makes default in military service. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 298 b.
 
 88 Domesday Book. 
 
 of Winchester has pleas of the highest class, and three times a 
 year without any summons his men must meet to hold them 1 . 
 In Worcestershire seven of the twelve hundreds into which 
 the county is divided are in the heads of four great churches ; 
 Worcester has three, Westminster two, Evesham one, Pershore 
 one. Westminster holds its lands as freely as the king held 
 them in his demesne ; Pershore enjoys all the pleas of the free 
 men; no sheriff can claim anything within the territory of 
 S*. Mary of Worcester, neither in any plea, nor in any other 
 matter 2 . In East Anglia we frequently hear of the reserved 
 pleas of the crown. In this Danish district they are accounted 
 to be six in number; probably they are griSbrice, hdmsocn, 
 fihtwite and fyrdwite, outlaw 's-work and the receipt of outlaws 3 . 
 Often we read how over the men of some lord the king and the 
 earl have 'the six forfeitures,' or how 'the soke of the six 
 forfeitures' lies in some royal manor 4 . But then there is 
 a large tract in which these six forfeitures belong to S fc . 
 Edmund; some other lord may have sake and soke in a 
 given parcel of that tract, but the six forfeitures belong to 
 S fc . Edmund; they are indeed 'the six forfeitures of S*. Edmund 5 .' 
 Other arrangements were possible. We hear of men over whom 
 S fc . Benet had three forfeitures 6 . The lawmen of Stamford had 
 
 1 D. B. i. 87 b : 'Istae consuetudinea pertinent ad Tantone, burgheristh, 
 latrones, pacis infractio, hainfare, denarii de hundret, et denarii S. Petri ; ter in 
 anno teneri placita episcopi sine ammonitione ; profectio in exercitum cum 
 hominibus episcopi.' See also the English document, Kemble, Cod. Dipl. iv. 
 p. 233. The odd word burgheristh looks like a corrupt form of burhgrtiS (the 
 peace of the burh), or of burhgerihta (burh-rights, borough-dues), which word 
 occurs in the English document. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 172, 175. 
 
 3 Cnut n. 12, 13, 14. Perhaps when in other parts of England the pleas 
 of the crown are reckoned to be but four, it is treated as self-evident that the 
 outlaw falls into the king's hand, as also the man who harbours an outlaw. If 
 fihtwite is the right word, we must suppose with Schmid (p. 586) that a fihtwite 
 was only paid when there was homicide. A fine for mere fighting or drawing 
 blood would not have been a reserved plea. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 179 b : ' Et iste Withri habebat sacham et socam super istam 
 terrain et rex et conies 6 forisf acturas. ' Ibid. 223 : ' In Cheiunchala soca de 
 6 forisfacturis.' 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 413 b : ' socam et sacam praeter 6 forisfacturas S. Eadmundi.' 
 Ibid. 373 : ' S. Eadmundus 6 forisfacturas.' Ibid. 384 b : ' Tota hec terra iacebat 
 in dominio Abbatiae [de Eli] T. E. E. cum omni consuetudine praeter sex foris- 
 facturas S. Eadmundi.' 
 
 6 D. B. ii. 244 : 'sex liberi homines... ex his habet S. Benedictus socam et de 
 uno commendationem et de 24 tres forisfacturas.'
 
 Sake and Soke. 89 
 
 sake and soke within their houses and over their men, save geld, 
 heriot, larceny and forfeitures exceeding 40 ores of silver 1 . 
 Certain burgesses of Romney serve the king on the sea, and 
 therefore they have their own forfeitures, save larceny, peace- 
 breach and forsteal, and these belong, not to the king, but to 
 the archbishop 2 . Sometimes King William will be careful to 
 limit his confirmation of a lord's sake and soke to the ' emendable 
 forfeitures/ the offences which can be paid for with money 8 . 
 
 That in the Confessor's day justiciary rights could only Soke as a 
 be claimed by virtue of royal grants, that they did not arise rega y> 
 out of the mere relation between lord and man, lord and tenant, 
 or lord and villein, seems to us fairly certain. In the first 
 place, as already said, soke is frequently contrasted with com- 
 mendation. In the second place, as we turn over the pages 
 of our record, we shall see it remarked of some man, who held 
 a manor in the days before the Conquest, that he had it with 
 sake and soke, and the remark is made in such a context that 
 thereby he is singled out from among his fellows 4 . Thus it 
 is said of a little group of villeins and sokemen in Essex 
 that ' their lord had sake and soke 8 .' Not that we can argue 
 that a lord has no soke unless it is expressly ascribed to him. 
 The surveyors have no great interest in this matter. Some- 
 times such a phrase as 'he held it freely' seems to serve as 
 an equivalent for 'he held it with sake and soke 6 .' It is 
 said of the Countess Judith, a lady of exalted rank, that she 
 had a manse in Lincoln without sake and soke 7 . Then we 
 are told that throughout the city of Canterbury the king 
 had sake and soke except in the lands of the Holy Trinity 
 (Christ Church), S*. Augustin, Queen Edith, and three other 
 lords 8 . We have a list of fifteen persons who had sake and 
 
 % 
 
 1 D. B. i. 336 b : ' praeter geld et heriete et forisfacturam corpornm suornm 
 de 40 oris argenti et praeter latronein.' Such a phrase as ' geld, heriot and 
 thief is instructive. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 4 b. 
 
 3 William I. for Ely, Hamilton, Inquisitio, p.xviii. : ' omnes alias forisfacturas 
 quae emendabiles stint.' 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 195 : ' Super hos habuit T. B. E. Episcopus 6 forisfacturas sed 
 hundret nee vidit breve nee sigillum nee concessum Regis.' 
 
 5 D. B. ii. 34 b. See e.g. D. B. i. 220. 
 
 7 D. B. i. 336 : ' Boperius de Busli habet unnm manram Sueni filii Suaue 
 cum saca et soca. Judita comitissa habet uiiuiu mansum Stori sine saca et 
 soca.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 2.
 
 90 Domesday Book. 
 
 soke in the two lathes of Sutton and Aylesford 1 , a list of thirty- 
 five persons who had sake and soke, toll and team in Lincoln- 
 shire (it includes the queen, a bishop, three abbots and two 
 earls 2 ), and a list of nineteen persons who had similar rights 
 in the shires of Derby and Nottingham 8 . Such lists would 
 have been pointless had any generalization been possible. Then 
 in East Anglia it is common enough to find that the men who 
 are reckoned to be the liberi homines of some lord are under 
 the soke of another lord or render their soke to the king and 
 the earl, that is to say, to the hundred court. Often enough 
 it is said somewhat pointedly that the men over whom the 
 king and the earl have soke are liberi homines, and this may 
 for a moment suggest that the lord as a matter of course has 
 soke over such of his men as are not ranked as ' free men ' ; 
 possibly it may suggest that freedom in this context implies 
 subjection to a national as opposed to a seignorial tribunal 4 . 
 But on the one hand a lord often enough has soke .over those 
 who are distinctively 'free men 5 ,' while on the other hand, 
 as will be explained below, he has not the soke over his 
 sokeman 6 . 
 
 Soke over But we must go further and say that the lord has not 
 always the soke over his villeins. This is a matter of much 
 importance. An entry relating to a manor in Suffolk seems 
 to put it beyond doubt : In the hundred and a half of Sanford 
 Auti a thegn held Wenham in King Edward's time for a manor 
 and three carucates of land ; there were then nine villani, four 
 bordarii and one serous and there were two teams on the de- 
 mesne; Auti had the soke over his demesne and the soke of 
 the villeins was in Bercolt 7 . Now Bercolt, the modern Bergholt, 
 was a royal manor, the seat of a great court, which had soke 
 over many men in the neighbouring villages. To all seeming 
 it was the court for the hundred, or 'hundred-and-a-half/ of 
 
 1 D. B. i. 1 b. 3 D. B. i. 337. 3 D. B. i. 280 b. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 185 : ' Super omnes liberos istius hundreti [de Northerpingeham] 
 habet Rex sacam et socam.' Ibid. 188 b : ' Eex et comes de omnibus istia liberis 
 hominibus socam.' Ibid. 203 : 'Et de omnibus Ms liberis [Episcopi Osberni] 
 soca in hundreto.' 
 
 6 D. B. ii. 210 : Super omnes istos liberos homines habuit Bex Eadwardus 
 socam et sacam, et postea Guert accepit per vim, sed Bex Willelmus dedit 
 [8. Eadmundo] cum manerio socam et sacam de omnibus liberis Guert sicut 
 ipse tenebat ; boo reclamant monachi.' 
 
 Below, p. 105. 7 D. B. ii. 425 b.
 
 Sake and Soke. 91 
 
 Sanford 1 . Here then we seem to have villeins who are not 
 under the soke of their lord but are the justiciables of the 
 hundred court. In another case, also from Suffolk, it is said of 
 the lord of a manor that he had soke ' only over the demesne 
 of his hall,' and this seems to exclude from the scope of his . 
 justiciary rights the land held by thirty-two villeins and eight 
 bordiers 2 . We may find the line drawn at various places. 
 Not very unfrequently in East Anglia a lord has the soke over 
 those men who are bound to his sheep-fold, while those who 
 are ' fold- worthy ' attend the hundred court 8 . In one case 
 a curious and instructive distinction is taken : ' In Farwell 
 lay in King Edward's day the sake and soke of all who had 
 less than thirty acres, but of all who had thirty acres the soke 
 and sake lay in the hundred 4 .' In this case the line seems 
 to be drawn just below the virgater, no matter the legal class 
 to which the virgater belongs. To our thinking it is plain 
 enough that many a manerium of the Confessor's day had no 
 court of its own. As we shall see hereafter, the manors are 
 often far too small to allow of our endowing each of them 
 with a court. When of a Cheshire manor we hear that ' this 
 manor has its pleas in its lord's hall ' we are being told of 
 something that is exceptional 5 . In the thirteenth century 
 no one would have made such a remark. In the eleventh the 
 halimote or hall-moot looks like a novelty. 
 
 Seignorial justice is as yet very closely connected with private 
 the general scheme of national justice. Frequently the lord 
 
 soke. 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 287, 287 b: ' Sanfort Hand, et dim....Supradictum manerium 
 scilicet Bercolt...cum soca de hundreto et dimidio reddebat T. B. E. 24 lib.' On 
 subsequent pages it is often said that the soke of certain persons or lands is in 
 Bergholt. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 408 b : ' Hagala tennit Gutmundus sob Bege Edwardo pro manerio 
 8 carfucatarum] terrae cum soca et saca super dominium hallae tantum. Tuno 
 32 villani...8 bordarii...lO servi. Semper 4 carucae in dominio. Tune et post 
 24 carucae hominum....Sex sochemanni eiusdem Gutmundi de quibus soca est 
 in hundreto.' 
 
 3 D. B. ii. 216 : ' De Redeham habebat Abbas socam super hos qni sequebantur 
 faldam, et de aliis soca in hundreto.' Ibid. 129 b : ' Super omnes istos qui 
 fultlam Comitis requirebant habebat Comes socam et sacam, super alios omnes 
 Bex et Comes.' Ibid. 194 b : ' In Begetuna tenuit Episcopus Almarus per 
 emptionem T. B. E. cum soca et saca de Comite Algaro de borfdariis] et sequent- 
 ibus faldam 3 carucatas terrae.' Ibid. 350 b : 'habebat socam et sacam super 
 hallam et bordarios.' 
 
 * D. B. ii. 130 b. 
 
 5 D. B. i. 265 b : ' Hoc manerium habet suum placitum in sola domini sui.'
 
 92 Domesday Book. 
 
 who has justice has a hundred. We remember how seven 
 of the twelve hundreds of Worcestershire are in the hands of 
 four great churches 1 . S e . Etheldreda of Ely has the soke of 
 five and a half hundreds in Suffolk 2 . In Essex Swain had 
 the half- hundred of Clavering, and the pleas thereof brought 
 him in 25s. a year 8 . In Nottinghamshire the Bishop of 
 Lincoln had" all the customs of the king and the earl throughout 
 the wapentake of Newark 4 . The monks of Battle Abbey 
 claimed that the sake and soke of twenty-two hundreds and 
 a half and all royal ' forfeitures ' were annexed to their manor 
 of Wye 5 . But further and this deserves attention when the 
 hundredal jurisdiction was not in the hands of some other 
 lord, it was conceived as belonging to the king. The sake 
 and soke of a hundred or of several hundreds is described as 
 'lying in,' or being annexed to, some royal manor and it 
 is farmed by the farmer of that manor. Oxfordshire gives 
 us the best example of this. The soke of four and a half 
 hundreds belongs to the royal manor of Bensington, that of 
 two hundreds to Headington, that of two and a half to Kirt- 
 lington, that of three to Upton, that of three to Shipton, that 
 of two to Bampton, that of two to Bloxham and Adderbury 6 . 
 What we see here we may see elsewhere also 7 . If then King 
 William gives the royal manor of Wye to his newly founded 
 church of S fc . Martin in the Place of Battle, the monks will 
 contend that they have obtained as an appurtenance the 
 hundredal soke over a large part of the county of Kent 8 . 
 Hnndredai The law seems as yet, if we may so speak, unconscious 
 rial soke. f * ne f act * na ^ underneath or beside the hundredal soke a 
 new soke is growing up. It seems to treat the soke over a 
 man or over a piece of land as an indivisible thing that must 
 ' lie ' somewhere and can not be in two places at once. It has 
 
 1 Above, p. 88. 2 D. B. ii. 385 b. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 46 b. 4 D. B. i. 283 b. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 11 b. ; Chron. de Bello (Anglia Christiana Soc.) p. 28 ; Battle 
 Custumals (Camd. Soc.), p. 126. 
 
 e D. B. i. 154 b. 
 
 7 D. B. 39 b, Hants : ' Huic manerio pertinet soca duorum hundredorum.' 
 Ibid. 64 b, Wilts : ' In hac firma erant placita hundretorum de Cicementone et 
 Sutelesberg quae regi pertinebant.' Ibid. ii. 185 : ' Super omnes liberos istius 
 hundreti habet rex sacam et socam.' Ibid. ii. 113 b : ' Soca et sacha de 
 Grenehou hundreto pertinet ad Wistune manerium Regis, quicunque ibi 
 teneat, et habent Bex et Comes.' 
 
 See above, note 5.
 
 Sake and Soke. 93 
 
 indeed to admit that while one lord has the soke, the king or 
 another lord may have certain reserved and exalted ' forfeitures,' 
 the three forfeitures or the four or the six, as the case may be 1 ; 
 but it has no classification of courts. The lord's court, if it be 
 not the court of an ancient hundred, is conceived as the court 
 of a half-hundred, or of a quarter of a hundred 2 , or as the court 
 of a district that has been carved out from a hundred 8 . Thus 
 Stigand had the soke of the half-hundred of Hersham, save 
 Thorpe which belonged to S fc . Edmund, and Pulham which 
 belonged to S fc . Etheldreda 4 ; thus also the king had the soke 
 of the half-hundred of Diss, except the land of S'. Edmund, 
 where he shared the soke with the saint, and except the lands 
 of Wulfgaet and of Stigand 5 . But it is impossible to maintain 
 this theory. The hundred is becoming full of manors, within 
 each of which a lord is exercising or endeavouring to exer- 
 cise a soke over all, or certain classes, of his men. It is 
 possible that in Lincolnshire we see the beginnings of a differ- 
 entiating process ; we meet with the word frisoca, frigsoca, 
 frigesoca. Whether this stands for ' free soken,' or, as seems 
 more likely, for 'friS soken,' soke in matters relating to the 
 peace, it seems to mark off one kind of soke from other kinds 6 . 
 We have to remember that in later days the relation of the 
 manorial to the hundredal courts is curious. In no accurate 
 sense can we say that the court of the manor is below the court 
 of the hundred. No appeal, no complaint of false judgment, 
 lies from the one to the other ; and yet, unless the manor enjoys 
 some exceptional privilege, it is not extra-hundredal and its 
 jurisdiction in personal causes is over-lapped by the jurisdiction 
 of the hundred court : the two courts arise from different prin- 
 ciples 7 . In Domesday Book the feudal or tenurial principle 
 
 1 Above, p. 88. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 379 : ' Super ferting de Almeham habet W. Episcopus socam et 
 sacam.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 184: Haec terra non pertinet...ad hundredum. De hac terra 
 habet Rogerius 15 sextarios mellis et 15 porcos quando homines sunt ibi et 
 placita super eos.' 
 
 * D. B. ii. 139 b. 6 D. B. ii. 114. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 340, 346, 357 b, 366, 368 b (ter).. See also on f. 344, 344 b, the 
 symbol f5 in the margin. The word frtf&s6cn occurs in J3 their, vm. 1 and 
 Cnut i. 2 3, where it seems to stand for a sanctuary, an asylum. 
 
 7 If one of ,-1's tenants is sued in a personal action in the hundred court he 
 will have to answer there unless A appears and ' claims his court.' This comes 
 out plainly in certain rolls of the court of Wisbeach Hundred, which by the kind
 
 94 Domesday Book. 
 
 seems still struggling for recognition. Already the Norman 
 lords are assuming a soke which their antecessores did not 
 enjoy 1 . As will be seen below, they are enlarging and con- 
 solidating their manors and thereby rendering a manorial 
 justice possible and profitable. Whether we ought to hold 
 that the mere shock and jar of conquest and dispossession 
 was sufficient to set up the process which covered our land 
 with small courts, or whether we ought to hold that an element 
 of foreign law worked the change, is a question that will never 
 be answered unless the Norman archives have yet many secrets 
 to tell. The great 'honorial' courts of later days may be 
 French; still it is hardly in this region that we should look 
 for much foreign law. It is in English words that the French 
 baron of the Conqueror's day must speak when he claims 
 justiciary rights. But that the process was far from being 
 complete in 1086 seems evident. 
 
 The sei- Many questions about the distribution and the constitution 
 
 court* f the courts we must leave unsolved. Not only does our 
 record tell us nothing of courts in unambiguous words, but 
 it hardly has a word that will answer to our ' court.' The term 
 curia is in use, but it seems always to signify a physical object, 
 the lord's house or the court-yard around it, never an insti- 
 tution, a tribunal 2 . Almost all that we are told is conveyed 
 to us under the cover of such words as sake, soke, placita, foris- 
 facturae. We know that the Bishop of Winchester has a court 
 at Taunton, for his tenants are bound to come together thrice 
 
 permission of the Bishop of Ely, I have examined. On a roll of 33 Edw. I. we find 
 Stephen Hamond sued for a debt ; ' et super hoc venit Prior Elyensis et petit 
 curiam suarn ; et Thomas Doreward petit curiam suam de dicto Stephano residente 
 suo et tenente suo.' The prior's petition is refused on the ground that Stephen is 
 not his tenant, and Doreward's petition is refused on the ground that it is 
 unprecedented. 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 291 : ' Et fuit in soca Eegis. Postquam Briennus habuit, nullam 
 consuetudinem reddidit in hundreto.' Ibid. 240 : ' Hoc totum tenuit Lisius pro 
 uno manerio ; modo tenet Eudo successor illius et in T. B. E. soca et saca fuit in 
 hundreto ; set modo tenet Eudo.' Ibid. 240 b : ' Soca istius terre T. R. E. iacuit 
 in Folsa Regis ; modo habet Walterius [Giffardus].' Ibid. 285 b : the 
 hundred testified that in truth the King and Earl had the soke and sake in the 
 Confessor's day, but the men of the vill say that Burchard likewise (similiter) 
 had the soke of his free men as well as of his villeins. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 35 b : ' Duo fratres tenuerunt T. B. E. ; unusquisque habuit domum 
 suam et tamen manserunt in una curia.' Ibid. 103 b : ' Ibi molendinum serviens 
 curiae. ' Ibid. 163 : ' arabant et herciabant ad curiam doinini. '
 
 Sake and Soke. 95 
 
 a year to hold his pleas without being summoned 1 . This 
 phrase ' to hold his pleas ' seems to tell us distinctly enough 
 that the suitors are the doomsmen of the court. Then, again, 
 we have the well-known story of what happened at Orwell 
 in Cambridgeshire. In that village Count Roger had a small 
 estate; he had land for a team and a half. This land had 
 belonged to six sokemen. He had borrowed three of them 
 from Picot the sheriff in order that they might hold his pleas, 
 and having got them he refused to return them 2 . That the 
 court that he wished to hold was a court merely for his land 
 at Orwell is highly improbable, but he had other lands scattered 
 about in the various villages of the Wetherly hundred, though 
 in all his tenants amounted to but 14 villeins, 42 bordiers, 
 15 cottiers, and 4 serfs. We can not draw the inference that 
 men of the class known as sokemen were necessary for the 
 constitution of a court, for at the date of the survey there was 
 no sokeman left in all Roger's land in Cambridgeshire; the 
 three that he borrowed from Picot had disappeared or were 
 reckoned as villeins or worse. Still he held a court and that 
 court had doomsmen. But we can not argue that every lord 
 who had soke, or sake and soke, had a court of his own. It 
 may be that in some cases he was satisfied with claiming the 
 ' forfeitures ' which his men incurred in the hundred courts. 
 This is suggested to us by what we read of the earl's third penny. 
 
 In the county court and in every hundred court that has Soke and 
 not passed into private hands, the king is entitled to but two- 
 thirds of the proceeds of justice and the earl gets the other 
 third, except perhaps in certain exceptional cases in which 
 the king has the whole profit of some specially royal plea. The 
 soke in the hundred courts belongs to the king and the earl 
 And just as the king's rights as the lord of a hundredal 
 court become bound up with, and are let to farm with, some 
 royal manor, so the earl's third penny will be annexed to some 
 comital manor. Thus the third penny of Dorsetshire was 
 annexed to Earl Harold's manor of Pireton 8 , and the third 
 penny of Warwickshire to Earl Edwin's manor of Cote*. Harold 
 had a manor in Herefordshire to which belonged the third penny 
 
 1 1). 13. i. 87 b. Kemble, Cod. Dip., iv. p. 233 : ' and Jriwa secan gemofc 
 on 12 mon'Sum.' 
 
 * D. B. i. 193 b ; Hamilton, Inquisitio, 77-8. 
 s D. B. i. 75. * D. B. i. 23&
 
 96 Domesday Book. 
 
 of three hundreds 1 ; Godwin had a manor in Hampshire to 
 which belonged the third penny of six hundreds 2 ; the third 
 penny of three Devonian hundreds belonged to the manor of 
 Blackpool 8 . Now, at least in some cases, the king could not 
 by his grants deprive the earl of his right; the grantee of 
 soke had to take it subject to the earl's third penny. Thus 
 for the shires of Derby and Nottingham; we have a list of 
 nineteen persons who were entitled to the king's two-pence, 
 but only three of them were entitled to the earl's penny 4 . 
 The monks of Battle declared that throughout many hundreds 
 in Kent they were entitled to ' the king's two-pence ' ; the earl's 
 third penny belonged to Odo of Bayeux 8 . And so of certain 
 ' free men ' in Norfolk it is said that ' their soke is in the 
 hundred for the third penny 6 .' A man commits an offence; 
 he incurs a tvite', two-thirds of it should go to his lord; one- 
 third to the earl : in what court should he be tried ? The 
 answer that Domesday Book suggests by its silence is that 
 this is a matter of indifference ; it does not care to distinguish 
 between the right to hold a court and the right to take the 
 profits of justice. Just once the veil is raised for a moment. 
 In Suffolk lies the hundred of Blything; its head is the vill 
 of Blythburgh where there is a royal manor 7 . Within that 
 hundred lies the considerable town of Dunwich, which Edric 
 holds as a manor. Now in Dunwich the king has this custom 
 that two or three men shall go to the hundred court if they 
 be duly summoned, and if they make default they shall pay a 
 fine of two ores, and if a thief be caught there he shall be judged 
 there and corporeal justice shall be done in Blythburgh and 
 the lord of Dunwich shall have the thief's chattels. Apparently 
 in this case the lord of Dunwich will see to the trying but 
 not to the hanging of the thief ; but, at any rate, a rare effort 
 is here made to define how justice shall be done 8 . The rarity 
 
 1 D. B. i. 186. s D. B. i. 38 b. 3 rj. B. i. 101. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 280 b : ' Hie notantur qui habuerunt socam et sacam et thol et 
 thaim et consuetudinem Eegis 2 denariorum....Horum omnium nemo habere 
 potuit tercium denarium comitis nisi eius concessu et hoc quamdiu viveret, 
 preter Archiepiscopum et Ulf Feriso et Godeiie Comitissam.' 
 
 8 See above, p. 92, note 5. 
 
 6 D. B. ii. 123 b : ' De istis est soca in hundreto ad tercium denarium. 
 
 7 D. B. ii. 282. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 312 : ' Bex habet in Duneuuic consuetudinem bane quod duo vel 
 tres ibunt ad hundret si recte moniti fnerint, et si boc non faciunt, forisfacti
 
 Sake and Soke. 97 
 
 of such efforts is very significant. Of course Domesday Book 
 is not a treatise on jurisdiction ; still if there were other terms 
 in use, we should not be for ever put off with the vague, 
 undifferentiated soke. On the whole, we take it that the lord 
 who enjoyed soke had a right to keep a court if he chose to 
 do so, and that generally he did this, though he would be far 
 from keeping a separate court for each of his little manors; 
 but if his possessions were small he may have contented him- 
 self with attending the hundred court and claiming the fines 
 incurred by his men. Sometimes a lord seems to have soke 
 only over his own demesne lands 1 ; in. this case the wites that 
 will come to him will be few. We may in later times see some 
 curious compromises. If a thief is caught on the land of the 
 Prior of Canterbury at Brook in Kent, "the borhs-elder and 
 frank-pledges of Brook are to take him to the court of the 
 hundred of Wye, which belongs to the Abbot of Battle. Then, 
 if he is not one of the Prior's men, he will be judged by the 
 hundred. But if he is the Prior's man, then the bailiff of 
 Brook will ' crave the Prior's court.' The Prior's folk will then 
 go apart and judge the accused, a few of the hundredors going 
 with them to act as assessors. If the tribunal thus constituted 
 cannot agree, then once more the accused will be brought back 
 into the hundred and will there be judged by the hundredors 
 in common. In this instance we see that even in Henry II. 's 
 day the Prior has not thoroughly extricated his court from the 
 hundred moot 2 . 
 
 It seems possible that a further hint as to the history of Soke and 
 soke is given us by certain entries relating to the boroughs, peace. 
 It will already have become apparent that if there is soke over 
 men, there is also soke over land: if men 'render soke' so 
 also acres 'render soke.' We can see that a very elaborate 
 web of rules is thus woven. One man strikes another. Before 
 
 sunt de 2 oris, et si latro ibi fuerit captus ibi judicabitur, et corporalis iusticia 
 in Blieburc capietur, et sua pecunia remanebit dominio de Duneuuic.' It seems 
 to us that the first ibi must refer to Dunwich and therefore that the second does 
 BO likewise. Still the passage is ambiguous enough. 
 
 1 See above, p. 91. 
 
 3 Battle Custumals (Camden Soc.) 136. This is an interesting example, for 
 it suggests an explanation of the common claim to hold a court ' outside ' the 
 hundred court (petit curiam euam extra hundredum). The claimant's men will 
 go apart and hold a little court by themselves outside the four benches ' of the 
 hundred.
 
 98 Domesday Booh 
 
 we can tell what the striker ought to pay and to whom he 
 ought to pay it, we ought to know who had soke over the 
 striker, over the stricken, over the spot where the blow was 
 given, over the spot where the offender was attached or 
 arrested or accused. 'The men of South wark testify that 
 in King Edward's time no one took toll on the strand or in 
 the water-street save the king, and if any one in the act of 
 committing an offence was there challenged, he paid the amends 
 to the king, but if without being challenged he escaped under 
 a man who had sake and soke, that man had the amends 1 .' 
 Then we read how at Wallingford certain owners of houses 
 enjoyed ' the gafol of their houses, and blood, if blood was 
 shed there and the man was received inside before he was 
 challenged by the king's reeve, except on Saturday, for then 
 the king had the forfeiture on account of the market; and 
 for adultery and larceny they had the forfeiture in their 
 houses, but the other forfeitures were the king's 2 .' We can not 
 hope to recover the intricate rules which governed these affairs, 
 rules which must have been as intricate as those of our ' private 
 international law.' feut the description of Wallingford tells 
 us of householders who enjoy the ' forfeitures ' which arise 
 from crimes committed in their own houses, and a suspicion 
 may cross our minds that the right to these forfeitures is not 
 in its origin a purely jurisdictional or justiciary right. However, 
 these householders are great people (the Bishop of Salisbury, 
 the Abbot of St Albans are among them), their town houses 
 are considered as appurtenant to their rural manors and the 
 soke over the manor comprehends the town house. And so 
 when we read how the twelve lawmen of Stamford had sake 
 and soke within their houses and over their own men 'save 
 geld, and heriot, and corporeal forfeitures to the amount of 
 40 ores of silver and larceny' we may be reading of rights 
 which can properly be described as justiciary 3 . 
 
 Soke in But a much more difficult case comes before us at Warwick 4 . 
 
 We first hear of the town houses that are held by great men 
 as parts of their manors, and then we hear that ' besides these 
 
 1 D. B. i. 32 : ' et si quis forisfaciens ibi calumpniatus fuisset, Eegi emendabat; 
 si vero non calumpniatus abisset sub eo qui sacam et socam habuisset, ille 
 emendam de reo haberet.' Compare with this the account of Guildford, 
 Ibid. 30. 
 
 * D. B. i. 50 b. D. B. i. 336 b. * D. B. i. 238.
 
 Sake and Soke. 99 
 
 houses there are in the borough nineteen burgesses who have 
 nineteen houses with sake and soke and all customs.' Now 
 we can not easily believe that the burgess's house is a juris- 
 dictional area, or that in exacting a mulct from one who 
 commits a crime in that house the burgess will be playing the 
 magistrate or exercising a right to do justice or take the 
 profits of justice by virtue of a grant made to him by the 
 king. Rather we are likely to see here a relic of the ancient 
 ' house-peace V If you commit an act of violence in a man's 
 house, whatever you may have to pay to the person whom 
 you strike and to the king, you will also have to make 
 amends to the owner of the house, even though he be but 
 a ceorl or a boor, for you have broken his peace 2 . The right 
 of the burgess to exact a mulct from one who has shed blood 
 or committed adultery within his walls may in truth be a 
 right of this kind, and yet, like other rights to other mulcts, 
 it is now conceived as an emanation of sake and soke. If 
 in the eleventh century we hear but little of this householder's 
 right, may this not be because the householder has surrendered 
 it to his lord, or the lord has usurped it from the householder, 
 and thus it has gone to swell the mass of the lord's juris- 
 dictional rights ? At Broughton in Huntingdonshire the Abbot 
 of Ramsey has a manor with some sokemen upon it 'and 
 these sokemen say that they used to have legerwite (fornication- 
 fine), bloodwite and larceny up to fourpence, and above four- 
 pence the Abbot had the forfeiture of larceny 3 .' Various 
 interpretations may be set upon this difficult passage. We 
 may fashion for ourselves a village court (though there are 
 but ten sokemen) and suppose that the commune of sokemen 
 enjoyed the smaller fines incurred by any of its members. Bub 
 we are inclined to connect this entry with those relating to 
 Wallingford and to Warwick and to believe that each sokeman 
 has enjoyed a right to exact a sum of money for the breach 
 of his peace. The law does not clearly mark off the right of 
 the injured housefather from the right of the offended magis- 
 trate. How could it do so ? If you commit an act of violence 
 
 1 The passages from the dooms are collected by Schmid s. v. Hattsfriede, 
 Feohtan. 
 
 2 Ine, 6 8 : ' If he fight in the house of a gavel-payer or boor, let him give 
 30 shillings by way of wite and 6 shillings to the boor.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 204. 
 
 7-2
 
 100 
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 Vendible 
 soke. 
 
 Soke and 
 
 111!. 11(1. 
 
 you must pay a wite to the king. Why so ? Because you 
 have wronged the king by breaking his peace and he requires 
 ' amends ' from you. With this thought in our minds we may 
 now approach an obscure problem. 
 
 We have said that seignorial justice is regarded as having 
 its origin in royal grants, and in the main this seems true. We 
 hardly state an exception to this rule if we say that grantees 
 of justice become in their turn grantors. Not merely could 
 the earl who had soke grant this to one of his thegns, but 
 that thegn would be said to hold the soke 'under' or ' of the 
 earl. Justice, we may say, was already being subinfeudated 1 . 
 But now and again we meet with much more startling state- 
 ments. Usually if a man over whom his lord has soke ' with- 
 draws himself with his land,' or ' goes elsewhere with his land/ 
 the lord's soke over that land 'remains': he still has juris- 
 dictional rights over that land though it is commended to a 
 new lord. We may be surprised at being very frequently told 
 that this is the case, for we can hardly imagine a man having 
 power to take his land out of one sphere of justice and to 
 put it into another. But that some men, and they not men 
 of high rank, enjoyed this power seems probable. Of a 
 Hertfordshire manor we read : ' In this manor there were six 
 sokemen, men of Archbishop Stigand, and each had one hide, 
 and they could sell, saving the soke, and one of them could 
 even sell his soke with the land 2 .' This case may be ex- 
 ceptional; there may have been a very unusual compact 
 between the archbishop and this egregiously free sokeman; 
 but the frequency with which we are told that on a sale the 
 soke ' remains ' does not favour this supposition. 
 
 We seem driven to the conclusion that in some parts of the 
 country the practice of commendation had been allowed to 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 419 b: ' Cercesfort tenuit Scapius teinnus Haroldi. . . . Scapins 
 habuit socam sub Haroldo." Ibid. 313 : ' Heroldus socam habuit et Stanuuinua 
 de eo....Idem Stanuuinus socam habuit de Heroldo.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 142 b : ' et vendere potuerunt praeter socam ; unus autem eorum 
 etiam socam suam cum terra vendere poterat.' Comp. D. B. ii. 230: 'Huic 
 manerio iacent 5 liberi homines ad socam tantum commend[ati] et 2 de omni 
 consuetudine.' Ibid. ii. 59: 'In Cingeham tenuit Sauinus presbyter 15 acras . 
 in eadem villa tenuit Etsinus 15 acras. ...Isti supradicti fuerunt liberi ita quod 
 ipsi possent vendere terram cum soca et saca ut hundretus testatur. ' Ibid. ii. 
 40 b : ' et iste fuit ita liber quod posset ire quo vellet cum soca et sacha set 
 tantum fuit homo Wisgari.'
 
 Sake and Soke. 101 
 
 interfere even with jurisdictional relationships : that there 
 were men who could 'go with their land to what lord they 
 chose ' and carry with them not merely their homage, but also 
 their suit of court and their ' forfeitures.' This may seem to 
 us intolerable. If it be true, it tells us that the state has been 
 very weak ; it tells us that the national scheme of justice has 
 been torn to shreds by free contract, that men have had the 
 utmost difficulty in distinguishing between property and political 
 power, between personal relationships and the magistracy to 
 which land is subject. But unless we are mistaken, the house- 
 peace in its decay has helped to produce this confusion. In a 
 certain sense a mere ceorl has had what is now called a soke, 
 it used to be called a mund or grift over his house and over 
 his loaf-eaters: that is to say, he has been entitled to have 
 money paid to him if his house-peace were broken or his loaf- 
 eaters beaten. This right he has been able to transfer to a 
 lord. In 'one way or another it has now come into the lord's 
 hand and become mixed up with other rights. In Henry I.'s 
 day a lawyer will be explaining that if a villein receives money 
 when blood is shed or fornication is committed in his house, this 
 is because he has purchased these forfeitures from his lord 1 . 
 This reverses the order of history. 
 
 Such is the best explanation that we can give of the men Soke and 
 who sell their soke with their land. No doubt we are accusing ti 
 Domesday Book of being very obscure, of using a single word 
 to express some three or four different ideas. In some degree 
 the obscurity may be due to the fact that French justiciars and 
 French clerks have become the exponents of English law. But 
 we may gravely doubt whether Englishmen would have produced 
 a result more intelligible to us. One cause of difficulty we may 
 perhaps remove. In accordance with common wont we have 
 from time to time spoken of seignorial jurisdiction. But if the 
 word jurisdiction be strictly construed, then in all likelihood 
 there never has been in this country any seignorial jurisdiction. 
 It is not the part of the lord to declare the law (iiis dicere); 
 'curia domini debet facere iudicia et non dominus 2 .' From 
 
 1 Leg. Henr. 81 3 : ' Quidam, villani qui sunt, einsmodi leierwitam et 
 blodwitam et huiusmodi minors forisfacta emerunt a dominis suis, vel quomodo 
 meruerunt, de suis et in suos, quorum flet-gefoth vel overseunessa est 30 den. ; 
 cothseti 15 den. ; servi 6 (al. 5) den.' Theflet-gefoth seems to be the sum due 
 for fighting in a man's flet or house. 
 
 2 Munimenta Gildhallae, i. 66.
 
 102 Domesday Book. 
 
 first to last this seems to be so, unless we take account of 
 theories that come to us from a time when the lord's court was 
 fast becoming an obsolete institution 1 . So it is in Domesday 
 Book. In the hundred court the sheriff presides ; it is he that 
 appoints a day for the litigation, but the men of the hundred, 
 the men who come together ' to give and receive right,' make 
 the judgments 2 . The tenants of the Bishop of Winchester 'hold 
 the bishops' pleas' at Taunton; Earl Roger borrows sokemen 
 'to hold his pleas 8 .' Thus the erection of a new court is no 
 very revolutionary proceeding ; it passes unnoticed. If once it 
 be granted that all the justiciary profits arising from a certain 
 group of men or tract of land are to go to a certain lord, it is 
 very much a matter of indifference to kings and sheriffs whether 
 the lord holds a court of his own or exacts this money in the 
 hundred court. Indeed, a sheriff may be inclined to say ' I am 
 not going to do your justice for nothing; do it yourself.' So 
 long as every lord will come to the hundred court himself or 
 send his steward, the sheriff will have no lack of capable dooms- 
 men. Then the men of the lord's precinct may well wish for a 
 court at their doors; they will be spared the long journey to the 
 hundred court ; they will settle their own affairs and be a law 
 unto themselves. Thus we ought not to say that the lax use 
 of the word soke covers a confusion between 'jurisdiction ' and 
 the profits of 'jurisdiction,' and if we say that the confusion is 
 between justice and the profits of justice, we are pointing to a 
 distinction which the men of the Confessor's time might regard 
 as somewhat shadowy. In any case their lord is to have their 
 wites; in any case they will get the judgment of their peers; 
 what is left to dispute about is mere geography, the number of 
 the courts, the demarcation of justiciary areas. We may say, if 
 we will, that far-sighted men would not have argued in this 
 manner, for seignorial justice was a force mighty for good and 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 580-2. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 424 : ' Et dicunt etiam quod istam terrain R[anulf us] oalumpniavit 
 supra Radulfum, et vicecomes Bogerius denominavit illis constitutum tempus 
 m[odo] ut ambo adfuisseut; Banulfo adveniente defuit Radulfus et iccirco diiudi- 
 caverunt homines hundreti Bannulfum esse saisitum.' Ibid. i. 165 b: 'Modo 
 iacet in Bernitone hundredo iudicio hominum eiusdem hundred!.' Ibid. i. 58 b : 
 ' unde iudicium non dixerunt, sed ante Regem ut iudicet dimiserunt.' Ibid. 
 182 b: 'In isto hundredo ad placita conveniunt qui ibi manent nt rectum 
 faciant et accipiant. ' 
 
 8 Above, p. 95.
 
 Sake and Soke. 103 
 
 for ill ; but it has not been proved to our satisfaction that the 
 men who ruled England in the age before the Conquest were 
 far-sighted. Their work ended in a stupendous failure. 
 
 To the sake and soke of the old English law we shall have Soke and 
 
 . f\ i- f i commeuda- 
 
 to return once more in our next essay. Our discussion of the tion. 
 sake and soke of Domesday Book was induced by a considera- 
 tion of the various bonds which may bind a man to a lord. 
 And now we ought to understand that in the eastern counties 
 it is extremely common for a man to be bound to one lord by 
 commendation and to another lord by soke. Very often indeed 
 a man is commended to one lord, while the soke over him and 
 over his land 'lies in' some hundred court which belongs to 
 another lord or is still in the hands of the king and the earl 
 How to draw with any exactness the line between the rights 
 given to the one lord by the commendation and to the other 
 lord by the soke we can not tell. For instance, we find many 
 men who can not sell their land without the consent of a lord. 
 This we may usually regard as the result of some term in the 
 bargain of commendation ; but in some cases it may well be the 
 outcome of soke. Thus at Sturston in Norfolk we see a free 
 man of St Etheldreda of Ely; his sake and soke belong to 
 Archbishop Stigand's manor of Earsham (Sturston and Earsham 
 lie some five miles apart); now this man if he wishes to give or 
 sell his land must obtain the licence both of St Etheldreda and 
 of Stigand 1 . And so as regards the forfeiture of land. We are 
 perhaps accustomed to think of the escheat propter delictum 
 tenentis as having its origin in the ideas of homage and tenure 
 rather than in the justiciary rights of the lord. Howbeit there 
 is much to make, us think that the right to take the land 
 of one who has forfeited that land by crime was closely con- 
 nected with the right to other wites or forisfacturae. ' Of all 
 the thegns who hold land in the Well wapentake of Lincolnshire, 
 St Mary of Lincoln had two-thirds of every forisfactura and 
 the earl the other third ; and so of their heriots ; and so if they 
 forfeited their land, two-thirds went to St Mary and the re- 
 mainder to the earl 2 .' St Mary has not enfeoffed these thegns ; 
 but by some royal grant she has two-thirds of the soke over 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 186 : ' In Sterestuna tenuit 1 liber homo S. Aldrede T. E. E. et 
 Stigandi erat soca et saco in Hersam, set neo dare nee vendere poterat terrain 
 suam sine licentia 8. Aldrede et Stigandi.' 
 
 a D. B. ii. 376.
 
 104 Domesday Book. 
 
 them. In Suffolk one Brungar held a small manor with soke. 
 He was a ' free man ' commended to Robert Wimarc's son ; but 
 the sake and soke over him belonged to St Edmund. Un- 
 fortunately for Brungar, stolen horses were found in his house, 
 and we fear that he came to a bad end. At any rate he drops 
 out of the story. Then St Edmund's Abbot, who had the sake 
 and soke, and Robert, who had the commendation, went to law, 
 and right gladly would we have heard' the plea; but they came 
 to some compromise and to all seeming Robert got the land 1 . 
 If we are puzzled by this labyrinthine web of legal relationships, 
 we may console ourselves with the reflection that the Normans 
 also were puzzled by it. They seem to have felt the necessity 
 of attributing the lordship of land to one lord and one only 
 (though of course that lord might have another lord above him), 
 of consolidating soke with commendation, homage with justice, 
 and in the end they brought out a simple and symmetrical 
 result, albeit to the last the relation of seignorial to hundredal 
 justice is not to be explained by any elegant theory of feudalism. 
 Sokemcn Yet another problem shall be stated, though we have little 
 
 men." hope of solving it. The writ, or rather one of the writs, which 
 defined the scope of the survey seems to have spoken of liberi 
 homines and sochemanni as of two classes of men that were 
 to be distinguished from each other. In Essex, Suffolk and 
 Norfolk this distinction is often drawn. In one and the same 
 manor we shall find both 'free men' and sokemen 3 ; we may 
 even hear of sokemen who formerly were 'free men 8 .' But 
 the import of this distinction evades us. Sometimes it is said 
 of sokemen that they ' hold freely 4 .' We read that four soke- 
 men held this land of whom three were free, while the fourth 
 had one hide but could not give or sell it 5 . This may suggest 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 401 b: 'Eodem tempore fueruut furati equi invent! in domo istius 
 Brungari, ita quod Abbas cuius fuit soca et saca et Rodbertus qui habuit com- 
 mendationem super istum venerunt de hoc furto ad placitum, et sicut hundret 
 testatur discesserunt amicabiliter sine iudicio quod vidissed (sic) bundret. ' 
 
 2 E.g. D. B. ii. 35 b: 'quas tenuerunt 2 sochemanni et 1 liber homo.' 
 
 3 D. B. ii. 28 b: ' Huic manerio iacent 5 sochemanni quorum 2 occupavit 
 Ingelricus tempore Eegis Willelmi qui tune erant liberi homines. ' 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 83: '3 sochemanni tenentes libere.' Ibid. 88 b: 'tune fuit 
 1 sochemannus qui libere tenuit 1 virgatam.' Ibid. 58: 'in hac terra sunt 
 13 sochemanni qui libere tenent.' 
 
 5 D. B. i. 212 b, Bedf. : ' Hanc terrain teuuerunt 4 sochemanni quorum 3 
 liberi fuerunt, quartus vero unam hidam habuit, sed nee dare nee vendere 
 potuit.'
 
 Sake and Soke. 105 
 
 that the principle of the division is to be found in the power 
 to alienate the land, to ' withdraw ' with the land to another 
 lord 1 . There may be truth in the suggestion, but we can not 
 square it with all our cases 2 . Often enough the 'free man' 
 can not sell without the consent of his lord 3 . We have just 
 met with a ' free man ' who had to obtain the consent both 
 of the lord of his commendation and of the lord of his soke 4 . 
 On the other hand, the sokeman who can sell without his lord's 
 leave is no rare being", and it was of a sokeman that we read 
 how he could sell, not only his land, but also his soke 8 . 
 
 Again, we dare not say that while the ' free man ' is the Difference 
 justiciable of a national court, the soke over the sokeman <freTmen' 
 belongs to his lord. Neither side of this proposition is true. 
 Very often the soke over the 'free man' belongs to a church 
 or to some other lord 7 , who may or may not be his lord by 
 commendation 8 . Very often the lord has not the soke over his 
 sokemen. This may seem a paradox, but it is true. We make 
 it clearer by saying that you may have a man who is your man 
 and who is a sokeman, but yet you have no soke over him ; his 
 soke 'lies' or 'is rendered' elsewhere. This is a common enough 
 phenomenon, but it is apt to escape attention. When we are 
 told that a certain English lord had a sokeman at a certain 
 place, we must not jump to the conclusion that he had soke 
 over that man of his. Thus in Hertfordshire ^thelmaer held 
 
 1 D. B. i. 35 b, ' Isti liberi homines ita liberi fuerunt quod poterant ire quo 
 volebant.' Ibid. ii. 187: '5 homines. ..ex istia erant 4 liberi ut non possent 
 recedere nisi dando 2 solidos.' 
 
 2 Bound, Feudal England, 34. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 59 b, Essex: quod tenuerunt 2 liberi homines... set non poterant 
 recedere sine licentia illius Algari.' Ibid. 216 b, Norf. : 'Ibi sunt 5 liberi 
 homines 8. Benedict! commehdatione tantura...et ita est in monasterio quod nee 
 vendere nee forisfaeere pot[ueru*nt] extra ecclesia set soca est in hundredo.' 
 Ibid. i. 137 b, Herts : 'duo teigni... vendere non potuerunt.' Ibid. i. 30 b, Hants: 
 'Duo liberi homines tenuerunt de episcopo T. B. E. sed recedere cum terra non 
 potuerunt.' 
 
 4 Above, p. 103, note 1. 
 
 6 E.g. D. B. i. 129 b: 'In hac terra fnerunt 5 sochemanni de 6 hidis quaa 
 potuerunt dare vel vendere sine licentia dominorum suorum/ 
 
 8 Above, p. 100, note 2. 
 
 7 E.g. D. B. ii. 358: ' 7 liberos homines... hi poterant dare vel vendere terram 
 set saca et soca et commendatio et servitium remanebant Sancto [Edmundo].' 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 186 : ' In Sterestuna tenuit unus liber homo S. Aldredae T. R. E. 
 et Stigandi erat soca et saco in Hersam.' Ibid. 139 b: 'habuit socam et 
 sacam...de commendatis suis.'
 
 106 Domesday Booh 
 
 a manor and in it there were four sokemen ; they were, we 
 are told, his homines : but over two of them the king had 
 sake and soke 1 . Unless we are greatly mistaken, the soke of 
 many of the East Anglian sokemen, no matter whose men they 
 were, lay in the hundred courts. This prevents our saying 
 that a sokeman is one over whom his lord has soke, or one who 
 renders soke to his lord. We may doubt whether the line 
 between the sokemen and the 'free men' is drawn in accordance 
 with any one principle. Not only is freedom a matter of degree, 
 but freedom is measured along several different scales. At 
 one time it is to the power of alienation or ' withdrawal ' that 
 attention is attracted, at another to the number or the kind 
 of the services and 'customs' that the man must render to 
 his lord. When we see that in Lincolnshire there is no class of 
 'free men' but that there are some eleven thousand sokemen, we 
 shall probably be persuaded that the distinction drawn in East 
 Anglia was of no very great importance to the surveyors or 
 the king. It may have been a matter of pure personal rank. 
 These liberi homines may have enjoyed a wergild of more than 
 200 shillings, for in the Norman age we see traces of a usage 
 which will not allow that any one is ' free ' if he is not noble 2 . 
 But perhaps when the Domesday of East Anglia has been fully 
 explored, hundred by hundred and vill by vill, we shall come 
 to the conclusion that the 'free men' of one district would have 
 been called sokemen in another district 3 . 
 Holdings Some of these sokemen and 'free men' had very small 
 
 of the . . J 
 
 sokemen. tenements. Let us look at a list of tenants in Norfolk. ' In 
 Carleton were 2 free men with 7 acres. In Kicklington were 
 2 free men with 2 acres. In Forncett 1 free man with 2 acres. 
 In Tanaton 4 free men with 4 acres. In Wacton 2 free men 
 with 1^ acres. In Stratton 1 free man with 4 acres. In 
 Moulton 3 free men with 5 acres. In Tibenham 2 free men with 
 7 acres. In Aslacton 1 free man with 1 acre 4 .' These eighteen 
 free men had but sixteen oxen among them. We think it 
 
 1 D. B. i. 141. 
 
 2 Liebermann, Leges Edwardi, p. 72. The most important passage is Leg. 
 Edw. 12 4: 'Manbote in Danelaga de villano et de socheman 12 oras [ = 20 
 sol.]: de liberis hominibus 3 marcas [=40 sol.].' 
 
 3 A study of the Hundred Bolls might prepare us for this result. One jury 
 will call servi those whom another jury would have called villani. See e.g. 
 B. H. ii. 688 fit. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 189 b, 190.
 
 Sake and Soke. 107 
 
 highly probable that in the survey of East Anglia one and the 
 same free man is sometimes mentioned several times ; he holds 
 a little land under one lord, and a little under another lord; 
 but in all he holds little. Then again, we see that these small 
 freemen often have a few bordiers or even a few free men 
 ' below them 1 .' And then we observe that, while some of them 
 are spoken of as having belonged to the manors of their lords, 
 others are reported to have had manors of their own. 
 
 6. The Manor. 
 
 This brings us face to face with a question that we have What is 
 hitherto evaded. What is a manor? The word manerium 
 appears on page after page of Domesday Book, but to define 
 its meaning will task our patience. Perhaps we may have 
 to say that sometimes the term is loosely used, that it has 
 now a wider, now a narrower compass, but we can not say 
 that it is not a technical term. Indeed the one statement 
 that we can safely make about it is that, at all events in certain 
 passages and certain contexts, it is a technical term. 
 
 We may be led to this opinion by observing that in the Manor ' a 
 description of certain counties Middlesex, Buckingham, Bed- term! 
 ford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, 
 York the symbol M which represents a manor, is often 
 carried out into the margin, and is sometimes contrasted with 
 the S which represents a soke and the B which represents 
 a berewick. This no doubt has been done though it may 
 not have been very consistently done for the purpose of 
 guiding the eye of officials who will turn over the pages in 
 search of manors. But much clearer evidence is forthcoming. 
 Throughout the survey of Essex it is common to find entries 
 which take such a form as this : ' Thurkil held it for two 
 hides and for one manor ' ; ' Brithmser held it for five hides 
 and for one manor ' ; ' Two free men who were brothers held 
 it for two hides and for two manors'; 'Three free men held 
 it for three manors and for four hides and twenty-seven acres 8 / 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 318: 'In Suttona tenet idem W. [de Cadomo] de B. Malet 2 liberos 
 homines commendatos Edrico 61 acr[arum] et sub 1 ex ipsis 5 liberi [sic] 
 homines." Ibid. 321 b: ' In Caldecota 6 liberi homines commendati Leuuino de 
 Baclietuna 74 acr. et 7 liberi homines sub eis commend[ati] de 6 acr. et dim.' 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 21, 26, 37 b, 59 b.
 
 108 Domesday Booh 
 
 In Sussex again the statement 'X tenuit pro uno manerio 1 ' 
 frequently occurs. Such phrases as ' Four brothers held it 
 for two manors, Hugh received it for one manor V 'These 
 four manors are now for one manor 3 ,' ' Then there were two 
 halls, now it is in one manor 4 ,' 'A certain thegn held four 
 hides and it was a manor 6 ,' are by no means unusual 8 . A 
 clerk writes 'Elmer tenuit' and then is at pains to add 
 by way of interlineation 'pro manerio 7 .' ' Eight thegns held 
 this manor, one of them, Alwin, held two hides for a manor; 
 another, Ulf, two hides for a manor; another, Algar, one hide 
 and a half for a manor ; Elsi one hide, Turkill one hide, Lodi 
 one hide, Osulf one hide, Elric a half-hide 8 ' when we read 
 this we feel sure that the scribe is using his terms carefully 
 and that he is telling us that the holdings of the five thegns 
 last mentioned were not manors. And then Hugh de Port 
 holds Wallop in Hampshire 'for half a manor 9 .' But let us 
 say at once that at least one rule of law, or of local custom, 
 demands a definition of a manerium. In the shires of Not- 
 tingham and Derby a thegn who has more than six manors 
 pays a relief of 8 to the king, but if he has only six manors 
 or less, then a relief of 3 marks to the sheriff 10 . It seems clear 
 therefore that not only did the Norman rulers treat the term 
 manerium as an accurate term charged with legal meaning, 
 but they thought that it, or rather some English equivalent 
 for it, had been in the Confessor's day an accurate term charged 
 with legal meaning. 
 
 The word The term manerium seems to have come in with the 
 manerium. c on q ueror u^ though other derivatives from the Latin verb 
 manere, in particular mansa, mansio, mansiuncula had been 
 freely employed by the scribes of the land-books. But these 
 had as a rule been used as representatives of the English hide, 
 and just for this reason they were incapable of expressing the 
 notion that the Normans desired to express by the word 
 manerium. In its origin that word is but one more name for 
 
 i D. B. i. 21. 2 D. B. i. 45. 
 
 D. B. i. 6b. * D. B. i. 27. 8 D. B. i. 163. 
 
 6 So in the Exeter record, D. B. iv. 390 : ' Tenuerunt 3 tegni pro 4 mansion- 
 ibus, et Kobertus habet illas pro 1 mansione.' 
 
 7 D. B. i. 169 b. Similar interlineations in i. 98. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 148; on f. 149 is a similar case. D. B. i. 45 b. 
 i D. B. i. 280 b. 
 
 11 In several passages in D. B. the word seems to be maneriua.
 
 The Manor. 109 
 
 a house. Throughout the Exeter Domesday the word maiisio 
 is used instead of the manerium of the Exchequer record, and 
 even in the Exchequer record we may find these two terms 
 used interchangeably: ' Three free men belonged to this 
 manerium ; one of them had half a hide and could withdraw 
 himself without the licence of the lord of the mansio 1 .' If 
 we look for the vernacular term that was rendered by manerium, 
 we are likely to find it in the English heal Though this 
 is not connected with the Latin aula, still these two words 
 bearing a similar meaning meet and are fused in the aula, 
 haula, halla of Domesday Book. 
 
 Now this term stands in the first instance for a house and Manor 
 can be exchanged with curia. You may say that there is 
 meadow enough for the horses of the curia 3 , and that there 
 are three horses in the aula*; you may speak indifferently 
 of a mill that serves the hall 4 , or of the mill that grinds the 
 corn of the court 5 . But further, you may say that in Stonham 
 there are 50 acres of the demesne land of the hall in Greeting, 
 or that in Thorney there are 24 acres which belong to the 
 hall in Stonham 6 , or that Roger de Rames has lands which 
 once were in the hall of St Edmund 7 , or that in the hall of 
 Grantham there are three carucates of land 8 , or that Guth- 
 mund's sake and soke extended only over the demesne of his 
 hall 9 . We feel that to such phrases as these we should do 
 no great violence were we to substitute 'manor' for 'hall.' 
 Other phrases serve to bring these two words very closely 
 together. One and the same page tells us, first, that Hugh 
 de Port holds as one manor what four brothers held as two 
 manors, and then, that on another estate there is one hall 
 though of old there were two halls 10 : these two stories seem to 
 have the same point. ' Four brothers held this ; there was 
 only one hall there 11 .' 'Two brothers held it and each had 
 his hall ; now it is as one manor 12 .' 'In these two lands there 
 is but one hall 18 .' ' Then there were two halls ; now it is in one 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 96 b: 'Huic manerio iacebant 3 liberi homines, unus tenuit dim. 
 hidam et potuit abire sine licentia domini ipsius mansionis.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 149, Wicombe. D. B. ii. 38 b, Hersam. 
 
 < D. B. i. 174 b, Poiwic. " D. B. i. 268, Gretford. D. B. ii. 350 b. 
 
 7 D. B. ii. 263: 'sed faernnt iu aula S. Edmundi.' 8 D. B. i. 337 b. 
 9 D. B. ii. 408 b: ' cum soca et saca super dominium hallae tan turn.' 
 1 D. B. i. 45, Wicheham, Werste. u D. B. i. 20, Waliland. 
 
 D. B. i. 11 b, Acres. 13 D. B. i. 26 b, Eldretune.
 
 110 Domesday Book. 
 
 manor 1 .' 'Ten manors; ten thegns, each had his hall 2 .' ' In- 
 
 gelric set these men to his hall Ingelric added these men 
 
 to his manor 3 .' 
 
 Difference We do not contend that manerium and holla are precisely 
 manor and equivalent. Now and again we shall be told of a manerium 
 haU - sine halla* as of some exceptional phenomenon. The term 
 
 manerium has contracted a shade of technical meaning ; it 
 refers, so we think, to a system of taxation, and thus it is 
 being differentiated from the term hall. Suppose, for example, 
 that a hall or manor has meant a house from which taxes are 
 collected, and that some one removes that house, houses being 
 very portable things 5 : ' by construction of law,' as we now say, 
 there still may be a hall or manor on the old site ; or we may 
 take advantage of the new wealth of words and say that, though 
 the hall has gone, the manor remains: to do this is neater 
 than to say that there is a ' constructive ' hall where no hall 
 can be seen. Then again, manerium is proving itself to be 
 the more elastic of the two terms. We may indeed speak 
 of a considerable stretch of la*id as belonging to or even as 
 'being in' a certain hall, and this stretch may include not 
 only land that the owner of the hall occupies and cultivates 
 by himself or his servants, but also land and houses that are 
 occupied by his villeins 6 : still we could hardly talk of the hall 
 being a league long and a league wide or containing a square 
 league. Of manerium, however, we may use even such phrases 
 as those just mentioned 7 . For all this, we can think of no 
 English word for which manerium can stand, save hall ; t'An, it 
 is clear enough, was translated by villa, not by manerium. 
 Size of the jf now we ^ urn f rom wor( j s to look at the things which 
 
 manena. 
 
 those words signify, we shall soon be convinced that to describe 
 a typical manerium is an impossible feat, for on the one hand 
 there are enormous maneria and on the other hand there are 
 
 1 D. B. i. 27, Percinges. 2 D. B. i. 284 b, Attune. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 29 b, 30 b. 4 D. B. i. 307 b, Burghedurum ; 308, Ternusc. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 63 : ' Ipse quoque trausportavit hallam et alias domes et pecuniam 
 in alio manerio.' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 338 b : ' Ad huius manerii aulam pertinent Catenai et Usun 4 car. 
 terrae ad geldum. Terra ad 8 carucas. Ibi in dominio 2 carucae et 20 villani 
 et 15 sochemanni et 10 bordarii habentes 9 carucas. Ibi 360 acre prati. Ad 
 enndem manerium iacet hec soca: In Linberge 4 car. terrae etc.' 
 
 7 Throughout Yorkshire the phrase is common, ' Totum manerium x. leu. 
 long, et y. leu. lat.'
 
 Hie Manor. 1 1 1 
 
 many holdings called maneria which are so small that we, with 
 our reminiscences of the law of later days, can hardly bring 
 ourselves to speak of them as manors. If we look in the world 
 of sense for the essence of the manerium we shall find nothing 
 that is common to all maneria save a piece of ground very 
 large it may be, or very small held (in some sense or another) 
 by a single person or by a group of co-tenants, for even upon a 
 house we shall not be able to insist very strictly. After weary 
 arithrhetical labours we might indeed obtain an average manor ; 
 we might come to the conclusion that the average manor 
 contained so many hides or acres, possibly that it included 
 land occupied by so many sokemen, villeins, bordiers, serfs; 
 but an average is not a type, and the uselessness of such calcu- 
 lations will soon become apparent. 
 
 We may begin by looking at a somewhat large manor. Let A. large 
 it be that of Stain es in Middlesex, which is held by St Peter of 
 Westminster 1 . It is rated at 19 hides but contains land for 
 24 plough-teams. To the demesne belong 11 hides and there 
 are 13 teams there. The villeins have 11 teams. There are : 
 
 3 villeins with a half-hide apiece. 
 
 4 villeins with a hide between them. 
 8 villeins with a half-virgate apiece. 
 
 36 bordiers with 3 hides between them. 
 1 villein with 1 virgate. 
 
 4 bordiers with 40 acres between them. 
 10 bordiers with 5 acres apiece. 
 
 5 cottiers with 4 acres. 
 
 8 bordiers with 1 virgate. 
 
 3 cottiers with 9 acres. 
 13 serfs. 
 46 burgesses paying 40 shillings a year. 
 
 There are 6 mills of 64 shillings and one fish-weir of 6s. 8d. 
 and one weir which renders nothing. There is pasture sufficient 
 for the cattle of the vill. There is meadow for the 24 teams, 
 and in addition to this there is meadow worth 20s. a year. 
 There is wood for 30 pigs ; there are 2 arpents of vineyard. To 
 this manor belong four berewicks. Altogether it is worth 35 
 and formerly it was worth 40. This is a handsome manor. 
 The next manor that is mentioned would be a fairer specimen. 
 It is Sunbury held by St Peter of Westminster 8 . It is rated at 
 7 hides and there is land for but 6 teams. To the demesne 
 
 1 D. B. i. 128. a D. B. i. 128 b.
 
 112 Domesday Book. 
 
 belong 4 hides and there is one team there. The villeins have 
 4 teams. There are : 
 
 A priest with a half-virgate. 
 8 villeins with a virgate apiece. 
 2 villeins with a virgate. 
 5 bordiers with a virgate. 
 5 cottiers. 
 1 serf. 
 
 There is meadow for 6 teams and pasture enough for the 
 cattle of the vill. Altogether it is worth 6 and has been 
 worth 7. Within this one county of Middlesex we can see 
 wide variations. There are manors which are worth 50 and 
 there are manors which are not worth as many shillings. The 
 archbishop's grand manor at Harrow has land for 70 teams 1 ; 
 the Westminster manor of Cowley has land for but one team 
 and the only tenants upon it are two villeins 2 . 
 
 Enormous But far larger variations than these are to be found. Let 
 Leranin- us look at a few gigantic manors. Leominster in Herefordshire 
 had been held by Queen Edith together with sixteen members 8 . 
 The names of these members are given and we may find them 
 scattered about over a wide tract of "Herefordshire. In this 
 manor with its members there were 80 hides. In the demesne 
 there were 30 teams. There were 8 reeves and 16 beadles and 
 8 radknights and 238 villeins, 75 bordiers and 82 male and 
 female serfs. These in all had 230 teams; so that with the 
 demesne teams there were no less than 260. Further there 
 were Norman barons paying rents to this manor. Ralph de 
 Mortemer for example paid 15*. and Hugh de Lacy 6s. 8d. It 
 is let to farm at a rent of 60 and besides this has to support a 
 house of nuns ; were it freed from this duty, it might, so thinks 
 the county, be let at a rent of 120. It is a most interesting 
 manor, for we see strong traces of a neat symmetrical arrange- 
 ment: witness the 16 members, 8 reeves, 8 radknights, 16 
 beadles; very probably it has a Welsh basis 4 . But we have 
 in this place to note that it is called a manor, and for 
 certain purposes it is treated as a single whole. For what 
 purposes ? Well, for one thing, it is let to farm as a single 
 whole. This, however, is of no very great importance, for land- 
 lords and farmers may make what bargains they please. But 
 
 i D B. i. 127. 2 D. B. i. 128 b. 8 D. B. i. 180. 
 
 4 Compare the cases in Seebohm, Village Community, 267.
 
 The Manor. 113 
 
 also it is taxed as a single whole. It is rated at the nice round 
 figures of 80 hides. 
 
 No less handsome and yet more valuable is Berkeley in Berkeley. 
 Gloucestershire 1 . It brought in a rent of 170 of refined money. 
 It had eighteen members which were dispersed abroad over so 
 wide a field that a straight line of thirty miles would hardly join 
 their uttermost points 2 . ' All the aforesaid members belong to 
 Berkeley.' There were 29 radknights, 162 villeins, 147 bordiers, 
 22 coliberts, 161 male and female serfs, besides some unenu- 
 merated men of the radknights; on the demesne land were 
 
 teams; and the tenants had 192. Tewkesbury also is Tewkea- 
 a splendid manor. 'When it wa.s all 'together in King Edward's 
 time it was worth 100,' though now but 50 at the most can 
 be had from it and in the turmoil of the Conquest its value fell 
 to 12*. It was a scattered unit, but still it was a unit for 
 fiscal purposes. It was reckoned to contain 95 hides, but the 
 45 which were in demesne were quit of geld, and matters had 
 been so arranged that all the geld on the remaining 50. hides 
 had, as between the lord and his various tenants, been thrown 
 on 35 of those hides. The 'head of the manor' was at Tewkes- 
 bury ; the members were dispersed abroad ; but ' they gelded in 
 Tewkesbury 4 .' 
 
 No list of great manors would be complete without a notice Tannton. 
 of Taunton 5 . ' The bishop of Winchester holds Tantoue or has 
 a mansion called Tantone. Stigand held it in King Edward's 
 day and it gelded for 54 hides and 2^ virgates. There is land 
 for 100 teams, and besides this the bishop in his demesne has 
 land for 20 teams which never gelded.' 'With all its appendages 
 and customs it is worth 154. 12d' 'Tantone' then is valued 
 as a whole and it has gelded as a whole. But ' Tantone' in this 
 sense covers far more than the borough which bears that name ; 
 it covers many places which have names of their own and had 
 names of their own when the survey was made 6 . We might 
 speak of the bishop of Exeter's manor of Crediton in Devon 
 
 1 D. B. i. 163. 
 
 a If we mistake not, the Osleuttorde of the record is Ashleworth, which, 
 though some miles to the north of Gloucester, either still is, or but lately was, 
 a detached piece of the Berkeley hundred. 
 
 D. B. i. 163. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 163 b : ' Hanc ten-am dedit regina Rogerio de Bnslei et geldabat 
 pro 4 hidis in Tedechesberie.' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 87 b; iv. 161. 6 Eyton, Somerset, ii. 34. 
 
 M. 8
 
 114 Domesday Book. 
 
 which is worth 75 and in which are 264 villeins and 73 bordiers 1 , 
 or of the bishop of Winchester's manor of Chilcombe in Hamp- 
 shire where there are nine churches 2 ; but we turn to another 
 part of England. 
 
 Large If we wish to see a midland manor with many members we 
 
 SI'S,? 8 may look at Rothley in Leicestershire 8 . The vill of Rothley 
 midlands, j^elf is not very large and it is separately valued at but 62s. 
 But ' to this manor belong the following members,' and then we 
 read of no less than twenty-one members scattered over a large 
 area and containing 204 sokemen who with 157 villeins and 94 
 bordiers have 82 teams and who pay in all 31. 8s. Id. Their 
 rents are thus reckoned as forming a single whole. In Lincoln- 
 shire Earl Edwin's manor of Kirton had 25 satellites, Earl 
 Morcar's manor of Caistor 16, the Queen's manor of Horncastle 
 15*. A Northamptonshire manor of 27 hides lay scattered 
 about in six hundreds 5 . 
 
 Town- It is common enough to see a town-house annexed to a 
 
 berewicks rural manor. Sometimes a considerable group of houses or 
 ' naws ' i 11 * ne borough is deemed to ' lie in ' or form part of 
 a manor remote from its walls. Thus, to give but two examples, 
 twelve houses in London belong to the Bishop of Durham's 
 manor of Waltham in Essex ; twenty-eight houses in London 
 to the manor of Barking 6 . Not only these houses but their 
 occupants are deemed to belong to the manor ; thus 80 burgesses 
 in Dunwich pertain to one of the Ely manors 7 . The here wick 
 (bereuita) 8 also frequently meets our eye. Its name seems to 
 signify primarily a wick, or village, in which barley is grown ; 
 but, like the barton (bertona) and the grange (grangia) of later 
 days, it seems often to be a detached portion of a manor which 
 is in part dependent on, and yet in part independent of, the 
 main body. Probably at the berewick the lord has some demesne 
 land and some farm buildings, a barn or the like, and the villeins 
 of the berewick are but seldom called upon to leave its limits ; 
 but the lord has no hall there, he does not consume its produce 
 upon the spot, and yet for some important purposes the berewick 
 is a part of the manor. The berewick might well be some way 
 
 \ 
 
 1 D. B. i. 101 b; iv. 107. 2 D. B. i. 41. 8 D. B. i. 230. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 338-9. 6 D. B. i. 220, Tingdene. 
 
 6 D. B. ii. 15 b, 17 b. * D. B. ii. 385 b. 
 
 8 The form bereuita is exceedingly common, but must, we think, be due to a 
 mistake ; c has been read as t.
 
 The Manor. 115 
 
 off from the hall ; a manor in Hampshire had three berewicks 
 on the mainland and two in the Isle of Wight 1 . 
 
 Then again in the north and east the manor is often the Manor and 
 centre of an extensive but very discrete territory known as its * 
 soke. One says that certain lands are ' soke ' or are ' the soke/ 
 or are 'in the soke ' of such a manor, or that 'their soke belongs* 
 to such a manor. One contrasts the soke of the manor with the 
 'inland' and with the berewicks 2 . The soke in this context 
 seems to be the territory in which the lord's rights are, or have 
 been, of a justiciary rather than of a proprietary kind 3 . The 
 manor of the eastern counties is a discrete, a dissipated thing. 
 Far from lying within a ring fence, it often consists of a small 
 nucleus of demesne land and villein tenements in one village, 
 together with many detached parcels in many other villages, 
 which are held by 'free men' and sokemen. In such a case we 
 may use the term manerium now in a wider, now in a narrower 
 sense. In valuing the manor, we hardly know whether to 
 include or exclude these free men. We say that the manor 
 'with the free men' is worth so much 4 , or that the manor 
 'without the free men' is worth so much 5 , that the manor is 
 worth 10 and that the free men pay 40 shillings 6 , that 
 Thurmot had soke over the manor and over three of the 
 free men while the Abbot of Ely had soke over the other 
 three 7 . 
 
 1 D. B. i. 38 b, Edlinges. Some of the ' wicks ' seem to have been dairy 
 farms. D. B. i. 58 b : ' et wika de 10 pensis caseornm.' On the Glastonbury 
 estates we find persons called wikarii, each of whom has a wika. Glastonbury 
 Eentalia, 39: 'Thomas de Wika tenet 5 acras et 50 oves matrices et 12 vaccas... 
 Philippus de Wika tenet unum ferlingum et 50 oves matrices et 12 vaccas.' 
 Ibid. 44 : 'A. B. tenet unum ferlingum et 50 oves matrices et 12 vaccas pro 1 
 sol. pro wika.' Ibid. 48 : ' Bicardus de Wika tenet 5 acras et 50 oves matrices 
 et 12 vaccas. Alanus de Wika eodem modo.' Ibid. p. 51. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 350: 'In Osgotebi et Tauelebi 2 bo[vatae] inland et 1 bo[vata] soca 
 huius manerii." D. B. i. 338 b: 'Hiboldeston est bereuuita non soca et in 
 Grangeham sunt 2 car[ucatae] inland et in Springetorp dim. car[ucata] est 
 inland. Reliqua omnis est soca.' 
 
 3 When therefore, as is often the case, we find that the occupants of ' the 
 soke ' are not sokemen but villeins, this seems to point to a recent depression of 
 the peasantry. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 330b: 'In illo manerio...sunt 35 liberi homines.... Tune valuerunt 
 liberi homines 4 libras. Manerium cum liberis hominibus valet modo 24 
 Jibras. ' 
 
 5 D. B. ii. 358 b : ' Hoc manerium exceptis liberis tune valuit 30 solidos.' 
 
 6 D. B. ii 289 b. 7 D. B. ii. 285 b. 
 
 82
 
 116 Domesday Book. 
 
 Minute From one extreme we may pass to the other extreme. If 
 
 there were huge manors, there were also tiny manors. Let us 
 begin in the south-west of England. Quite common is the 
 manor which is said to have land for but one team; common 
 also is the manor which is said to have land for but half a 
 team. This means, as we believe, that the first of these manors 
 has but some 120 acres of arable, while the second has but 60 
 acres or thereabouts. 'Domesday measures' are, it is well 
 known, the matter of many disputes; therefore we will not 
 wholly rely upon them, but will look at some of these 'half- 
 team' manors and observe how much they are worth, how many 
 tenants and how much stock they have upon them. 
 
 (i) A Somersetshire manor 1 . Half the land is in demesne ; half is 
 held by 7 bordiers. The only plough beasts are 4 oxen on the demesne ; 
 there are 3 beasts that do not plough, 20 sheep, 7 acres of underwood, 
 20 acres of pasture. It is worth 12s., formerly it was worth 10s. 
 
 (ii) A Somersetshire manor 2 . A quarter of the land is in demesne ; 
 the rest is held by 2 villeins and 3 bordiers. The men have one team ; 
 apparently the demesne has no plough-oxen. No other animals are 
 mentioned. There are 140 acres of wood, 41 acres of moor, 40 acres of 
 pasture. It is worth 12s. 6d. and has been worth 20s. 
 
 (iii) A Somersetshire manor 3 . All the land, save 10 acres, is in 
 demesne ; 2 bordiers hold the 10 acres. There is a team on the demesne ; 
 there are 2 beasts that do not plough, 7 pigs, 16 sheep, 4 acres of meadow, 
 7 of pasture. Value, 6s. 
 
 (iv) A Somersetshire manor 4 . The whole of the arable is in demesne ; 
 the only tenant is a bordier. There are 4 plough-oxen and 11 goats and 
 7 acres of underwood. Value, 6s. 
 
 (v) A Devonshire manor 6 . To all seeming all is in demesne and 
 there are no tenants. There are 4 plough-beasts, 15 sheep, 5 goats, 
 4 acres of meadow. Value, 3s. 
 
 (vi) A Devonshire manor 6 . Value, 3s. All seems to be in demesne ; 
 \ve see no tenants and no stock. 
 
 We have been at no great pains to select examples, and yet 
 smaller manors may be found, manors which provide arable land 
 for but two oxen. Thus 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 397 ; i. 93 b, Ichetoca. 
 
 2 D. B. iv. 411 ; i. 94 b, Tocheswilla. 
 D. B. iv. 398 ; i. 93 b, Pilloc. 
 
 4 D. B. iv. 341 ; i. 96, Sordemanneford. 
 8 D. B. iv. 355 ; i. 116 b, Labera. 
 D. B. iv. 367 ; i. 112 b, Oplomia.
 
 The Manor. 117 
 
 (vii) A Somersetshire manor 1 occupied by one villein. We read 
 nothing of any stock. Value, 15rf. 
 
 (viii) A Somersetshire manor 2 with 3 bordiers on it. Value, 4a. 
 (ix) A Somersetshire manor 3 with one bordier on it. Value, 30ct 
 
 The lowest value of a manor in this part of the world is, so 
 far as we have observed, one shilling ; that manor to all appear- 
 ance was nothing but a piece of pasture land*. Yet each of 
 these holdings is a mansio, and the Bishop of Winchester's 
 holding at Taunton is a mansio. 
 
 From one side of England we will journey to the other Small 
 side ; from Devon and Somerset to Essex and Suffolk. We the east, 
 soon observe that in describing the holdings of the ' free men ' 
 and sokemen of this eastern district as they were in King 
 Edward's day, our record constantly introduces the term 
 manerium. A series of entries telling us how ' a free man 
 held x hides or carucates or acres' will ever and anon be broken 
 by an entry that tells us how 'a free man held x hides or 
 carucates or acres for a manor' 6 . We soon give up counting 
 the cases in which the manor is rated at 60 acres. We begin 
 counting the cases in which it is rated at 30 acres and find 
 them numerous; we see manors rated at 24 acres, at 20, at 
 15, at 12 acres. But this, it may be said, tells us little, for 
 these manors may be extravagantly underrated 6 . Let us then 
 look at a few of them. 
 
 (i) In Espalle Siric held 30 acres for a manor; there were always 
 3 bordiers and one team and 4 acres of meadow ; wood for 60 pigs and 
 13 beasts. It was then worth 10s. 7 
 
 (ii) In Torentuna Turchetel a free man held 30 acres for a manor ; 
 there were always 2 bordiers and one team and a half. It is worth 10s. 8 
 
 (iii) In Bonghea Godric a free man held 30 acres for a manor ; there 
 were 1 bordier and 1 team and 2 acres of meadow. It was then worth 8s. 9 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 338 ; i. 95 b, Aisseforda. 
 
 2 D. B. iv. 395 ; i. 93, Terra Colgrini. 
 8 D. B. iv. 394; i. 93, Rima. 
 
 4 D. B. iv. 338 ; i. 95 b, Aisseforda. 
 
 6 As the term manerium is often represented by the mere letter M or m, we 
 will refer to some cases in which it is written in full. D. B. ii. 295 b : '40 acraa 
 pro uno manerio ' ; Ibid. 311 b : 'In eadem villa est 1 liber homo de 40 acris et 
 tenet pro manerio.' 
 
 6 The question whether the acreage stated in the Suffolk survey is real or 
 rateable can not be briefly debated. We hope to return to it. 
 
 * D. B. ii. 322 b, 323. 8 D. B. ii. 323. D. B. ii. 288.
 
 118 Domesday Book. 
 
 (iv) Three free men and their mother held 30 acres for a manor. 
 There was half a team. Value, 5s. 1 
 
 (v) In Rincham a free man held 30 acres for a manor. There were 
 half a team and one acre of meadow. Value, 5s. 2 
 
 (vi) In Wenham Mlfg&r a free man held 24 acres for a manor. 
 Value, 4s. 3 
 
 (vii) In Torp a free man held 20 acres for a manor. One team ; 
 wood for 5 pigs. Value, 40d. 4 
 
 (viii) In Tudenham JElfric the deacon, a free man, held 12 acres for a 
 manor. One team, 3 bordiers, 2 acres of meadow, 1 rouncey, 2 beasts 
 that do not plough, 11 pigs, 40 sheep. Value, 3s. 6 
 
 We are not speaking of curiosities ; the sixty acre manor was 
 very common in Essex, the thirty acre manor was no rarity 
 in Suffolk. 
 
 The manor Now it is plain enough that the ' lord ' of such a manor, 
 peasant's or rather the holder of such a manor, for there was little 
 holding lordship in the case, was often enough a peasant, a tiller of 
 the soil. He was under soke and under commendation ; com- 
 mended it may be to one lord, rendering soke to another. 
 Sometimes he is called a sokeman 8 . But he has a manor. 
 Sometimes he has a full team, sometimes but half a team. 
 Sometimes he has a couple of bordiers seated on his land, who 
 help him in his husbandry. Sometimes there is no trace of 
 tenants, and his holding is by no means too large to permit 
 of his cultivating it by his own labour and that of his sons. 
 No doubt in the west country even before the Conquest these 
 petty mansiones or maneria were being accumulated in the 
 hands of the wealthy. The thegn who was the antecessor of 
 the Norman baron, sometimes held a group, a geographically 
 discontinuous group, of petty manors as well as some more sub- 
 stantial and better consolidated estates. But still each little 
 holding is reckoned a manor, while in the east of England there 
 is nothing to show that the nameless free men who held the 
 manors which are said to consist of 60, 40, 30 acres had usually 
 more than one manor apiece. When therefore we are told that 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 309. D. B. ii. 297 b. 8 D. B. ii. 377. 
 
 * D. B. ii. 333. D. B. ii. 423. 
 
 6 D. B. ii. 316 : ' In Aldeburc tenuit Uluricus sochemannus Edrici T. B. E. 80 
 acras pro manerio.' Ibid. 353 : ' Nordberiam tenuit Eduinus presbyter soche- 
 mannus Abbatis 30 acras pro manerio. '
 
 The Manor. 119 
 
 already before the Conquest England was full of manors, we 
 must reply: Yes, but of what manors 1 ? 
 
 Now were the differences between various manors a mere Definition 
 difference in size arid in value, a student of law might pass 
 them by. Our notion of ownership is the same whether it be 
 applied to the largest and most precious, or to the smallest 
 and most worthless of things. But in this case we have not 
 to deal with mere differences in size or value. The examples 
 that we have given will have proved that few, if any, pro- 
 positions of legal import will hold good of all maneria. We 
 must expressly reject some suggestions that the later history 
 of our law may make to us. 'A manor has a court of its 
 own': this is plainly untrue. To say nothing of extreme 
 cases, of the smallest of the manors that we have noticed, we 
 can not easily believe that a manor with less than ten tenants 
 has a court of its own, yet the number of such manors is 
 exceedingly large. 'A manor has freehold tenants': this of 
 course we must deny, unless we hold that the villani are free- 
 holders. 'A manor has villein or customary tenants': even 
 this proposition, though true of many cases, we can not accept. 
 Not only may we find a manor the only tenants upon which 
 are liberi homines 9 , but we are compelled to protest that a 
 manor need not have any tenants at all. 'A manor must 
 contain demesne land ' J this again we can not believe. In 
 one case we read that the whole manor is being farmed by 
 the villeins so that there is nothing in demesne 3 , while in other 
 cases we are told that there is nothing in demesne and see 
 
 1 We have taken oar examples of small manors from the east and the south* 
 west because Little Domesday and the Exeter Domesday give details which are 
 not to he had elsewhere. But instances may be found in many other parts of 
 England. Thus in Sussex, i. 24, two free men held as two manors land rated 
 at a hide and sufficient for one team ; it is now tilled by four villeins. In the 
 Isle of Wight, D. B. i. 39 b, five free men held as five manors land sufficient for 
 two teams ; it is now tilled by four villeins. In Gloucestershire, D. B. i. 170, is 
 a manor worth ten shillings with two serfs upon it ; also a manor rated at one 
 virgate. In Derbyshire, D. B. i. 274 b, land sufficient for four teams and rated 
 as four carucates had formed eight manors. In Nottinghamshire, D. B. i. 285 b, 
 land sufficient for a team and a half and valued at ten shillings had formed five 
 manors for five thegns, each of whom had his hall. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 380 : 'In Thistledona tenet 1 liber homo Ulmarus commendatus 
 S. Eldrede 60 acras pro manerio et 5 liberi homines sub se.' 
 
 * D. B. i. 127 b: 'Wellesdone tenent canonici S. Pauli....Hoc manerium 
 tenent villani ad fir mam canonicorum. In dominio nil habetur.'
 
 120 Domesday Booh 
 
 no trace of any recent change 1 . Thus, one after another, all 
 the familiar propositions seem to fail us, and yet we have seen 
 good reason to believe that manerium has some exact meaning. 
 It remains that we should hazard an explanation. 
 
 Th <? 1 ? anor A nianor is a house against which geld is charged. To the 
 geld. opinion that in some way or another the definition of a manor 
 is intimately connected with the great tax we shall be brought 
 by phrases such as the following : ' Richard holds Fivehide of 
 the Earl which Brihtmser held in King Edward's time for forty 
 acres and for a manor 2 .' ' Two free men who were brothers, 
 Bondi and ^Elfric held it for two hides and for two manors 3 .' 
 When we say that a man holds land ' as ' or ' for ' (pro) forty 
 acres, we mean that his holding, be its real size what it may, 
 is rated to the geld at forty acres. If we add the words ' and 
 as (or for) one manor,' surely we are still speaking of the geld. 
 For one moment the thought may cross our minds that, besides 
 a tax on land, there has been an additional tax on ' halls,' on 
 houses of a certain size or value ; but this we soon dismiss as 
 most unlikely. To raise but one out of many objections : had 
 there been such a house-tax, it would have left plain traces of 
 itself in those ' Geld Inquests ' of the south-western counties that 
 have come down to us. Kather we regard the matter thus : 
 The geld is a land-tax, a tax of so much per hide or carucate. 
 In all likelihood it has been assessed according to a method 
 which we might call the method of subpartitioned provincial 
 quotas. The assumption has been made that a shire or other 
 large district contains a certain number of hides ; this number 
 has then been apportioned among the hundreds of that shire, 
 and the number allotted to each hundred has been apportioned 
 among the vills of that hundred. The common result is that 
 some neat number of hides, five, ten or the like is attributed 
 
 1 D. B. i. 235 b : Billesdone, 'In dominio nil fuit nee est.' Ibid. 166 b, Glouc.: 
 'Isdem Willelmus [de Ow] tenet Alvredestone. Bondi tenuit T. B. E. Ibi 
 3 hidae geldantes. Nil ibi est in dominio, sed 5 villani et 3 bordarii habent 
 3 Caracas.'...' Isdem Willelmus tenet Odelavestone. Brictri filius Algari tenuit. 
 Ibi nil in dominio nisi 5 villani cum 5 carucis.' D. B. iv. 396: 'Bogerius habet 
 1 mansionem quae vocatur P....et reddit gildum pro dimidia virgata ; hanc 
 potest arare 1 carruca. Hanc tenet Anschetillus de Bogerio. Ibi habet Ansche- 
 tillus 4 bordarios qui tenent totain illam terrain et habent ibi 1 carrucam et 
 1 agrum prati, et reddit 10 solidos." 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 31. a D. B. ii. 59 b.
 
 The Manor. 121 
 
 to the vill 1 . This again has been divided between the holdings 
 in that vill. Ultimately it is settled that for fiscal purposes 
 a given holding contains, or must be deemed to contain, this 
 or that number of hides, virgates, or acres. Thus far the 
 system makes no use of the manerium. But it now has to 
 discover some house against which a demand may be made 
 for every particular penny of geld. Despite the 'realism' of 
 the system, it has to face the fact that, after all, taxes must be 
 paid by men and not by land. Men live in houses. It seeks 
 the tax-payer in his house. Now, were all the occupiers of land 
 absolute owners of the land that they occupied, even were it 
 true that every acre had some one person as its absolute owner, 
 the task would be simple. A schedule of five columns, such 
 we are familiar with, would set forth ' Owner's Name,' ' Place 
 of Residence,' 'Description of Geldable Property,' 'Hidage,' 
 'Amount due.' But the occupier is not always the owner; 
 what is more, there is no absolute ownership. Two, three, four 
 persons will be interested in the land; the occupier will have 
 a lord and that lord a lord ; the occupier may be a serf, a villein, 
 a sokeman ; there is commendation to be considered and soke 
 and all the infinite varieties of the power to 'withdraw' the 
 land from the lord. Rude and hard and arbitrary lines must 
 be drawn. Of course the state will endeavour to collect the 
 geld in big sums. It will endeavour to make the great folk 
 answer for the geld which lies on any land that is in any way 
 subject to their power; thus the cost of collecting petty sums 
 will be saved and the tax will be charged on men who are 
 solvent. The central power may even hold out certain ad- 
 vantages to the lord who will become responsible for the geld 
 of his tenants or justiciables or commended men. The hints 
 that we get in divers counties that the lord's 'inland' has borne 
 no geld seem to point in this direction, though the arrange- 
 ments about this matter seem to have varied from shire to 
 shire 2 . On the pipe rolls of a later day we see that the geld 
 charged against the magnates is often 'pardoned.' For one 
 reason the king can not easily tax the rich ; for another he 
 
 1 I leave this sentence as it stood before Mr Bound had published in his 
 Feudal England the results of his brilliant researches. Of the ' five hide unit ' 
 I already knew a good deal ; of the ' six carucate unit ' I knew nothing. 
 
 2 Bound, Domesday Studies, i. 109.
 
 122 
 
 Domesday Booh 
 
 Classifica- 
 
 g eld - 
 
 Proofs of 
 
 connexion 
 
 between 
 
 andThe r 
 geld. 
 
 can not easily tax the poor; so he gets at the poor through 
 the rich. The small folk will gladly accept any scheme that 
 will keep the tax-collector from their doors, even though they 
 purchase their relief by onerous promises of rents and services. 
 The great men, again, may find advantage in such bargains; 
 they want periodical rents and services, and in order to obtain 
 them will accept a certain responsibility for occasional taxes. 
 This process had gone very far on the eve of the Conquest. 
 Moreover the great men had enjoyed a large liberty of paying 
 their geld where they pleased, of making special compositions 
 with the king, of turning some wide and discrete territory into 
 a single geld-paying unit, of forming such ' manors ' as Taunton 
 or Berkeley or Leominster. 
 
 In King Edward's day, the occupiers of the soil might, 
 so i* seems to us, be divided by the financier into three main 
 classes. In the first class we place the man who has a manor. 
 He has, that is, a house at which he is charged with geld. 
 He may be a great man or a small, an earl or a peasant ; 
 he may be charged at that house with the geld of a hundred 
 hides or with the geld of fifteen acres. In the second class 
 we place the villeins, bordiers, cottiers. The geld apportioned 
 to the land that they occupy is demanded from their lord 
 at his manor, or one of his manors. How he recoups himself 
 for having to make this payment, that is his concern ; but he 
 is responsible for it to the king, not as guarantor but as 
 principal debtor. But then, at least in the east and north j 
 there are many men who fall into neither of these classes. They 
 are not villeins, they are sokemen or ' free men ' ; but their 
 own tenements are not manors; they belong to or 'lie in' 
 some manor of their lord. These men, we think, can be 
 personally charged with the geld; but they pay their geld 
 at their lord's hall and he is in some measure bound to exact 
 the payment. 
 
 Any thing that could be called a strict proof of this theory 
 
 n> i i i 
 
 we can not offer; but it has been suggested by many facts 
 an d phrases which we can not otherwise explain. In the first 
 place, our record seems to assume that every holding either 
 is a manor or forms part of a manor 1 . Then we are told how 
 
 1 D. B. i. 35: 'In Driteham tenet Eicardus [filius Gisleberti] 1 hidam et 
 dimidiam. JElmar tenuit de Eege E. pro uno manerio....In eadem Driteham est 
 1 hida et dimidia quam tenuit Aluric de Bege E. pro uno manerio, et postea
 
 The Manor. 123 
 
 lands 'geld' at or in some manor or at the caput manerii. 
 Thus lands which lie many miles away from Tewkesbury, but 
 which belong to the manor of Tewkesbury, ' geld in Tewkes- 
 bury 1 / Sometimes the same information is conveyed to us 
 by a phrase that deserves notice. A piece of land is said to 
 ' defend itself in or at some manor, or, which is the same 
 thing, to have its wara or render its wara, that is to say, 
 its defence, its answer to the demand for geld, there 8 . ' In 
 Middleton two sokemen had 16 acres of land and they rendered 
 their wara in the said Middleton, but they could give and sell 
 their land to whom they pleased 3 / When we are told that 
 certain lands are in warnode Drogonis or in warnode Archi- 
 episcopi, it is meant that the lands belong to Drogo or the 
 Archbishop for the purpose of 'defence* against the geld 4 . 
 It is not sufficient that land should be taxed, it must be taxed 
 'in' some place, which may be remote from that in which, 
 as a matter of physical fact, it lies 5 . One clear case of a free 
 tenant paying his geld to his lord is put before us : ' Leofwin 
 had half a hide and could withdraw with his land and he 
 paid geld to his lord and his lord paid nothing 6 / Besides 
 this we have cases in which the lord enjoys the special privilege 
 
 dedit illam terrain uxori suae'et filiae ad aecclesiam de Certesy, sicuti homines 
 de hundredo testantur. Iticardus [films Gisleberti] calumniator. Non iacet 
 ulli manerio, nee pro manerio tenet, set liberata fuit ei et modo 3 hidae geldant 
 pro una hida et dimidia.' To say of the second of these two plots that it 
 neither is a manor nor yet belongs to a manor, is to say that it is shirking the 
 geld. D. B. i. 48: 'Walerannus tenet Dene....Ista tera non adiacet ulli suo 
 manerio.' Here suo = Waleranni. Waleran seems to be holding land without 
 good title. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 163 b, Clifort. D. B. i. 58 b: 'In Winteham tenet Hubertus de 
 Abbate 5 hidas, de terra villanorum fuerunt 4, et geldaverunt cum hidis 
 manerii.' 
 
 2 The word wara means defence ; it comes from a root which has given us, 
 wary, warrant, warn, guarantee, weir, etc. See Vinogradoff, Villainage, 243. 
 
 D. B. i. 212. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 340, 366, 368. Is not the last part of the word A.-S. notu, 
 (business, office)? 
 
 8 D. B. i. 132 b : Hoc manerium tenuit Heraldus Comes et iacuit et iacet in 
 Hiz [Hitchin, Herts] sed wara hujus manerii iacuit in Bedefordscire T. B. E. in 
 hundredo de Maneheue.' D. B. i. 190, 'Haec terra est bereuuicha in Neuport 
 [Essex] set wara ejus iacet in Grantebrige.' When in the survey of Oxfordshire, 
 i. 160, it is said, 'Ibi Ihida de warland in dominio,' the taxed land is contrasted 
 with the inland, which in this county has gone untased. 
 
 D. B. i. 28.
 
 124 Domesday Book. 
 
 of collecting the geld from his tenants and keeping it for 
 his own use 1 . A remarkable Kentish entry tells us that at 
 Peckham the archbishop had an estate which had been rated 
 at six sullungs, and then that 'of the land of this manor a 
 certain man of the archbishop held a half-sullung which in 
 King Edward's day gelded with these six sullungs, although 
 being free land it did not belong to the manor save for the 
 purpose of the scot 2 / Here we have land so free that the 
 one connexion between it and the manor to which it is 
 attributed consists in the payment of geld it gelds along 
 with the other lands of the manor. In the great lawsuit 
 between the churches of Worcester and Evesham about the 
 lands at Hamton, the former contended that these lands should 
 pay their geld along with the other estates of the bishop*. 
 
 Land gelds Let us observe the first question that the commissioners 
 )r ' are to ask of the jurors. What is the name of the mansio ? 
 Every piece of geldable land is connected with some mansio, 
 at which it gelds. Let us observe how the commissioners 
 and the jurors proceed in a district where the villae and the 
 mansiones or maneria are but rarely coincident. The jurors 
 of the Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire are speaking of 
 their country vill by vill. They come to the vill of Abington*. 
 Abington, they say, was rated at five hides. Of these five 
 hides the king has a half-hide ; this lies in Litlington. Earl 
 Roger has one virgate; this lies in his manor of Shingay. 
 Picot the sheriff has a half-virgate ; this lies and has always 
 lain in Morden. In what sense important to the commissioners 
 or their master can a bundle of strips scattered about in the 
 fields of Abington be said to lie in Litlington, in Shingay, or 
 in Morden ? We answer that it gelds there. 
 
 Geld and Hence the importance of the hall. It is the place where 
 
 geld is demanded and paid. A manor without a hall is a 
 
 1 See the cases of the monks of Bury and the canons of S. Petroc, above, 
 p. 55. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 4 b : ' De terra huius manerii tenfuit] unus homo archiepiscopi 
 dimid. solin et cum his 6 solins geldabat T. E. E. quamvis non pertineret manerio 
 nisi de scoto quia libera terra erat.' The scotum in this context seems to be or 
 to include the geld. Compare D; B. i. 61 b : ' Haec terra iacet et appreciata est 
 in Gratentun quod est in Oxenefordscire et tamen dat scotum in Berchescire.' 
 D. B. ii. 11 : ' In Colecestra habet episcopus 14 domos et 4 acras non reddentes 
 consnetudinem praeter scotum nisi episcopo.' 
 
 * See above, p. 85. * Hamilton, Inquisitio, 60.
 
 The Manor. 125 
 
 thing to be carefully noted, otherwise some geld may be lost 1 . 
 A man's land has descended to his three sons: if 'there is 
 only one hall,' but one demand for geld need be made ; if ' each 
 has his hall,' there must be three separate demands. When 
 we are told that two brothers held land and that each had 
 his house (domus) though they dwelt in one court (curia), 
 a nice problem is being put before us: Two halls, or one 
 hall Two manors or one manor 2 ? 
 
 The petty maneria of Suffolk, what can they be but The petty 
 holdings which geld by themselves ? The holders of them 
 are not great men, they have no tenants or just two or three 
 bordiers ; sometimes they can not ' withdraw ' their lands from 
 their lords. But still they pay their own taxes at their own 
 houses. 
 
 In supposing that forces have been at work which tend The lord 
 to make the lord responsible for the taxes of his men, we nian's' 3 
 are not without a warrant in the ancient dooms. ' If a king's taxes - 
 thegn or" a lord of land (landrica) neglects to pay the Rome 
 penny, let him forfeit ten half-marks, half to Christ, half to 
 the king. If a " townsman " withholds the penny, let the lord 
 of the land pay the penny and take an ox from the man, and 
 if the lord neglects to do this, then let Christ and the king 
 receive the full b6t of -12 ores 3 .' The right of doing justice 
 is also the duty of doing justice. It is natural that the lord 
 with soke should become a tax-gatherer, and he will gladly 
 guarantee the taxes if thereby he can prevent the king's 
 officers from entering his precinct and meddling with his 
 justiciables. At no time has the state found it easy to collect 
 taxes from the poor ; over and over again it has been glad to 
 avail itself of the landlord's intermediation*. 
 
 Our theory that while the lord is directly and primarily Distinction 
 responsible for the geld of his villeins, he is but subsidiarily yy W( 
 responsible for the geld of those of his sokemen or ' free men ' 
 
 1 Above, p. 110. 2 D. B. i. 35 b. 
 
 3 Northumbrian Priests' Law, 58, 59, (Schmid, p. 369.) 
 
 4 An Act of 1869 (32-3 Vic. c. 41) allowed the owners of certain small houses 
 to agree to pay the rates which under the ordinary law would become due from 
 the occupiers, and authorized the vestries to allow such owners a commission of 
 25 per cent. See also the instructive recital in 59 Geo. in. c. 12, sec. 19 : The 
 small occupiers are evading the poors' rate, and the owners exact higher rents 
 than they would otherwise get, on the ground that the occupiers can not be 
 effectually assessed. 
 
 sokeraen.
 
 126 Domesday Book. 
 
 who are deemed to belong to his manor, is founded in part 
 on what we take to have been the wording of King William's 
 writ 1 , in part on the form taken by the returns made thereto. 
 The writ draws a marked line between the villein and the 
 sokeman. The king wishes to know how much land each 
 sokeman, each liber homo, holds ; he does not care that any 
 distinction should be drawn between the lord's demesne lands 
 and the lands of the villeins. And, on the whole, his commands 
 are obeyed. A typical entry in the survey of East Anglia 
 will first describe in one mass the land held by the lord and 
 his villeins, will tell us how many carucates this land is rated 
 at, how many teams there are on the demesne, and how many 
 the men have, then it will enumerate sheep and pigs and 
 goats, and then, as it were in an appendix, it will add that 
 so many sokemen belong to this manor and that between them 
 they hold so many carucates or acres 2 . In Suffolk even the 
 names of these humble tenants are sometimes recorded 3 . And 
 then, we have seen 4 that there is some doubt as to whether 
 or no these men are or are not to be reckoned as part of the 
 manor for all purposes. We have to say that the manor ' with 
 the free men,' or ' without the free men ' is worth so much. 
 The lord's After all, we are only supposing that the fashion in which 
 liability? 7 tne danegeld was put in charge resembled in some of its 
 main outlines the fashion in which a very similar tax was 
 put in charge under Richard I. In 1194 the land-tax that 
 was levied for the payment of the king's ransom seems to 
 have been assessed according to the hidage stated in Domesday 
 Book 8 . Then in 1198 a new assessment was made. We are 
 told that the king ordained that every baron should with 
 the sheriffs aid distrain his men to pay the tax cast upon 
 them, and that if, owing to the baron's default, distresses were 
 
 1 See above, p. 24. 
 
 2 E.g. D. B. ii. 389 b, 'Clarum tenuit Aluricus pro manerio 24 car. terrae 
 T. B. E. Tune 40 villani....Tunc 12 carucae in dominio. ...Tune 36 carucae 
 hominum Huic manerio semper adiacent 5 sochemani cum omni consuetudine 
 1 car. terrae et dim. Semper 1 caruca et dimidia.' 
 
 3 E.g. D. B. ii. 339: 'In eadem villa 14 liberi homines commendati, Godricus 
 faber et Edricus et Ulnotus et Osulfus et Uluricus et Stanmarus et Leuietus et 
 Wihtricus et Blachemanus et Mansuna et Leuinns et Ulmarus et Ulfah et alter 
 Ulfah et Leofstarms de 40 acris et habent 2 carucas et valent 10 solidos.' 
 
 4 Above, p. 115. 
 
 6 Bolls of the King's Court, Ric. I. (Pipe Boll. Soc.), p. xxiv. But apparently 
 there had been considerable rearrangements in some of the counties.
 
 The Manor. 127 
 
 not made, then the amount due from the baron's men should 
 be seized from the baron's own demesne and he should be 
 left to recoup himself as best he could 1 . Now it is a liability 
 of this sort that we are venturing to carry back into the 
 Confessor's day. The lord is responsible to the state as prin- 
 cipal, and indeed as sole, debtor for so much of the geld as is 
 due from his demesne land and from the land of his villani, 
 while as regards any lands of ' free men ' or sokemen which are 
 attached to his manor, his liability is not primary nor absolute ; 
 he is bound to take measures to make these men pay their 
 taxes ; if he fails in this duty, then their taxes will become 
 due from his demesne 2 . 
 
 When we read that in Nottinghamshire the relief of the Manors 
 thegn who had six manors or less was three marks, while his who to the 
 had more than six manors was eight pounds 8 , this may seem 
 to hint that some inferior limit was set to the size of the 
 manor. If so, it was drawn at a very low point in the scale 
 of tenements. Possibly some general rule had compelled all 
 men who held less than a bovate or half-virgate to 'add' 
 themselves to the manor of some lord. But the Nottingham- 
 shire rule is rude and arbitrary. He who has seven houses 
 against which geld is charged is a big man. On the other 
 hand, it is probable that the Norman lords brought with them 
 some notion, and not a very modest notion, of what a reasonably 
 sufficient manerium should be. The king has in some cases 
 rewarded them by a promise of ten or twenty manors without 
 specifying very carefully what those manors are to be like. He 
 has promised Count Eustace a hundred manors*. Thus we 
 would explain a not uncommon class of entries: 'fourteen 
 free men commended to Wulfsige were delivered to Rainald 
 
 1 Hoveden, iv. 46. The important words are these : ' Statutum etiam fuit 
 quod quilibet baro cum vicecomite faceret districtiones super homines suos ; et 
 si per defectum baronum districtiones factae non fuissent, caperetur de dominico 
 baronum quod super homines suos restaret reddendum, et ipsi barones ad homines 
 BUOS inde caperent. ' The baron's homines we take to be freeholders ; he would 
 be absolutely liable for the tax cast upon his villeinage. As to the tax of 1198 
 Bee Eng. Hist. Rev. iii. 501, 701 ; iv. 105, 108. 
 
 2 In Dial, de Scac. ii. 14, the author tells us that until recently if a baron 
 who owed money to the crown was insolvent, the goods of his knights could be 
 seized. The idea of subsidiary liability is not too subtle for the time. 
 
 8 Above, p. 108. 
 
 * D. B. ii. 9 : ' set Comes Eustachius 1 ex illis [hidis] tenet que non est de 
 suis c. [100] mansionibus."
 
 128 Domesday Booh 
 
 to make up (ad perficiendum) this manor of Carlington 1 .' 
 in Berningham a free man held 20 acres of land and this 
 was delivered to Walter Giffard to make up Letheringsett 2 .' 
 'Peter claims the land which belonged to seventeen free men 
 as having been delivered to him to make up this manor 3 / 
 'This land was delivered to Peter to make up some, but his 
 men do not know what, manor 4 .' The small ' free men ' of 
 the east have been ' added to ' manors to which they did not 
 belong in King Edward's day. A few of the free men of 
 Suffolk still ' remain in the king's hand ' ready to be delivered 
 out to complete the manors of their conquerors 5 . Here too 
 we may perhaps find the explanation of the entry which says 
 that Hugh de Port held Wallop 'for half a manor 6 .' The 
 king has promised him a dozen or score of manors ; and this 
 estate at Wallop worth but fifteen shillings a year, really no 
 gentleman would take it for a manor. 
 
 Summary. Such then is the best explanation that we can offer of 
 the manerium of Domesday Book. About details we may 
 be wrong, but that this term has a technical meaning which 
 is connected with the levy of the danegeld we can not doubt. 
 It loses that meaning in course of time because the danegeld 
 gives way before newer forms of taxation. It never again 
 acquires a technical meaning until the late days when retro- 
 spective lawyers find the essence of a manor in its court 7 . 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 233 b. 2 D. B. ii. 242 b. 8 D. B. ii. 258. 
 
 * D. B. ii. 258. 5 D. B. ii. 447. 6 D. B. i. 45 b. 
 
 7 Two objections to our theory may be met by a note. (1) Some manors are 
 free of geld, and therefore to make our definition correct we ought to say that a 
 manor is a tenement which either pays its geld at a single place or which would 
 do so were it not freed from the tax by some special privilege. A manerium does 
 not cease to be a manerium by being freed from geld. (2) In later days we may 
 well find a manor holden of another manor, so that a plot of land may be 
 within two manors. If this usage of the term can be traced back into Domesday 
 Book as a common phenomenon, then our doctrine is in great jeopardy. But 
 we have noticed no passage which clearly and unambiguously says that a tract 
 of land was at one and the same time both a manerium and also a part of 
 another manerium. To this we must add that of the distribution of maneria 
 T. E. E. we only obtain casual and very imperfect tidings. If T. B. W. a free 
 man has been ' added to ' a manerium, the commissioners have no deep interest in 
 the inquiry whether T. R. E. his tenement was itself an independent manerium. 
 A great simplification has been effected and the number of maneria has been 
 largely reduced.
 
 Manor and VilL 129 
 
 7. Manor and VilL 
 
 After what has now been said, it is needless to repeat Manorial 
 that in Domesday Book the manerium and the villa are manorial 
 utterly different things 1 . In a given case the two may coincide, s ' 
 and throughout a great tract of England such cases were 
 common .and we may even say that they were normal. But 
 in the east this was not so. We may easily find a village 
 which taken as a whole has been utterly free from seignorial 
 domination. Orwell in Cambridgeshire will be a good example 2 . 
 
 In King Edward's day this vill of Orwell was rated at The vill of 
 4 hides : probably it was somewhat underrated for at the 
 date of the survey it was deemed capable of finding land for 
 nearly 6 teams. The following table will show who held the 
 four hides before the Conquest: 
 
 H. v. A. 
 
 Two sokemen, men of Edith the Fair 
 
 A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand 1J 
 
 A sokeman, man of Kobert Wimarc's son 1J 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl ^Elfgar 1J 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 3 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 
 
 Sigar a man of JSsgar the Staller 1J 
 
 Turbert a man of Edith the Fair 3J 5 
 
 Achil a man of Earl Harold 1 
 
 A sokeman of the King 1 
 S l . Mary of Chatteris J 
 
 S'. Mary of Chatteris J 
 
 4 O 3 
 
 It will be seen that eight of the most exalted persons in 
 the land, the king, the archbishop, three earls, two royal 
 marshals or stallers, and that mysterious lady known as Edith 
 the Fair, to say nothing of the church of Chatteris, had a 
 certain interest in this little Cambridgeshire village. But 
 then how slight an interest it was ! Every one of the tenants 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 174 : ' Hec villa fuit in duobus maneriis T. B. E.' Ibid. i. 164 : 
 'De his 2 villis fecit Comes W. unum manerium.' 
 
 2 Inquisitio, 77-9. 
 
 3 This result comes out correctly if ln.=4v=120A. For the state of this 
 vill T. B. W. see Bound, Feudal England, 40. 
 
 M. 9
 
 130 Domesday Book. 
 
 was free to 'withdraw himself,' 'to give or sell his land.' Now 
 we can not say that all of them were peasants. Achil the 
 man of Harold seems to have had other lands in the neigh- 
 bouring villages of Harlton and Barrington 1 . It is probable 
 that Turbert, Edith's man, had another virgate at Kingston 2 : 
 he was one of the jurors of the hundred in which Orwell lay 3 . 
 Sigar the man of ^Esgar was another juror, and held land 
 at Thriplow, Foxton, Haslingfield and Shepreth ; he seems 
 to have been his lord's steward 4 . But we may be fairly certain 
 that the unnamed sokemen tilled their own soil, though perhaps 
 they had help from a few cottagers. And they can not have 
 been constantly employed in cultivating the demesne lands 
 of their lords. They must go some distance to find any such 
 demesne lands. The Wetherley hundred, in which Orwell 
 lies, is full of the sokemen of these great folk : Waltheof, for 
 example, has 3 men in Comberton, 4 in Barton, 3 in Grant- 
 chester, 1 in Wratworth : but he has no demesne land, and if 
 he had it, he could not get it tilled by these scattered tenants. 
 The Fair Edith has half a hide in Haslingfield and we are 
 told that this belongs to the manor of Swavesey. Now at 
 Swavesey Edith has a considerable manor 5 , but it can not have 
 got much in the way of labour out of a tenant who lived at 
 Haslingfield, for the two villages are a long ten miles apart. 
 As to the king's sokemen, their only recorded services are 
 the avera and the inward. The former seems to be a carrying 
 service done at the sheriff's bidding and to be only exigible 
 when the king comes into the shire, while inward seems to 
 be the duty of forming a body guard for the king while he 
 is in the shire : if in any year the king did not come, a small 
 sum of money was taken instead 6 . 
 
 1 His plot at Orwell is said to belong to Harlton. Then at Harlton we find 
 an Achil with sokemen under him, and though in D. B. he is described as a 
 king's thegn, this is not incompatible with his being the man of Harold for 
 some of his lands. At Barrington Achillas Danaus homo Haroldi has a holding 
 of 40 acres. 
 
 2 Inquisitio, 86. * Ibid. 68. * Ibid. 43, 44, 45, 73, 76. 
 & D. B. i. 195. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 139 : ' De consuetudine 1 averam inveniebat cum Bex in scyra 
 Teniebat, si non 5 den. jeddebat.' D. B. i. 190, '[Sochemanni in Fuleberne] 
 reddunt per annum 8 libras arsas et pensatas et unoquoque anno 12 equos et 
 12 inguardos si Bex in vicecomitatu veniret, si non veniret 12 sol. et 8 den. ; 
 T. B. E. non reddebant vicecomiti nisi averas et inguardos vel 12 sol. et 8 den. 
 et superplus invasit Picot [vicecomes] super Begem.'
 
 Manor and Vill. 
 
 131 
 
 Lest it should be thought that in picking out the village A Cam - 
 t r\ 11 J- i u* -11 u bridgeshire 
 
 of Orwell we have studiously sought a rare case, we will here hundred. 
 
 set out in a tabular form what we can learn of the state of the 
 hundred in which Orwell lies. The Wetherley hundred con- 
 tained twejve vills : it 'was a land of true villages which until 
 very lately had wide open fields 1 . In the Confessor's day the 
 lands in it were allotted thus: 
 
 CAMBRIDGESHIRE. WETHERLEY HUNDRED 2 . 
 
 I. COMBERTON. A vill of 6 hides. 
 
 1. Seven sokemen of the King 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof | 
 A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand / 
 
 2. A man of Earl Waltheof 
 
 3. A sokeman, man of the King 
 
 A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand 
 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 
 
 4. The King 
 
 II. BARTON. A vill of 7 hides. 
 
 1. Two sokemen, men of Earl Waltheof 
 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 
 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 
 
 2. Juhael the King's hunter 
 
 3. A sokeman, man of Edith the Fair 
 
 4. Twenty-three sokemen of the King 
 
 H. 
 
 1 
 
 
 1 
 
 15 
 
 
 1 
 
 o' 
 
 
 1 
 
 15 
 
 
 1 
 
 15; 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 3 
 
 15 3 
 
 15 
 
 15* 
 
 
 
 01 
 <)J 
 
 
 
 C. B. 
 
 4 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 5 9 
 12 
 
 5 
 
 1 
 
 6 
 12 
 
 1 Wratworth has completely disappeared from the modern map ; its territory 
 seems to be included in that of the present Orwell. See Rot. Hund. ii. 559 and 
 Lysons, Magna Britannia, ii. 243. A small hamlet called Malton seems to 
 represent it. Whitwell also is no longer the name of a village, while the modern 
 Coton is not mentioned in D. B. There is now a Whitwell Farm near the 
 village of Coton, but in the parish of Barton. The modern Coton does not 
 seem to be the ancient Whitwell, for on Subsidy Rolls we may find Whitwell 
 annexed to Barton and Coton to Grantchester. 
 
 3 The figures in our first column represent the division of the vill among the 
 Norman lords. H. V. A. stand for Hides r Virgates, Acres. By C. and B. we 
 signify the Carucae and Boves for which ' there was land.' 
 
 3 There is some small error in this case. 
 
 4 A small conjectural emendation. 
 
 92
 
 132 Domesday BOOK. 
 
 III. GRANTCHESTER. A vill of 7 hides 1 . 
 
 
 H. V. A. 
 
 C. B. 
 
 1. Five sokemen, men of the King 3 
 
 1 
 
 2. Two sokemen, men of the King 210"! 
 A sokeman, man of JEsgar the Staller 2 Oj 
 
 6 
 
 3. A sokeman, man of Earl JSlfgar 3 0| 
 
 Three sokemen, men of Earl Waltheof 2 OJ 
 
 \j 
 
 4. Godman a man of Edith the Fair 1 15 
 
 1 
 
 5. Juhael the King's hunter 1 
 
 4 
 
 6. Wulfric, the King's man 15 
 
 3 
 
 700 
 
 12 7 
 
 IV. HASLINGFIELD. A vill of 20 hides. 
 
 
 1. The King 710 
 
 8 
 
 2. Five sokemen, men of the King 300) 
 A sokeman, man of .<Esgar the Staller 1 3 Oj 
 
 4 
 
 3. Ealdred a man of Edith the Fair 1 15 
 
 1 4 
 
 4. Edith the Fair, belonging to Swavesey 2 
 
 4 
 
 5. Sigar a man of JEsgar the Staller 500 
 
 6 
 
 6. Two sokemen of the King 113 
 
 2 
 
 7. Merewin, a man of Edith the Fair 12 
 
 
 
 20 
 
 22 
 
 V. HARLTON. A vill of 5 hides. 
 
 
 1. Achil, a King's thegn and under him 
 
 
 five sokemen of whom four were 
 
 
 his men while the fifth was the 
 
 
 man of Ernulf 400 
 
 6 
 
 2. Godman a man of ^Esgar the Staller 100 
 
 1 
 
 500 
 
 7 
 
 VI. BARRINGTON. A vill of 10 hides. 
 
 
 1. Eadric Pur a King's thegn 3 0\ 
 
 
 Fifteen sokemen, men of the King 4 1 15 
 
 
 Four sokemen, men of Earl JSlfgar 2 15 
 
 
 Three sokemen, men of ^Esgar the 
 
 11 
 
 Staller 100 
 
 
 Eadric Pur, holding of the Church 
 
 
 of Chatteris 15/ 
 
 
 2. The Church of Chatteris 200 
 
 4 
 
 3. Ethsi, holding of Robert Wimarc's son 20 
 
 3 
 
 4. Achil the Dane, a man of Earl Harold 40 
 
 6 
 
 5. A sokeman, man of the King 15 
 
 2 
 
 11 O 2 
 
 17 3 
 
 1 The Inq. Com. Cant, says 6 hides. 
 
 2 An error of one hide in the particulars. The two records do not fully agree.
 
 Manor and Vill. 
 
 133 
 
 VII. 
 
 SHEPRETH. A vill of 5 hides. 
 
 
 
 H. V. A. 
 
 C. B. 
 
 1. 
 
 Four sokemen, men of the King]^ 9 ft 1 ^ 
 
 .2 2 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl 
 
 JElfgarJ 
 
 
 2. 
 
 The Church of Chatteris 
 
 1 1 15 
 
 1 4 
 
 3. 
 
 Sigar a man of JEsgar the Staller 100 
 
 1 
 
 4. 
 
 Heming a man of the King 1 15 
 
 4 
 
 5. 
 
 The Church of Ely 
 
 15 
 
 2 
 
 
 
 500 
 
 5 4 
 
 VIII 
 
 ORWELL. A vill of 4 hides. 
 
 L 
 
 Two sokemen, men of Edith the Fair 20' 
 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Abp 
 
 Stigand 1 10 
 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 1 10 
 
 1 4 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 20 
 
 
 
 A Sokeman, man of Earl 
 
 jElfgar 1 10 
 
 
 2. 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl 
 
 Waltheof 3 0' 
 
 10 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 10 
 
 
 3. 
 
 Sigar, a man of JEsgar the Staller 1 10 
 
 4 
 
 4. 
 
 Turbert, a man of Edith 
 
 the Fair 3 12J 1 4 
 
 5. 
 
 Achil, a man of Earl Harold 1 
 
 2 
 
 6. 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 1 
 
 3 
 
 7. 
 
 The Church of Chatteris 
 
 10 
 
 1 
 
 8. 
 
 The Church of Chatteris 
 
 7| } 
 
 
 
 400 
 
 6 2 
 
 IX. 
 
 WRATWORTH. A vill of 4 hides. 
 
 1. 
 
 A sokeman, man of Edith the Fair 3 10^ 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Abp 
 
 Stigand 3 
 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl 
 
 ^Elfgar 1 10 
 
 3 
 
 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 10 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 20' 
 
 2. 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl 
 
 Waltheof 2 20' 
 
 . 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 10 
 
 1 
 
 3. 
 
 A sokeman, man of Edith the Fair 1 10 
 
 4 
 
 4. 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 1 
 
 3 
 
 5. 
 
 Two sokemen, men of the King 2 
 
 4 
 
 
 
 400 
 
 5 3 
 
 X. 
 
 WHITWELL. A vill of 4 hides. 
 
 1. 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl 
 
 jElfgar 1 20 
 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 1 
 
 1 4 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of the King 2 
 
 
 2. 
 
 A sokeman, man of Abp 
 
 Stigand 15 
 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Edith 
 
 the Fair 10 
 
 4 
 
 
 [A sokeman] 
 
 15 
 
 
 3. 
 
 Six sokemen, men of the 
 
 King 110 
 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 2 
 
 2 
 
 
 A sokeman, man of Earl 
 
 Mlfg&r 1 
 
 
 4. 
 
 Godwin a man of Edith 
 
 the Fair 2 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 400 
 
 6
 
 134 
 
 Domesday 
 
 Booh 
 
 
 
 
 
 XL 
 
 1. 
 
 2. 
 
 WIMPOLE. A vill of 4 hides. 
 
 Edith the Fair 
 Earl Gyrth 
 
 H. 
 
 2 
 1 
 
 V. 
 2 
 1 
 
 A. 
 15 
 15 
 
 c. 
 3 
 2 
 
 B. 
 
 
 
 
 4 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 XII. ARRINGTON. A vill of 4 hides. 
 
 1. JSlfric, a King's thegn 1 1 
 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 1 
 A sokeman, man of the Abbot of Ely 1 
 Asokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 
 
 2. A man of Edith the Fair 2 
 
 The Now if by a 'manor* we mean what our historical 
 
 economists usually mean when they use that term, we must 
 protest that before the Norman Conquest there were very few 
 manors in the Wetherley hundred. In no one case was the 
 whole of a village coincident with a manor, with a lord's estate. 
 The king had considerable manors in Comberton and Hasling- 
 field. Sigar had a manor at Haslingfield; the church of 
 Chatteris had a manor at Barrington besides some land at 
 Shepreth ; Wimpole was divided between Edith and Earl Gyrth ; 
 Harlton between Achil and Godman. But in Barton, Grant- 
 chester, Shepreth, Orwell, Wratworth, Whitwell and Arririgton 
 we see nothing manorial, unless we hold ourselves free to use that 
 term of a little tenement which to all appearance might easily 
 be cultivated by the labour of one household, at all events with 
 occasional help supplied by a few cottagers. Indeed it is diffi- 
 cult to say what profit some of the great people whose names 
 we have mentioned were deriving from those of their men who 
 dwelt in the Wetherley hundred. We take the Mercian earl 
 for example 2 . One of the sokemen of Grantchester, four of the 
 sokemen of Barrington, one of the sokemen of Shepreth, one 
 of the sokemen of Orwell, one of the sokemen of Wratworth, 
 two of the sokemen of Whitwell were ^Elfgar's men. That 
 ^Elfgar got a little money or a little provender out of them is 
 probable, that they did some carrying service for him is possible 
 and perhaps they aided him at harvest time on some manor 
 
 1 A small emendation justified by Inq. Eliensis (Hamilton, p. 110). 
 3 JElfgar died before King Edward ; Freeman, Norman Conquest, ed. 3, 
 iii. 469, places his death in or about 1062.
 
 Manor and Vill. 135 
 
 of his in another part of the county; but that they were not 
 the tillers of his land seems clear 1 . 
 
 What is more, our analysis of this Wetherley hundred enables The soke- 
 us to drive home the remark that very often a sokeman was ^fgnonai 
 not the sokeman of his lord or, in other words, that he was not J ustice - 
 under seignorial justice 2 . JSlfgar had ten sokemen scattered 
 about in six villages. Did he hold a court for them ? We 
 think not. Did they go to the court of some distant manor ? 
 We think not. The court they attended was the Wetherley 
 hundred-moot. One of the sokemen in Arrington was in a some- 
 what exceptional position exceptional, that is, in this hundred. 
 Not only was he the man of the Abbot of Ely, but his soke 
 belonged to the Abbot ; and if he sold his tenement, and this 
 he could do without the Abbot's consent, the soke over his land 
 would 'remain' to the Abbot 3 . He was not only his lord's 
 man but his lord's justiciable and probably attended some 
 court outside the hundred. But for the more part these men 
 of Wetherley were not the justiciables of their lords. It was 
 a very free hundred when the Normans came there : much too 
 free for the nation's welfare we may think, for these sokemen 
 could go with their land to what lord they pleased. Also be it 
 noted in passing that the churches have little in Wetherley. 
 
 In 1086 there had been a change. The sokemen had Changes 
 disappeared. The Norman lords had made demesne land where Wetherley 
 their English antecessores possessed none. Count Roger had l 
 instituted a seignorial court at Orwell. He had borrowed 
 three sokemen 'to hold his pleas' from Picot the sheriff and 
 had refused to give them up again 4 . Apparently they had 
 sunk to the level of villani. Two centuries afterwards we 
 
 1 The history of the earldoms during Edward's reign is exceedingly obscure. 
 See Freeman's elaborate note : Ibid., 555. In particular Cambridgeshire seems 
 to have lain now in one and now in another earldom. Thus it comes about 
 that Cambridgeshire sokemen are commended some to ^Elfgar, some to Waltheof, 
 some to Harold, some to Gyrth. ^Elfgar, for example, had at one time been 
 earl in East Anglia. Men who had commended themselves to an earl would, 
 unless they 'withdrew themselves,' still be his men though he had ceased to be 
 earl of their county. 
 
 2 See above, p. 105. Observe how frequently our record speaks of 'soche- 
 manni homines Algari' and the like. These sokemen are JElfgar's men; but 
 are not properly his sokemen. 
 
 * Inq. Com. Cant. 110. This is from the Inquisitio Eliensis. Compare 
 p. 83. 
 
 * Jnq. Com. Cant. 77-8.
 
 136 Domesday Book. 
 
 see the hundred of Wetherley once more. There is villeinage 
 enough in it. The villein at Orwell, for example, holds only 
 10 acres but works for his lord on 152 days in the year, besides 
 boon-days 1 . And yet we should go far astray if we imposed 
 upon these Cambridgeshire villages that neat manorial system 
 which we see at its neatest and strongest in the abbatial car- 
 tularies. The villages do not become manors. The manors 
 are small. The manors are intermixed in the open fields. 
 There are often freeholders in the village who are not the 
 tenants of any lord who has a manor there. A villein will 
 hold two tenements of two lords. The villein of one lord will 
 be the freeholder of another. The ' manorial system ' has been 
 forced upon the villages, but it fits them badly 2 . 
 Manorial- In the thirteenth century the common field of a Cambridere- 
 
 isminCam- . ... . . 3 
 
 bridge- shire village was often a very maze or proprietary rights, and 
 yet the village was an agrarian whole. Let us take, for 
 example, Duxford as it stood in the reign of Edward I. 8 We 
 see 39 villein tenements each of which has fourteen acres in 
 the fields. These tenements are divided between five different 
 manors. Four of our typical 'townsmen' hold of Henry de 
 Lacy, who holds of Simon de Furneaux, who holds of the Count 
 of Britanny, who holds of the king. Two hold of Ralph of 
 Duxford, who holds of Basilia wife of Baldwyn of St George, 
 who holds of William Mortimer, who holds of Simon de 
 Furneaux, who holds of the Count of Britanny, who holds 
 of the king. Eight hold of the Templars, who hold of Roger 
 de Colville, who holds of the Earl of Albemarle, who holds 
 of the king. Nine hold of William le Goyz, who holds of 
 Henry of Boxworth, who holds of Richard de Freville, who 
 holds of the king. Sixteen hold of John d'Abernon, who 
 holds of the Earl Marshal, who holds of the king. Three of 
 the greatest ' honours ' in England are represented. Three 
 monasteries and two parochial churches have strips in the 
 fields. And yet there are normal tenements cut according 
 to one pattern, tenements of fourteen acres the holders of 
 
 1 Bot. Hund. ii. 558. 
 
 2 One instance may suffice. In Sawston (Rot. Hund. ii. 575-80) are three 
 manors, A, B, C; A has a sub-manor. One Thomas Dovenel holds in villeinage 
 of the lord of A ; in villeinage of the lord of B ; in freehold of the lord of B ; 
 in freehold of a tenant of the lord of B ; in freehold of a tenant of a tenant of 
 the lord of B. 
 
 8 Rot. Hund. ii. 580.
 
 Manor and Vill. 137 
 
 which, though their other services may differ, pay for the 
 more part an equal rent 1 . The village seems to say that it 
 must be one, though the lords would make it many. And 
 then we look back to the Confessor's day and we see that a 
 good part of Duxford was held by sokemen 8 . 
 
 Perhaps we shall be guilty of needless repetition ; but what The soke- 
 is written in Domesday Book about maneria is admirably the'manors. 
 designed for the deception of modern readers whose heads are 
 full of 'the manorial system.' Therefore let us look at two 
 Hertfordshire villages. In one of them there is a manerium 
 which Kalph Basset holds of Robert of Ouilly 8 . It has been 
 rated at 4, but is now rated at 2 hides. There is land for 
 4 teams. In demesne are 2 teams; and 3 villani with 
 2 sokemen of 1 hide and 5 bordarii have 2 teams. There are 
 1 cottager and 1 serf and a mill of 10 shillings and meadow 
 for 3 teams. It is now worth 3 ; in King Edward's day it 
 was worth 5. Now here, we say, is a pretty little manor of 
 the common 'kind. Let us then explore its past history. 'Five 
 sokemen held this manor.' Yes, we say, before the Conquest 
 this manor was held in physically undivided shares by five 
 lords. Their shares were small and they were humble people ; 
 but still they had a manor. But let us read further. 'Two 
 of them were the men of Brihtric and held 1 hides; other 
 two were the men of Osulf the son of Frane and held 1| hides; 
 and the fifth was the man of Eadmer Atule and held a hide.' 
 We will at once finish the story and see how Robert of Ouilly 
 came by this manor. ' No one of these five sokemen belonged 
 to his antecessor Wigot ; every one of them might sell his land. 
 One of them bought (i.e. redeemed) his land for nine ounces 
 of gold from King William, so the men of the hundred say, 
 and afterwards turned for protection to Wigot.' So Robert's 
 title to this manor is none of the best. But are we sure that 
 before the Conquest there was anything that we should call 
 a manor ? These five sokemen who have unequal shares, who 
 have three different lords, who hold in all but 4 team-lands, 
 whose land is worth but 5, do not look like a set of co- 
 parceners to whom a 'manor* has descended. When Robert 
 of Ouilly has got his manor there are upon it 2 sokemen, 
 
 1 On four out of the five manors the rent is 2s. 3d. ; on the fifth 3s. Qd. 
 
 2 Inq. Com. Cant. 41. D. B. i. 137 b.
 
 138 Domesday Book. 
 
 3 villeins, 5 bordarii, a cottager and a serf. It was not a 
 splendid manor for five lords. 
 
 Hertford- We turn over a few pages. Hardouin of Eschalers has 
 
 m^ a manor rated at 5^ hides 1 . It contains land for 8 teams. 
 
 In demesne are 2 hides less 20 acres, and 3 teams ; 11 villani 
 
 with the priest and 5 bordarii have 5 teams. There are 
 
 4 cottagers and 6 serfs. It is worth 9; in the Confessor's 
 day it was worth 10. Who held this manor in the past ? 
 Nine sokemen held it. Rather a large party of joint lords, 
 we say ; but still, families will grow. Howbeit, we must finish 
 the sentence : ' Of these, one, Sired by name, was the man of 
 Earl Harold and held 1 hide and 3 virgates for a manor; 
 another, Alfred, a man of Earl ^Elfgar, held 1 hides for a 
 manor; and the other seven were sokemen of King Edward 
 and held 2 hides and 1 virgate and they supplied the sheriff 
 with 9 pence a year or 2 averae (carrying services).' No, we 
 have not been reading of the joint holders of a ' manor ' ; we 
 have been reading of peasant proprietors. Two of them 
 were substantial folk; each of the two held a manerium at 
 which geld was paid ; the other seven gelded at one of the 
 king's maneria under the view of his bailiffs. Maneria there 
 have been everywhere ; but ' manors ' we see in the making. 
 Hardouin has made one under our eyes. 
 
 The small We hear the objection that, be it never so humble, a manor 
 na " is a manor. But is that truism quite true ? If all that we 
 want for the constitution of a manor is a proprietor of some 
 land who has a right to exact from some other man, or two 
 or three other men, the whole or some part of the labour that 
 is necessary for the tillage of his soil, we may indeed see manors 
 everywhere and at all times. Even if we introduce a more 
 characteristically medieval element and demand that the tillers 
 shall be neither menial servants nor labourers hired for money, 
 but men who make their living by cultivating for their own 
 behoof small plots which the proprietor allows them to occupy, 
 still we shall have the utmost difficulty if we would go behind 
 manorialism. But suppose for a moment that we have a village 
 the land of which is being held by nine sokemen, each of whom 
 has a hide or half-hide scattered about in the open fields, and 
 each of whom controls the labour bf a couple of serfs, shall we 
 not be misleading the public and ourselves if we speak of nine 
 
 1 D. B. i. 141 b.
 
 Manor and Vill. 139 
 
 manors or even of nine ' embryo manors ' ? At any rate it 
 is clear enough that if these estates of the sokemen are 'embryo 
 manors,' then these embryos were deposited in the common 
 fields. In that case the common fields, the hides and yard- 
 lands of the village are not the creatures of manorialism. 
 
 We have seen free villages ; we have seen a free hundred. The Danes 
 We might have found yet freer hundreds had we gone % to dom. 
 Suffolk. We have chosen Cambridgeshire because Cambridge- 
 shire can not be called a Danish county, except in a sense in 
 which, notwithstanding the wasted condition of Yorkshire, 
 about one half of the English nation lived in Danish counties. 
 When men divide up England between the three laws, they 
 place Cambridgeshire under the Danelaw ; but to that law 
 they subject about one half of the inhabitants of England. 
 There may have been many men of Scandinavian race in Cam- 
 bridgeshire ; but we find hundreds not wapentakes, hides not 
 carucates, while among the names of villages there are few indeed 
 which betray a Scandinavian 'origin. The Wetherley hundred 
 was not many miles away from the classic fields of Hitchin 1 . 
 
 But in truth we must be careful how we use our Dane. TheDanish 
 
 . . i i f^ i i counties. 
 
 Yorkshire was a Danish county in a sense in which Cambridge- 
 shire was not Danish ; it was a land of trithings and wapentakes, 
 a land without hides, where many a village testified by its 
 name to a Scandinavian settlement. And yet to all appearance 
 it was in the Confessor's day a land where the manors stood 
 thick 2 . Then we have that wonderful contrast between 
 Yorkshire and Lincolnshire which Ellis summed up in these 
 figures : 
 
 Sochemanni Villani Bordarii 
 
 Lincolnshire 11,503 7,723 4,024 
 
 Yorkshire 447 5,079 1,819 
 
 Perhaps this contrast would have been less violent if 
 Yorkshire had not been devastated : but violent it is and 
 
 1 Inq. Com. Cant., pp. 108-110. As names of the Abbot of Ely's sokemen in 
 Meldreth and neighbouring villages we have Grimmus, Alsi Gild, Wenesi, Alsi, 
 Leofwinus, .ZEdricus, Godwinus, Almarus, Aluricus f rater Godunini, Mdriz, 
 Alsi Berd, Alricus Godingessune, Wenestan, Alwin Blondus, Alfuuinus, Alure- 
 dus, Alricus Brunesune, Alware, Hunuft, Hunwinus, Brizstanus. This does not 
 point to a preponderance of Norse or Danish blood. 
 
 2 Owing to the wasted condition of Yorkshire, the information that we 
 obtain of the T. K. E. is meagre and perfunctory. But what seems character- 
 istic of this county is a holding of two or three ploughlands which we might 
 fairly call an embryo manor.
 
 140 Domesday Book. 
 
 must be. It will provoke the remark that the 'faults' (if 
 any faults there be) in a truly economic stratification of 
 mankind are not likely to occur just at the boundaries of the 
 shires, whereas so long as each county has a court from which 
 there is no appeal to any central tribunal, we may expect 
 to find that lines which have their origin in fiscal practice 
 will be sharp lines and will coincide with the metes and 
 bounds of jurisdictional districts. 
 
 The con- Nor should it escape remark that the names by which a 
 
 between grand distinction is expressed are in their origin very loose 
 terms an d etymologically ill-fitted to the purpose that they 
 are serving. In English the villanus is the ttinesman or, as we 
 should say, the villager. And yet to all seeming the sokeman 
 is essentially a villager. What is more the land where the 
 sokemen and ' free men ' lived was a land of true villages, of big 
 villages, of limitless 'open fields,' whereas the hamleted west was 
 servile. Then again sokeman is a very odd term. If it signified 
 that the man to whom it is applied was always the justiciable 
 of the lord to whom he was commended, we could understand it. 
 Even if this t man were always the justiciable of a court that had 
 passed into private hands, we could still understand it. But ap- 
 parently there are plenty of sokemen whose soke 'is' or 'lies' in 
 those hundred courts that have no lord but the king. The best 
 guess that we can make as to the manner in which they have 
 acquired their name is that in an age which is being persuaded 
 that some ' service ' must be done by every one who holds land, 
 suit of court appears as the only service that is done by all 
 these men. They may owe other services; but they all owe 
 suit of court. If so we may see their legal successors in those 
 freeholders of the twelfth century who are 'acquitting' their 
 lords and their villages by doing suit at the national courts 1 . 
 But when a new force comes into play (and the tribute to the 
 pirate was a new and a powerful force) new lines of demarcation 
 must be drawn, new classes of men must be formed and words 
 
 1 See the early extents in Cart. Earns, iii. Thus (242) at Hemingford: 
 B. V. tenet tres virgatas et dimidiam et sequitur hundredum et comitatum.... 
 B. H. tenet duas virgatas et sequitur hundredum et comitatum.' Elsworth 
 (249) : 'B. filius T. duas virgatas. Pro altera sequitur comitatum et hundredum ; 
 pro altera solvit quinque solidos.' Brancaster (261) : ' Cnutus avus Petri tenebat 
 terram suam libere in tempore Begis Henrici et sequebatur comitatum et 
 hundredum, et fuit quietus ab omni servitio.' See also VinogradofE, Villain- 
 age, 441 fi.
 
 Manor and Vill. 141 
 
 will be borrowed for the purpose with little care for etymological 
 niceties. One large and widely-spread class may find a name 
 for itself in a district where the ordinary 'townsmen' or villagers 
 are no longer treated as taxpayers responsible to the state, while 
 some practice peculiar to a small part of the country may confer 
 the name of ' sokemen ' on those tillers of the soil who are 
 rated to the geld. We are not arguing that this distinction, 
 even when it first emerged, implied nothing that concerned the 
 economic position of the villein and the sokeman. The most 
 dependent peasants would naturally be the people who could 
 not be directly charged with the geld, and the peasants who 
 could not pay the geld would naturally become dependent on 
 those who would pay it for them; still we are not entitled to 
 assume that the fiscal scheme accurately mirrored the economic 
 facts, or that the varying practice of different moots and 
 different collectors may not have stamped as the villeins of one 
 shire those who would have been the sokemen of another 1 . 
 
 Be this as it may, any theory of English history must face Free 
 the free, the lordless, village and must account for it as for ^ 
 one of the normal phenomena which existed in the year of 
 grace 1066. How common it was we shall never know until 
 the material contained in Domesday Book has been geo- 
 graphically rearranged by counties, hundreds and vills. But 
 whether common or no, it was normal, just as normal as the 
 village which was completely subject to seignorial power. 
 We have before us villages which, taken as wholes, have no 
 lords. What is more, it seems obvious enough that, unless 
 there has been some great catastrophe in the past, some 
 insurrection of the peasants or the like, the village of Orwell 
 and other villages might be named by the dozen has never 
 had a lord. Such lordships as exist in it are plainly not the 
 relics of a dominion which has been split up among divers 
 persons by the action of gifts and inheritances. The sokemen 
 
 1 Some thirty years ago the whole political world of England was agitated 
 by controversy about 'the compound householder.' Was he to have a vote? 
 The historian of the nineteenth century will not treat the compound house- 
 holders as forming one homogeneous class of men whose general status could be 
 marked off from that of other classes. Nor, it is to be hoped, will etymological 
 guesses lead him to believe that the compound householder held a compound 
 house. He will say that a landlord 'compounded for' the rates of the 
 aforesaid householder. Mutatis mutandis may not the villein have been the 
 compound householder of the eleventh century?
 
 142 Domesday Book. 
 
 of Orwell have worshipped every rising sun. One has com- 
 mended himself to the ill-fated Harold, another to the ill-fated 
 Waltheof, a third has chosen the Mercian ^Elfgar, a fourth has 
 placed himself under the aspiring Archbishop ; yet all are free 
 to ' withdraw.' We have here a very free village indeed, for 
 its members enjoy a freedom of which no freeholder of the 
 thirteenth century would even dream, and in a certain sense 
 we have here a free village community. How much com- 
 munalism is there ? Of this most difficult question only a 
 few words will now be said, for our guesses about remote ages 
 we will yet a while reserve. 
 
 Village In the first place, we can not doubt that the 'open field 
 
 ties!' system ' of agriculture prevails as well in the free villages as in 
 those that are under the control of a lord. The sokeman's hide 
 or virgate is no ring-fenced ' close ' but is composed of many 
 scattered strips. Again, we can hardly doubt that the practice 
 of 'co-aration' prevailed. The sokeman had seldom beasts 
 enough to make up a team. It is well known that the whole 
 scheme of land-measurements which runs through Domesday 
 Book is based upon the theory that land is ploughed by teams of 
 eight oxen. It is perhaps possible that smaller teams were some- 
 times employed ; but when we read that a certain man ' always 
 ploughed with three oxen 1 ,' or ' used to plough with two oxen 
 but now ploughs with half a team 2 ,' or ' used to plough with a 
 team but now ploughs with two oxen 3 ,' we are reading, not of 
 small teams, but of the number of oxen that the man in 
 question contributed towards the team of eight that was made 
 up by him and his neighbours. When of a piece of land in 
 Bedfordshire it is said that ' one ox ploughs there,' this means 
 that the land in question supplies but one ox in a team of 
 eight 4 ; and here and not in any monstrous birth do we find 
 the explanation of ' terra est dimidio bovi et ibi est semibos 8 ': 
 there is a sixteenth part of a teamland and its tenant along 
 with some other man provides an ox. There may have been 
 light ploughs as well as heavy ploughs, but the heavy plough 
 must have been extremely common, since the term 'plough 
 team' (carwca) seems invariably to mean a team of eight. 
 
 The Then one notable case meets our eye in which the owner- 
 
 villagers as 
 co-owuers. l D. B. ii. 204: ' 3 liberi homines... semper arant cum 3 bobus.' 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 184 b. * D. B. ii. 192 b. * D. B. i. 211. 
 
 5 D. B. i. 218 b. Compare the ' dimidius porous ' of ii. 287.
 
 Manor and Vill. 143 
 
 ship of land, of arable land, seems to be attributed to a village 
 community. In Goldington, a village in Bedfordshire, Walter 
 now holds a hide ; there is land for one team and meadow for 
 half a team. ' The men of the vill held this land in common 
 and could sell it 1 .' Apparently the men of the vill were ^Elfwin 
 Sac a man of the Bishop of Lincoln who held half a team-land 
 and ' could do what he liked with it/ nine sokemen who held 
 three team-lands between them, three other sokemen who held 
 three team-lands, and Mlfmser a man of Asgil who held three 
 team-lands 2 . How it came about that these men, besides 
 holding land in -severalty, held a tract in common, we are left 
 to guess. Nor can we say whether such a case was usual or 
 unusual. Very often in Little Domesday we meet an entry 
 which tells how x free men held y acres and had z teams ; for 
 example, how 15 free men held 40 acres and had 2 teams 8 . In 
 general we may well suppose that each of them held his strips 
 in severalty, but we dare not say that such a phrase never points 
 to co-ownership. 
 
 Then as to such part of the land as is not arable : Even in Th e waste 
 the free village a few enclosed meadows will probably be found; vill. 
 but the pasture ground lies open for ' the cattle of the vill.' At 
 the date of the survey, though several Norman lords have 
 estates in one vill, the common formula used in connexion 
 with each estate is, not ' there is pasture for the cattle of this 
 manor, or of this land/ but ' there is pasture for the cattle of 
 the vill.' Occasionally we read of 'common pasture' in a 
 context which shows that the pasture is common not to several 
 manorial lords but to the villeins of one lord 4 . In the hundred 
 of Coleness in Suffolk there is a pasture which is common to 
 all the men of the hundred 5 . But, as might be expected, we 
 hear little of the mode in which pasture rights were allotted or 
 regulated. Such rights were probably treated as appurtenances 
 of the arable land : ' The canons of Waltham claim as much 
 
 1 D. B. i. 213 b: 'Hanc terrain tenuerunt homines villae communiter et 
 vendere potuerunt.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 210, 212 b, 213 b. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 214 : ' In Meldone Johannes de Roches occupavit iniuste 25 acras 
 super homines qui villam tenent.' This is a vague phrase. 
 
 4 e.g. D. B. i. 112 b: ' Colsuen homo Episcopi Constantiensis aufert ab hoc 
 manerio communem pasturam quae ibi adiacebat T. B. E. et etiam T. B. W. 
 quinque annis.' 
 
 5 D. B. ii. 339 b.
 
 144 Domesday Book. 
 
 wood as belongs to one hide 1 .' If the rights of user are known, 
 no one cares about the bare ownership of pasture land or wood 
 land : it is all one whether we say that Earl Edwin is entitled 
 to one third of a certain wood or to every third oak that grows 
 therein 2 . 
 
 Co-owner- Sometimes the ownership of a mill is divided into so many 
 mms? shares that we are tempted to think that this mill has been 
 erected at the cost of the vill. In Suffolk a free man holds a 
 little manerium which is composed of 24 acres of land, 1 acres 
 of meadow and 'a fourth part of the mill in every third 
 year 3 ' : he takes his turn with his neighbours in the enjoy- 
 ment of the revenue of the mill. We may even be led to 
 suspect that the parish churches have sometimes been treated 
 as belonging to the men of the vill who have subscribed to 
 erect or to endow them. In Suffolk a twelfth part of a church 
 belongs to a petty manerium which contains 30 acres and is 
 cultivated by two bordiers with a single team 4 . When a parish 
 church gets its virgate by ' the charity of the neighbours 5 ,' 
 when nine free men give it twenty acres for the good of their 
 souls 6 , we may see in this some trace of communal action. 
 The system Incidentally we may notice that the system of virgate 
 
 of virgates 
 
 in a free holdings seems quite compatible with an absence of seignorial 
 lge * control. In the free village, for example in Orwell, we shall 
 often find that one man has twice, thrice or four times as much 
 as another man: the same is the case in the manorialized 
 villages of Middlesex, where a villein may have as much as a 
 hide or as little as a half- virgate ; but all the holdings will bear, 
 at least in theory, some simple relation to each other. Thus in 
 Orwell the virgates are divided into thirds and quarters, and in 
 several instances a man has four thirds of a virgate. In Essex 
 and East Anglia, though we may find many irregular and many 
 very small holdings, tenements of 60, 45, 40, 30, 20, 15 acres 
 are far commoner than they would be were it not that a unit 
 of 120 acres will very easily break into such pieces. Domesday 
 Book takes no notice of family law and its 'vendere potuit' 
 merely excludes the interference of the lord and does not imply 
 that a man is at liberty to disappoint his expectant heirs. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 140 b. 
 
 ' 2 D. B. i. 75 : 'tercia vero pars vel tercia quercus erat Comitis Eduini.' 
 3 D. B. ii. 404 b : ' et in tercio anno quarta pars mol[endini].' 
 * D. B. ii. 291 b. 6 D. B. ii. 24 b. D. B. ii. 438.
 
 Manor and Vill. 145 
 
 Very possibly there has been among the small folk but little 
 giving or selling of land. . 
 
 Nor is a law which gives the dead man's land to all his sons The vir- 
 as co-heirs a sufficient force to destroy the system of hides and inherit- 11 
 virgates when once it is established by some original allotment. auce> 
 In the higher ranks of society we see large groups of thegns 
 holding land in common, holding as the Normans say 'in 
 parage.' We can hardly doubt that they are co- heirs holding 
 an inheritance that has not been physically partitioned 1 . 
 Sometimes it is said of a single man that he holds in parage *. 
 This gives us a valuable hint. Holding in parage implies that 
 one of the ' pares,' one of the parceners, as a general rule he 
 would be the eldest^ of them is answerable to king and lord 
 for the services due from the land, while his fellows are bound 
 only to him ; they must help him to discharge duties for which 
 he is primarily responsible 3 . This seems the import of such 
 passages as the following ' Five thegns held two bovates ; one 
 of them was the senior (the elder, and we may almost say the 
 lord) of the others 4 ' ' Eight thegns held this manor ; one of 
 them Alii, a man of King Edward, was the senior of the 
 others 8 ' 'Godric and his brothers held three carucates; two 
 of them served the third 6 ' ' Chetel and Turver were brothers 
 and after the death of their father they divided the land, but 
 so that Chetel in doing the king's service should have help 
 from Turver his brother 7 ' ' Siwate, Alnod, Fenchel and Aschil 
 divided the land of their father equally, and they held in such 
 wise that if there were need for attendance in the king's host 
 and Siwate could go, his brothers were to aid him [with money 
 and provisions] ; and on the next occasion another brother was 
 to go and Siwate like the rest was to help him ; and so on down 
 
 1 D. B. i. 83 : ' sex taini in paragio,' ' quatuor taini in paragio.' Ibid. 83 b : 
 'novem taini in paragio.' Ibid. 168 b : ' quinque fratres tenuerunt pro 5 
 maneriis et poterant ire quo volebant et pares erant.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 96 b: 'dim. hida quam tenebat T. B. E. unus tainus in paragio.' 
 Ibid. 40 : ' Brictric tenuit de episcopo in paragio.' 
 
 3 But it was possible for several men to be holding in parage and yet for 
 each of them to have a separate manerium. This seems to imply that their 
 holdings were physically separate and that each holding was separately liable 
 for geld, though as regards other matters, e.g. military service, the division was 
 ignored. 
 
 * D. B. i. 291. D. B. i. 145 b. D. B. i. 341. 
 
 7 D. B. i. 354. 
 
 M. 10
 
 146 Domesday Book. 
 
 the list; but Siwate was the king's man 1 .' No doubt similar 
 arrangements were made by co-heirs of lowlier station 2 . The 
 integrity of the tenement is maintained though several men 
 have an interest in it. In relation to the lord and the state 
 one of them represents his fellows. When the shares become 
 very small, some of the claimants might be bought out by the 
 others 3 . 
 
 The farm But, to return to the village, we must once more notice 
 that the Canons of St Paul's have let their manor of Willesden 
 to the villeins 4 . This leads us to speculate as to the incidence 
 and collection of those great provender rents of which we read 
 when royal manors are described. In King Edward's day a 
 royal manor is often charged with the whole or some aliquot 
 share of a ' one night's farm,' that is one day's victual for the 
 king's household. Definite amounts of bread, cheese, malt, 
 meat, beer, honey, wool have to be supplied ; thus, for example, 
 Cheltenham must furnish three thousand loaves for the king's 
 dogs and King's Barton must do the like 6 . Then too Edward 
 the sheriff receives as the profits of the shrievalty of Wilt- 
 shire, 130 pigs, 32 bacons, certain quantities of wheat, malt, 
 oats, and honey, 400 chicken, 1600 eggs, 100 cheeses, 100 lambs, 
 52 fleeces'. Between the king and the men of the manor, no 
 doubt there stands a farmer, either the sheriff or some other 
 person, who is bound to supply the due quantity of provender ; 
 but to say that this is so does not solve the problem that is 
 before us. We have still to ask how this due quantity is 
 obtained from the men of the village. It is a quantity which 
 can be expressed by round figures; it is 3000 dog-cakes, or 
 the like. We do not arrive at these pretty results by adding 
 up the rents due from individuals. Again, just in the counties 
 which are the homes of freedom we hear much of sums of 
 
 1 D. B. i. 375 b : ' Siuuate et Alnod et Fenchel et Aschil equaliter et pariliter 
 diviserunt inter se terrain patris sui T. B. E. et ita tenuerunt ut si opus fuit 
 expeditione Begis et Siuuate potuit ire, alii fratres iuverunt eum. Post istum, 
 ivit alter et Siuuate cum reliquis iuvit eum ; et sic de omnibus. Siuuate tamen 
 fuit homo Begis.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 206 : sex sochemanni id est Aluuoldus et 5 fratres eius habuerunt 
 4 hid. et dim. ad geldum.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 233 : ' Hanc terrain tenuerunt 2 fratres pro 2 maneriis, et postea 
 emit alter ab altero partem suam et fecit unum manerium de duobus T. B. E.' 
 4 D. B. i. 127 b : ' Hoc manerium tenent villani ad firmam canonicorum.' 
 e D. B. i. 162 b. 
 D. B. i. 69.
 
 Manor and Vill. 147 
 
 money that are paid to a lord by way of free will offering 1 . In 
 Norfolk and Suffolk the villagers will give a yearly gersuma, 
 in Lincoln they will pay a yearly tailla, and this will be a neat 
 round sum ; very often it is 20 shillings, or 40 or 10. 
 
 In this particular we seem to see an increase of something Round 
 that may be called communalism, as we go backwards. 
 course in the cartularies of a later age we may discover round 
 sums of money which, under the names of 'tallage' or 'aid' 
 are imposed upon the vill as a whole ; but in general we may 
 accept the rule that tributes to be paid by the vill as a whole, 
 in money or in kind, are not of recent origin. They are more 
 prominent in the oldest than in other documents. As examples, 
 we may notice the 'coinage' of the Boldon Book one vill 
 renders 20 shillings, another 30 shillings for cornage 2 ; also the 
 contributions of sheep, poultry, bread and cloth which the vills 
 of Peterborough Abbey bring to the monks on the festival of 
 their patron saint one vill supplying ten rams and twenty 
 ells of cloth, another four rams, five ells of cloth, ten chicken 
 and three hundred loaves 8 . But then we have to notice that 
 a village which has to pay a provender rent or even a tailla 
 or gersuma is not altogether a free village. Its communal 
 action is called out by seignorial pressure. 
 
 And as we go backwards the township seems to lose such The 
 definiteness as is given to it by the police law of the thirteenth 
 century*. This was to be expected, for such law implies a law * 
 powerful, centralized state; which sends its justices round the 
 country to amerce the townships and compel these local 
 communities to do their duties. Once and once only does 
 the township appear in the Anglo-Saxon dooms. This is 
 in a law of Edgar. If a man who is on a journey buys 
 cattle, then on his return home he must turn them onto the 
 common pasture, 'with the witness of the township.' If he 
 fails to do so, then after five nights the townsmen are to give 
 information to the elder of the hundred, and in that case 
 they and their cattle-herd will be free of blame, and the 
 man who brought the cattle into the town will forfeit them, 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 118 b Yarmouth: 'De gersuma has 4 libras dant burgenses gratis 
 et amicitia.' 
 
 2 Thus D. B. iv. 568: 'Due ville reddunt 30 sol. de cornagio.' Ib. 570: 
 * Queryngdonshire reddit 76 sol. de cornagio.' 
 
 8 Black Book of Peterborough, passim. * Hist. Engl. Law, i. 550. 
 
 102
 
 148 Domesday Book. 
 
 half to the lord and half to the hundred. If, on the other hand, 
 the townsmen fail in the duty of giving information, their 
 herd will pay for it with his skin 1 . The township has very little 
 organization of which the state can make use. It does not 
 seem even to have an ' elder ' or head-man, and, from the threat 
 of a flogging, we may gather that its common herdsman will 
 be a slave. Purchases of cattle can not be made 'with the 
 witness of the township ' ; the purchaser ought to seek out two 
 or three of those twelve standing witnesses who are appointed 
 for every hundred 2 . So again, in the twelfth century we see 
 the finder of a stray beast bringing it into the vill; he 
 conducts it to the church-door and tells his story to the priest, 
 the reeve and as many of the best men of the vill as can be 
 got together. Then the reeve sends to the four neighbouring 
 vills, calls in from each the priest, the reeve and three or four 
 men and recounts the tale in their presence. Then on the 
 following day he goes to the head-man of .the hundred and puts 
 the whole matter before him and delivers up the beast to him, 
 unless indeed the place where it was found straying was within 
 the domain of some lord who had sake and soke 3 . Here again, 
 the organization of the township appears to be of a most rudi- 
 mentary kind. It has no court, unless its lord has sake and 
 soke; it has no power to detain an estray for safe custody. 
 In this very simple case it requires the help of other vills and 
 must transmit the cause to the hundred court. And so again, 
 though there may be some reason for thinking that at one time 
 the murder fine the fine payable if the slayer of a foreigner was 
 not arrested was primarily exigible from the vill in which the 
 corpse was found, the hundred being but subsidiarily liable, still 
 this rule seems to have been soon abandoned and the burden 
 of the fine, a fine far too heavy for a single vill, was cast upon 
 the hundred*. For all this, however, the law knew and made 
 use of the township. The Domesday commissioners required 
 the testimony of the priest, the reeve and six villani of every 
 vill. So soon as the law about suit to the hundred court 
 becomes at all plain, the suit is due rather from vills than from 
 men, and the burden is discharged by the lord of the vill or 
 
 1 Edgar iv. 8. 9. 2 Ibid. 6. 
 
 * Leg. Edw. Conf. 24. 
 
 4 Leg. Edw. Conf. 15. Compare Leg. Henr. 91; Leg. Will. Cong. i. 22; 
 Leg. "Will. Conq. in. 3.
 
 Manor and Vill. 149 
 
 his steward, or, if neither of them can attend, then by the 
 priest, the reeve and four of the vill's best men 1 . 
 
 How could these requirements be met by a vill which had The free 
 nd lord ? It would be a fair remark that the existence of such Norman 
 vills is not contemplated by the Norman rulers. The men who men*" 
 will represent the vill before the Domesday commissioners will 
 in their eyes be villani. This assumption is becoming true 
 enough. We have seen Orwell full of sokemen ; in 1086 there 
 is never a sokeman in it; there is no one in it who is above 
 the rank of a villein. Count Roger and Walter Giffard, Count 
 Alan and Geoffrey de Mandeville can make such arrangements 
 about the suit of Orwell, the reeveship of Orwell, as they think 
 fit. Everywhere the Frenchmen are consolidating their manors, 
 creating demesne land where their English antecessores had 
 none, devising scientific frontiers, doing what in them lies to 
 make every vill a manor. Thus is evolved that state of things 
 which comes before us in the thirteenth century. The work 
 of the foreigners was done so completely that we can see but 
 very little of the institutions that they swept away. 
 
 On the whole, however, we shall do well not to endow the Organiza- 
 free township of the Confessor's day with much organization, free 
 We may be certain that, at least as a general rule, it had 'no Vllla & e - 
 court; we may doubt very gravely whether it always had any 
 elder, head-man, or reeve. Often it was a small and yet a 
 heterogeneous, and a politically distracted body. Some of its 
 members might be attached to the house of Godwin, some had 
 sworn to live and die for the house of Leofric. Just because it 
 is free it has few, if any, communal payments to make. Only 
 if it comes under a single lord will it have to render a provender 
 rent, a tailla or gersuma. As a sphere for communal action 
 there remains only the regulation of the arable lands, the woods 
 and waste. We can not say for certain that these give scope 
 for much regulation. The arable strips are held in severalty ; 
 if by chance some of them are held in common, this in all 
 probability is a case rather of co-ownership than of communal 
 ownership. The pasture rights may well be regarded as appur- 
 tenances of the arable strips. The practice of ' co-aration ' need 
 not be enforced by law ; the man who will not help his neigh- 
 bours must be content to see his own land unploughed. The 
 course of agriculture is fixed and will not be often or easily 
 Leg. Henr. 7 7.
 
 150 Domesday Booh 
 
 altered. The 'realism' which roots every right and duty in 
 - a definite patch of soil, the rapid conversion of new arrange- 
 ments into immemorial customs, the practice of taking turn 
 and turn about, the practice of casting lots, these will do much 
 towards settling questions such as our modern imaginations 
 would solve by means of a village council. No doubt, from 
 time to time a new departure is made ; new land is reclaimed 
 from the waste, perhaps the pasture rights are stinted or re- 
 distributed, a mill is built or a church is endowed; but all 
 this requires no periodic assemblies, no organization that we 
 dare call either permanent or legal. Once in five years or so 
 there may be something to be done, and done it will be by 
 a resolution of the villagers which is or calls itself an unanimous 
 resolution. If the Cambridgeshire townships had been land- 
 owning corporations, each of them would have passed as a single 
 unit into the hands of some Norman baron. But this did not 
 happen. On the contrary, the Norman barons had to content 
 themselves with intermixed strips ; the strips of ^Elfgar's men 
 went to Count Roger, the strips of Edith's men went to Count 
 Alan. We are far from denying the existence of a communal 
 sentiment, of a notion that somehow or another the men of 
 the vill taken as a whole owned the lands of the vill, but this 
 sentiment, this notion, if strong was vague. There were no 
 institutions in which it could realize itself, there was no form 
 of speech or thought in which it could find an apt expression. 
 It evaded the grasp of law. At the touch of jurisprudence the 
 township became a mere group of individuals, each with his 
 separate rights 1 . 
 
 8. The Feudal Superstructure. 
 
 The higher It remains that we should speak very briefly of the higher 
 men. ranks of men and the tenure by which they held their land. 
 Little accurate information can be extorted from our record. 
 The upper storeys of the old English edifice have been de- 
 molished and a new superstructure has been reared in their 
 stead. It is not the office of Domesday Book to tell us much 
 even of the new nobility, of the services which the counts 
 
 1 It is possible that the entry (i. 204) which tells how the sokemen of 
 Broughton enjoyed the smaller wites points to a free village court; but we have 
 put another interpretation upon this; see above, p. 99.
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 151 
 
 and barons are to render to the king in return for their 
 handsome endowments: as to the old nobility, that has pe- 
 rished. Still there are some questions that we ought to ask. 
 
 The general theory that all land tenure, except indeed the Dependent 
 tenure by which the king holds land in demesne, is dependent 
 tenure, seems to be implied, not only by many particular entries, 
 but also by the whole scheme of the book. Every holder of 
 land, except the king, holds it of (de) some lord, and therefore 
 every acre of land that is not royal demesne can be arranged 
 under the name of some tenant in chief. Even a church will 
 hold its land, if not of the king, then of some other lord 1 . The 
 terms of the tenure are but very rarely described, for Domesday 
 Book is no feodary. Just now and again a tenure in elemosina 
 is noticed and in some of these cases this term seems already 
 to bear the technical sense that it will have in later days ; the 
 tenant owes a spiritual, but no secular service 2 . A few in- 
 stances of what later lawyers would call a 'tenure by divine 
 service,' as distinct from a tenure in frank-almoin, may be 
 found 3 . A few words here and there betray the existence of 
 tenure by knight's service and of castle guard 4 . In the servi- 
 entes Regis who have been enfeoffed in divers counties we may 
 see the predecessors of the tenants by serjeanty*. We shall 
 remark, however, the absence of those abstract terms which are 
 to become the names of the various tenures. We read of 
 servientes, sochemanni, villani, burgenses, but not of seriantia 6 , 
 socagium, villenagium, burgagium. As we pursue our retro- 
 gressive course through the middle ages, we do not find that 
 the law of personal condition becomes more and more distinct 
 from the law of land tenure ; on the contrary, the two become 
 less and less separable. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 91: 'Ecclesia Romana beati Petri Apostoli tenet de Eege Peritone.' 
 Ib. 157 : ' Ecclesia Sancti Dyonisii Parisii tenet de Eege Teigtone. Bex 
 Edwardus ei dedit.' Ib. 20 b: 'Abbas de Grestain tenet de Comite 2 hidas in 
 Bedingham. ' 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 220. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 218 b: 'Rex vero Willelmus sibi postea in elemosina concessit, 
 unde pro anima Regis et Regine omni ebdomada 2 feria missam persolvit.* 
 D. B. ii. 133: 'et cantat unaquaque ebdomada tres missas.' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 3: 'reddit unum militem in servitio Archiepiscopi.' Ib. 10 b: 
 'servitium unius militis.' Ib. 32: 'servitium unius militis.' Ib. 151 b; 'in- 
 veniebat 2 loricatos in custodiam de Windesores. ' 
 
 8 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 268. 
 
 6 But D. B. i. 218 b gives us ' tenet in ministerio Regis.'
 
 152 Domesday Book. 
 
 It has sometimes been said that a feudal tenure was the 
 only kind of land tenure that the Norman conquerors could 
 conceive. In a certain sense this may be true, but we should 
 have preferred to say that probably they could not easily 
 conceive a kind of tenure that was not dependent : every one 
 who holds land (except he be the king) holds it of someone else. 
 The adjective ' feudal ' was not in their vocabulary, and their 
 use of the word feudum occasionally we meet the older 
 feum 1 is exceedingly obscure. Very rarely does it denote a 
 tenure or a mass of rights; usually, though it may connote 
 rights of a certain order, it denotes a stretch of land ; thus we 
 may read of the fee of the Bishop of Bayeux, thereby being 
 meant the territory which the bishop holds. Occasionally, 
 however, we hear of a man holding land infeudo. One instance 
 may be enough to show that such a phrase did not imply 
 military tenure: 'William the Chamberlain held this manor 
 in feudo of the Queen [Matilda] at a rent of 3 a year and 
 after her death he held it in the same fashion of the king 2 .' 
 All sense of militariness, and all sense of precariousness, that 
 the word has ever had in its continental history, seems to be 
 disappearing. Already the process has begun which will make 
 it applicable to every person who has heritable rights in land. 
 William the Chamberlain is, we take it, already a fee farmer, 
 that is, a rent-paying tenant with heritable rights 3 . As to the 
 word beneficium, which feum or feudum has been supplanting, 
 we shall hardly find it with its old meaning. It seems to be 
 holding its own only within the sphere of ecclesiastical rights, 
 where the 'benefice' will survive until our own day 4 . 
 
 1 D. B. i. 4 b : ' De terra huius manerii tenet Godefridus in feuo dimid. 
 eolin.' Ib. 36 b: ' Humfridus Camerarius tenet de feuo Eeginae Cumbe.' 
 Ib. 336 b: 'Ipsam [domum] clamat Normannus Crassus de feuo Begis.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 129 b: 'Postea Willelmus Camerarius tenuit de Begina in feudo 
 pro 3 lib. per annum de firma, et post mortem Beginae eodem modo tenuit de 
 Eege.' 
 
 3 But, as in general a farmer would have no heritable rights, holding in fee 
 may be contrasted with holding in farm. D. B. i. 230 b: 'Has terras habet 
 Goduinus de Bege ad firmam, Dislea vero tenet de Bege in feudo.' So again it 
 may be contrasted with the husband's rights in his wife's marriage portion. 
 D. B. i. 214 b : ' De ista terra tenet Pirotus 3 hidas de maritagio suae feminae 
 et unam hidam et terciam partem unius hidae tenet in feudum de Nigello. ' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 158: Bobert de Ouilly holds forty-two houses in Oxford, some 
 meadow-land and a mill ' cum beneficio 8. Petri,' i.e. together with the benefice 
 of S. Peter's church. Elsewhere, i. 273, we read that King William gave a
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 153 
 
 A yet more interesting and equally foreign word is not Alodium. 
 unfrequently used, namely, alodium. The Norman commis- 
 sioners deemed that a large number of English tenants in 
 Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire and some in Berkshire 
 had been alodiarii or aloarii and had held in alodium or sicut 
 alodium. The appearance of this term in one district and in 
 one only is far from proving that there had been anything 
 peculiar in the law of that district. It may well be a mere 
 chance that the liberi homines of other counties are not called 
 alodiaries. Still in Hampshire, where alodiaries abounded, it 
 was not every free man holding land who had an alod 1 . 
 Perhaps we shall be right in thinking that the term pointed to 
 heritability : the free man who holds land but has no alod has 
 only an estate for life. Certainly it does not mean that the 
 tenant has no lord. The alodiary may hold his alod 'of his 
 lord 2 ; he may owe service to his lord 3 ; he may pay a relief 4 ; 
 he may have no power 'to withdraw himself with his land' from 
 his lord 8 . The Norman lawyers had no speculative objection 
 to the existence of alodiaries ; it in no way contradicted such 
 doctrine of tenure as they had formed. In 1086 there were 
 still alodiaries in Berkshire 6 , and in royal charters of a much 
 later day there is talk of the alodiaries of Kent as of an existing 
 class 7 . It is just possible that William's commissioners saw 
 some difference between holding infeudo and holding in alodio. 
 
 manor to the monks of Burton ' pro beneficio suo ' ; but the meaning of this is 
 by no means clear. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 44 b : ' Duo liberi homines tenuerunt de Alwino sed non fuit alod.' 
 The same phrase occurs on f. 46. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 22 : ' Aluuard et Algar tenuerunt de Eege pro 2 maneriis in 
 alodia...2Elueua tenuit de Eege Edwardo sicut alodium.' Ib. 26: ' Godwinus 
 Comes tenuit et de eo 7 aloarii.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 60b: 'Duo alodiarii tenuerunt T. E. E....unus servivit Eeginae, 
 alter Bundino.' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 1 : ' Quando moritur alodiarius, Bex inde habet relevationem 
 terrae.' 
 
 5 D. B. i. 52 b : ' Has hidas tenuerunt 7 alodiarii de Episcopo nee poterant 
 recedere alio vel ab illo.' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 63 b : ' Ibi sunt 5 alodiarii.' 
 
 7 See charter of John for St Augustin's, Canterbury, Eot. Cart. p. 105: 
 omnes allodiarios quos eis habemus datos.' This phrase seems to descend 
 through a series of charters from two charters of the Conqueror in which the 
 ' swa fele J>egna swa ic heom togeleton habbe ' of the one appears in the other 
 as 'omnes allodiarios.' If so, we get from the Conqueror's own chancery the 
 equation J>egn= alodiarius, Hist. Mon. S. August. 349-50.
 
 154 Domesday Booh 
 
 If ever they contrasted the two words, they may have hinted 
 that while the feudum has been given by the lord to the man, 
 the alodium has been brought by the man to the lord ; but we 
 can not be very certain that they ever opposed these terms to 
 each other 1 . Such sparse evidence as we can obtain from 
 Normandy strengthens our belief that the wide, the almost 
 insuperable, gulf that modern theorists have found or have set 
 between ' alodial ownership ' and ' feudal tenure ' was not per- 
 ceptible in the eleventh century 2 . It can be no part of our 
 task to trace the history of these terms alodium and feudum 
 behind the date at which they are brought into England, but 
 hereafter we shall see that here in England a process had been 
 at work which, had these terms been in use, would have 
 brought the alod very near to the feud, the feud very near to 
 the alod. 
 
 Appiica- It is probable that this process had gone somewhat further 
 
 i n Normandy than in England. It is probable that the Nor- 
 mans knew that in imposing upon all English lands ' the 
 formula of dependent tenure' they were simplifying matters. 
 They seem to think, and they may be pretty right in thinking, 
 that every English land-holder had held his land under (sub) 
 some lord; but apparently they do not think that every 
 English land-holder had held his land of (de) some lord. Not 
 unfrequently they show that this is so. Thus one Sigar holds 
 a piece of Cambridgeshire of Geoffrey de Mandeville ; he used 
 to hold it under ^Esgar the Staller 8 . We catch a slight shade 
 of difference between the two prepositions ; sub lays stress on 
 the lord's power, which may well be of a personal or justiciary, 
 rather than of a proprietary kind, while de imports a theory 
 about the origin of the tenure ; it makes the tenant's rights look 
 like derivative rights : it is supposed that he gets his land from 
 
 1 D. B. i. 23 : in two successive entries we have ' Offa tenuit de Episcopo in 
 
 feudo Almar tenuit de Goduino Comite in alodium.' So again, i. 59: 
 
 'Blacheman tenuit de Heraldo Comite in alodio...Blacheman tenuit in feudo 
 T. R. E.' The suggestion has been made that alodium represents book-land; 
 see Pollock, Land Laws, ed. 3. p. 27 ; Eng. Hist. Rev. xi. 227 ; but we gravely 
 doubt whether the humbler alodiarii had books. The author of the 
 Quadripartitus renders bocland by terra hereditaria, terra teetimentalis, terra 
 libera, and even by feudum (Edg. n. 2) ; alodium occurs in the Instituta Cnuti. 
 After this we can hardly say for certain that D. B. does not use alodium and 
 feoflum as equivalents, both representing a heritable estate, as absolute an 
 ownership of land as is conceivable. 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 46. 8 D. B. i. 197.
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 155 
 
 his lord. And at least in the eastern counties so it may well 
 have seemed to the Normans matters sadly needed simplifica- 
 tion. Even elsewhere and when a large estate is at stake they 
 can not always get an answer to the question ' Of whom was 
 this land holden 1 ? ' Still they thought that some of the 
 greatest men in the realm had held their lands, or some of 
 their lands, of the king or of someone else. The formulas 
 which are used throughout the description of Hampshire and 
 some other counties seem to assume that every holder of a 
 manor, at all events if a layman, had held it of the king, if he 
 did not hold it of another lord. Tenure in feudo again they 
 regarded as no innovation 2 . They saw the work of subinfeu- 
 dation : Brihtmaer. held land of Azor and Azor of Harold ; we 
 may well suppose that Harold held it of the king and that 
 some villeins held part of it of Brihtmser,' and thus we see 
 already a feudal ladder with no less than five rungs 8 . They 
 saw that the thegns owed ' service ' to their lords 4 . They saw 
 the heriot ; they sometimes called it a relief 5 . We can not be 
 sure that this change of names imported any change in the 
 law ; when a burgess of Hereford died the king took a heriot, 
 but if he could not get the heriot he took the dead man's land 6 . 
 They saw that in certain cases an heir had to ' seek ' his 
 ancestor's lord if he wished to enjoy his ancestor's land 7 . They 
 saw that many a free man could not give or sell his land 
 without his lord's consent. They saw that great and powerful 
 men could not give or sell their land without the king's consent 8 . 
 
 1 D. B. i. 238 b : ' Reliqnas autem 7 hidas et dimidiam tenuit [sic] Britnodua 
 et Aluui T. B. E., sed comitatus nescit de quo tenuerint.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 23 : Offa tenuit de episcopo in feudo.' Ib. i. 59 b : ' Blacheman 
 tenuit in feudo T. E. E.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 28 b: 'Bricmar tenuit de Azor et Azor de Heraldo... Terra est 2 
 carucis. In dominio est una et 2 villani et 2 bordarii cum dimidia caruca.' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 75 b : ' De eadem terra ten[ent] 3 taiui 3 bidas et reddunt 3 libras 
 excepto servicio. ' Ib. 86 b : ' Huic manerio est addita dimidia hida. Tres 
 taini tenebant T. E. E. et serviebaut preposito manerii per consuetudinem 
 absque omni firma donante.' 
 
 5 D. B. i. 1 : ' Quando moritur alodiarius, Bex inde habet relevationem terrae.' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 179 : ' Burgensis cum caballo serviens, cum moriebatur, habebat 
 Bex equnm et arma eius. De eo qui equum non habebat, si moreretur, habebat 
 Eex ant 10 solidos aut terrain eius cum domibus.' 
 
 7 D. B. i. 50 b : ' Alric tenet dimidiam hidam. Hanc tenuit pater eius de 
 Eege E. Sed hie Eegem non requisivit post mortem Godric sui avunctili qui 
 earn custodiebat. ' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 238 b: 'Huic aecclesiae dedit Aluuinus vicecomes Cliptone
 
 156 Domesday Booh 
 
 Military They saw something very like military tenure. No matter 
 
 with which we have to deal is darker than the constitution of 
 the English army on the eve of its defeat. We may indeed 
 safely believe that no English king had ever relinquished the 
 right to call upon all the free men of his realm to resist an 
 invader. On the other hand, it seems quite clear that, as a 
 matter of fact, 'the host' was no longer 'the nation in arms.' 
 The common folk of a shire could hardly be got to fight outside 
 their shire, and ill- armed troops of peasants were now of little 
 avail. The only army upon which the king could habitually 
 rely was a small force. The city. of Oxford sent but twenty 
 men or twenty pounds 1 : Leicester sent twelve men 2 : Warwick 
 sent ten 3 . In Berkshire the law was that, if the king called out 
 the host, one soldier (miles) should go for every five hides and 
 should receive from each hide four shillings as his stipend for 
 two months' service. If -the man who was summoned made 
 default, he forfeited all his land to the king ; but there were 
 cases in which he might send one of his men as a substitute, 
 and for a default committed by his substitute he suffered no 
 forfeiture, but only a fine of fifty shillings 4 . It is probable that 
 a similar 'five hide rule' obtained throughout a large part of 
 England. The borough of Wilton was bound to send twenty 
 shillings or one man ' as for an honour of five hides 6 .' When 
 an army or a fleet was called out, Exeter ' served to the amount 
 of five hides 6 .' All this points to a small force of well armed 
 
 concessu Eegis Edwardi et filiorum suorum pro anima sua.' Ib. 59 : ' De hoc 
 manerio scira attestatur, quod Edricus qui eum tenebat deliberavit ilium filio 
 BUG qui erat in Abendone monachus ut ad firmam illud teneret et sibi donee 
 viveret uecessaria vitae donaret; post mortem vero eius manerium haberet. 
 Et ideo nesciunt homines de scira quod abbatiae pertineat, neque enim inde 
 viderunt brevem Eegis vel sigillum. Abbas vero testatur quod in T. B. E. misit 
 ille manerium ad aecclesiam unde erat et inde habet brevem et sigillum E. E.' 
 
 1 D. B. i. 154 : ' Quando Bex ibat in expeditione, burgenses 20 ibant cum eo 
 pro omnibus aliis, vel 20 libras dabant Eegi ut omnes essent liberi.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 230 : ' Quando Eex ibat in exercitu per terram, de ipso burgo 
 12 burgenses ibant cum eo.' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 238 : ' Consuetudo Waruuic fuit, ut eunte rege per terram in 
 expeditionem, decem burgenses de Waruuic pro omnibus aliis irent.' 
 
 * D. B. i. 57 b. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 64 b : ' Quando Eex ibat in expeditione vel terra vel mari, habebat 
 de hoc burgo aut 20 solidos ad pascendos suos buzecarlos, aut unum hominem 
 ducebat secum pro honore 5 hidarum. ' 
 
 6 D. B. i. 100: 'Quando expeditio ibat pet terram aut per mare serviebat 
 haec ci vitas quantum 5 hidae terrae. '
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 157 
 
 soldiers. For example, ' the five hide rule ' would be satisfied if 
 Worcestershire sent a contingent of 240 men. But not only 
 was the army small ; it was a territorial army ; it grew out of 
 the soil. 
 
 At first sight this ' five hide rule ' may seem to have in it The army 
 little that is akin to a feudal system of knights' fees. We may land, 
 suppose that it will work thus : The host is summoned ; the 
 number of hides in each hundred is known. To despatch a 
 company of soldiers proportioned to the number of the hides, 
 for example twenty warriors if the hundred contains just one 
 hundred hides, is the business of the hundred court and the 
 question ' Who must go ? ' will be answered by election, rotation 
 or lot. But it is not probable that the territorializing process 
 will stop here, and this for several reasons. An army that can 
 not be mobilized without the action of the hundred moots is 
 not a handy force. While the hundredors are deliberating the 
 Danes or Welshmen will be burning and slaying. Also a king 
 will not easily be content with the responsibility of a fluctuating 
 and indeterminate body of hundredors ; he will insist, if he can, 
 that there must be some one person answerable to him for each 
 unit of military power. A serviceable system will not have 
 been established until the country is divided into 'five-hide- 
 units',' until every man's holding is such an unit, or is composed 
 of several such units, or is an aliquot share of such an unit. 
 Then again the holdings with which the rule will have to deal 
 are not homogeneous; they are not all of one and the same 
 order. It is not as though to each plot of land there corre- 
 sponded some one person who was the only person interested in 
 it ; the occupiers of the soil have lords and again those lords 
 have lords. The king will insist, if he can, that the lords who 
 stand high in this scale must answer to him for the service that 
 is due from all the lands over which they exercise a dominion, 
 and then he will leave them free to settle, as between them- 
 selves and their dependants, the ultimate incidence of the 
 burden : thus room will be made for the play of free contract 
 At all events when, as is not unusual, some lord is the lord of 
 a whole hundred and of its court, the king will regard him as 
 personally liable for the production of the whole contingent 
 that is due from that hundred. In this way a system will be 
 evolved which for many practical purposes will be indistinguish- 
 able from the system of knights' fees, and all this without any
 
 158 Domesday Book. 
 
 help from the definitely feudal idea that military service is the 
 return .which the tenant makes to the lord for the gift of land 
 that the lord has made to the tenant. 
 
 Feudalism That this process had already done much of its work when 
 service 7 the old English army received its last summons, we can not 
 doubt, though it is very possible that this work had been done 
 sporadically. We see that the land was being plotted out into 
 five-hide-units. In one passage the Norman clerks call such a 
 unit an honour, an 'honour of five hides 1 .' There is an old 
 theory based upon legal texts that such an honour qualifies 
 its lord or owner to be a thegn. If a ceorl prospers so that he 
 has five hides ' to the king's utware,' that is, an estate rated as 
 five hides for military purposes, he is worthy of a thegn's 
 wergild 2 . Then the Anglo-Saxon charters show us how the 
 kings have been endowing their thegns with tracts of territory 
 which are deemed to contain just five or some multiple of five 
 hides 3 . The thegn with five hides will have tenants below 
 him ; but none of them need serve in the host if their lord 
 goes, as he ought to go, in person. Then each of these terri- 
 torial units continues to owe the same quantum of military 
 service, though the number of persons interested in it be 
 increased or diminished, and thus the ultimate incidence of 
 the duty becomes the subject-matter of private arrangements. 
 That is the point of a story from Lincolnshire which we have 
 already recounted: A man's land descends to his four sons; 
 they divide it equally and agree to take turns in doing the 
 military service that is due from it ; but only the eldest of them 
 is to be the king's man 4 . Then we see that the great nobles 
 lead or send to the war all the milites that are due from the 
 lands over which they have a seignory. There are already 
 wide lands which owe military service we can not put it 
 otherwise to the bishop of Winchester as lord of Taunton : 
 they owe 'attendance in the host along with the men of the 
 bishop 8 .' The churches of Worcester and Evesham fell out 
 about certain lands at Hamton ; one of the disputed questions 
 
 1 Above, p. 156, note 5. 
 
 2 Schmid, App. vn. c. 2. 9-12; App. v; Pseudoleges Canuti (i.e. Instituta 
 Cnuti) 60, 61 (Schmid, p. 431). 
 
 3 Of this we shall speak in another Essay. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 375 b ; above, p. 145. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 87 b: 'Istae oonsuetudines pertinent ad Tantone profectio in 
 
 exercitum cum hominibus episcopi Hae duae terrae non debent exercitum.'
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 159 
 
 was whether or no Hamton ought to do its military service 
 'in the bishop's hundred of Oswaldslaw' or elsewhere 1 . This 
 question we take to be one of great importance to the bishop. 
 Lord of the triple hundred of Oswaldslaw, lord of three 
 hundred hides, he is bound to put sixty warriors into the field 
 and he is anxious that men who ought to be helping him to 
 make up this tale shall not be serving in another contingent. 
 
 But from Worcestershire we obtain a still more precious Default of 
 piece of information. The custom of that county is this : 
 When the king summons the host and his summons is dis- 
 regarded by one who is a lord with jurisdiction, ' by one who is 
 so free a man that he has sake and soke and can go with his 
 land where he pleases/ then all his lands are in the king's 
 mercy. But if the defaulter be the man of another lord and 
 the lord sends a substitute in his stead, then he, the defaulter, 
 must pay forty shillings to his lord, to his lord, not to the 
 king, for the king has had the service that was due ; but if the 
 lord does not send a substitute, then the forty shillings which 
 the defaulter pays to the lord, the lord must pay to the king*. 
 A feudalist of the straiter sort might well find fault with this 
 rule. He might object that the lord ought to forfeit his land, 
 not only if he himself fails to attend the host, but also if he 
 fails to bring with him his due tale of milites. Feudalism was 
 not perfected in a day. Still here we have the root of the 
 matter the lord is bound to bring into the field a certain 
 number of milites, perhaps one man from every five hides, and 
 if he can not bring those who are bound to follow him, he must 
 bring others or pay a fine. His man, on the other hand, is 
 bound to him and is not bound to the king. That man by 
 shirking his duty will commit no offence against the king. 
 The king is ceasing to care about the ultimate incidence of 
 the military burden, because he relies upon the responsibility 
 of the magnates. How this system worked in the eastern 
 counties where the power of the magnates was feebler, we can 
 
 1 See above, p. 85, note 3. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 172 : ' Quando Bex in hostem pergit, si quis edictum eius vocatus 
 remanserit, si ita liber homo est at habeat socam suam et sacam et cam terra 
 sua possit ire quo voluerit, de ornni terra sua est in misericordia Regis. 
 Cuiuscumque vero alterius domini homo si de hoste remanserit et dominus eius 
 pro eo alium hominem duxerit, 40 sol. domino suo qui vocatus fait emendabit. 
 Quod si ex toto nullus pro eo abierit, ipse quidem domino suo 40 sol. dabit, 
 dominas autem eius totidem solidis Kegi emendabit.'
 
 160 Domesday Book. 
 
 not tell. It is not improbable that one of the forces that is 
 attaching the small free proprietors to the manors of their lords 
 is this ' five hide rule ' ; they are being compelled to bring their 
 acres into five-hide-units, to club together under the superin- 
 tendence of a lord who will answer for them to the king, while 
 as to the villeins, so seldom have they fought that they are 
 ceasing to be ' fyrd- worthy 1 .' But in the west we have already 
 what in substance are knights' fees. The Bishop of Worcester 
 held 300 hides over which he had sake and soke and all 
 customs ; he was bound to put 60 milites into the field ; if he 
 failed in this duty he had to pay 40 shillings for each deficient 
 miles. At the beginning of Henry II.'s reign he was charged 
 with 60 knights' fees 2 . 
 
 The new "We are not doubting that the Conqueror defined the 
 
 service. amount of military service that was to be due to him from 
 each of his tenants in chief, nor are we suggesting that he paid 
 respect to the rule about the five hides, but it seems question- 
 able whether he introduced any very new principle. A new 
 theoretic element may come to the front, a contractual 
 element: the tenant in chief must bring up his knights 
 because that is the service that was stipulated for when he 
 received his land. But we cannot say that even this theory 
 was unfamiliar to the English. The rulers of the churches had 
 been giving or 'loaning' lands to thegns. In so doing they 
 had not been dissipating the wealth of the saints without 
 receiving some ' valuable consideration ' for the gift or the loan 
 (Icen) ; they looked to their thegns for the military service that 
 their land owed to the king. To this point we must return 
 in our next essay ; but quite apart from definitely feudal 
 bargains between the king and his magnates, between the 
 magnates and their dependants, a definition of the duty of 
 military service which connects it with the ownership of land 
 (and to such a definition men will come so soon as the well- 
 armed few can defeat the ill-armed many) will naturally produce 
 a state of things which will be patient of, even if it will not 
 engender, a purely feudal explanation. If one of the men to 
 whom the Bishop of Worcester looks for military service makes 
 a default, the fine that is due from him will go to the bishop, 
 not to the king. Why so ? One explanation will be that the 
 bishop has over him a sake and soke of the very highest order, 
 1 See above, p. 77, note 1. * See Round, Feudal England, 249.
 
 * The Feudal Superstructure. 161 
 
 which comprehends even that fyrd-wite, that fine for the 
 neglect of military duty, which is one of the usually reserved 
 pleas of the crown 1 . Another explanation will be that this man 
 has broken a contract that he made with the bishop and 
 therefore owes amends to the bishop: to the bishop, not to 
 the king, who was no party to the contract. Sometimes the 
 one explanation will be the truer, sometimes the other. Some- 
 times both will be true enough. As a matter of fact, we believe 
 that these men of the Bishop of Worcester or their predecessors 
 in title have solemnly promised to do whatever service the 
 king demands from the bishop 2 . Still we can hardly doubt 
 which of the two explanations is the older, and, if we attribute 
 to the Norman invaders, as perhaps we may, a definite appre- 
 hension of the theory that knight's service is the outcome of 
 feudal compacts, this still leaves open the inquiry whether the 
 past history of military service in Frankland had not been very 
 like the past history of military service in England. Already 
 in the days of Charles the Great the duty of fighting the 
 Emperor's battles was being bound up with the tenure of land 
 by the operation of a rule very similar to that of which 
 we have been speaking. The owner of three (at a later time 
 of four) manses was to serve ; men who held but a manse apiece 
 were to group themselves together to supply soldiers. Then at 
 a later time the feudal theory of free contract was brought in 
 to explain an already existing state of things 3 . 
 
 Closely connected with this matter is another thorny topic, The 
 namely, the status of the thegn and the relation of the thegn to thegns - 
 his lord. In the Confessor's day many maneria had been held 
 by thegns; some of them were still holding their lands when 
 the survey was made and were still called thegns. The king's 
 
 1 D. B. i. 208 : ' Testantur homines de comitatu quod Bex Edwardua dedit 
 Suineshefet Siuuardo Comiti soccam et sacam, et sic habuit Haroldus comes, 
 praeter quod geldabant in hundredo et in hostem cum eis ibant.' It is here 
 noted that though Harold had sake and soke over Swineshead, it paid its geld 
 and did its military duty in the hundred. Our record would hardly mention such 
 a point unless very often the exaction of geld and military service was one of 
 the rights and duties of the lord who had sake and soke. 
 
 2 In the next chapter we shall speak of the bishop's land-loans. 
 
 3 See the capitularies of 807 and 808 (ed. Boretius, pp. 134, 137). Also, 
 Fustel de Coulanges, Les transformations de la royaute, 516 ff. It may well be 
 doubted whether the five-hide rule had not been borrowed by English kings 
 from their Prankish neighbours. Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 208 S. 
 
 M. 11
 
 162 Domesday Book. 
 
 
 
 thegns were numerous, but the queen also had thegns, the 
 earls had thegns, the churches had thegns and we find thegns 
 ascribed to men who were neither earls nor prelates but 
 themselves were thegns 1 . Many of the king's thegns were able 
 to give or sell the lands that they held, ' to go to whatever lord 
 they pleased 2 .' On the other hand, many of the thegns of the 
 churches held lands which they could not ' withdraw ' from the 
 churches 3 ; in other words 'the thegn-lands' of the church could 
 not be separated from the church 4 . The Conqueror respected 
 the bond that tied them to the church. The Abbot of Ely 
 complained to him that the foreigners had been abstracting the 
 lands of S*. Etheldreda. His answer was that her demesne 
 manors must at once be given back to her, while as for the men 
 who have occupied her thegnlands, they must either make their 
 peace with the abbot or surrender their holdings 5 . Thus the 
 abbot seems to have had the benefit of that forfeiture which his 
 thegns incurred by espousing the cause of Harold. We see 
 therefore that the relation between thegn, lord and land varied 
 from case to case. The land might have proceeded from the 
 lord and be held of the lord by the thegn as a perpetually 
 inheritable estate, or as an estate granted to him for life, or 
 granted to him and two successive heirs 6 ; on the other hand, 
 the lord's hold over the land might be slight and the bond 
 between thegn and lord might be a mere commendation which 
 the thegn could at any time dissolve. Again, the relation 
 between thegn and lord is no longer conceived as a menial, 
 'serviential' or ministerial relation. The Taini Regis are 
 
 1 D. B. i. 152 b: 'duo teigni homines Alrici filii Goding.' Ib. 'Hoc 
 manerium tenuit Azor films Toti teignus Begis Edwardi et alter teiguus homo 
 eius tenuit unam hidam et vendere potuit. ' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 84 b : at the end of a list of royal thegns ' Omnes qui has terras 
 T. B. E. tenebant, poterant ire ad quern dominum volebant.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 41 : ' Tres taini tenuerunt de episcopo et non potuerunt ire 
 quolibet.' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 91 : ' Hae terrae erant tainland in Glastingberie T. B. E. nee 
 poterant ab aecclesia separari.' 
 
 5 Hamilton, Inquisitio, pp. xviii. xix. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 66 b : ' De hac eadem terra 3 hidas vendiderat abbas cuidam taino 
 T. B. E. ad aetatem trium hominum, et ipse abbas habebat inde servitiurn, et 
 postea debet redire ad dominium.' Ib. i. 83 b: 'Ipsa femina tenet 2 hidas in 
 Tatentone quae erant de dominio abbatiae de Cernel; T. E. E. duo teini 
 tenebant prestito.'
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 163 
 
 often contrasted with the Servientes Regis 1 . The one trait 
 of thegnship which comes out clearly on the face of our 
 record is that the thegn is a man of war 2 . But even this trait 
 is obscured by language which seems to show that there has 
 been a great redistribution of military service. Though there 
 is no Latin word that will translate thegn except miles, though 
 these two terms are never contrasted with each other, and 
 though there are thegns still existing, still of these two terms 
 one belongs to the old, the other to the new order of things 3 . 
 Thus thegnship is already becoming antiquated and we are left 
 to guess from older dooms and later Leges what was its essence 
 in the days of King Edward. 
 
 The task is difficult for we can see that this institution has Nature 
 undergone many changes in the course of a long history and 
 yet can not tell how much has remained unchanged. We begin 
 by thinking of thegnship as a relation between two men. The 
 thegn is somebody's thegn. The household of the great man, 
 but more especially the king's household, is the cradle of 
 thegnship. The king's thegns are his free servants servants 
 but also companions. In peace they have duties to perform 
 about his court and about his person ; they are his body-guard 
 in war. Then the king and other great lords follow his 
 example begins to give lands to his thegns, and thus the 
 nature of the thegnship is modified. The thegn no longer lives 
 in his lord's court ; he is a warrior endowed with land. Then 
 the thegnship becomes more than a relationship, it becomes a 
 status. The thegn is a 'twelve hundred man'; his wergild 
 and his oath countervail those of six ceorls. This status 
 seems to be hereditary; the thegn's sons are 'dearer born* 
 than are the sons of the ceorl 4 . But we can not tell how far 
 
 1 D. B. i. 64b: 'Herman et alii servientes Regis. ..X)do et alii taini Regis .. 
 Henzeus et alii ministri Regis.' Ib. 75: 'Guddmund et alii taini... Willelmns 
 Belet et alii servientes Regis.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 56 b (Berkshire custom) : ' Tainus vel miles Regis dominions 
 moriens, pro relevamento dimittebat Regi omnia arma sua et equum unum cum 
 sella, alium sine sella.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 83: 'Bricsi tenuit miles Regis E.' Such entries are rare. 
 D. B. i. 66: 'De eadem terra huius manerii tenfent] duo Angli....Unus ex eis 
 est miles iussu Regis et nepos fuit Hermanni episcopi.' Here the king compels 
 an Englishman to become a mile*. D. B. i. 180 b: 'Quinque taini... habebant 
 sub se 4 milites.' The warrior was not necessarily of thegnly rank. 
 
 4 See the passages collected by Schmid, Gesetze, p. 667. 
 
 112
 
 164 Domesday Book. 
 
 this principle is carried. We can not easily reconcile this 
 hereditary transmission of thegn-right with the original 
 principle that thegnship is a relation between two men. We 
 may have thegns who are nobody's thegns, or else we may 
 have persons entitled to the thegnly wergild who yet are not 
 thegns. What is more, since the law which regulates the 
 inheritance of land does not favour the first-born, we may have 
 poor thegns and landless thegns. Yet another principle comes 
 into play. A duty of finding well armed warriors for the host 
 is being territorialized ; every five hides should find a soldier. 
 The thegn from of old has to attend the host with adequate 
 equipment ; the men who under the new system have to attend 
 the host with horse and heavy armour are usually thegns. Then 
 the man who has five hides, and who therefore ought to put a 
 warrior into the field, is a thegn or is entitled to be a thegn. 
 The ceorl obtains the thegnly wergild if he has an estate rated 
 for military purposes at five hides. Another version of this 
 tradition requires of the ceorl who ' thrives to thegn-right ' five 
 hides of his own land, a church, a kitchen, a house in the burh, 
 a special office in the king's hall. To be 'worthy of thegn-right' 
 may be one thing, to be a thegn, another. To be a thegn one 
 must be some one's thegn. The prosperous ceorl will be no 
 thegn until he has put himself under some lord. But the bond 
 between him and his lord may be dissoluble at will and 
 may hardly affect his land. It is, we repeat, very difficult 
 to discover how these various principles were working together, 
 checking and controlling each other in the first half of the 
 eleventh century. Several inconsistent elements seem to be 
 blended. There is the element of hereditary caste : the thegn 
 transmits thegnly blood to his offspring. There is the element 
 of personal relationship : he is the thegn of some lord and owes 
 fealty to that lord.- There is the military element: he is a 
 warrior who has horse and heavy armour and is bound to fight 
 the nation's battles. Connected with this last there is the 
 proprietary element: each five hides must send a warrior to 
 the host; the man with five hides is entitled to become, 
 perhaps he may be compelled to become a thegn, a warrior 1 . 
 
 1 In their treatment of the thegnship of the last days before the Conquest, 
 Maurer lays stress upon the proprietary element, Schmid upon the hereditary. 
 See Little, Gesiths and Thegns, E. H. E. iv. 723.
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 165 
 
 . On the whole, we gather from Domesday Book that the The thegna 
 military element is subduing the others. The thegn is the man day. 
 who for one reason or another is a warrior. For one reason or 
 another, we say ; for the class of thegns is by no means homo- 
 geneous. On the one hand, we see the thegns of the churches, 
 who have been endowed by the prelates in order that they 
 may do the military service due from the ecclesiastical lands. 
 Many of the prelates have thegns, and for the creation of 
 thegnlands by the churches it would not be easy to find any 
 explanation save that which we have already found in the 
 territorialization of military service. The thegn might pay 
 some annual ' recognition ' to the church, he might send his 
 labourers to help his lord for a day or two at harvest time; 
 but we may be sure that he was not rack-rented and that, if 
 military service be left out of account, the church was a loser 
 by endowing him. Here the land proceeds from the lord to the 
 thegn ; the thegn can not give or sell it ; the holder of that land 
 can have no lord but the church ; if he forfeits the land, he 
 forfeits it to the church. But, on the other hand, we see 
 numerous king's thegns who are able ' to go to what lord they 
 please.' We may see in them landed proprietors who by the 
 play of ' the five hide rule ' have become bound to serve as 
 warriors. We may be fairly certain that they have not been 
 endowed by the king, otherwise they would not enjoy the 
 liberty, that marvellous liberty, of leaving him, of putting 
 themselves under the protection and the banner of some earl 
 or some prelate. Not that every thegn will (if we may borrow 
 phrases from a later age) possess a full ' thegn's fee ' or owe the 
 service of a whole warrior. Large groups of thegns we may see 
 who obviously are brothers or cousins enjoying in undivided 
 shares the inheritance of some dead ancestor. They may take 
 it in turns to go to the war ; the king may hold the eldest of 
 them responsible for all the service ; but each of them will be 
 called a thegn, will be entitled to a thegnly wergild and swear 
 a thegnly oath. Still, on the whole, the thegn of Domesday 
 Book is a warrior, and he holds though perhaps along with his 
 coparceners land that is bound to supply a warrior. 
 
 In the main all thegns seem to have the same legal status, Greater 
 though they may not be all of equal rank. All of them seem thegns. 
 to have the wergild of twelve hundred shillings. A law of Cnut, 
 after describing the heriot of the earl, distinguishes two classes
 
 166 Domesday Booh 
 
 of thegns ; there is ' the king's thegn who is nighest to him * 
 and whose heriot includes four horses and 50 mancuses of 
 gold, and 'the middle thegn' or 'less thegn' from whom he gets 
 but one horse and one set of arms or 2. x This law should 
 we think be read in connexion with the rule that is recorded 
 by Domesday Book as prevailing in the shires of Derby and 
 Nottingham: the thegn who had fewer than seven manors 
 paid a relief of 3 marks to the sheriff, while he who had 
 seven and upwards paid 8 to the king 2 . A rude line is 
 drawn between the richer and the poorer thegns of the 
 king. The former deal immediately with the king and pay 
 their reliefs directly to him ; the latter are under the sheriff 
 and their reliefs are comprised in his farm. Thus the wealthy 
 thegns, like the barones maiores of later days, are ' nigher to ' 
 the king than are the ' less-thegns ' or those barones minores 
 who in a certain sense are their successors. 
 
 The great The kings, the earls and the churches have of course many 
 demesne manors. Of the ecclesiastical estates we shall speak 
 in our next essay, for they can be best examined in the 
 light that is cast upon them by the Anglo-Saxon charters. 
 Here we will merely observe that some of the churches have 
 not only large, but well compacted territories. The abbey of 
 S*. Etheldreda, for example, besides having outlying manors, 
 holds the two hundreds which make up the isle of Ely; her 
 property in Cambridgeshire is valued at 3 18 s . The earls 
 also are rich in demesne manors and so is the king. 
 
 The king as King William is much richer than King Edward was. The 
 Conqueror has been chary in appointing earls and consequently 
 he has in his hand, not only the royal manors, but also a 
 great many comital manors, to say nothing of some other 
 estates which, for one reason or another, he has kept to himself. 
 Edward had been rich, but when compared with his earls he 
 had not been extravagantly rich. In Somersetshire, for ex- 
 ample, there were twelve royal manors which may have brought 
 in a revenue of 500 or thereabouts, while there were fifteen 
 comital manors which were worth . nearly 300*. The royal 
 demesne had been a scattered territory; the king had some- 
 thing in most shires, but was far richer in some than in others. 
 
 1 Cnut, ii. 71. a D. B. i. 280 b. 
 
 8 Hamilton, Inquisi'io, 121. * Eyton, Somerset, i. 84.
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 167 
 
 It was not so much in the number of his manors as in their 
 size and value that he excelled the richest of his subjects. 
 Somehow or another he had acquired many of those vills 
 which were to be the smaller boroughs and the market towns , 
 of later days. We may well suppose that from of old the 
 vills that a king would wish to get and to keep would be 
 the nourishing vills, but again we can not doubt that many 
 a vill has prospered because it was the king's. 
 
 Among the manors which William holds in the south-west The 
 a distinction is drawn by the Exeter Domesday. The manors demesne, 
 which the Confessor held are 'The King's Demesne which 
 belongs to the kingdom,' while those which were held 
 by the house 'of Godwin are the 'Comital Manors 1 .' So in 
 East Anglia certain manors are distinguished as pertaining 
 or having pertained to the kingdom or kingship, the regnum 
 or regio*. This does not seem to have implied that they were 
 inalienably annexed to the crown, for King Edward had given 
 some of them away. Neither when it speaks of the time of 
 William, nor when it speaks of the time of Edward, does our 
 record draw any clear line between those manors which the 
 king holds as king and those which he holds in his private 
 capacity, though it may just hint that certain ancient estates 
 ought not to be alienated. The degree in which the various 
 manors of the crown stood outside the national system of 
 finance, justice and police we can not accurately ascertain. 
 Some, but by no means all, pay no geld. Of some it is 
 said that they have never paid geld. Perhaps in these 
 ingeldable manors we may see those which constituted 
 the royal demesne of the West Saxon kings at some 
 remote date. Of the king's vill of Gomshall in Surrey it is 
 written : ' the villeins of this vill were free from all the affairs 
 of the sheriff 3 / as though it were no general truth that with 
 a royal manor the sheriff had nothing to do. 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 75: 'Dominicatns Eegis ad Regnum pertinens in Devenescira.' 
 Ib. 99 : ' Mansiones de Comitatu.' Eyton, Somerset, i. 78. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 119: 'Hoc manerium fuit de regno, sed Bex Edwardus dedit 
 Radulfo Comiti.' Ib. 144: ' Suafham pertinuit ad regionem et Bex E. dedit B. 
 Comiti.' Ib. 281 b: 'Terra Begis de Begione quam Rogerus Bigotus servat.' 
 Ib. 408 b : ' Tornei manerium Begis de regione.' Mr Bound, Feudal England, 
 p. 140, treats regio as a mere blunder ; but it may well stand for kingship. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 30 b: 'Huius villae villani ab oinni re vicecom[itis] sunt quieti.'
 
 168 Domesday Book. 
 
 Thecomi- As with the estates of the king, so with the estates of 
 :>rs< the earls, we find it impossible to distinguish between private 
 property and official property. Certain manors are regarded 
 as the ' manors of the shire ' (mansiones de comitatu 1 ) ; certain 
 vills are ' comital vills 2 ,' they belong to ' the consulate 3 .' He- 
 reditary right tempered by outlawry was fast becoming the 
 title by which the earldoms were holden. The position of the 
 house of Leofric in Mercia was far from being as strong as the 
 position of the house of Rolf in Normandy, and yet we may 
 be sure that King Harold would not have been able to treat 
 the sons of ^Elfgar as removable officers. But one of the best 
 marked features of Domesday Book, a feature displayed on 
 page after page, the enormous wealth of the house of Godwin, 
 seems only explicable by the supposition that the earlships 
 and the older ealdormanships had carried with them a title 
 to the enjoyment of wide lands. That enormous wealth had 
 been acquired within a marvellously short time. Godwin was 
 a new man : nothing certain is known of his ancestry. His 
 daughter's marriage with the king will account for something ; 
 Harold's marriage with the daughter of ^Elfgar will account 
 for something, for instance, for manors which Harold held in 
 the middle of JElfgar's country 4 ; and a great deal of simple 
 rapacity is laid to the charge of Harold by jurors whose testi- 
 mony is not to be lightly rejected 5 ; but the greater part of the 
 land ascribed to Godwin, his widow and his sons, seems to 
 consist of comitales villae. 
 
 Private The wealth of the earls is a matter of great importance. If 
 
 govern!" 1 we subtract the estates of the king, the estates of the earls, and 
 
 revenues * ne est ates of the churches and, as we shall see hereafter, the 
 
 churches had obtained the bulk of their wealth directly from 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 99. 
 
 2 Pseudoleges Canuti ( = Liebermann's Instituta Cnuti), 55 (Schmid, p. 430): 
 Comitis rectitudines secundum Anglos istae sunt communes cum rege: tertius 
 denarius in villis ubi mercatum convenerit, et in castigatione latronum, et 
 comitales villae, quae ad comitatum eius pertinent.' 
 
 3 D. B. ii. 118 b: 'Terre Eegis in Tetford...est una leugata terre in longa et 
 dim. in lato de qua Bex habet duas paries: de his autem duabus partibus tercia 
 pars in consulatu iacet.' But this seems to mean that only this part of the land 
 is in the county of Norfolk. Ibid. i. 246 : in Stafford the king has twenty-two ' 
 houses ' de honore comitum. ' 4 D. B. i. 246. 
 
 5 Ellis, Introduction, i. 313. When twenty years after Harold's death a 
 question about the title to land is at issue, there seems no reason why the jurors 
 should tell lies about Harold.
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 169 
 
 the kings, if we subtract again the lands which the king, the 
 earls, the churches have granted to their thegns, the England 
 of 1065 will not appear to us a land of very great landowners, 
 and we may obtain a valuable hint as to one of the origins of 
 feudalism. A vast amount of land is or has recently been held 
 by office-holders, by the holders of the kingship, the earlships, 
 or the ealdormanships. We seem to see their proprietary rights 
 arising in the sphere of public law, growing out of governmental 
 rights, which however themselves are conceived as being in 
 some sort proprietary. Many a passage in Domesday Book 
 will suggest to us that a right to take tribute and a right to 
 take the profits of justice have helped to give the king and the 
 earls their manors and their seignories. Even in his own 
 demesne manors the king is apt to appear rather as a tribute 
 taker than as a landowner. Manors of very unequal size and 
 value have had to supply him with equal quantities of victuals ; 
 each has to give ' a night's farm ' once a year. Then from the 
 counties at large he has taken a tribute ; from Oxfordshire, for 
 example, 10 for a hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, 23 
 for dogs and 6 sesters of honey 1 ; from Worcestershire 10 or a 
 Norway hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse 2 ; from War- 
 wickshire 23 for ' the dog's custom,' 20 shillings for a sumpter 
 horse, 10 for a hawk and 24 sesters of honey 3 . The farm of 
 the county that the sheriff pays is made up out of obscure old 
 items of this sort. Many men who are not the king's tenants 
 must assist him in his hunting, must help in the erection of 
 his deer-hays 4 . Then there are the avera and the inwards that 
 are exacted by the king or his sheriff from sokemen who are 
 not the king's men. The sheriff also is entitled to provender 
 rents ; out of ' the revenues which belong to the shrievalty ' of 
 Wiltshire, Edward of Salisbury gets pigs, wheat, barley, oats, 
 honey, poultry, eggs, cheeses, lambs and fleeces ; and besides 
 this he seems to have ' reveland ' which belongs to him as 
 sheriff 5 . Then we see curious payments in money and renders 
 
 1 D. B. i. 154 b. 2 D. B. i. 172. D. B. 1^238. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 56 b: Berkshire custom, 'Qui monitus ad stabilitionem venationis 
 non ibat 50 sol. Regi emendabat.' See also the Hereford custom, Ib. 179 ; also 
 Bectitudines (Schmid, App. III.) c. 1. 
 
 5 D. B. i. 69. But the meaning of reveland is obscure. The most 
 important passages about it are in D. B. i. 57 b (Eseldeborne), 181 (Getune). 
 D. B. i. 83 : ' Hanc tenet Aiulf de Bege quamdiu erit vicecomes.'
 
 170 Domesday Booh 
 
 in kind made to some royal or some comital manor by the 
 holders of other manors. In Devonshire, Charlton which belongs 
 to the Bishop of Coutances, Honiton which belongs to the 
 Count of Mortain, Smaurige which belongs to Ralph de 
 Pomerai, Membury which belongs to William Chevre, Roverige 
 which belongs to S l . Mary of Rouen, each of these manors used 
 to pay twenty pence a year to the royal manor of Axminster 1 . 
 In Somersetshire there are manors which have owed consuetu- 
 dines, masses of iron and sheep and lambs to the royal manors 
 of South Perrott and Cury, or the comital manors of Crewkerne 
 and Dulverton 2 . Then again, we find that pasture rights are 
 connected with justiciary rights: Godwin had a manor in 
 Hampshire to which belonged the third penny of six hun- 
 dreds, and in all the woods of those six hundreds he had free 
 pasture and pannage 3 ; the third penny of three hundreds in 
 Devonshire and the third animal of the moorland pastures were 
 annexed to the manor of Holland 4 . Many things seem to 
 indicate that the distinction between private rights and govern- 
 mental powers has been but faintly perceived in the past. 
 The If now we look at that English state which is the outcome 
 
 f a purely English history, we see that it has already taken a 
 pyramidal or conical shape. It is a society of lords and men. 
 At its base are the cultivators of the soil, at its apex is the 
 king. This cone is as yet but low. Even at the end of 
 William's reign the peasant seldom had more than two lords 
 between him and the king, but already in the Confessor's reign 
 he might well have three 5 . Also the cone is obtuse : the angle 
 at its apex will grow acuter under Norman rulers. We can 
 indeed obtain no accurate statistics, but the number of land- 
 holders who were King Edward's men must have been much 
 larger than the tale of the Norman tenants in chief. In the 
 geographical distribution of the large estates under William 
 there is but little more regularity than there was under his 
 predecessor. In Cheshire and in Shropshire the Conqueror 
 
 1 D. B. i. 100. 
 
 2 D. B/i. 86, 86 b, 92, 97 ; so in Devonshire, 117 b : ' Hoc manerium debet 
 per consuetudinem in Tavetone manerium Eegis aut 1 bovem aut 30 denarios.' 
 
 , 3 D. B. i. 38b. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 101 : ' Ipsi manerio pertinet tercius denarius de hundredis 
 Kortmoltone et Baden tone et Brantone et tercium animal pasturae morarurn.' 
 6 Above, p. 155.
 
 The Feudal Superstructure. 171 
 
 formed two great fiefs for Hugh of Avranches and Koger of 
 Montgomery, well compacted fiefs, the like of which England 
 had not yet seen. But the units which William found in 
 existence and which he distributed among his followers were 
 for the more part discrete units, and seldom did the Norman 
 baron acquire as his honour any wide stretch of continuous 
 territory. Still a great change took place in the substance of 
 the cone, or if that substance is made up of lords and men 
 and acres, then in the nature of, or rather the relation between, 
 the forces -which held the atoms together. Every change 
 makes for symmetry, simplicity, consolidation. Some of these 
 changes will seem to us predestined. To speculate as to what 
 would have happened had Harold repelled the invader would 
 be vain, and certainly we have no reason for believing that in 
 that case the formula of dependent tenure would ever have got 
 hold of every acre of English land and every right in English 
 land. The law of 'land loans' (Lehnrecht) would hardly have 
 become our only land law, had not a conqueror enjoyed an 
 unbounded power, or a power bounded only by some reverence 
 for the churches, of deciding by what men and on what 
 terms every rood of England should be holden. Had it 
 not been for this, we should surely have had some franc 
 alien to oppose to the fief, some Eigen to oppose to the Lehn. 
 But if England was not to be for ever a" prey to rebellions and 
 civil wars, the power of the lords over their men must have 
 been not indeed increased, but territorialized ; the liberty of 
 ' going with one's land to whatever lord one chose ; must have 
 been curtailed. As yet the central force embodied in the 
 kingship was too feeble to deal directly with every one of its 
 subjects, to govern them and protect them. The intermedia- 
 tion of the lords was necessary; the state could not but be 
 pyramidal ; and, while this was so, the freedom that men had of 
 forsaking one lord for another, of forsaking even the king for 
 the ambitious earl, was a freedom that was akin to anarchy. 
 Such a liberty must have its wings dipt ; free contract must 
 be taught to know its place ; the lord's hold over the man's 
 land must become permanent. This change, if it makes at 
 first for a more definite feudalism, or (to use words more 
 strictly) if it substitutes feudalism for vassalism, makes also for 
 the stability of the state, for the increase of the state's power 
 over the individual, and in the end for the disappearance of
 
 172 Domesday Book. 
 
 feudalism. The freeholder of the thirteenth century is much 
 more like the subject of a modern state than was the free man 
 of the Confessor's day who could place himself and his land 
 under the power and warranty of whatever lord he chose. 
 Lordship in becoming land lordship begins to lose its most 
 dangerous element; it is ceasing to be a religion, it is be- 
 coming a ' real ' right, a matter for private law. Again, we 
 may guess, if 'we please, that but for the Norman Conquest 
 the mass of the English peasantry would never have fallen so 
 low as fall it did. The 'sokemen' would hardly have been 
 turned into ' villeins,' the ' villeins ' would hardly have become 
 ' serfs.' And yet the villeins of the Confessor's time were in a 
 perilous position. Already they were occupying lands which 
 for two most important purposes were reckoned the lands of 
 their lords, lands for which their lords gelded, lands for which 
 their lords fought. Even in an English England the time 
 might have come when the state, refusing to look behind their 
 lords, would have left the protection of their rights to a Hof- 
 recht, to ' the custom of the manor.' 
 
 Last It is, we repeat it, vain to speculate about such matters, for 
 
 we know too little of the relative strength of the various forces 
 that were at work, and an accident, a war, a famine, may at 
 any moment decide the fate, even the legal fate, of a great 
 class. And above all there 'is the unanswerable question 
 whether Harold or any near successor of his would or could 
 have done what William did so soon as the survey was accom- 
 plished, when he proved that, after all, the pyramid was no 
 pyramid and that every particle of it was in immediate contact 
 with him, and ' there came to him all the land-sitting men 
 who were worth aught from over all England, whosesoever men 
 they were, and they bowed themselves to him, and became this 
 man's men 1 .' 
 
 9. The Boroughs. 
 
 Dark as the history of our villages may be, the history 
 of the boroughs is darker yet ; or rather, perhaps, the darkness 
 seems blacker because we are compelled to suppose that it 
 conceals from our view changes more rapid and intricate than 
 
 1 Chron. aim. 1085.
 
 The Boroughs. 173 
 
 those that have happened in the open country. The few 
 paragraphs that follow will be devoted mainly to the develop- 
 ment of one suggestion which has come to us from foreign 
 books, but which may throw a little light where every feeble 
 ray is useful. At completeness we must not aim, and in 
 our first words we ought to protest that no general theory 
 will tell the story of every or any particular town 1 . 
 
 In the thirteenth century a legal, though a wavering, line The bor- 
 is drawn between the borough and the mere vill or rural cent. xiii. 
 township 2 . It is a wavering line, for stress can be laid now 
 upon one and now upon another attribute of the ancient and 
 indubitable boroughs, and this selected attribute can then 
 be employed as a test for the claims of other towns. When 
 in Edward I.'s day the sheriffs are being told to bid every 
 borough send two burgesses to the king's parliaments, there 
 are somewhat more than 150 places to which such summonses 
 will at times be addressed, though before the end of the 
 middle ages the number of ' parliamentary boroughs ' will 
 have shrunk to 100 or thereabouts 3 . Many towns seem to 
 hover on the border line and in some cases the sheriff has 
 been able to decide whether or no a town shall be represented 
 in the councils of the realm. Yet if we go back to the early 
 years of the tenth century, we shall still find this contrast 
 between the borough and the mere township existing as 
 a contrast whence legal consequences flow. Where lies the 
 contrast ? What is it that makes a borough to be a borough ? 
 That is the problem that we desire to solve. It is a legal 
 problem. We are not to ask why some places are thickly 
 populated or why trade has flowed in this or that channel. 
 We are to ask why certain vills are severed from other vills 
 and are called boroughs. 
 
 We may reasonably wish, however, since mental pictures The num- 
 must be painted, to know at the outset whereabouts the line boroughs. 
 
 1 A sketch of the principal argument of this section was published in Eng. 
 Hist. Eev., xi. 13, as a review of Keutgen's Untersuchungen iiber den Ursprung 
 der deutschen Stadtverfassung. The origin of the French and German towns 
 has become the theme of a large and very interesting literature. A good 
 introduction to this will be found in an article by M. Pirenne, L'origine des 
 constitutions urbaines, Eevue historique, liii. 52, Ivii. 293, and an article by 
 Mr Ashley, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. x. July, 1896. The continuous 
 survival of Roman municipal institutions even in Gaul seems to be denied by 
 almost all modern students. 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 625. 8 Stubbs, Const. Hist. iii. 448.
 
 174 Domesday Book. 
 
 will be drawn, and whether when we are speaking of the 
 Conqueror's reign and earlier times we shall have a large or 
 a small number of boroughs on our hands. Will it be a 
 hundred and fifty, or a hundred, or will it be only fifty ? At 
 once we will say that some fifty boroughs stand out prominently 
 and will demand our best attention, though a second and far 
 less important class was already being formed. 
 
 The aid- In the middle of the twelfth century the Exchequer was 
 
 boroughs of treating certain places in an exceptional fashion. It was sub- 
 cent, xii. j ec ting them to a special tax in the form of an auarilium or 
 donum. This fact we may take as the starting point for our 
 researches. Now if we read the unique Pipe Roll of Henry 
 I 's reign and the earliest Pipe Rolls of Henry II. 's we observe 
 that an ' aid ' or a ' gift ' is from time to time collected from the 
 ' cities and boroughs,' and if we put down the names of the towns 
 which are charged with this impost, we obtain a remarkable 
 result 1 . Speaking broadly we may say that the only towns 
 which pay are ' county towns.' For a large part of England 
 this is strictly true. We will follow the order of Domesday 
 Book, beginning however with its second zone. If London is 
 in Middlesex 2 , it is Middlesex's one borough. In Hertfordshire 
 is Hertford. In Buckinghamshire is Buckingham, but no 
 aid can be expected from it. In Oxfordshire is Oxford. In 
 Gloucestershire is Gloucester, but Winchcombe also asserts 
 its burghal rank. In Worcestershire is Worcester, while Droit- 
 wich appears occasionally with a small gift. Hereford is the 
 one borough of Herefordshire. Turning to the third zone, we 
 pass rapidly through Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bed- 
 fordshire and Northamptonshire ; each has its borough. This 
 will be true of Leicestershire also; but Leicester is by this 
 time so completely in the hands of its earl that the king gets 
 nothing from it. Nor, it would seem, does he get anything 
 from Warwick. Half in Warwickshire, half in Staffordshire 
 lies Tamworth; Stafford also pays. At times Bridgenorth 
 appears beside Shrewsbury. Nothing is received from Chester, 
 for it is the head of a palatinate. Derby, Nottingham and 
 York are the only representatives of their shires. Lincolnshire 
 
 1 We must exclude cases in which the king takes an aid from his whole 
 demesne, e.g. for his daughter's marriage, for in such a case many royal manors 
 which have no right to be called boroughs must make a gift. 
 
 2 Bound, Geoffrey de Mandeville, 347, has excellent remarks on this point.
 
 The Boroughs. 
 
 175 
 
 has Stamford on its border as well as Lincoln in its centre. 
 Norfolk has Thetford as well as Norwich ; but Suffolk has 
 only Ipswich and Essex only Colchester. 
 
 In the southern zone matters are not so simple. Kent Aid-paying 
 contains Canterbury and Rochester ; Surrey contains Guildford in the 
 and Southwark ; Sussex only Chichester. Hampshire has 
 Winchester ; Southampton is receiving special treatment. Wal- 
 lingford represents Berkshire. When we get to Wiltshire 
 and Dorset we are in the classical land of small boroughs. 
 There are various little towns whose fate is in the balance; 
 Marlborough and Calne seem for the moment to be the most 
 prominent. In Somersetshire, whatever may have been true 
 in the past, Ilchester is standing out as the one borough that 
 pays an aid. Exeter has now no second in Devonshire. If there 
 is a borough in Cornwall, it makes no gift to the king. 
 
 We may obtain some notion of the relative rank of these List of aids, 
 towns if we set forth the amounts with which they are charged 
 in 1130 and in 1156, though the materials for this comparison 
 are unfortunately incomplete. 
 
 
 Pipe Roll 
 31 Hen. I 
 
 Pipe Roll 
 2 Hen. II 
 
 
 Pipe Roll 
 31 Hen. I 
 
 Pipe Roll 
 2Hen.II 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 London 
 
 120 
 
 120 
 
 Wiltshire boroughs 17 
 
 Winchester 
 
 80 
 
 
 Calne 
 
 
 1 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 60 
 
 60 
 
 Dorset boroughs 
 
 15 
 
 
 York 
 
 40 
 
 40 
 
 Huntingdon 
 
 8 
 
 8 
 
 Norwich 
 
 30 
 
 33J 
 
 Ipswich 
 
 7 
 
 3J 
 
 Exeter 
 
 
 20 
 
 Guildford 
 
 5 
 
 5 
 
 Canterbury 
 
 20 
 
 13J 
 
 Southwark 
 
 5 
 
 5 
 
 Colchester 
 
 20 * 
 
 12I 1 
 
 Hertford 
 
 5 
 
 
 Oxford 
 
 20 
 
 20 
 
 Stamford 
 
 5 
 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 15 
 
 15 
 
 Bedford 
 
 5 
 
 6?j 
 
 Wallingford 
 
 15 
 
 
 Shrewsbury 
 
 
 5 
 
 Worcester 
 
 
 15 
 
 Droitwich 
 
 
 5 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 12 
 
 12 
 
 Stafford 
 
 3 a 
 
 3J 
 
 Hereford 
 
 
 10 
 
 Winchcombe 
 
 3 
 
 5 
 
 Thetford 
 
 10 
 
 
 Tamworth 
 
 2f 
 
 1 1 3 
 
 Northampton 
 
 10 
 
 
 Ilchester 
 
 
 2J 
 
 Rochester 
 
 
 10 
 
 Chichester 3 
 
 
 
 Nottingham ) 
 
 15 
 
 15 
 
 
 % 
 
 
 Derby i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 Nearly. 
 
 2 This may come only from the Staffordshire part of Tamworth. 
 * Chichester pays in later years; but very little.
 
 176 Domesday Booh 
 
 Value of ]\^ ow we are no t putting this forward as a list of those 
 
 the list. * < 
 
 English towns that were the most prosperous in the middle of 
 the twelfth century. We have made no mention of flourishing 
 seaports, of Dover, Hastings, Bristol, Yarmouth. Nor is this a 
 list of all the places that are casually called burgi on rolls of 
 Henry II.'s reign. That name is given to Scarborough, Knares- 
 borough, Tickhill, Cirencester and various other towns. New 
 tests of ' burgality ' (if we may make that word) are emerging 
 and old tests are becoming obsolete. We see too that some 
 towns are dropping out of the list of aid-paying boroughs. In 
 1130 Wallingford has thrice failed to pay its aid of 15 and the 
 whole debt of 45 must be forgiven to the burgesses pro 
 paupertate eorum 1 . So Wallingford drops out of this list. 
 Probably Buckingham has dropped out at an earlier time for 
 a similar reason. But still this list, especially in the form 
 that it takes in Henry I.'s time, is of great importance to 
 those who are going to study the boroughs of Domesday Book. 
 It looks like a traditional list. It deals out nice round sums. 
 It is endeavouring to keep Wallingford on a par with Gloucester 
 and above Northampton. It is retaining Winchcombe. 
 Thebor- If we make the experiment, we shall discover that this 
 
 catalogue really is a good prologue to Domesday Book. We will 
 once more visit the counties which form the second zone. The 
 account that our record gives of Hertfordshire has a preface. 
 That preface deals with the borough of Hertford and precedes 
 even the list of the Hertfordshire tenants in chief. Buckingham 
 in Buckinghamshire and Oxford in Oxfordshire are similarly 
 treated. In Gloucestershire the city of Gloucester and the 
 borough of Winchcombe are described before the body of the 
 county is touched. In Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Cam- 
 bridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, 
 Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire 2 , Shropshire, Che- 
 shire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire 3 and Yorkshire the same 
 procedure is adopted: the account of the shire's city or 
 borough precedes the account of the shire. In Lincolnshire 
 the description of the county is introduced by the description 
 
 1 Pipe tfoll, 31 Hen. I. p. 139. 
 
 2 Was the blank space in D. B. i. 246 left for the borough of Tamworth ? 
 This borough is incidentally mentioned in D. B. i. 238, 246, 246 b. 
 
 3 But the account of the two sister boroughs here falls between the accounts 
 of the two sister counties.
 
 The Boroughs. 177 
 
 of Lincoln and Stamford ; also of Torksey, which had been a 
 place of military importance and seems to have been closely 
 united with the city of Lincoln by some governmental bond 1 . 
 Convenient arrangement is not the strong point of 'Little 
 Domesday ' ; but what is said therein of Colchester is said at 
 the very end of the survey of Essex, while Norwich, Yarmouth 
 and Thetford stand at the end of the royal estates in Norfolk, 
 and Ipswich stands at the end of the royal estates in Suffolk. 
 
 If now we enter the southern zone and keep in our minds Southern 
 the scheme that we have seen prevailing in the greater part in Domes- 
 of England, we shall observe that the account of Kent has y " 
 a pro ] ogue touching Dover, Canterbury and Rochester. In 
 Berkshire an excellent account of Wallingford precedes the 
 rubric Terra Regis. Four places in Dorset are singled out for 
 prefatory treatment, namely, Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham 
 and Shaftesbury. In Devon Exeter stands, if we may so speak, 
 above the line, and stands alone, though Barnstaple, Lidford 
 and Totness are reckoned as boroughs. Of the other counties 
 there is more to be said. If we compare the first page of the 
 survey of Somerset with the first pages that are devoted to its 
 two neighbours, Dorset and Devon, we shall probably come to 
 the conclusion that the compilers of the book scrupled to put 
 any Somerset vill on a par with Exeter, Dorchester, Bridport, 
 Wareham and Shaftesbury. In each of the three cases the page 
 is mapped out in precisely the same fashion. The second 
 column is headed by Terra Regis. A long way down in the 
 first column begins the list of tenants in chief. The upper part 
 of the first column contains in one case the account of Exeter, 
 in another the account of the four Dorset boroughs, but in the 
 third case, that of Somerset, it is left blank. In Wiltshire 
 Malmesbury and Marlborough stand above the line ; but, if we 
 look to the foot of the page, we shall suspect that the compilers 
 can not easily force their general scheme upon this part of the 
 country. In Surrey no place stands above the line. Guildford 
 is the first place mentioned on the Terra Regis ; Southwark 
 seems to be inadequately treated on a later page. The case of 
 Sussex is like that of Somerset ; th,e list of the tenants in chief 
 is preceded by a blank space. In Hampshire a whole column 
 
 1 D. B. i. 337. It is even called a suburbium of Lincoln, though it lies full 
 10 miles from the city. 
 
 M. 12
 
 178 Domesday Book. 
 
 is left blank. On a later page the borough of Southampton has 
 a column to itself; in the next column stands the Terra Regis 
 of the Isle of Wight. And now let us turn back to the 
 Middlesex that we have as yet ignored. Nearly two columns, 
 to say nothing of some precedent pages, are void 1 . 
 The Now we must not be led away into speculations which 
 
 wou ld be vain. We must not, for example, inquire whether 
 
 plan of the information that had been obtained touching: London and 
 
 Domesday 
 
 Book. Winchester was too bulky to fill a room that had been left for 
 it. We must not inquire whether something was to be said of 
 Chichester or Hastings, of Ilchester or of Bristol that has not 
 been said. But apparently we may attribute to King William's 
 officials a certain general idea. It is an idea which suits the 
 greater part of England very well, though they find difficulties 
 in their way when they endeavour to impose it on some of the 
 counties that lie south of the Thames. The broad fact stands 
 clear that throughout the larger part of England the commis- 
 sioners found a town in each county, and in general one town 
 only, which required special treatment. They do not locate it 
 on the Terra Regis ; they do not locate it on any man's land. 
 It stands outside the general system of land tenure. 
 The For a while, then, let us confine our attention to these 
 
 borough on coun ty towns, and we shall soon see why it is that they are 
 
 no man & > j j 
 
 land. rarely brought under any rubric which would describe them as 
 pieces of the king's soil or pieces of some one else's soil. The 
 trait to which we allude we shall call (for want of a better 
 term) the tenurial heterogeneity of the burgesses. In those 
 boroughs that are fully described we seldom, if ever, find 
 that all the burgesses have the same landlord. Of. course there 
 is a sense in which, according to the view of the Domesday 
 surveyors and of all later lawyers, every inch of borough land is 
 held of one landlord, namely, the king ; but in that sense every 
 inch of England has the same landlord. The fact that we 
 would bring into relief is this, that normally the burgesses of 
 the borough do not hold their burgages immediately of one and 
 the same lord ; they are not ' peers of a tenure ' ; the group that 
 they constitute is not a tenurial group. Far rather we shall 
 
 1 The one glimpse that I have had of the manuscript suggested to me 
 (1) that the accounts of some of the boroughs were postscripts, and (2) that 
 space was left for accounts of London and Winchester. The anatomy of the 
 book deserves examination by an expert.
 
 The Boroughs. 179 
 
 find that, though there will be some burgesses holding immedi- 
 ately of the king, there will be others whose titles can be traced 
 to the king only through the medium of other lords. And the 
 mesne lord will often be a very great man, some prelate or 
 baron with a widespread honour. Within the borough he will, 
 to use the language of Domesday Book, ' have ' or ' hold ' a 
 small group of burgesses, and sometimes they will be reckoned 
 ^,s annexed to or as 'lying in' some manor distant from the 
 town. It seems generally expected that the barons of the 
 county should have a few burgages apiece in the county town. 
 This arrangement does not look new. Seemingly the great 
 men of an earlier day, the antecessores of the Frenchmen, have 
 owned town-houses : not so much houses for their own use, as 
 houses or 'haws' (hagae) in which they could keep a few 
 ' burgesses.' 
 
 Some examples of this remarkable arrangement should be Hetero- 
 given. First we will look at Oxford. The king has many tenures iu 
 houses ; the Archbishop of Canterbury has 7 ; the Bishop of boroughs. 
 Winchester 9 ; the Bishop of Bayeux 18 ; the Bishop of 
 Lincoln 30 ; the Bishop of Coutances 2 ; the Bishop of Hereford 
 3 ; the Abbot of St Edmund's 1.; the Abbot of Abingdon 14 ; 
 the Abbot of Eynsham 13. And so with the worldly great : 
 the Count of Mortain has 10 ; Count Hugh has 7 ; the Count 
 of Evreux 1 ; Robert of Ouilly 12; Roger of Ivry 15 ; Walter 
 Giffard 17 : but we need not repeat the whole long list 1 . 
 
 It is so at Wallingford; King Edward had 8 virgates on 
 which were 276 houses, and they paid him 11 rent; Bishop 
 Walkelin of Winchester has 27, which pay 25 shillings; the 
 Abbot of Abingdon has two acres, on which are 7 houses paying 
 4 shillings; Milo Crispin has 20 houses, which pay 12 shillings 
 and 10 pence; and so forth 2 . Further, it is said that the 
 Bishop's 27 houses are valued in Brightwell; and, turning to 
 the account of Brightwell, there, sure enough, we find mention 
 of the 25 shillings which these houses pay 3 . Milo's 20 houses 
 are said to 'lie in ' Newnham ; he has also in Wallingford 6 
 houses which are in Hazeley, 1 which is in Stoke, 1 which is in 
 Chalgrove, one acre with 6 houses which is in Sutton, one acre 
 with 11 houses which is in Bray; 'all this land' we are told 
 4 belongs to Oxfordshire, but nevertheless it is in Wallingford.' 
 
 1 D. B. i. 154. 2 D. B. i. 56. D. B. i. 58. 
 
 122
 
 180 Domesday Book. 
 
 Yes, Milo's manor of Chalgrove lies five, his manor of Hazeley 
 lies seven miles from Wallingford ; nevertheless, houses which 
 are physically in Wallingford are constructively in Chalgrove 
 and Hazeley. That we are not dealing with a Norman novelty 
 is in this case extremely plain. Wallingford is a border town. 
 We read first of the Berkshire landowners who have burgesses 
 within it. There follows a list of the Oxfordshire ' thegns ' who 
 hold houses in Wallingford. Archbishop Lanfranc and Count 
 Hugh appear in this context as 'thegns' of Oxfordshire. 
 Examples When we have obtained this clue, we soon begin to see that 
 genefty what is true of Oxford and Wallingford is true even of those 
 towns of which no substantive description is given us. Thus 
 there are 'haws' or town-houses in Winchester which are 
 attached to manors in all corners of Hampshire, at Wallop, 
 Clatford, Basingstoke, Eversley, Candover, Strathfield, Minstead 
 and elsewhere. Some of the manors to which the burghers of 
 London were attached are not, even in our own day, within our 
 monstrous town ; there are some at Banstead and Bletchingley 
 in Surrey, at Waltham and Thurrock in Essex. But in every 
 quarter we see this curious scheme. At Warwick the king has 
 in his demesne 113 houses, and his barons have 112 1 . Of the 
 barons' houses it is written : ' These houses belong to the lands 
 which the barons hold outside the borough and are valued 
 there.' Or turn we to a small town: at Buckingham the 
 barons have 26 burgesses ; no one of them has more than 5. a 
 The page that tells us this presents to us an admirable 
 contrast between Buckingham and its future rival. Aylesbury 
 is just an ordinary royal manor and stands under the rubric 
 Terra Regis. Buckingham is a very petty townlet ; but it is a 
 borough, and Count Hugh and the Bishop of Coutances, Robert 
 of Ouilly, Roger of Ivry, Arnulf of Hesdin and other mighty 
 men have Burgesses there. As a climax we may mention the 
 case of Winchcombe. The burgages in this little town were 
 held by many great people. About the year 1100 the king 
 had 60 ; the Abbot of Winchcombe 40 ; the Abbot of vesham 
 2 ; the Bishop of Hereford 2 ; Robert of Belleme 3 ; Robert 
 Fitzhamon 5, and divers other persons of note had some 29 
 houses among them 3 . However poor, however small Winchcombe 
 
 1 D. B. i. 238. 2 D. B. i. 143. 
 
 8 Ellis, Introduction, ii. 446; Winchcombe Land-boc, ed. Boyce, p. xiv; 
 Stevenson, Rental of Gloucester, p. ix.
 
 The Boroughs. 181 
 
 may have been, it radically differed from the common manor 
 and the common village. 
 
 We have seen above how in the Conqueror's day the Abbey Burgesses 
 of Westminster had a manor at Staines 1 and how that manor to manors. 
 included 48 burgesses who paid 40s. a year. Were those bur- 
 gesses really in Staines, and was Staines a borough ? No, they 
 were in the city of London. The Confessor had told his 
 Middlesex thegns how he willed that St Peter and the brethren 
 at Westminster should have the manor (cotlif) of Staines 
 with the land called Staninghaw (mid Sara lande Stceningehaga) 
 within London and all other things that had belonged to 
 Staines 2 . Is not the guess permissible that Staining Lane in 
 the City of London 3 , wherein stood the church of St Mary, 
 Staining, was so called, not ' because stainers lived in it,' but 
 because it once contained the haws of the men of Staines ? 
 We must be careful before we find boroughs in Domesday 
 Book, for its language is deceptive. Perhaps we may believe 
 that really and physically there were forty-six burgesses in 
 the vill of St Albans 4 ; but, after what we have read of Staines, 
 can we be quite sure that these burgesses were not in London ? 
 The burgesses who de iure 'are in' one place are often de 
 facto in quite another place. 
 
 We may for a moment pass over two centuries and turn Tenure of 
 to the detailed account of Cambridge given to us by the borough 
 
 Hundred Rolls, the most elaborate description that we have 
 
 of any medieval borough. Now in one sense the ' vill ' or within 
 
 borough of Cambridge belongs to the king, and, under him, borough. 
 
 to the burgesses, for they hold it of him in capite at a fee- 
 
 farm rent. But this does not mean that each burgess holds 
 
 his tenement of the corporation or communitas of burgesses, 
 
 which in its turn holds every yard of land of the king in chief. 
 
 It does not even mean that each burgess holds immediately 
 
 of the king, the communitas intervening as farmer of the king's 
 
 rents 6 . No, the titles of the various burgesses go up to the king 
 
 by many various routes. Some of them pay rents to the officers 
 
 of the borough who are the king's farmers ; but many of them 
 
 do not. -The Chancellor and Masters of the University, for ex- 
 
 ample, hold three messuages in the vill of Cambridge ; ' but ' 
 
 1 D. B. i. 128, 128 b; and above, p. 111. a K. 855 (iv. 211). 
 
 3 Stow, Survey, ed. Strype, Bk. iii p. 121. 4 D. B. i. 135 b. 
 5 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 636.
 
 182 Domesday Book. 
 
 say the sworn burgesses ' what they pay for the same, we do 
 not know and can not discover 1 .' How could it be otherwise ? 
 Domesday Book shows us that the Count of Britanny had ten 
 burgesses in Cambridge 2 . Count Alan's houses will never be 
 held in chief of the. crown by any burgess: they will form part 
 of the honour of Richmond to the end of time. We may 
 take another example which will show the permanence of 
 proprietary arrangements in the boroughs. From an account 
 of Gloucester* which comes to us from the year 1100 or there- 
 abouts we learn that there were 300 houses in the king's 
 demesne and 313 belonging to other lords. From the year 
 1455 we have another account which tells of 310 tenements 
 paying landgavel to the king's farmers and 346 which pay 
 them nothing 3 . 
 
 The king Perhaps no further examples are needed. But this tenurial 
 
 landlords! heterogeneity seems to be an attribute of all or nearly all 
 the very ancient boroughs, the county towns. In some cases 
 the king was the landlord of far the greater number of the 
 burgesses. In other cases the bishop became in course of time 
 the lord of some large quarter of a town in which his cathedral 
 stood. At Canterbury and Rochester, at Winchester and 
 Worcester, this process had been at work from remote days ; the 
 bishops had been acquiring land and ' haws ' within the walls 4 . 
 But we can see that in Henry I.'s day there were still four earls 
 who were keeping up their interest in their burgesses at Win- 
 chester 6 . In the later middle ages we may, if we will, call these 
 places royal boroughs and the king's ' demesne boroughs,' for 
 the burgesses derive their 'liberties' directly from the king. 
 But we must keep these ancient boroughs well apart from any 
 royal manors which the king has newly raised to burghal rank. 
 In the latter he will be the immediate landlord of every bur- 
 gess; in the former a good deal of rent will be paid, not to 
 him, nor to the community us his farmers, but to those who 
 are filling the shoes of the thegns of the shire. 
 
 Hot. Hund. ii. 361. 2 D. B. i. 189. 
 
 8 Kental of Gloucester, ed. W. H. Stevenson : Gloucester, 1890, p. x. 
 
 4 There are many examples in Kemble's Codex. 
 
 5 Pipe Boll, 31 Hen. I. p. 41: 'Vicecomes reddit compotum de 80 de 
 auxilio civitatis....Et in perdonis....Comiti de Mellent 25 sol....Comiti de 
 Lerecestria 35 sol. ...Comiti de Warenna 16 sol Comiti Gloecestriae 116 sol. 
 et 8 den.' See also the Liber Wintoniae, D. B. iv. 531 ff.
 
 The Boroughs. 183 
 
 This said, we will turn back our thoughts to the oldest days. The oldest 
 The word that deserves our best attention is burh, the future 
 borough, for little good would come of an attempt to found 
 a theory upon the Latin words, such as civitas, oppidum and 
 urbs which occur in some of those magniloquent land-books 1 . 
 Now it seems fairly clear that for some long time after the 
 Germanic invasions the word burh meant merely a fastness, 
 a stronghold, and suggested no thick population nor any popu- 
 lation at all. This we might learn from the map of England. 
 The hill-top that has been fortified is a burh. Very often it 
 has given its name to a neighbouring village 2 . But, to say 
 nothing of hamlets, we have full two hundred and fifty parishes 
 whose names end in burgh, borough or bury, and in many cases 
 we see no sign in them of an ancient camp or of an excepr 
 tionally dense population. It seems a mere chance that they 
 are not tons or hams, worths or thorpes. Then again, in Essex 
 and neighbouring shires it is common to find that in the 
 village called X there is a squire's mansion or a cluster of 
 houses called X-bury. Further, we can see plainly from our 
 oldest laws that the palisade or entrenchment around a great 
 man's house is a burh. Thus Alfred: The king's burh-bryce 
 (the sum to be paid for breaking his burh) is 120 shillings, an 
 
 1 In the A.-S. land-books the word civitas is commonly applied to 
 Worcester, Winchester, Canterbury, and other such places, which are both 
 bishops' sees and the head places of large districts. But (K. v. p. 180) 
 Gloucester is a civitas, and for some time after the Conquest it is rather the 
 county town than the cathedral town that bears this title. Did any one ever 
 speak of Selsey or Sherborne as a civitas? In 803 (K. v. p. 65) the bishops of 
 Canterbury, Lichfield, Leicester, Sidnacester, Worcester, Winchester, Dun- 
 wich, London and Rochester style themselves bishops of civitates, while those 
 of Hereford, Sherborne, Elmham and Selsey do not use this word. But an 
 inference from this would be rash. 
 
 2 An interesting example is this. In 779 Offa conveys to a thegn land at 
 Sulmonnesburg. The boundaries mentioned in the charter are those of the 
 present parish of Bourton-on-the-Water. ' Sulmonnesburg. . .is the ancient camp 
 close to Bourton which gave its name to the Domesday Hundred of 
 Salmanesberie, and at a gap in the rampart of which a Court Leet was held 
 till recently.' See C. S. Taylor, Pre-Domesday Hide of Gloucestershire, Trans. 
 Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeol. Soc. vol. xviii. pt. 2. As regards the 
 names of hills and of villages named from hills there may occasionally be 
 some difficulty in marking off those which go back to beorh (berry, berrnw, 
 barrow) from those which go back to burh (burgh, borough, bury). Mr Stevenson 
 tells me that in the West of England the termination -borough sometimes 
 represents -beorh.
 
 184 Domesday Book. 
 
 archbishop's 90 shillings, another bishop's 60 shillings, a twelve- 
 hundred man's 30 shillings, a six-tmndred-man's 15 shillings, 
 a ceorl's edor-bryce (the sum to be paid for breaking his 
 hedge) 5 shillings 1 . The ceorl, whose wer is 200 shillings, 
 will not have a burh, he will only have a hedge round his 
 house; but the man whose wer is 600 shillings will probably 
 have some stockade, some rude rampart ; he will have a burh. 
 
 The king's We observe the heavy b6t of 120 shillings which protects 
 the king's burh. May we not see here the very first stage 
 in the legal history of our boroughs ? We pass over some 
 centuries and we read in a statement of the Londoners' customs 
 that a man who is guilty of unlawful violence must pay the 
 king's burh-bryce of five pounds 2 . And then the Domesday 
 surveyors tell us how at Canterbury every crime committed 
 in those streets which run right through the city is a crime 
 against the king, and so it is if committed upon the high- 
 roads outside the city for the space of one league, three perches 
 and three feet 3 . This curious accuracy over perches and feet 
 sends us to another ancient document : ' Thus far shall the 
 king's peace (grift) extend from his burhgeat where he is sitting 
 towards all four quarters, namely, three miles, three furlongs, 
 three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine hand-breadths, nine barley- 
 corns 4 .' And then we remember how Fleta tells us that the 
 verge of the king's palace is twelve leagues in circumference, 
 .and how within that ambit the palace court, the king's most 
 private court, has jurisdiction 5 . 
 
 peaceofthe Has not legal fiction been at work since an early time? 
 
 burh. 
 
 1 Alfred, 40; Ine, 45. 
 
 2 Aethelr. iv. 4. The Quadripartitus is our only authority for these 
 Instituta; but Dr Liebermann (Quadrip. p. 138) holds that the translator had 
 in front of him a document written before the Conquest. Schmid would read 
 borh-bryce; see p. 541 ; but this emendation seems needless. Has not the sum 
 been Normanized? The king's burh-bryce used to be 120 (i.e. in English 'a 
 hundred ') shillings, and a hundred Norman shillings make 5. So according 
 to the Berkshire custom (D. B. i. 56 b) he who by night breaks a civitas pays 
 100 shillings to the king and not (it is noted) to the sheriff. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 2 : ' Concordatum est de rectis callibus quae habent per civitatem 
 introitum et exitum, quicunque in illis forisfecerit, regi emendabit.' See the 
 important document contained in a St Augustin's Cartulary and printed in 
 Larking, Domesday of Kent, Appendix, 35 : ' Et omnes vie civitatis que habent 
 duas portas, hoc est introitum et exitum, ille sunt de consuetudine Eegis.' 
 
 4 Schmid, App. XII ; Leg. Henr. c. 16. 
 
 8 Fleta, p. 66 ; see also 13 Eic. II. stat. 1. cap. 3.
 
 The Boroughs. 185 
 
 Has not the sanctity of the king's house extended itself over a 
 group of houses? The terra burh seems to spread outwards 
 from the defensible house of the king and with it the sphere of 
 his burh-bryce is amplified. Within the borough there reigns 
 a special peace. This has a double meaning : not only do acts 
 which would be illegal anywhere become more illegal when they 
 are done within the borough, but acts which would be legal 
 elsewhere, are illegal there. King Edmund legislating against 
 the blood-feud makes his burh as sacred as a church; it is a 
 sanctuary where the feud may not be prosecuted 1 . If in 
 construing such a passage we doubt how to translate burh, 
 whether by house or by borough, we are admitting that the 
 language of the law does not distinguish between the two. 
 The Englishman's house is his castle, or, to use an older term, 
 his burh ; the king's borough is the king's house, for his house- 
 peace prevails in its streets 2 . 
 
 Our oldest laws seem to know no burh other than the strong The town 
 house of a great (but he need not be a very great) man. Early 
 in the tenth century, however, the word had already acquired a 
 new meaning. In ^Ethelstan's day it seems to be supposed by 
 the legislator that a moot will usually be held in a burh. If a 
 man neglects three summonses to a moot, the oldest men of the 
 burh are to ride to his place and seize his goods 3 . Already a 
 burh will have many men in it. Some of them will be elder-men, 
 aldermen. A moot will be held in it. Very possibly this will 
 be the shire-moot, for, since there is riding to be done, we see 
 that the person who ought to have come to the moot may live 
 at a distance 4 . A little later the burh certainly has a moot of 
 its own. Edgar bids his subjects seek the burh-gemdt as well 
 as the scyr-gemdt and the hundred-gemot. The borough-moot 
 is to be held thrice a year 5 . At least from this time forward, 
 the borough has a court. An important line is thus drawn 
 between the borough and the mere tti,n. The borough has a 
 court; the village has none, or, if the villages are getting 
 
 1 Edmund, n. 2. 
 
 2 See also Schmid, App. IV. (Be giiSe and be munde), 15 : If any man 
 fights or steals in the king's burh or the neighbourhood (the 'verge'), he 
 forfeits his life, if the king will not concede that he be redeemed by a wergild.' 
 
 * .ffithelstan, n. 20. 
 
 4 K. 1334 (vi. p. 195) : a contract made at Exeter before Earl Godwin and 
 all the shire. 
 
 5 Edgar, in. 5 ; Cnut, u. 18.
 
 186 Domesday Booh 
 
 courts, this is due to the action of lords who have sake and 
 soke and is not commanded by national law. National law 
 commands that there shall be a moot thrice a year in every 
 burh. 
 
 The The extension of the term burh from a fortified house to a 
 
 boroughs fortified group of houses must be explained by those who are 
 skilled in the history of military affairs. It is for them to tell 
 us, for example, how much use the Angles and Saxons in the 
 oldest days made of the entrenched hill-tops, and whether the 
 walls of the Roman towns were continuously repaired 1 . How- 
 beit, a time seems to have come, at latest in the struggle 
 between the Danish invaders and the West-Saxon kings, when 
 the establishment and maintenance of what we might call 
 fortified towns was seen to be a matter of importance. There 
 was to be a cluster of inhabited dwellings which as a whole was 
 to be made defensible by ditch and mound, by palisade or wall. 
 Edward the Elder and the Lady of the Mercians were active 
 in this work. Within the course of a few years burgs were 
 ' wrought ' or ' timbered ' at Worcester, Chester, Hertford, 
 Witham in Essex, Bridgnorth, Tamworth, Stafford, Warwick, 
 Eddisbury, Warbury, Runcorn, Buckingham, Towcester, Maldon, 
 Huntingdon 2 . Whatever may be meant by the duty of re- 
 pairing burgs when it is mentioned in charters coming from .a 
 somewhat earlier time, it must for the future be that of 
 upholding those walls and mounds that the king and the lady 
 are rearing. The land was to be burdened with the main- 
 tenance of strongholds. The land, we say. That is the style 
 of the land-books. Land, even though given to a church, is 
 not to be free (unless by exceptional favour) of army-service, 
 bridge-work and borough-bettering or borough-fastening. Wall- 
 work 3 is coupled with bridge-work ; to the duty of maintaining 
 the county bridges is joined the duty of constructing and 
 repairing the boroughs. Shall we say the ' county boroughs ' ? 
 The shire Let us ask ourselves how the burden that is known as 
 borough, burh-bot, the duty that the Latin charters call constructio, 
 munitio, restauratio, defensio, arcis (for arx is the common 
 
 1 Mention is made of the walls of Eochester and Canterbury in various 
 charters from the middle of cent, viii onwards : K. vol. i. pp. 138, 183, 274 ; 
 vol. ii. pp. 1, 26, 36, 57, 86 ; vol. v. p. 68. 
 
 2 Green, Conquest of England, 189-207. 
 
 3 For instance, K. iii. pp. 5, 50.
 
 The Boroughs. 187 
 
 term) will really be borne. Is it not highly probable, almost 
 certain, that each particular tract of land will be ascript to 
 some particular arx or castellum 1 , and that if, for instance, there 
 is but one burh in a shire, all the lands in that shire must help 
 to better that burh. Apportionment will very likely go further. 
 The man with five hides will know how much of the mound or 
 the wall he must maintain, how much 'wall- work' he must do. 
 We see how the old bridge-work becomes a burden on the 
 estates of the county landowners. From "century to century 
 the Cambridgeshire landowners contribute according to their 
 hidage to repair the most important bridge of their county, a 
 bridge which lies in the middle of the borough of Cambridge. 
 Newer arrangements, the rise of castles and of borough 
 communities, have relieved them from the duty of 'borough- 
 fastening ; ' but the bridge- work is apportioned on their lands. 
 
 The exceedingly neat and artificial scheme of political Military 
 geography that we find in the midlands, in the country of g * 
 the true ' shires/, forcibly suggests deliberate delimitation for 
 military purposes. Each shire is to have its borough in its 
 middle. Each shire takes its name from its borough. We 
 must leave it for others to say in every particular case whether 
 and in what sense the shire is older than the borough or the 
 borough than the shire: whether an old Roman Chester was 
 taken as a centre or whether the struggles between Germanic 
 tribes had fixed a circumference. But a policy, a plan, there 
 has been, and the outcome of it is that the shire maintains the 
 borough 2 . 
 
 There has come down to us in a sadly degenerate form a 
 document which we shall hereafter call ' The Burghal Hidage 8 .' 
 It sets forth, so we believe, certain arrangements made early 
 in the tenth century for the defence of Wessex against Danish 
 
 1 K. 1154 (v. 302): 'adiacent etiatn agri quamplurimi circa castellum quod 
 Welingaford vocitatur.' K. 152 (i. 183): 'castelli quod nominatur Hrofescester.' 
 K. 276 (ii. 57) : ' castelli Hrobi.' 
 
 2 A beautiful example is given by Staffordshire and Warwickshire. Each 
 has its borough in its centre, while Tamworth on the border is partly in the 
 one shire, partly in the other. See Pipe Koll, 31 Hen. I. 75, 76, 107, 108. As 
 to these Mercian shires, see Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. 123 ; Green, Conquest of 
 England, 237 : ' Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire are other 
 instances of purely military creation, districts assigned to the fortresses which 
 Eadward raised at these points.' 
 
 3 See our index under Burghal Hidage. Mr W. H. Stevenson's valuable 
 aid in the identification of these burgs is gratefully acknowledged.
 
 188 Domesday Boole. 
 
 inroads. It names divers strongholds, and assigns to each a 
 large number of hides. A few of the places that it mentions 
 we have not yet found on the map. Beginning in the east of 
 Sussex and following the order of the list, we seem to see 
 Hastings, Lewes, Burpham (near Arundel), Chichester, Por- 
 chester, Southampton, Winchester, Wilton, Tisbury (or perhaps 
 Chisenbury), Shaftesbury, Twyneham, Wareham, Bredy, Exeter, 
 Halwell near Totness, Lidford, Barnstaple, Watchet, Axbridge ; 
 then Langport and Lyng (which defend the isle of Athelney), 
 Bath, Malmesbury, Cricklade, Oxford, Wallingford, Bucking- 
 ham, Eastling near Guildford, and Southwark. Corrupt and 
 enigmatical though this catalogue may be, it is of the highest 
 importance. It shows how in the great age of burg-building 
 the strongholds had wide provinces which in some manner 
 or another were appurtenant to them, and it may also 
 give us some precious hints about places in Wessex which 
 once were national burgs but which forfeited their burghal 
 character in the tenth century. Guildford seems to have 
 risen at the expense of Eastling and Totness at the expense 
 of Halwell, while Tisbury, Bredy and Watchet (if we are 
 right in fancying that they are mentioned) soon lost caste. 
 Lyng is not a place which we should have named among 
 the oldest of England's burgs, and yet we have all read 
 how Alfred wrought a ' work ' at Athelney. In Wessex 
 burgs rise and fall somewhat rapidly. North of the Thames 
 the system is more stable. Also it is more artificial, for north 
 of the Thames civil and military geography coincide. 
 The shire's Let us now look once more at the Oxford of Domesday 
 Book. The king has twenty ' mural houses 1 ' which belonged 
 to Earl ^Elfgar ; they pay 13s. 2d He has a house of Qd. which 
 is constructively at Shipton ; one of 4d. at Bloxham ; one of 30d. 
 at Risborough and two of 4id. at Twyford in Buckinghamshire. 
 ' They are called mural houses because, if there be need and the 
 king gives order, they shall repair the wall.' There follows a 
 list of the noble houseowners, an archbishop, six bishops, three 
 earls and so forth. 'All the above hold these houses free 
 because of the reparation of the wall. All the houses that 
 are called " mural " were in King Edward's time free of every- 
 thing except army service and wall-work.' Then of Chester 
 we read this 2 : 'To repair the wall and the bridge, the reeve 
 
 1 D. B. i. 154. 2 D. B. i. 262 b.
 
 The Boroughs. 189 
 
 called out one man from every hide in the county, and the 
 lord whose man did not come paid 40s. to the king and earl.' 
 The duty of maintaining the bulwark of the county's borough is 
 incumbent on the magnates of the county. They discharge it 
 by keeping haws in the borough and burgesses in those haws 1 . 
 
 We may doubt whether the duty of the county to its Henry the 
 borough has gone no farther than mere * wall- work.' A tale the W Ger- 
 from the older Saxony may come in well at this point. When man burgs> 
 the German king Henry the Fowler was building burgs in 
 Saxony and was playing the part that had lately been played 
 in England by Edward and ^Ethelflsed, he chose, we are told, 
 the ninth man from among the agrarii milites ; these chosen 
 men were to live in the burgs ; they were to build dwellings 
 there for their fellows (confamiliares) who were to remain in the 
 country tilling the soil and carrying a third of the produce 
 to the burgs, and in these burgs all concilia and conventus and 
 convivia were to be held 2 . Modern historians have found in this 
 story some difficulties which need not be noticed here. Only 
 the core of it interests us. Certain men are clubbed together 
 into groups of nine for the purpose of maintaining the burg 
 as a garrisoned and victualled stronghold in which all will 
 find room in case a hostile inroad be made. 
 
 Turning to England we shall not forget how in the year The shire 
 894 Alfred divided his forces into two halves ; half were to thefrTown 
 take the field, half to remain at home, besides the men who houses - 
 were to hold the burgs 3 ; but at all events we shall hardly go 
 astray if we suggest that the thegns of the shire have been 
 bound to keep houses and retainers in the borough of their 
 shire and that this duty has been apportioned among the great 
 estates 4 . We find that the baron of Domesday Book has a 
 
 1 It will be understood that we are not contending for an exact cor- 
 respondence between civil and military geography. Oxford and Wallingford 
 are border towns. Berkshire men help to maintain Oxford, and Oxfordshire 
 men help to maintain Wallingford. 
 
 2 Widukind, i. 35. For comments see Waitz, Heinrich V. 95; Eichter, 
 Annalen, iii. 8; Giesebrecht, Kaiserzeit (ed. 5), i. 222, 811; Keutgen, Ursprung 
 der deutschen Stadtverfassung, p. 44. Giesebrecht holds that Edward's 
 measures may well have been Henry's model. 
 
 3 A.-S. Chron. ann. 894. 
 
 4 A charter of 899 (K. v. p. 141) professes to tell how King Alfred, Abp 
 Plegmund and /Ethelred ealdorman of the Mercians held a moot 'do 
 instauratione urbis Londoniae.' One result of this moot was that two plots of 
 land inside the walls, with hythes outside the walls, were given by the king,
 
 190 Domesday Book. 
 
 few burgesses in the borough and that these few burgesses 
 ' belong' in some sense or another to his various rural manors. 
 Why should he keep a few burgesses in the borough and in 
 what sense can these men belong some to this manor and some 
 to that ? To all appearance this arrangement is not modern. 
 King Edmund conveyed to his thegn ^Ethelweard an estate 
 of seven hides at Tistead in Hampshire and therewith the- 
 haws within the burg of Winchester that belonged to those 
 seven hides 1 . When the Bishop of Worcester loaned out lands 
 to his thegns, the lands carried with them haws in the ' port ' 
 of Worcester 2 . We have all read of the ceorl who ' throve to 
 thegn-right.' He had five hides of his own land, a church and 
 a kitchen, a bell-tower and a burh-geat-setl, which, to our 
 thinking, is just a house in the ' gate/ the street of the burh 3 . 
 He did not acquire a town-house in order that he might enjoy 
 the pleasures of the town. He acquired it because, if he was 
 to be one of the great men of the county, he was bound to 
 keep in the county's burh retainers who would do the wall- 
 work and hoard provisions sent in to meet the evil day when 
 all men would wish to be behind the walls of a burh. 
 The We have it in our modern heads that the medieval borough 
 
 iiftL 8 is a sanctuary of peace, an oasis of ' industrialism ' in the wil- 
 roug ' derness of ' militancy.' Now a sanctuary of peace the borough 
 is from the very first. An exceptional and exalted peace 
 reigns over it. If you break that peace you incur the king's 
 burh-bryce. But we may strongly suspect that the first burg- 
 men, the first burgenses, were not an exceptionally peaceful 
 folk. Those burhwaras of London who thrashed Swegen 4 and 
 chose kings were no sleek traders; nor must we speak con- 
 temptuously of ' trained bands of apprentices ' or of ' the civic 
 militia.' In all probability these burg-men were of all men 
 
 the one to the church of Canterbury, the other to the church of Worcester. 
 How will the instauratio of London be secured by such grants ? 
 
 1 K. 1144 (v. 280). Other cases : K. 663 (Chichester), 673 (Winchester), 
 705 (Warwick), 724 (Warwick), 746 (Oxford), 1235 (Winchester). 
 
 2 K. 765-6, 805. 
 
 3 Schmid, App. V. This might mean a seat (of justice) in the gate of his 
 own burh. But this document will hardly be older than, if so old as, cent, x., 
 by which time we should suppose that burh more often pointed to a borough 
 than to a strong house. We may guess that in the latter sense it was 
 supplanted by the hall of which we read a great deal in Domesday. See above, 
 p. 109. However, it does not seem certain that O. E. geat can mean street. 
 
 4 A.-S. Chron. ann. 994.
 
 The Boroughs. 191 
 
 in the realm the most professionally warlike. Were we to 
 say that in the boroughs the knightly element was strong 
 we might mislead, for the word knight has had chivalrous 
 adventures. However, we may believe that the burgensis 
 of the tenth century very often was a cniht, a great man's 
 cniht, and that if not exactly a professional soldier (pro- 
 fessional militancy was but beginning) he was kept in the 
 borough for a military purpose and was perhaps being fed 
 by the manor to which he belonged. These knights formed 
 gilds for religious and convivial purposes. At Cambridge there 
 was a gild of thegns, who were united in blood-brotherhood. 
 We can not be certain that all these thegns habitually lived 
 in Cambridge. Perhaps we should rather say that already a 
 Cambridgeshire club had its head-quarters in Cambridge and 
 there held its 'morning-speeches' and its drinking bouts. 
 These thegns had 'knights' who seem to have been in some 
 sort inferior members of the gild and to have been bound by 
 its rules 1 . Then we hear of 'knight-gilds' at London and 
 Canterbury and Winchester 2 . Such gilds would be models for 
 the merchant-gilds of after-days, and indeed when not long 
 after the Conquest we catch at Canterbury our first glimpse 
 of a merchant-gild, its members are calling themselves knights : 
 knights of the chapman-gild 3 . -Among the knights who dwelt 
 in the burg such voluntary societies were the more needful, 
 because these men had not grown up together as members 
 of a community. They came from different districts and had 
 different lords. In this heterogeneity we may also see one 
 reason why a very stringent peace, the king's own house-peace, 
 should be maintained, and why the borough should have a 
 moot of its own. When compared with a village there is 
 something artificial about the borough. . 
 
 This artificiality exercised an influence over the later fate of Bu 
 the boroughs. The ground had been cleared for the growth of * 8 
 a new kind of community, one whose members were not bound 
 together by feudal, proprietary, agricultural ties. But the 
 strand that we have been endeavouring to trace is broken at 
 
 1 Thorpe, Diplomatarium, 610. When the Confessor sends a writ to 
 London he addresses it to the bishop, portreeve and burh-thegus. See K. iv. 
 pp. 856, 857, 861,872. 
 
 2 Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 183, 189. 
 8 Gross, op. cit. ii. 37.
 
 192 Domesday Book. 
 
 the Conquest. The castle arises. It is garrisoned by knights 
 who are more heavily armed and more professionally militant 
 than were their predecessors. The castle is now what wants 
 defending; the knights who defend it form no part of the 
 burghal community, and perhaps ' the castle fee ' is in law no 
 part of the borough. And yet let us see how in the twelfth 
 century the king's castle at Norwich was manned. It was 
 manned by the knights of the Abbot of St Edmund's. One 
 troop served there for three months and then was relieved by 
 another, and those who were thus set free went home to the 
 manors with which the abbot had enfeoffed them and which 
 they held by the service of castle-guard 1 . Much in this 
 arrangement is new ; the castle itself is new ; but it is no 
 new thing, we take it, that the burh should be garrisoned by 
 the knights of abbots or earls. And who built the castles, who 
 built the Tower of London ? Let us read what the chronicler 
 says of the year 1097 : Also many shires which belonged to 
 London for work 2 were sorely harassed by the wall that they 
 wrought around the tower, and by the bridge, which had been 
 nearly washed away, and by the work of the king's hall that 
 was wrought at Westminster. There were shires or districts 
 which from of old owed this work or work of this kind to 
 London-bury 3 . 
 
 Borough Long before the Conquest, however, a force had begun to 
 
 market, play which was to give to the boroughs their most permanent 
 characteristic. They were to be centres of trade. We must 
 not exclude the hypothesis that some places were fortified and 
 converted into burgs because they were already the focuses of 
 such commerce as there was. But the general logic of the 
 process we take to have been this : The king's burh enjoys a 
 special peace : Even the men who are going to or coming from 
 it are under royal protection: Therefore within its walls men 
 can meet together to buy and sell in safety : Also laws which 
 are directed against theft command that men shall not buy and 
 sell elsewhere : Thus a market is established : Traders begin to 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 257. 
 
 2 A.-S. Chron. ann. 1097 : ' Eac manege sciran J>e mid weorce to Lundenne 
 belumpon...' Thorpe thought good to substitute scipan for sciran. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 298. .Outside York were some lands which gelded with the city; 
 et in tribus operibus Regis cum civibus erant.' This refers to the trinoda 
 necessitous.
 
 The Boroughs. 193 
 
 build booths round the market-place and to live in the borough. 
 A theory has indeed been brilliantly urged which would find 
 the legal germ of the borough rather in a market-peace than in 
 the peace of a burg 1 . But this doctrine has difficulties to meet. 
 A market-peace is essentially temporary, while the borough's 
 peace is eternal. -A market court, if it arises, will have a 
 jurisdiction only over bargains made and offences committed 
 on market-days, whereas the borough court has a general 
 competence and hears pleas relating to the property in houses 
 and lands. Here in England during the Angevin time the 
 ' franchise,' or royally granted right, of holding a market is quite 
 distinct from the legal essence of the borough. Lawful markets 
 are held in many places that are not boroughs ; indeed in the 
 end by calling a place ' a mere market-town ' we should imply 
 that it was no borough. Already in Domesday Book this seems 
 to be the case. Markets are being held and market-tolls are 
 being taken in many vills which are not of burghal rank 3 . 
 Perhaps also we may see the borough-peace and the market- 
 peace lying side by side. In the Wallingford of the Confessor's 
 day there were many persons who had sake and soke within 
 their houses. If any one spilt blood and escaped into one of 
 those houses before he was attached, the owner received the 
 blood-wite. But it was not so on Saturdays, for then the money 
 went to the king 'because of the market 3 .' Thus the king's 
 borough-peace seems to be intensified on market-days ; on 
 those days it will even penetrate the houses of the immunists. 
 So at Dover some unwonted peace or ' truce ' prevailed in the 
 town from S*. Michael's Day to S k . Andrew's: that is to say, 
 during the herring season 4 . 
 
 The establishment of a market is not one of those indefinite Establisb- 
 phenomena which the historian of law must make over to the markets, 
 historian of economic processes. It is a definite and a legal act. 
 The market is established by law. It is established by law 
 which prohibits men from buying and selling elsewhere than in 
 a duly constituted market. To prevent an easy disposal of 
 
 1 Sohm, Die Entstehung des deutschen Stadtewesens : Leipzig, 1890. 
 8 Ellis, Introduction, i. 248-253. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 56 b. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 1. Black Book of the Admiralty, ii. 158: 'the herring season, 
 that is from S'. Michael's Day to S*. Clement's (Nov. 23).' S 1 . Andrew's Day 
 is Dec. 1. 
 
 ' M. 13
 
 '194 Domesday Book. 
 
 stolen goods is the aim of this prohibition. Our legislators are 
 always thinking of the cattle-lifter. At times they seem to go 
 the full length of decreeing that only in a ' port ' may anything 
 be bought or sold, unless it be of trifling value; but other 
 dooms would also sanction a purchase concluded before the 
 hundred court. He who buys elsewhere runs a risk of being 
 treated as a thief if he happens to buy stolen goods 1 . Official 
 i witnesses are to be appointed for this purpose in every hundred 
 and in every burh : twelve in every hundred and small burh, 
 thirty-three in a large burh 2 . Here once more we see the burh 
 co-ordinated with the hundred. A by-motive favours this 
 establishment of markets. Those who traffic in the safety of 
 the king's burh may fairly be asked to pay some toll to the 
 king. They enjoy his peace; perhaps also the use of royal 
 weights and measures, known and trustworthy, is another part 
 of the valuable consideration that they receive. First and last 
 throughout the history of the boroughs toll is a matter of 
 importance 3 . It gives the king a revenue from the borough, 
 a revenue that he can let to farm. Also, though we do not 
 think that the borough court was in its origin a mere market 
 court, the disputes of the market-place will provide the borough 
 court with plentiful litigation, and in this quarter also the king 
 will find a new source of income. Among the old land-books 
 that which speaks most expressly of the profits of jurisdiction 
 as the subject-matter of a gift is a charter which concerns the 
 . town of Worcester. ^Ethelred and ^Ethelflaed, the ealdorman 
 and lady of the Mercians, have, at the request of the bishop, 
 built a burh at Worcester, and they declare that of all the 
 rights that appertain to their lordship both in market (on 
 ceapstowe) and in street, within the burh and without, they 
 have given half to God and S*. Peter, with the witness of King 
 Alfred and all the wise of Mercia. The lord of the church 
 is to have half of all, be it land-fee, or fiht-wite, stealing, 
 wohceapung (fines for buying or selling contrary to the rules 
 of the market) or borough-wall-scotting 4 . Quite apart from 
 
 1 Edward, i. 1; JSthelstan, n. 12, 1-3; iv. 2; vi. 10; Edmund, m. 5; 
 Edgar, -iv. 7-11; Leg. Will, i; 46; Leg. Will. in. 10. See- Schmid, Glossar. 
 s.v. Marktrecht. 
 
 - Edgar, iv. 3-6. We should expect rather 36 than 33, and xxxvi might 
 , easily become xxxiii. ... ,'-\ ,-*) : .iJ 
 
 3 K. 280 (ii. 63),. 316 (ii. 118). 
 
 4 Kemble, Cod. Dip. 1075 (v. 142); Kemble, Saxons, ii. 328; Thorpe, 136:
 
 The Boroughs. 195 
 
 the rent of houses, there is a revenue to be gained from the 
 borough. 
 
 Another rule has helped to define the borough, and this Moneyers 
 rule also has its root among the regalia. No one, says King burh. 
 ^Ethelstan, is to coin money except in a port; in Canterbury 
 there may be seven moneyers, four of the king, two of the 
 bishop, one of the abbot ; in Rochester three, two of the king, 
 one of the bishop ; in London-borough eight ; in Winchester 
 six ; in Lewes two ; in Hastings one ; in Chichester one ; in 
 Hampton two ; in Wareham two ; in Exeter two ; in Shaftesbury 
 two, and in each of the other boroughs one 1 . Already, then, a 
 burh is an entity known to the law : every burh is to have its 
 moneyer. 
 
 We have thus to consider the burh (1) as a stronghold, a Burh and 
 place of refuge, a military centre : (2) as a place which has a 
 moot that is a unit in the general, national system of moots: 
 (3) as a place in which a market is held. When in the laws 
 this third feature is to be made prominent, the burh is spoken 
 of as a port, and perhaps from the first there might be a port 
 which was not a burh 1 . The word port was applied to inland 
 towns. To this usage of it the portmoot or portmanmoot that 
 in after days we may find in boroughs far from the coast bears 
 abiding testimony. On the other hand, except on the seaside, 
 .this word has not become a part of many English place names*. 
 If, as seems probable, it is the Latin portus, we apparently learn 
 from the use made of it that at one time the havens (and some 
 of those havens may not have been in England) were the only 
 known spots where there was much buying and selling. But 
 be it remembered that a market-place, a ceap-stow, does not 
 
 * ge landfeoh, ge fihtwite, ge stale, ge wohceapung, ge burhwealles sceatinge.' 
 In D. B. i. 173 it is said that the Bishop of Worcester had received the third 
 penny of the borough. Apparently in the Confessor's day he received 6, the 
 third of a sum of 18. As to the early history of markets, see the paper 
 contributed by Mr C. I. Elton to the Eeport of the Eoyal Commission on 
 Market Bights, 1889. 
 
 1 .SHhelstan, n. 14. 
 
 2 The general equivalence of port and burh we may perhaps infer from 
 .iEthelstan, 11. 14 : No one is to coin money outside a port, and there is to be a 
 moneyer in every burh. 
 
 3 Stockport, Langport, Amport, Newport-Pagnell, Milborne Port, Littleport 
 are instances. But a very small river might be sufficient to make a place a 
 -haven. 
 
 132
 
 196 
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 Military 
 and com- 
 mercial 
 elements 
 in the 
 borough. 
 
 The 
 
 borough 
 and agri- 
 culture. 
 
 imply a resident population of buyers and sellers ; it does not 
 imply the existence of retailers 1 . 
 
 We can not analyse the borough population ; we can not 
 weigh the commercial element implied by port or the military 
 element implied by burh; but to all seeming the former had 
 been rapidly getting the upper hand during the century which 
 preceded the making of Domesday Book. If we are on the 
 right track, there was a time when the thegns of the shire must 
 have regarded their borough haws rather as a burden than as a 
 source of revenue. They kept those haws because they were 
 bound to keep them. On the other hand, the barons of the 
 Conqueror's day are deriving some income from these houses. 
 Often it is very small. Count Hugh, for example, has just one 
 burgess at Buckingham who pays him twenty-six pence a year 2 . 
 All too soon, it may be, had the boroughs put off their 
 militancy. Had they retained it, England might never have 
 been conquered. Houses which should have been occupied by 
 ' knights,' were occupied by chapmen. 
 
 But this is not the whole difficulty. Even if we could 
 closely watch the change which substitutes a merchant or 
 shopkeeper for a ' knight ' as the typical burg-man or burgess, 
 we should still have to investigate an agrarian problem. Very 
 likely we ought to think that even on the eve of the Conquest 
 the group of men which dwells within the walls is often a group 
 which by tilling the soil produces a great part of its own food, 
 
 1 Seemingly if this O.-E. port is not Lat. portus, it is Lat. porta, and there 
 is some fascination about the suggestion that the burh-geat, or in modern 
 German the Burg-gasse, in which the market is held, was described in Latin as 
 porta burgi. In A.D. 762 (K. i. p. 133) we have a house 'quae iam ad 
 Quenegatum urbis Dorouernis in foro posita est.' In A.D. 845 (K. ii. p. 26) we 
 find a ' publica strata ' in Canterbury 'ubi appellatur Weoweraget,' that is, the 
 gate of the men of Wye. But what we have to account for is the adoption of 
 port as an English word, and if our ancestors might have used geat, they need 
 not have borrowed. In A.D. 857 (K. ii. p. 63) the king bestows on the church 
 of Worcester certain liberties at a spot in the town of London, 'hoc est, quod 
 habeat intus liberaliter modium et pondera et mensura sicut in porto mos est 
 ad fruendum.' To have public weights and measures is characteristic of a 
 portus ( = haven). The word may have spread outwards from London. Dr 
 Stubbs (Const. Hist. i. 439) gives a weighty vote for porta; but the continental 
 usage deserves attention. Pirenne, Bevue historique, Ivii. 75 : ' Toutes les villes 
 anciennes [en Flandre] s'y forment au bord des eaux et portent le nom carac- 
 teristique de portus, c'est-a-dire de debarcaderes. C'est de ce mot portus que 
 vient le mot fiamand poorter, qui designe le bourgeois.' See D. B. i. 181 b t 
 in Hereford Port.' 
 
 a D. B. i. 143.
 
 The Boroughs. 197 
 
 though some men may be living by handicraft or trade and 
 some may still be supported by those manors to which they 
 'belong.' In one case the institutions that are characteristic 
 of burh and port may have been superimposed upon those of an 
 ancient village which had common fields. In another an almost 
 uninhabited spot may have been chosen as the site for a strong- 
 hold. In the former and, as we should fancy, the commoner 
 case a large choice is open to the constructive historian, for he 
 may suppose that the selected village was full of serfs or full of 
 free proprietors, that the soil was royal demesne or had various 
 landlords. In one instance he may think that he sees the 
 coalescence of several little communities that were once distinct ; 
 in another the gradual occupation of a space marked out by 
 Roman walls. The one strong hint that is given to us by 
 Domesday Book and later documents is that our generalities 
 should be few and that, were this possible, each borough should 
 be separately studied. 
 
 As a rule, quite half of the burgesses in any of those county Burgesses 
 towns that are fully described in the survey are the king's own vators. 
 burgesses, and in some cases his share is very large. This 
 suggests that the land on which the borough stands has been 
 royal land and that the king provided the shire thegns with 
 sites for their haws. For their haws they have sometimes been 
 paying him small rents. On the other hand, at Leicester, 
 though the king has some 40 houses, the great majority belong 
 to Hugh of Grantmesnil. He has about 80 houses which 
 pertain to 17 different manors and which may in the past 
 have been held by many different thegns ; but he also holds 
 110 houses which are not allotted to manors and which have 
 probably come to him as the representative of the earls and 
 ealdormen of an older time 1 . This looks as if in this case the 
 soil had been not royal but ' comital ' laud at the time when 
 the place was fortified and when the landowners of the shire, 
 including perhaps the king, were obliged to build houses within 
 the wall. But though we fully admit that each of our boroughs 
 has lived its own life, our evidence seems to point to the 
 conclusion that in those truly ancient boroughs of which we 
 have been speaking, though there might be many inhabitants 
 who held and who cultivated arable land lying without the 
 walls, there were from a remote time other burgesses who were 
 
 1 D. B. i. 230.
 
 198 Domesday Booh 
 
 not landowners and were not agriculturists and yet were men 
 of importance in the borough. If we look, for example, at the 
 elaborate account of Colchester we shall first read the names of 
 the king's burgesses. ' Of these 276 burgesses of the king, the 
 majority have one house and a plot of land of from one to 
 twenty-five acres ; some possess more than one house and some 
 have none; they had in all 355 houses and held 1296 acres 
 of land 1 '. But these were not the only burgesses. Various 
 magnates had houses which were annexed to their rural manors. 
 Count Eustace (to name a few) had 12, Geoffrey de Mandeville 
 2, the Abbot of Westminster 4, the Abbess of Barking 3, and 
 seemingly to these houses no strips in the arable fields were 
 attached 2 . Thus, though many of the burgesses may till the 
 soil, the borough community is not an agrarian community. 
 We can not treat it as a village community that has prospered 
 and slowly changed its habits. A new principle has been 
 introduced, an element of heterogeneity. The men who meet 
 each other in court and market, the men who will hereafter 
 farm the court and market, are not the shareholders in an 
 agricultural concern. 
 
 Burgage That tenurial heterogeneity of which we have been speaking 
 
 had another important effect. When in later days a rural 
 manor is being raised to the rank of a liber burgus, the intro- 
 duction of ' burgage tenure ' seems to be regarded as the very 
 essence of the enfranchisement 3 . Probably this feature had 
 appeared in many boroughs at an early date. The lord with 
 lands in Oxfordshire may have been bound to keep a few houses 
 and retainers in Oxford. If, however, the commercial element 
 in the town began to get the better of the military element, if 
 Oxford became a centre of trade, then a house in Oxford could 
 be let for a money rent. In Domesday Book the barons 
 are drawing rents from their borough houses. If any return 
 is to be made by the occupier to the owner it will take the 
 form of a money rent; it can hardly take another form. 
 Thus tenure at a money rent would become the typical tenure 
 of a burgage tenement. It will be a securely heritable tenure, 
 because the landlord is an absentee and has too few tenants in 
 
 1 Cutts, Colchester, 65; Bound in The Antiquary, vol. vi. (1882) p. 5. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 106-7. See Round, op. cit., p. 252. 
 8 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 629.
 
 The Boroughs. . 199' 
 
 the town to require the care of a resident reeve. But there 
 may have been many dwellers in some of the boroughs who 
 were bound to help in the cultivation of a stretch of royal or 
 episcopal demesne that lay close to the walls. In the west, 
 some of the king's burgesses seem to have been holding under ; 
 onerous terms. At Shrewsbury, which lies near the border of 
 Wales where every girl's marriage gave rise to an amobyr, a 
 maid had to pay ten, a widow twenty shillings when she took a 
 husband, and a relief of ten shillings was due when a burgess 
 died 1 . At Hereford the reeve's consent was necessary when a 
 burgage was to be sold, and he took a third of the price. When 
 a burgess died the king got his horse and arms (these Hereford 
 burgesses were fighting men); if he had no horse, then ten 
 shillings ' or his land with the houses/ Any one who was too 
 poor to do his service might abandon his tenement to the reeve 
 without having to pay for it. Such an entry as this seems to tell 
 us that the services were no trivial return for the tenement 2 . 
 
 On the other hand, we may see at Stamford what seem to Eastern 
 be the remains of a very free group of settlers, presumably Astern 
 Danes. The town contains among other houses 77 -houses of boroughs< 
 sokemen 'who hold their lands in demesne and seek lords' 
 wherever they please, and over whom the king has nothing 
 but wite and heriot and toll.' These may be the. same persons 
 who hold 272 acres of land and pay no rent for it 3 . At 
 Norwich, again, we seem to hear of a time when the burgesses 
 were free to commend themselves to whomever they would, and 
 were therefore living in houses which were all their own, and 
 for which they paid no rent 4 . It is very possible that, so far as 
 landlordly rights are concerned, there was as much difference 
 between the eastern and the western towns as there was 
 between the eastern and the western villages. Still if we 
 look at borough after borough, tenure at a money rent is the 
 tenure of, the burgage houses that we expect to find, and such 
 a tenure, even if in its origin it has been precarious, is likely to 
 
 1 D. B. i. 252. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 179. So at Chester (i. 262 b) it is considered possible that the 
 heir -will not be able to pay the relief of ten shillings and will forfeit the* 
 tenement. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 336. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 116. See also the case of Thetford (D. B. ii. 119), where there 
 had been numerous burgesses who could choose their lords.
 
 200 
 
 Domesday Book. 
 
 Common 
 property 
 of the 
 burgesses. 
 
 The cdm- 
 munity as 
 land- 
 holders. 
 
 become heritable and secure. As to the shire thegns, they 
 have in some cases paid to the king small rents for their haws ; 
 but in others, for example at Oxford, tenure by wall-work has 
 been their tenure, and when in other towns we find them paying 
 rent to the king we may perhaps see commuted wall-work. 
 
 Traces are few in Domesday Book of any property that 
 can be regarded as the property of a nascent municipal cor- 
 poration, and even of any that can be called the joint or 
 common property of the burgesses. In general each burgess 
 holds his house in the town of the king or of some other lord 
 by a several title, and, if he has land in the neighbouring fields, 
 this also he holds by a several title. 'In the borough of 
 Nottingham there were in King Edward's day 183 burgesses 
 and 19 villani. To this borough belong 6 carucates of land for 
 the king's geld and one meadow and certain small woods... This 
 land was divided between 38 burgesses and [the king] received 
 75s. 7d from the rent of the land and the works of the burgesses.' 
 ' In the borough of Derby there were in King Edward's day 243 
 
 resident burgesses To this borough belong 12 carucates of 
 
 land for the geld, but they might be ploughed by 8 teams. 
 This land was divided among 41 burgesses who had 12 teams 1 .' 
 In these cases we see plainly enough that such arable land 
 as is in any way connected with the borough has been held by 
 but a few out of the total number of the burgesses. Therefore 
 we must deal cautiously with entries that are less explicit. 
 When, for example, in the description of Stamford we read 
 " Lagemanni et burgenses habent cclxxii. acras sine omni con- 
 suetudine 2 ,' we must not at once decide that there is any 
 ownership by the burgesses as a corporation, or any joint 
 ownership, or even that all the burgesses have strips in these 
 fields, though apparently the burgesses who have strips pay 
 no rent for them. This is the fact and the only fact that 
 the commissioners desire to record. They do not care whether 
 every burgess has a piece, or whether (as was certainly the 
 case elsewhere) only some of them held land outside the walls. 
 When of Norwich we read ' et in burgo tenent burgenses xliii. 
 capellas 8 ,' we do not suppose that all the Norwich burghers 
 have chapels, still less that they hold the forty-three chapels 
 
 1 D. B. i. 280. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 336 b. 
 
 * D. B. ii. 117.
 
 The Boroughs. 201 
 
 as co-owners, still less that these chapels belong to a cor- 
 poration. We remember that the Latin language has neither 
 a definite nor an indefinite article. Therefore when of 80 
 acres at Canterbury, which are now held by Ralph de Co- 
 lombiers, we read ' quas tenebant burgenses in alodia de rege,' 
 we need not suppose that these acres had belonged to the 
 (i.e. to all the) burgesses of Canterbury 1 . So of Exeter it is 
 written: 'Burgenses Exoniae urbis habent extra civitatem 
 terram xii. caruc[arum] quae nullam consuetudinem reddunt 
 nisi ad ipsam civitatem.' This, though another interpretation 
 is possible, may only mean that there are outside the city 
 twelve plough-lands which are held by burgesses whose rents 
 go to make up that sum of 18 which is paid to the king, 
 or rather in part to the sheriff and in part to the queen dowager, 
 as the ferm of the city 8 . Concerning Colchester there is an 
 entry which perhaps ascribes to the community of burgesses 
 the ownership or the tenancy of fourscore acres of land and of 
 a strip eight perches in width surrounding the town wall ; but 
 this entry is exceedingly obscure 2 . Another dark case occurs 
 at Canterbury. We are told that the burgesses or certain 
 burgesses used to hold land of the king ' in their gild 4 .' Along 
 with this we must read another passage which states how 
 in the same city the Archbishop has twelve burgesses and 
 thirty-two houses which 'the clerks of the vill hold in their 
 gild.' Apparently in this last case we have a clerical club 
 
 1 D. B. i. 2. In 923 (K. v. p. 186) we hear of land outside Canterbury 
 called Burhutiare bocaceras, apparently acres booked to [certain] burgesses. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 100. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 107: 'In commune burgensum iiii. xx. acrae terrae; et circa 
 murum viii. percae ; de quo toto per annum habent burgenses Ix. sol. ad 
 servicium regis si opus fuerit, sin autem, in commune dividunt.' As to this 
 most difficult passage, see Bound, Antiquary, vol. vi. (1882) p. 97. Perhaps 
 the most natural interpretation of it is that the community or commune of the 
 burgesses holds this land and receives by way of rent from tenants, to whom it 
 is let, the sum of 60 shillings a year, which, if this be necessary, goes to make 
 up what the borough has to pay to the king, or otherwise is divisible among 
 the burgesses. But, as Mr Bound rightly remarks, 60 shillings for this land 
 would be a large rent. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 2: 'Ipsi quoque burgenses habebant de rege 33 acras terrae in 
 gildam suam." Another version says, '33 agros terre quos burgenses semper 
 habuerunt in gilda eorum de donis omnium regum.' The document here cited 
 is preserved in a cartulary of St Augustin, and is printed in Larking, 
 Domesday of Kent, App. 35. It is closely connected with the Domesday Survey 
 and is of the highest interest.
 
 202 Domesday Book. 
 
 or fraternity holding land, and the burgher's gild may be of 
 much the same nature, a voluntary association. Not very 
 long after the date of Domesday, for Anselm was still alive, 
 an exchange of lands was made between the convent (hired, 
 familid) of Christ Church and the 'cnihts' of the chapman 
 gild of Canterbury. The transaction takes place between the 
 ' hired ' on the one hand, the ' heap ' (for such is the word 
 employed) on the other. The witnesses to this transaction 
 are Archbishop Anselm and the 'hired' on the one hand, 
 Calveal the portreeve and 'the eldest men of the heap' on 
 the other 1 . But to see a municipal corporation in the burghers' 
 gild of Domesday Book would be very rash. We do not know 
 that all the burghers belonged to it or that it had any govern- 
 mental functions 2 . 
 
 Eights of We may of course find that a group of burgesses has 
 'rights of common;' but rights of common, though they are 
 rights which are to be enjoyed in common, are apt to be 
 common rights in no other sense, for each commoner has a 
 several title to send his beasts onto the pasture. Thus 'all 
 the burgesses of Oxford have pasture in common outside the 
 wall which brings in [to the king] 6s. 8d 3 .' The soil is the 
 king's ; the burgesses pay for the right of grazing it. The 
 roundness of the sum that they pay seems indeed to hint 
 at some arrangement between the king and the burgesses 
 taken in mass; but probably each burgess, and the lord of 
 each burgess, regards a right of pasture as appurtenant to 
 a burgage tenement. The case is striking, for we have seen 
 how heterogeneous a group these Oxford burgesses were 4 . No 
 less than nine prelates, to say nothing of earls and barons, 
 had burgesses in the city. We must greatly doubt whether 
 there is any power in any assembly of the burgesses to take 
 from the Bishop of Winchester or the Count of Mortain the 
 customary rights of pasture that have been enjoyed by the 
 
 Absence of ^ enan ts of his tenements. 
 
 communal- \y e might perhaps have guessed that the boroughs would 
 
 boroughs. 
 
 1 Gross, Gild Merchant, ii. 37. 
 
 2 We do not even know for certain that when our record says that the 
 burgesses and the clerks held land ' in gildam suam,' more was meant than that 
 the land was part of their geldable property. See Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 189. 
 In the Exon Domesday the geld is gildum. 
 
 * D. B. i. 154. * See above, p. 179.
 
 The Boroughs. 203 
 
 be the places of all others in which such communalism as there 
 was in the ancient village community would maintain and 
 develop itself, until in course of time the borough corporation, 
 the ideal borough, would stand out as the owner of lands 
 which lay within and without the wall. But, if we have not 
 been going astray, we may see why this did not happen, at 
 least in what we may call the old national boroughs. The 
 burgensic group was not homogeneous enough. We may sup- 
 pose that some members of it had inherited arable strips and 
 pasture rights from the original settlers ; but others were 
 ' knights ' who had been placed in the haws of the shire-thegns, 
 or were merchants and craftsmen who had been attracted by 
 the market, and for them there would be no room in an old 
 agrarian scheme. Indeed it is not improbable that, even as 
 regards rights of pasture, there was more difference between 
 burgess and burgess than there was between villager and 
 villager. In modern times it is not unknown that some of 
 the burgesses will have pasture rights, while others will have 
 none, and in those who are thus favoured we may fancy that 
 we see the successors in title of the king's tenants who turned 
 out their beasts on the king's land 1 . 
 
 We have seen that in the boroughs a group of men is The 
 formed whose principle of cohesion is not to be found in community 
 land tenure. The definition of a burgess may involve the 
 possession of a house within or hard by the walls; but the 
 burgesses do not coalesce as being the tenants or the men 
 of one lord; and yet coalesce they will. They are united in 
 and by the moot and the market-place, united under the king 
 in whose peace they traffic; and then they are soon united 
 over against the king, who exacts toll from them and has 
 favours to grant them. They aspire to farm their own tolls, 
 to manage their own market and their own court. The king's 
 
 1 In modern York the freemen inhabiting the different wards had rights of 
 .pasture varying from ward to ward: Appendix to Eeport of Municipal 
 Corporations' Commissioners, 1835, p. 1745. York is one of the towns in 
 which we may perhaps suppose that there has been a gradual union of several 
 communities which were at one time agrarianly distinct. See D. B. i. 298. 
 Dr Stubbs seems to regard this as a common case and speaks of ' the townships 
 which made up the burh' (Const. Hist. i. 101). We can not think that the 
 evidence usually points in this direction, and have grave doubts as to the 
 existence within the walls of various communities that were called townships. 
 "Within borough walls we must not leap from parish to township.
 
 204 Domesday Book. 
 
 rights are pecuniary rights ; he is entitled to collect numerous 
 small sums. Instead of these he may be willing to take a 
 fixed sum every year, or, in other words, to let his rights to 
 farm. 
 
 The farm This step seems to have been very generally taken before 
 borough, the Conquest. Already the boroughs were farmed. Now the 
 sums which the king would draw from a borough would be 
 of several different kinds. In the first place, there would be 
 the profits of the market and of the borough court. In the 
 second place, there would be the gafol, the ' haw-gavel ' and 
 ' land-gavel ' arising from tenements belonging to the king 
 and' occupied by burgesses. In the third place, there might 
 be the danegeld ; but the danegeld was a tax, an occasional 
 tax, and for the moment we may leave it out of our con- 
 sideration. Now the profits of the market and court seem to 
 have been farmed. The sums that they bring in to the king 
 are round sums. The farmer seems to have been the sheriff or 
 in some cases the king's portreeve. We can find no case in 
 which it is absolutely clear to our minds that the borough itself, 
 the communitas burgi, is reckoned to be the king's farmer. 
 Again, the king's gafol, that is his burgage rents, may be farmed : 
 they are computed at a round sum. Thus at Huntingdon 
 ten pounds are paid by way of land-gafol, and we may be fairly 
 certain that the sum of the rents of the individual burgesses 
 who held their tenements immediately of the king (there were 
 other burgesses who belonged to the Abbot of Ramsey) did 
 not exactly make up this neat sum 1 . In this case, however, 
 the sum due to the king from his farmer, probably the sheriff, 
 in respect of the land-gafol is expressly distinguished from 
 the sum that he has to pay for the farm of the borough (ftrma 
 burgi): at least in its narrowest sense, the burgus which is 
 farmed is not a mass of lands and houses, it is a market and 
 a court 2 . But, though we find no case in which the community 
 of the borough is unambiguously treated as the king's farmer, 
 there are cases in which it seems to" come before us as the 
 sheriff's farmer. ' The burgesses ' of Northampton pay to the 
 sheriff 30. 10s. per annum: 'this belongs to bis farm 8 .' The 
 sheriff of Northamptonshire is liable to the king for a round 
 
 1 D. B. i. 203. As to the whole of this matter see Mr Bound's paper on 
 Domesday Finance in Domesday Studies, vol. i. 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 635. a D. B. i. 219.
 
 The Boroughs. 205 
 
 sum as the farm of the shire, but 'the burgesses' of North- 
 ampton are liable to the sheriff for a round sum. This may 
 mean that for this round sum they are jointly and severally 
 liable, while, on the other hand, they collect the tolls and fines, 
 perhaps also the king's burgage rents, and have an opportunity 
 of making profit by the transaction. 
 
 We must not be in haste to expel the sheriff from the The sheriff 
 boroughs of the shire, or to bring the burgesses into immediate borough's 
 contact with the king's treasury. We must remember that fann ' 
 at the beginning of Henry II.'s reign there is scarcely an 
 exception to the rule that the boroughs of the shire are in 
 the eyes of auditors at the Exchequer simply parts of that 
 county which the sheriff farms. So far as the farm is con- 
 cerned, the royal treasury knows nothing of any boroughs 1 . 
 The sheriff of Gloucestershire, for example, accounts for a 
 round sum which is the farm of his county ; neither he nor 
 any one else accounts to the king for any farm of the borough 
 of Gloucester. If, as is most probable, the borough is being 
 farmed, it is being farmed by some person or persons to whom, 
 not the king, but the sheriff has let it for a longer or shorter 
 period at a fixed rent. Here, again, we see the likeness between 
 a borough and a hundred. The king lets the shire to farm > 
 the shire includes hundreds and boroughs ; the sheriff ' lets 
 the hundreds to farm; the sheriff lets the boroughs to farm.' 
 A few years later a new arrangement is made. The king 
 begins to let the borough of Gloucester to farm. A sum of 
 50 (blanch) is now deducted from the rent that the sheriff' 
 has been paying for his shire, and, on the other hand, Osmund 
 the reeve accounts for 55, which is the rent of the borough. 
 We must not antedate a change which is taking place very 
 gradually in the middle of the twelfth century. Nor must we 
 at once reject the inference that, as the bailiffs to whom the 
 sheriff lets the hundreds are chosen by him, so also the bailiffs 
 or portreeves to whom he lets the boroughs are or have been 
 chosen by him. It seems very possible that one of the first 
 
 1 The case of London is anomalous; but not so anomalous as it is often 
 supposed to be. On this point see Bound, Geoffrey de Mandeville, 347 ff. On 
 the Pipe Roll of 2 Hen. II. (pp. 24, 28) the citizens of Lincoln are accounting 
 for a farm of 180, while the sheriff in consequence of this arrangement is 
 credited with 140 (blanch) when he accounts for the farm of the shire. This 
 is as yet a rare phenomenon.
 
 206 Domesday Boole. 
 
 steps towards independence that a borough takes is that its 
 burgesses induce the sheriff to accept their nominee as his 
 farmer of the town if they in mass will make themselves 
 jointly and severally liable for the rent. These movements 
 take place in the dark and we can not date them; but to 
 antedate them would be easy. 
 The com- We also see that the 'geld' that the borough has to pay 
 
 muuityand , ,, ,, 
 
 the geld, is a round sum that remains constant from year to year. 
 Cambridge, for example, is assessed at a hundred hides, Bedford 
 at half a hundred 1 . Now we have good reason to believe that, 
 in the open country also, a round sum of geld or (and this is the 
 same thing) a round number of hides had been thrown upon 
 the hundreds, that the sum thrown upon a hundred was then 
 partitioned among the vills, and that the sum thrown upon a 
 vill was partitioned among the persons who held land in the 
 vill. In the open country, however, when once the partition 
 had been made, the number of hides that was cast upon the 
 land of any one proprietor seems to have been fixed for good 
 and all 2 . If we suppose, for example, that a vill had been 
 assessed at ten hides and that five of those units had been 
 assigned to a certain Edward, then Edward or his successors in 
 title would always have to pay for five hides, and would have to 
 pay for no more although the other proprietors in the vill 
 obtained an exemption from the tax or were insolvent. In 
 short, the tax though originally distributed by a partitionary 
 method was not repartitionable. On the other hand, in the 
 boroughs a more communal arrangement seems to have pre- 
 vailed. In some sense or another, the whole borough, no matter 
 what its fortunes might be, remained answerable for the twenty, 
 fifty or a hundred hides that had been imposed upon it. Such 
 a difference would naturally arise. In the open country the 
 taxational hidation was supposed to represent and did represent, 
 albeit rudely, a state of facts that had once existed. The man 
 who was charged with a hide ought in truth to have had one 
 of those agrarian units that were commonly known as hides. 
 But when a borough was charged with hides, a method of 
 taxation that was adapted to and suggested by rural arrange- 
 ments was being inappropriately applied to what had become 
 
 1 As to the round sums cast on the boroughs, see Bound in Domesday 
 Studies, i. 117 ff. ; also Bound, Feudal England, 156. 
 8 This may not have been the case in East Anglia.
 
 The Boroughs. 207 
 
 or would soon become an urban district. Thus the gross sum 
 that is cast upon the borough does not split itself once and for 
 all into many small sums each of which takes root in a 
 particular tenement. The whole sum is exigible from the 
 whole borough every time a geld is imposed. It is repartition- 
 able. 
 
 For all this, however, we must be careful not to see more Partition 
 communalism or more local self-government than really exists. 
 At first sight we may think that we detect a communal or a 
 joint liability of all the burgesses for the whole sum that is 
 due from the borough in any one year. 'The English born' 
 burgesses of Shrewsbury send up a piteous wail 1 .- They still 
 have to pay the whole geld as they paid it in the Confessor's 
 day, although the earl has taken for his castle the sites of 
 fifty-one houses, and other fifty houses are waste, and forty- 
 three French burgesses hold houses which used to pay geld, 
 and the earl has given to the abbey, which he has founded, 
 thirty-nine burgesses who used to pay geld along with the 
 others. But, when we examine the matter more closely, we 
 may doubt whether there is here any joint and several (to say 
 nothing of any corporate) liability. Very various are the modes 
 in which a land-tax or house-tax may be assessed and levied. 
 Suppose a tax of 100 imposed upon a certain district in which 
 there are a hundred houses. Suppose it also to be law that, 
 though some of these houses come to the hands of elemosynary 
 corporations (which we will imagine to enjoy an immunity from 
 taxation) still the whole 100 must be raised annually from the 
 householders of the district. For all this, we have not as yet 
 decided that any householder will ever be liable, even in the 
 first instance, for more than his own particular share of the 
 100. A readjustment of taxation there must be. It may 
 take one of many forms. There may be a revaluation of the 
 district, and the 100 may be newly apportioned by some 
 meeting of householders or some government officer. But, 
 again, the readjustment may be automatic. Formerly there 
 were 100 houses to pay 100. Now there are 90 houses to 
 pay 100. That each of the 90 must pay ten-ninths of a pound 
 is a conclusion that the rule of three draws for us. In the 
 middle ages an automatic readjustment was all the easier 
 because of the common assumption that the value of lands 
 
 1 D. B. i. 252.
 
 208 Domesday Book. 
 
 and houses was known to every one and that one virgate in a 
 manor was as good as another, one ' haw ' in a borough as good 
 as another 1 . We do not say that the complaint of the burgesses 
 at Shrewsbury points to no more than an automatic readjust- 
 ment of taxation which all along has been a taxation of 
 individuals; still the warning is needful that the exaction 
 at regular or irregular intervals of a fixed amount from a 
 district, or from the householders or inhabitants of a district, 
 an amount which remains constant though certain portions of 
 the district obtain immunity from the impost, does not of 
 necessity point to any kind of liability that is not the liability 
 of one single individual for specific sums which he and he only 
 has to pay ; nor does it of necessity point to any self-governing 
 or self-assessing assembly of inhabitants 2 . 
 
 No corpor- Returning, however, to the case of Northampton, it certainly 
 
 piiedbythe seems to tell us of a composition, not indeed between the 
 
 farming burgesses and the king, but between the burgesses and the 
 
 borough, sheriff. 'The burgesses of Northampton pay to the sheriff 
 
 30. 10s.' We may believe that ' the burgesses ' who pay this 
 
 sum have a chance of making a profit. If so, ' the burgesses ' 
 
 are already beginning to farm 'the borough.' From this, 
 
 nevertheless, we must not leap to corporate liability or corporate 
 
 property. Very likely the sheriff regards every burgess of 
 
 Northampton as liable to him for the whole 30. 10s. ; very 
 
 certainly, as we think, he does not look for payment merely to 
 
 property which belongs, not to any individual burgess nor to 
 
 any sum of individual burgesses, but to ' the borough ' of 
 
 Northampton. Nor if the burgesses make profit out of tolls 
 
 and fines, does it follow that they have a permanent common 
 
 1 D. B. i. 298. Of York we read : ' In the geld of the city are 84 carucates 
 of land, each of which gelds as much as one house in the city.' This seems to 
 point to an automatic adjustment. To find out how much geld any house 
 pays, divide the total sum that is thrown upon York by the number of 
 houses + 84. 
 
 2 Mr Bound (Domesday Studies, i. 129) who has done more than anyone 
 else for the elucidation of the finance of Domesday, has spoken of ' the great 
 Anglo-Saxon principle of collective liability.' This 'may be a useful term, 
 provided that we distinguish (a) liability of a corporation for the whole tax 
 whenever it is levied ; (b) joint and several liability of all the burgesses for the 
 whole tax whenever it is levied ; (c) liability of each burgess for a share of the 
 whole tax, the amount that he must pay in any year being affected by an 
 increase or decrease in the number of contributories.
 
 TJie Boroughs. 209 
 
 purse ; they may divide the surplus every year 1 , or we may 
 suspect them of drinking the profits as soon as they are made. 
 
 Entries which describe the limits that are set to the duty of Borough 
 
 .,. c i i a -aud county 
 
 military or of naval service may seem more eloquent. Thus of organiza- 
 Dover we are told that the burgesses used to supply twenty tlon< 
 ships for fifteen days in the year with twenty-one men in each 
 ship, and that they did this because the king had released to 
 them his sake and soke 2 . Here we seem to read of a definite 
 transaction between the king of the one part and the borough 
 of the other part, and one which implies a good deal of 
 governmental organization in the borough. We would say 
 nothing to lessen the just force of such a passage, which does 
 not stand alone 3 ; but still there need be but little more 
 organization in the borough of Dover than there is in Berk- 
 shire. It was the custom of that county that, when the king 
 summoned his host, only one soldier went from every five 
 hides, while each hide provided him with four shillings for his 
 equipment and wages 4 . We may guess that in a county such 
 a scheme very rapidly ' realized ' itself and took root in the soil, 
 that in a borough there was less ' realism,' that there were more 
 frequent readjustments of the burden ; but the difference is a 
 difference of degree. 
 
 Of anything that could be called the constitution of the Govern- 
 
 i TIT mentofthe 
 
 boroughs, next to nothing can we learn. We may take it that boroughs. 
 
 in most cases the king's farmer was the sheriff of the shire ; in 
 some few cases, as for example at Hereford, the reeve of the 
 borough may have been directly accountable to the king 5 . , We 
 know no proof that in any case the reeve was an elected officer. 
 Probably in each borough a court was held which was a court 
 for the borough ; probably it was, at least as a general rule, 
 co-ordinate with a hundred court, and indeed at starting the 
 borough seems to be regarded as a vill which is also a hundred 6 . 
 
 1 See the entry touching Colchester, above, p. 201, note 3. 
 8 D. B. i. 1. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 238. The custom of Warwick was that when the king made an 
 expedition by land ten burgesses of Warwick should go for all the rest. He who 
 did not go when summoned [summoned by whom?] paid 100 shillings to the 
 king ; [so his offence was against the king not against the town.] And if the 
 king went against his enemies by sea, they sent him four boat-swains or four 
 pounds in money. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 56 b. 5 D. B. i. 179. 
 
 6 At Chester (D. B. i. 262 b) the twelve civic iud 'ces paid a fine if they were 
 
 M. 14
 
 210 Domesday Book. 
 
 The action of this court, however, like the action of other 
 hundred courts, must as time went on have been hampered by 
 the growth of seignorial justice. The sake and soke which a 
 lord might have over his men and over his lands were certainly 
 not excluded by the borough walls. He had sometimes been 
 expressly told that he might enjoy these rights ' within borough 
 and without borough/ It is difficult for us to realize the exact 
 meaning that 'sake and soke' would bear when ascribed to a 
 prelate or thegn who had but two or three houses within the 
 town. Perhaps in such cases the town houses were for juris- 
 dictional purposes deemed to be situate within some 'rural 
 manor of their lord. But in a borough a lord might have a 
 compact group of tenants quite large enough to form a petty 
 court. In such a case the borough court would have the 
 seignorial courts as rivals, and many a dispute would there be. 
 At Lincoln one Tochi had a hall which undoubtedly was free 
 'from, all custom'; but he had also thirty houses over which 
 the king had toll and forfeiture. So the burgesses swore ; but 
 a certain priest was ready to prove by ordeal that they swore 
 falsely 1 . In these cases the lord's territory would appear in 
 later times as a little ' liberty ' lying within the borough walls. 
 The middle ages were far spent before such liberties had become 
 mere petty nuisances 2 . In the old cathedral towns, such as 
 Canterbury and Winchester, the bishop's jurisdictional powers 
 and immunities were serious affairs, for the bishop's tenants 
 were numerous 3 . Nevertheless, in the great and ancient 
 boroughs, the boroughs which stand out as types and models, 
 there was from a very remote time a court, a borough-moot 
 or portman-moot, which was not seignorial, a court which was a 
 unit in a national system of courts. 
 The Of the form that the borough court took we can say little. 
 
 Perhaps at first it would be an assembly of all the free burg-men 
 or port-men. As its business increased in the large boroughs, 
 as it began to sit once a week instead of thrice a year, a set 
 
 absent without excuse from the ' hundret.' This seems to mean that their 
 court was called a hundred moot. It is very possible that, at least in the earliest 
 time, the moot that was held in the borough had jurisdiction over a territory 
 considerably larger than the walled space, and in this case the urban would 
 hardly differ from the rural hundred. A somewhat new kind of 'hundred' 
 might be formed without the introduction of any new idea. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 336. 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 631. 
 
 3 Green, Town Life, vol. i. ch. xi.
 
 The Boroughs. 211 
 
 of persons bound to serve as doomsmen may have been formed, 
 a set of aldermen or lawmen whose offices might or might 
 not be hereditary, might or might not ' run with ' the pos- 
 session of certain specific tenements. A 'busting' might be 
 formed, that is, a house-thing as distinct from a ' thing ' or 
 court held in the open air. Law required that there should 
 be standing witnesses in a borough, before whom bargains 
 and sales should take place. Such a demand might hasten 
 the formation of a small body of doomsmen. In Cambridge 
 there were lawmen of thegnly rank 1 ; in Lincoln there were 
 twelve lawmen 2 ; in Stamford there had been twelve, though 
 at the date of Domesday Book there were but nine 3 ; we read 
 of four indices in York 4 , and of twelve indices in Chester*. 
 So late as 1275 the twelve lawmen of Stamford lived on in 
 the persons of their heirs or successors. There are, said a 
 jury, twelve men in Stamford who are called lawmen because 
 their ancestors -were in old time the judges of the laws (indices 
 legum) in the said town; they hold of the king in chief; by 
 what service we do not know ; but you can find out from 
 Domesday Book 6 . Over the bodies of these, presumably Danish, 
 lawmen there has been much disputation. We know that 
 taken individually the lawmen of Lincoln were holders of 
 heritable franchises, of sake and soke. We know that among 
 the twelve indices of Chester were men of the king, men of 
 the earl, men of the bishop ; they had to attend the ' hundred/ 
 that is, we take it, the borough court. We know no more ; 
 but it seems likely that we have to deal with persons who 
 collectively form a group of doomsmen, while individually each 
 of them is a great man, of thegnly rank, with sake and soke 
 over his men and his lands ; his office passes to his heir 7 . On 
 the whole, however, we must doubt whether the generality of 
 English boroughs had arrived at even this somewhat rudi- 
 mentary stage of organization. In 1200 the men of Ipswich, 
 having received a charter from King John, decided that there 
 
 1 D. B. i. 189. 2 D. B. i. 336 b. D. B. i. 336 b. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 298. 5 D. B. i. 262 b. B. H. i. 354-6. 
 
 7 Besides the well known English books, see a paper by Konrad Maurer, 
 Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Miinchen, Philosoph.- 
 philolog. Classe, 1887, vol. ii. p. 363. In the Leges Edw. Conf. 38 2, the 
 'lagemanni et meliores homines de burgo' seem to serve as inquest men, rather 
 than doomsmen; while the lahmen of the document concerning the Dunsetan 
 (Schmid, App. i.) seem to be doomsmen. 
 
 H 2
 
 212 Domesday Book. 
 
 should be in their borough twelve chief portmen, 'as there 
 were in the other free boroughs in England/ who should have 
 full power to govern and maintain the town and to render 
 the judgments of its court 1 . Now Ipswich has a right to be 
 placed in the class of ancient boroughs, of county towns, and 
 yet to all appearance it had no definite class of chief men 
 or doomsmen until the year 1200. Still we ought not to 
 infer from this that the town moot had been in practice a 
 democratic institution. There may be a great deal of oligarchy, 
 and oligarchy of an oppressive kind, though the ruling class 
 has never been defined by law. Domesday Book allows us to 
 see in various towns a large number of poor folk who can not 
 pay taxes or can only pay a poll tax. We must be chary of 
 conceding to this crowd any share in the dooms of the court 2 . 
 Definition But what concerns the government of the boroughs has 
 borough. f r tne ti me been sufficiently said by others. In our few last 
 words we will return to our first theme, the difference between 
 the borough and the mere township. 
 
 Mediatized We have seen that in Domesday Book a prominent position 
 is conceded to certain towns. They are not brought under 
 any rubric which would place them upon the king's or any 
 other person's land. It must now be confessed that there 
 are some other towns that are not thus treated and that none 
 the less are called boroughs. If, however, we remember that 
 burgesses often are in law where they are not in fact, the 
 list that we shall make of these boroughs will not be long. 
 Still such boroughs exist and a few words should be said about 
 them. They seem to fall into two classes, for they are described 
 as being on the king's land or on the land of some noble or 
 prelate. Of the latter class we will speak first. It does not 
 contain many members and in some cases we can be certain 
 that in the Confessor's day the borough in question had no 
 other lord than the king. Totness is a case in point. It now 
 falls under the title Terra Judhel de Tottenais; but we are 
 told that King Edward held it in demesne 3 . In Sussex we 
 
 1 Gross, Gild Merchant, ii. 114 ff. ; Hist. Eng. Law, i. 642. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 290, Ipswich: 'Modo vero sunt 110 burgenses qui consuetudinem 
 reddunt et 100 pauperes burgenses qui non possunt reddere ad geltum Eegis 
 nisi unum denarium de suis capitibus.'' D. B. ii. 116, Norwich: 'Modo sunt in 
 burgo 665 burgenses anglici et consuetudines reddunt, et 480 bordarii qui 
 propter pauperiem nullam reddunt consuetudinem.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 108 b.
 
 The Boroughs. 213 
 
 see that Steyning, Pevensey and. Lewes are called burgi 1 , 
 Steyning is placed on the land of the Abbot of Fecamp, 
 Pevensey on that of the Count of Mortain and Lewes on that 
 of William of Warenne ; but at Lewes there have been many 
 haws appurtenant to the rural manors of the shire thegns 2 . 
 In Kent the borough of Hythe seems to be completely under 
 the archbishop 8 . He has burgesses at Romney over whom he 
 has justiciary rights, but they serve the king 4 . The 'little 
 borough called Fordwich ' belonged to the Abbot of S* Au- 
 gustin. But of this we know the history. The Confessor gave 
 him the royal two-thirds, while the bishop of Bayeux as the 
 successor of Earl Godwin gave him the comital one-third 5 . 
 Further north, Louth in Lincolnshire and Newark in Not- 
 tinghamshire seem to be accounted boroughs ; they both belong 
 to the bishop of Lincoln; but in the case of Newark (which 
 was probably an old burh) we may doubt whether his title is 
 very ancient 6 . We are told that at Tatteshall, the Pontefract 
 of later days 7 , there are sixty 'minute burgesses/ that is, we 
 take it, burgesses in a small way. Ilbert de Lacy is now their 
 lord ; but here again we may suspect a recent act of mediatiza- 
 tion 8 . Grantham in Lincolnshire is placed on the Terra Regis ; 
 it had belonged to Queen Edith ; there were, however, seventy- 
 seven tofts in it which belonged to 'the sokemen of the thegns,' 
 that is, to the sokemen of the thegns of the shire*. Then in 
 Suffolk we see that Ipswich is described at the end of the section 
 which deals with the royal estates ; a similar place is found for 
 Norwich, Yarmouth and Thetford in the survey of Norfolk 10 . 
 But for Dunwich we must look elsewhere. There were bur- 
 gesses at Dunwich ; but to all seeming the royal rights over 
 
 1 Whether the novum burgum mentioned in D. B. i. 17 is Winchelsea or 
 Eye or a new town at Hastings seems to be disputable. See Round, Feudal 
 England, 568. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 26 b, 27. 8 D. B. i. 4 b. 
 4 D. B. i. 4b. See also, 10 b. 8 D. B. i. 12. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 345, 283 b. It has been said that Leofric gave Newark to the see. 
 
 7 Dodsworth's Yorkshire Notes, ed. B. Holmes (reprinted from Yorkshire 
 Archaeological Journal), p. 126. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 316 b. The estate is ingeldable and therefore looks like an 
 ancient possession of the king. 
 
 9 D. B. 337 b : ' Toftes sochemanorum teignorum.' Some commentators 
 have seen here ' sokemen thegns ' ; but the other interpretation seems far more 
 probable. 
 
 10 Had these towns been described in Great Domesday, they would probably 
 have been definitely placed outside the Terra Begia.
 
 214 Domesday Book. 
 
 the town had passed into- the hands of Eadric of Laxfield 1 . 
 The successor of the same Eadric has burgesses among his 
 tenants at Eye 3 . There are burgesses at Clare, though Clare 
 belongs altogether to the progenitor of the lordly race which 
 will take its name from this little town 3 . But at least in 
 this last case, the burgesses may be new-comers, or rather 
 perhaps we may see that an old idea is giving way to a newer 
 idea of a borough, and that if men engaged in trade or handi- 
 craft settle round a market-place and pay money-rents to 
 a lord they will be called burgesses, though the town is no 
 national fortress. At Berkhampstead 52 burgesses are collected 
 in a burbium, but they may be as new as the two arpents of 
 vineyard 4 . We must not say dogmatically that never in the 
 days before the Conquest had a village become a borougji while 
 it had for its one and only landlord some person other than 
 the king, some bishop, or some thegn. This may have hap- 
 pened at Taunton. In 1086 there were burgesses at Taunton 
 and it enjoyed 'burh-riht,' and yet from a very remote time 
 it had belonged to the bishops of Winchester. But the cases 
 in which we may suppose that a village in private hands 
 became a burgus and that this change took place before the 
 Norman invasion seem to be extremely few. In these few 
 the cause of the change may have been that the king by way 
 of special favour imposed his burhgrift upon the town and 
 thereby augmented the revenue of its lord 6 . 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 811, 312, 385. 2 D. B. ii. 319 b. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 389 b : ' semper unum mercatum modo 43 burgenses.' For 
 Sudbury, see D. B. ii. 286 b ; for Beccles, 369 b. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 136 b : ' In burbio huius villae 52 burgenses.' The word burbium 
 looks as if some one had argued that as suburbium means an annex to a town, 
 therefore burbium must mean a town. But the influence of burh, burg, bourg 
 may be suspected. A few pages back (132) the burgum of Hertford seems to be 
 spoken of as ' hoc suburbium.' It is of course to be remembered that burgus or 
 burgum was a word with which the Normans were familiar : it was becoming the 
 French bourg. It is difficult to unravel any distinctively French thread in the 
 institutional history of our boroughs during the Norman age; but the little 
 knot of traders clustered outside a lord's castle at Clare or Berkhampstead, at 
 Tutbury, Wigmore or Bhuddlan may have for its type rather a French bourg 
 than an English burh. Indeed at Bhuddlan (i. 269) the burgesses have received 
 the law of Breteuil. 
 
 5 For Taunton, see D. B. i. 87 b: 'Istae consuetudines pertinent ad 
 Tantone: burgeristh, latrones, pacis infractio, hainfare, denarii de hundred, 
 denarii S. Petri, ciricieti.' Compare the document which stands as K. 897 
 (iv. 233): ' Daet is 8erest...seo men redden into Tantune cirhsceattas and
 
 The Boroughs. 215 
 
 As to the boroughs that are regarded as standing on the Boroughs 
 king's land, these also seem to be* few and for the more part king's land 
 they are small. There are burgesses at Maldon 1 ; but Maid on 
 is not placed by the side of Colchester 2 ; it is described among 
 the royal estates. There are burgesses at Bristol 8 ; but Bristol 
 is not placed beside Gloucester and Winchcombe. Perhaps we 
 should have heard more of it, if it had not, like Tarn worth, stood 
 on the border of two counties. In the south-west the king's 
 officials seem to be grappling with difficulties as best they 
 may. In Dorset they place Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham and 
 Shaftesbury above the rubric Terra Regis*, and we can not find 
 that they reckon any other place as a borough. In Devonshire 
 we see Exeter above the line ; Lidford and Barnstaple, however, 
 are called boroughs though they are assigned to the king's 
 land, and (as already said) Totness is a borough, though it is 
 mediatized and is described among the estates of its Breton 
 lord 6 . No borough in Somerset is placed above the line, though ' 
 we learn that the king has 107 burgesses in Ilchester who pay 
 him 20 shillings 6 , and that he and others have burgesses at 
 Bath 7 . Perhaps the space that stands vacant before the list % of 
 the tenants in chief should have been filled with some words 
 about these two towns. Axbridge, Langport and Milborne 
 seem to be boroughs ; Axbridge and Langport occur in that 
 list of ancient fortresses which we have called The Burghal 
 Hidage 8 . Wells was an episcopal, Somerton a royal manor; 
 we have no reason for calling either of them a borough. In 
 Hampshire another of the ancient fortresses, Twyneham (the 
 modern Christ Church) is still called burgus, but seems to 
 be finding its level among the royal manors 9 . In Wiltshire 
 Malmesbury and Marlborough are placed above the line. We 
 learn that the king receives 50 from the burgm of Wilton w , 
 and we also learn incidentally that various lords have burgesses 
 in that town ; for example, the bishop of Salisbury has burgesses 
 in Wilton who belong to his manor of Salisbury 11 . Old Salisbury 
 (' old Sarum ' as we foolishly call it) seems to be a mere manor 
 
 burhgerihtu.' See also K. 1084 (v. 157): 'ut episcopi homines [apud Tantun] 
 tarn nobiles quam ignobiles...hoc idem ius in omni haberent dignitate quo regis 
 homines perfruuntur, regalibus fiscis commorantes.' 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 5b. 2 D. B. ii. 104. D. B. i. 163. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 75. 5 D. B. i. 100, 108 b. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 86 b. " D. B. i. 87. 8 See above, p. 188. 
 
 D..B. 38 b, 44. D. B. 64 b. " D. B. 66.
 
 216 Domesday Book. 
 
 belonging to the bishop; but the king receives its third 
 penny. He receives also the third penny of Cricklade, which 
 we have named before now as one of the old Wessex strong- 
 holds, and several of the county magnates had burgesses 
 there. On the other hand Calne, Bedwind and Warminster are 
 reckoned to be manors on the king's land. Burgesses belong to 
 them ; but whether those burgesses are really resident in them 
 may not be quite certain 1 . Devizes we can not find. That 
 puzzles should occur in this quarter is what our general theory 
 might lead us to expect. In the old home of the West-Saxon 
 kings there may well have been towns which had long ago 
 secured the name and the peace of royal burgs, though they 
 manifested none of that tenurial heterogeneity which is the 
 common mark of a borough. A town, a village, which not only 
 belonged to the king but contained a palace or house in which 
 he often dwelt, would enjoy his special peace, and might 
 maintain its burghal dignity long after there was little, if 
 any, real difference between it and other manors or villages 
 of which the king was the immediate landlord. Already in 
 1086 there may have been 'rotten boroughs,' boroughs that 
 were rotten before they were ripe 8 . 
 
 Attributes A borough belongs to the genus villa (ttiri). In age after 
 borough, age our task is to discover its differentia, and the task is hard 
 because, as age succeeds age, changes in law and changes in 
 fact are making the old distinctions obsolete while others 
 are becoming important. Let us observe, then, that already 
 when Domesday Book was in the making those ancient 
 
 1 The burgesses belonging to Eamsbury are really at Cricklade : D. B. 
 i. 66. 
 
 2 It seems very possible that already before the Conquest some boroughs 
 had fallen out of the list. In cent. x. we read, for example, of a burh at 
 Towcester and of a burh at Witham in Essex. We must not indeed contend 
 that a shire-supported town with tenurial heterogeneity came into existence 
 wherever Edward the Elder or the Lady of the Mercians 'wrought a burh.' 
 But still during a time of peace the walls of a petty burh would be 
 neglected, and, if the great majority of the inhabitants were the king's tenants, 
 there would be little to distinguish this place from a royal village of the 
 common kind. See for Towcester, D. B. i. 219 b ; for Witham, D. B. ii. 1 b. 
 In later days we may see an old borough, such as Buckingham, falling very 
 low and sending no burgesses to parliament. It will be understood that AVO 
 have not pledged ourselves to any list of the places that were boroughs in 
 1066. There are difficult cases such as that of St Albans; see above, p. 181. 
 But, we are persuaded that few places were deemed burgi, except the shire 
 towns.
 
 The Boroughs. 217 
 
 attributes of which we have been speaking were disappearing 
 or were fated soon to disappear. We have thought of the 
 typical borough as a fortified town maintained by a district 
 for military purposes. But already the shire thegns have 
 been letting their haws at a rent and probably have been 
 letting them to craftsmen and traders. Also the time has come 
 for knight-service and castles and castle-guard. We have 
 thought of the typical borough as the sphere of a special 
 peace. But the day is at hand when a revolution in the 
 criminal law will destroy the old system of wer and wite and 
 b6t, and the king's peace will reign always and everywhere 1 . 
 We have thought of the typical borough as a town which has 
 a court. But the day is at hand when almost every village will 
 have its court, its manorial court. New contrasts, however, are 
 emerging as the old contrasts fade away. Against a back- 
 ground of villeinage and week- work, the borough begins to 
 stand out as the scene of burgage tenure. The service by 
 which the burgess holds his tenement is a money rent. This 
 may lead to a large increase in the number of boroughs. If a 
 lord enfranchises a manor, abolishes villein customs, takes 
 money rents, allows his tenants to farm the court and perhaps 
 also to farm a market that he has acquired from the king, he 
 will be said to create a liber burgus*. Merchant gilds, elected 
 bailiffs, elected mayors and common seals will appear and will 
 complicate the question. There will follow a time of un- 
 certainty and confusion when the sheriffs will decide as suits 
 them best which* of the smaller towns are boroughs and which 
 are not. 
 
 If the theory that we have been suggesting is true, all or ciassifica- 
 very nearly all our ancient boroughs (and we will draw the line boroughs, 
 of ancientry at the Conquest) are in their inception royal 
 
 1 A last relic of the old borough peace may be found in Britton's definition 
 of burglary (i. 42) : ' Burglars are those who feloniously in time of peace break 
 churches, or the houses of others, or the walls or gates of our cities or boroughs 
 (de nos citez ou de nos burgs).' 
 
 - By a charter of enfranchisement a lord might introduce burgage tenure 
 and abolish ' servile customs ' ; but it must be, to say the least, doubtful 
 whether he could, without the king's licence, confer upon a village the public 
 status of a borough and e.g. authorize it to behave like a hundred before the 
 justices in eyre. This is one of the reasons why sheriffs can draw the line 
 where they please, and why some towns which have been enfranchised never 
 obtain a secure place in the list of parliamentary boroughs.
 
 218 Domesday Book. 
 
 boroughs. The group of burgesses when taken as a whole 
 had no superior other than the king. His was the peace that 
 prevailed in the streets; the profits of the court and of the 
 market were his, though they were farmed by a reeve. Karely, 
 however, was he the landlord of all the burgesses. In general 
 not a few of them lived in houses that belonged to the thegns 
 of the shire.. We must be careful therefore before we speak of 
 these towns as ' boroughs on the royal demesne.' For the more 
 part, the compilers of Domesday Book have refused to place 
 them on the Terra Regis. In course of time some of them will 
 be currently spoken of as boroughs on or of the royal demesne. 
 The rights of those who represent the thegns of the shire will 
 have become mere rights to rent, and, their origin being 
 forgotten, they will even be treated as mere rent-charges 1 . 
 The great majority of the burgesses will in many instances be 
 the king's immediate tenants and he will be the only lord of that 
 incorporeal thing, ' the borough/ the only man who can grant it 
 a charter or let it to farm. But we must distinguish between 
 these towns and those which at the Conquest were manors on 
 the king's land. These latter, if he enfranchises them, will be 
 boroughs on the royal demesne in an exacter sense. So, again, 
 we must distinguish between those ancient boroughs which the 
 king has mediatized and those manors of mesne lords which are 
 raised to the rank of boroughs. We have seen that from the 
 ancient borough the king received a revenue of tolls and fines. 
 Therefore he had something to give away. He could mediatize 
 the borough. Domesday Book shows us that this had already 
 been done in a few instances 2 . At a later time some even of 
 the county towns passed out of the king's hands into the hands 
 of earls. This happened at Leicester and at Warwick. The 
 earl succeeded to the king's rights, and the burgesses had to go 
 to the earl for their liberties and their charters. But such 
 cases are very distinct from those in which a mesne lord grants 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 630. When it is being said that if land in the borough 
 escheats, it always escheats to the king, the mesne tenures are already being 
 forgotten within the borough, just as in modern times we have forgotten 
 them in the open country. The burgher's power of devising his land made 
 escheat a rare event, and so destroyed the evidence of mesne tenure. 
 
 2 See above, p. 212. Also the king might give away an undivided share of 
 the borough. Apparently the church of Worcester had received the third 
 penny of the city ever since the day when the burh was wrought by the 
 ealdorman and lady of the Mercians. See above, p. 194.
 
 The Boroughs. 219 
 
 an enfranchising charter to the men of a place which has 
 hitherto been one of his manors, and by speaking of boroughs 
 which are 'on the land of mesne lords' we must not confuse 
 two classes of towns which have long had different histories. 
 In the ancient boroughs there is from the first an element that 
 we must call both artificial and national. The borough does 
 not grow up spontaneously ; it is made ; it is ' wrought ' ; it is 
 ' timbered.' It has a national purpose ; it is maintained ' at 
 the cost of the nation ' by the duty that the shire owes to it. 
 This trait may soon have disappeared, may soon have been 
 forgotten, but a great work had been done. In these nationally 
 supported and heterogeneously peopled towns a new kind of 
 community might wax and thrive.
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 ENGLAND BEFORE THE CONQUEST. 
 Object of No one can spend patient hours in examining the complex 
 
 this Essay. .,.,.', J T> i vv, i- ^ 
 
 web disclosed by Domesday .Book without making some theones, 
 at least some guesses, about the political, social and economic 
 threads of which that web has been woven. But if we here 
 venture to fashion and state a few such theories or such guesses, 
 it is with no hope that they will be a complete explanation 
 of old English history. For, in the first place, we are to speak 
 mainly of the things of the law, of legal ideas and legal forms, 
 and once for all we may protest that we have no wish to over- 
 estimate their importance. The elaborate and long continued 
 development to which we point when we speak of ' feudalism,' 
 can not be fully explained by any discussion of legal ideas 
 and legal forms. On the other hand, it can not be fully ex- 
 plained without such discussion, for almost all that we can 
 know about it is to be found in legal documents. In the 
 second place, we are to make a selection. Certain phases 
 of our oldest legal history, notably those which are called 
 ' constitutional,' have been so fully treated by classical books, 
 that at the present moment there is no good reason why we 
 should traverse the ground that has been covered. Therefore 
 if, for example, we say little or nothing of the ancient Germanic 
 comitatus or of the relationship between lord and man in so 
 far as it is a merely personal relationship, this will not be 
 because we have overlooked these matters ; it will be because 
 there is nothing to be gained by our repeating what has been 
 well and sufficiently said by Dr Konrad Maurer, Dr Reinhold 
 Schmid, Dr Stubbs and others. And if, again, we lay great 
 stress on what may be called the ecclesiastical phase of the 
 feudalizing process, this will not be because we think it the 
 only phase, it will be because we think that too little attention
 
 England before the Conquest. 221 
 
 has been paid by English writers to the influence which the 
 churches exercised upon temporal affairs by means of their 
 endowments. The day for an artistically proportioned picture 
 of the growth of feudalism has not yet come ; the day for a 
 quantitative analysis of the elements of feudalism may never 
 come ; for the present we must be content if we can bring 
 out a few new truths or set a few old truths in a new light. 
 The vast and intricate subject may be approached from many 
 different quarters. If we can make some little progress along 
 our chosen path, we shall be all the more willing to admit 
 that progress along other paths is possible. 
 
 It can not but be, however, that this part of our work 
 should be controversial, though it need not be polemical. We contro- 
 are told that ' in spite of all the labour that has been spent toAugio 8 
 on the early history of England, scholars are still at variance ^ a ,i on hls ~ 
 upon the most fundamental of questions : the question whether 
 that history began with a population of independent freemen 
 or with a population of dependent serfs 1 '. Some exception 
 may be taken to this statement. No one denies that for the 
 purposes of English history slavery is a primitive institution, 
 nor that in the seventh and eighth centuries there were many 
 slaves in England. On the other hand, no one will assert 
 that we can ascertain, even approximately, the ratio that the 
 number of slaves bore to the number of free men. Moreover 
 such terms as 'dependent' and 'independent' are not words 
 that we can profitably quarrel over, since they are inexact and 
 ambiguous. For all this, however, it may well be said that 
 there are two main theories before the world. The one would 
 trace the English manor back to the Roman villa, would 
 think of the soil of England as being tilled from the first 
 mainly by men who, when they were not mere slaves, were 
 coloni ascript to the land. The other would postulate the 
 existence of a large number of free men who with their own 
 labour tilled their own soil, of men who might fairly be 
 called free ' peasant proprietors ' since they were far from rich 
 and had few slaves or servants, and yet who were no mere 
 peasants since they habitually bore arms in the national host. 
 What may be considered for the moment as a variant on this 
 latter doctrine would place the ownership of the soil, or of 
 
 1 Ashley, Introduction to Fustel de Coulanges, Origin of Property in Land, 
 p. vii.
 
 222 England before the Conquest. 
 
 large tracts of the soil, not in these free peasants taken as 
 individuals, but in free village communities. 
 
 The Roma- Now we will say at once that the first of these theories 
 theory un- we can not accept if it be put forward in a general form, if 
 e ' it be applied to the whole or anything like the whole of 
 England. Certainly we are not in a position to deny that 
 in some cases, a Roman villa having come into the hands of 
 a Saxon chieftain, he treated the slaves and coloni that he 
 found upon it in much the same way as that in which they 
 had been theretofore treated, though even in such a case the 
 change was in all probability momentous, since large commerce 
 and all that large commerce implies had perished. But against 
 the hypothesis that this was the general case the English 
 language and the names of our English villages are the un- 
 answered protest. It seems incredible that the bulk of the 
 population should have been of Celtic blood and yet that 
 the Celtic language should not merely have disappeared, but 
 have stamped few traces of itself upon the speech of the 
 conquerors 1 . This we regard as an objection which goes to 
 the root of the whole matter and which throws upon those 
 who would make the English nation in the main a nation of 
 Celtic bondmen, the burden of strictly proving their thesis. 
 The German invaders must have been numerous. The Britons 
 were no cowards. They contested the soil inch by inch. The 
 struggle was long and arduous. What then, we must ask, 
 became of the mass of the victors ? Surely it is impossible 
 that they at once settled down as the 'dependent serfs' of 
 their chieftains. Again, though it is very likely that where 
 we find a land of scattered steads and of isolated hamlets, there 
 the Germanic conquerors have spared or have been unable 
 to subdue the Britons or have adapted their own arrangements 
 to the exterior framework that was provided by Celtic or 
 Roman agriculture, still, until Meitzen 2 has been refuted, we 
 are compelled to say that our true villages, the nucleated 
 villages with large ' open fields,' are not Celtic, are not Roman, 
 but are very purely and typically German. But this is not 
 all Hereafter we shall urge some other objections. The 
 
 1 The gradual disappearance in recent times of the Irish language is no 
 parallel case, for this is a triumph of the printing press. Mr Stevenson tells me 
 that the number of unquestioned cases of a word borrowed from Celtic in very 
 ancient times is now reduced to less than ten. 
 
 2 Meitzen, Siedelung and Agrarwesen der Germanen, especially ii. 120 ff.
 
 England before the Conquest. 223 
 
 doctrine in question will give no rational explanation of the 
 state of things that is revealed to us by the Domesday Survey 
 of the northern and eastern counties and it will give no 
 rational explanation of seignorial justice. This being so, we 
 seem bound to suppose that at one time there was a large 
 class of peasant proprietors, that is, of free men who tilled the 
 soil that they owned, and to discuss the process which sub- 
 stitutes for peasant proprietorship the manorial organization. 
 
 Though we can not deal at any length with a matter which Feudalism 
 lies outside the realm of legal history, we ought at once to stage. " 1 
 explain that we need not regard this change as a retrogression. 
 There are indeed historians who have not yet abandoned the 
 habit of speaking of feudalism as though it were a disease of 
 the body politic. Now the word ' feudalism ' is and always will 
 be an inexact term, and, no doubt, at. various times and places 
 there emerge phenomena which may with great propriety be 
 called feudal and which come of evil and make for evil. But if 
 we use the term, and often we do, in a very wide sense, if we 
 describe several centuries as feudal, then feudalism will appear 
 to us as a natural and even a necessary stage in our history : 
 that is to say, if we would have the England of the sixteenth 
 century arise out of the England of the eighth without passing 
 through a period of feudalism, we must suppose many immense 
 and fundamental changes in the nature of man and his 
 surroundings. If we use the term in this wide sense, then 
 (the barbarian conquests being given us as an unalterable fact) 
 feudalism means civilization, the separation of employments, 
 the division of labour, the possibility of national defence, the 
 possibility of art, science, literature and learned leisure; the 
 cathedral, the scriptorium, the library, are as truly the work of 
 feudalism as is the baronial castle. When therefore we speak, 
 as we shall have to speak, of forces which make for the 
 subjection of the peasantry to seignorial justice and which 
 substitute the manor with its villeins for the free village, we 
 shall so at least it seems to us be speaking not of abnormal 
 forces, not of retrogression, not of disease, but in the main of 
 normal and healthy growth. Far from us indeed is the cheerful 
 optimism which refuses to see that the process of civilization is 
 often a cruel process ; but the England of the eleventh century 
 is nearer to the England of the nineteenth than is the England 
 of the seventh nearer by just four hundred years.
 
 224 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Feudalism This leads to a remark which concerns us more deeply. As 
 
 as progress 111 i i t_ * j "i i i 
 
 and as re- regards the legal ideas in which feudalism is expressed a general 
 regress. q ues tion may be raised. If we approach them from the stand- 
 point of modern law, if we approach them from the standpoint 
 of the classical Roman law, they are confused ideas. In 
 particular no clear line is drawn between public and private 
 law. Ownership is dominium] but governmental power, 
 jurisdictional power, these also are dominium. Office is 
 property; taxes are rents; governmental relationships arise 
 ex contractu. Then within the province of private law the 
 ideas are few ; these few have hard work to do ; their outlines 
 are blurred. One dominium rises above another dominium, one 
 seisin over another seisin. Efforts after precision made in 
 comparatively recent times by romanizing lawyers serve only 
 to show how vague was the subject-matter with which they had 
 to deal. They would give the lord a dominium directum, the 
 vassal a dominium utile; bufc then, when there has been further 
 subinfeudation, this vassal will have a dominium utile as regards 
 the lord paramount, but a dominium directum as regards the 
 sub- vassal. So again, as we shall see hereafter, the gift of land 
 shades off into the ' loan ' of land, the ' loan ' into the gift. The 
 question then occurs whether we are right in applying to this 
 state of things such a word as ' confusion/ a word which 
 implies that things that once were distinct have wrongfully or 
 unfortunately been mixed up with each other, a word which 
 implies error or retrogression. 
 
 Progress Now, no doubt, from one point of view, namely that of 
 
 "ess in the im i versa> l history, we do see confusion and retrogression. Ideal 
 history of possessions which have been won for mankind by the thought of 
 Roman lawyers are lost for a long while and must be recovered 
 painfully. Lines that have been traced with precision are 
 smudged out, and then they must be traced once more. If 
 we regard western Europe as a whole, this retrogression appears 
 as a slow change. How slow that is a much controverted 
 question. There are, for example, historians who would have 
 us think of the Gaul of Merovingian times as being in the main 
 governed by Roman ideas and institutions, which have indeed 
 been sadly debased, but still are the old ideas and institutions. 
 There are other historians who can discover in this same Gaul 
 little that is not genuinely German and barbarous. But at 
 any rate, it must be admitted that somehow or another a
 
 England before 'the Conquest. 225 
 
 retrogression takes place, that the best legal ideas of the ninth 
 and tenth centuries are not so good, so modern, as those of the 
 third and fourth. If, howeyer, we take a narrower view and fix 
 our eyes upon the barbarian hordes which invade a Roman 
 province, shall we say that their legal thought gradually goes 
 to the bad, and loses distinctions which it has once ap- 
 prehended ? To turn to our own case Shall we say that 
 Englishmen of the eighth century mark the line that divides 
 public from private law, while Englishmen of the eleventh 
 century can not perceive it? 
 
 No one perhaps to such a question would boldly say : Yes. Tlie COI >- 
 
 . : tact of bar- 
 
 And yet, when it comes to a treatment of particulars, an barism ami 
 affirmative answer seems to be implied in much that has 
 been written even by modern historians. They begin at the 
 beginning and attribute precise ideas and well-defined law to 
 the German conquerors of Britain. If they began with the 
 eleventh century and thence turned to the earlier time, they 
 might come to another opinion, to the opinion that in the 
 beginning all was very vague, and that such clearness and pre- 
 cision as legal thought has attained in the days of the Norman 
 Conquest has been very gradually attained and is chiefly due 
 to the influence which the old heathen world working through 
 the Roman church has exercised upon the new. The process 
 that is started when barbarism is brought into contact with 
 civilization is not simple. The hitherto naked savage may at 
 once assume some part of the raiment, perhaps the hat, of the 
 white man. When after a while he puts these things aside 
 and learns to make for himself clothes suitable to the climate 
 in which he lives and the pursuits in which he is engaged, we 
 see in this an advance, not a relapse ; and yet he has abandoned 
 some things that belong to the white man. Even so when our 
 kings of the eighth century set their hands to documents 
 written in Latin and bristling with the technical terms of 
 Roman law, to documents which at first sight seem to express 
 clear enough ideas of ownership and alienation, we must not afc 
 once assume that they have grasped these ideas. In course of 
 time men will evolve formulas which will aptly fit their thought, 
 for example, the ' feudal ' charter of feoffment with its tenendum 
 de me and its reddendo mihi. Externally it will not be so 
 Roman or (we may say it) so modern a document as was the 
 land-book of the eighth century, and yet in truth there has 
 M. 15
 
 226 England before the Conquest. 
 
 been progress not retrogress. Words that Roman lawyers 
 Would have understood give way before words which would 
 have been nonsense to them, feoffamentum, liberatio seisinae 
 and the like. This is as it should be. Men are learning to 
 say what they really mean. 
 
 Our ma- And now let us remember that our materials for the legal 
 
 history of the long age which lies behind Domesday Book are 
 scanty. A long age it is, even if we measure it only from the 
 date of Augustin's mission. The Conqueror stands midway 
 between ^thelbert and Elizabeth. To illustrate five hundred 
 years of legal history we have only the dooms and the land-books. 
 The dooms are so much taken up with the work of keeping 
 the peace and punishing theft that they tell us little of the 
 structure of society or of the feudalizing process, while as to 
 what they imply it is but too easy for different men to form 
 different opinions. Some twelve hundred land-books or charters, 
 genuine and spurious, are our best, almost our only, evidence, 
 and it must needs be that they will give us but a partial and 
 one-sided view of intricate and many-sided facts 1 . 
 
 1. Book-land and the Land-book. 
 
 The lands Now these charters or land-books are, with hardly any 
 churches, exceptions, ecclesiastical title-deeds. Most of them are deeds 
 whereby lands were conveyed to the churches ; some are deeds 
 whereby lands were conveyed to men who conveyed them to 
 the churches. Partial, one-sided and in details untrustworthy 
 though the testimony that they bear may be, there is still one 
 general question that they ought to answer and we ought to 
 ask. Domesday Book shows us many of the churches as the 
 lords of wide and continuous tracts of land. Now about this 
 
 1 We shall use, and cite by the letter K., Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus Aevi 
 Saxonici. We shall refer by the letters H. & S. to the third volume of the 
 Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents edited by Haddan and Stubbs, by the 
 letter T. to Thorpe's Diplomatarium, by the letter B. to Birch's Cartularium, by 
 the letter E. to Earle's Land Charters. Reference will also be made to the two 
 collections of facsimiles, namely, the four volumes which come from the 
 British Museum and the two which come from the Ordnance Survey. We are 
 yet a long way off a satisfactory edition of the land-books. A model has been 
 lately set by Prof. Napier and Mr Stevenson in their edition of the Crawford 
 Collection of Early Charters, Oxford, 1895.
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 227 
 
 important element in the feudal structure the land-books ought 
 to tell us something. They ought to tell us how the churches 
 acquired their territories; they ought to tell us what class of 
 men made gifts of land to the churches ; they ought to tell us 
 whether those gifts were of big tracts or of small pieces. For 
 -example, let us remember how Domesday Book shows us that 
 four minsters, Worcester, Evesham, Pershore and Westminster, 
 v.-ere lords of seven-twelfths of Worcestershire, that the church 
 -of Worcester was lord of one quarter of that shire and lord of 
 the triple hundred of Oswaldslaw. How did that church 
 become the owner of a quarter of a county, to say nothing of 
 lands in other shires? We ought to be able to answer this 
 question in general terms, for among the charters that have 
 come down to us there is no series which is longer, there is 
 hardly a long series which is of better repute, than the line of 
 the land-books which belonged to the church of Worcester. 
 They come to us for the more part in the form of a cartulary 
 compiled not long after the Conquest by the monk Heming at 
 the instance of Bishop Wulfstan 1 . 
 
 Now the answer that they give to our question is this : How the 
 With but few exceptions, the donors of these lands were kings acquired 
 or under-kings, kings or under-kings of the Mercians, kings of tbeur 
 the English, and the gifts were large gifts. Very often the 
 charter comprised a tract of land which in Domesday Book 
 appears as a whole vill or as several contiguous vills. Seldom 
 indeed is the subject-matter of the gift described as being a 
 villa or a vicus : the king merely says that he gives so many 
 manses or the land of so many manentes at a certain place. 
 Still, if we compare these charters with Domesday Book, we 
 shall become convinced that very often the land given was of 
 wide extent. For example, Domesday Book tells us that the 
 church of Worcester holds Sedgebarrow (Seggesbarue) where 
 it has four hides for geld, but eight plough teams. How was 
 this acquired ? The monks answer that three centuries ago, 
 in 777, Aldred the under-king of the Hwiccas gave them 
 
 1 Heming's Cartulary was published by Hearne. It has been said that 
 some of the documents in this collection which Kemble accepted as genuine 
 commit the fault of supposing that the old episcopal minster was dedicated to 
 S*. Mary, whereas it was dedicated to S'. Peter. See Robertson, Historical 
 Essays, 195. However, where Heming's work can be tested it generally gains 
 credit. 
 
 152
 
 228 England before the Conquest. 
 
 viculum qui nuncupatur aet Segcesbaruue iiii. mansiones, that 
 land having been giving to him by Offa king of the Mercians 
 in order that the soul of the subregulus might have something 
 done for it 1 . In the Conqueror's reign the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury held a great estate in Middlesex of which Harrow 
 was the centre, and which contained no less than 100 hides. 
 Already in 832 the archbishop or his church had 104 hides at 
 Harrow 2 . Here we will state our belief, its grounds will appear 
 in another essay, that the ' manses ' that the kings throw about 
 by fives and tens and twenties, are no small holdings, but hides 
 each of which contains, or is for fiscal purposes deemed to 
 contain, some 120 acres of arable land together with stretches, 
 often wide stretches, of wood, meadow and waste, the extent of 
 which varies from case to case. From the seventh century 
 onwards the kings are giving large territories to the churches. 
 One instance is beyond suspicion, for Bede attests it. In 686 
 or thereabouts ^Ethelwealh king of the South Saxons gave to 
 Bishop Wilfrid the land of eighty-seven families in the pro- 
 montory of Selsey, and among its inhabitants were two hundred 
 and fifty male and female slaves 3 . This gift comprised a 
 spacious tract of country; it comprised what then were, or 
 what afterwards became, the sites of many villages 4 . But to 
 whichever of our oldest churches we turn, the story that it 
 proclaims in its title-deeds is always the same : We obtained 
 our lands by means of royal grants ; we obtained them not in 
 little pieces, here a few acres and there a few, but in great 
 pieces. Canterbury and Winchester echo the tale that is told 
 by Worcester. Another example may be given. It is one that 
 has been carefully examined of late. In 739 King ^Ethelheard 
 of Wessex gave to Forthhere bishop of Sherborne twenty cassati 
 at the place called ' Cridie.' Thereby he disposed of what now 
 are 'the parishes of Crediton, Newton S*. Gyres, Upton Pyne, 
 Brampford Speke, Hittesleigh, Drewsteignton, Colebrooke, 
 Morchard Bishop, Sandford, Kennerleigh and the modern 
 parish of Sherwood, part of Cheriton Bishop, and possibly the 
 
 1 D. B. i. 173 b ; K. 131 (i. 158); B. i. 311. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 127; K. 230 (i. 297) ; B. i. 558. 
 
 3 Hist. Eccl. iv. 13 (ed. Plummer, i. 232). 
 
 4 See the spurious charter of Csedwalla, K. 992 (v. 32) which purports to 
 show where the 87 manses lay. According to it, the gift comprised some places 
 which lay well outside the promontory of Selsey. But more of this hereafter.
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 229 
 
 whole of Clannaborough.' He disposed of the whole and more 
 than the whole of the modern 'hundred' of Crediton 1 . Then, 
 to choose one last instance, it is said that already in 679 Osric 
 of the Hwiccas gave to an abbess centum manentes qui adiacent 
 civitati quae vocatur Hdt Bathu*. It is not unlikely that this 
 means that a king newly converted to Christianity disposed by 
 one deed of many square leagues of land, namely, of the hundred 
 of Bath 3 . The kingdom of the Hwiccas was not boundless. If 
 Osric executed a few more charters of this kind he would soon 
 have ' booked ' it all. 
 
 Let us then examine with some care the charters that come The 
 to us from the earliest period, a period which shall begin with books? 
 the year 600 and end with the year 750. From this time we 
 have some forty charters sufficiently genuine for our present 
 purpose. With hardly an exception the grantor is a king or 
 an under-king, while the grantee is a dead saint, a church, a 
 bishop, an abbot, or a body of monks. If the grantee is a 
 layman, the gift is made to him in order that he may found a 
 minster. If this purpose is not expressed, it is to be under- 
 stood. Thus in 674 or thereabouts Wulfhere king of the 
 Mercians gives five manses to his kinsman Berhtferth as a 
 perpetual inheritance. Berhtferth is to have full power to give' 
 them to whom he pleases, and we are not told that he proposes 
 to devote them to pious uses. Nevertheless, the king makes 
 the gift 'for the love of Almighty God and of his faithful 
 servant S*. Peter 4 .' In other cases the lay donee is to hold 
 the land ' by church right ' or 'by minster right 5 .' Indeed 
 there seems to be no single deed of this period which does not 
 purport upon its face to be in some sort an ecclesiastical act, an 
 act done for the good of the church 6 . 
 
 1 Napier and Stevenson, Crawford Charters, p. 43. Some of the best work 
 that has been done towards connecting Domesday Book with the A.-S. land-books 
 will be found in a paper on the Pre-Domesday Hide of Gloucestershire : Trans- 
 actions of Bristol and Gloucestershire Arch. Soc. vol. xviii., by Mr C. S. Taylor. 
 
 2 K. 12 (i. 16) ; B. i. 69 ; H. & S. 129 ; Plummer, Bede, ii. 247. The charter 
 itself is open to grave suspicion. 
 
 3 C. S. Taylor, The Pre-Domesday Hide of Gloucestershire. 
 
 4 E. p. 4; B. M. Facsim. iv. 1. 
 
 5 K. 83 (i. 100): 'in possessionem aecclesiasticae rationis et regulae...in ius 
 monasticae rationis.' K. 90 (i. 108) : ' in possessionem iuris ecclesiastic!.' 
 IL 101 (i. 122): 'ut sit aecclesiastici iuris potestate subdita in perpetuum.' 
 
 K. 54 (i. 60) is a gift to an abbess, for compare K. 36 (i. 41). We here
 
 230 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Exotic These charters are documents of ecclesiastical origin ; they 
 
 character 
 
 of the book, are also documents of foreign origin. The bishops and abbots 
 have brought or have imported models from abroad. The 
 ' books ' that they induce the kings to sign are full of technical 
 phrases which already have an ancient history. By way of 
 illustration we will notice one point at which there is an 
 instructive resemblance and an instructive contrast. On the 
 Continent a grantor of lands ends his conveyance with a ' penal 
 stipulation.' If an heir of his controverts the deed, he is to pay 
 a certain sum, and none the less the conveyance is to remain 
 in full force. In England we can not thus stipulate for a 
 pecuniary penalty; the land-book is still so purely an eccle- 
 siastical affair that the punishment of its violator must be left 
 to the church and to God. So instead of stipulating that he 
 shall pay money, we stipulate that he shall be excommunicated 
 and, if impenitent, damned, but we do not forget to add that 
 none the less the conveyance shall remain as valid and effectual 
 as ever. ' If anyone,' says Eadric of Kent, ' shall attempt to go 
 against this gift, let him be separated from all Christianity and 
 the body and blood of Jesus Christ, manentem hanc donationis 
 chartulam 1 in sua nihilominus firmitate.' Such words may look 
 somewhat out of place in their new surroundings ; but they are 
 part of a venerable formula 2 . 
 
 The book But what is the model to which in the last resort these 
 
 confer* S documents go back ? A conveyance by a Roman landowner. 
 
 ownership. jj e jj as j n ^ Q land full and absolute dominium and is going to 
 .transfer this to another. Let us observe that the recorded 
 motive which prompts a king to set his cross, or rather Christ's 
 cross, to a land-book is a purely personal motive. He wishes 
 to save his soul, he desires pardon for his crimes 3 . Of the 
 welfare of his realm he says nothing; but his soul must be 
 saved. Sometimes he will give land to an under-king or to an 
 
 leave out of account the early lease for lives granted by Bp. Wilfrid, K. 91 (i. 109), 
 an important document, but one which must be mentioned in another context. 
 
 1 An accusative absolute. 
 
 2 Eadric 's deed is K. 27 (i. 30). See also Hlothar's charter K. 16 (i. 20) and 
 Suaebraed's, K. 52 (i. 59) ; B. M. Facs. i. plates 1, 3. With these should be 
 compared the forms in Koziere, Formules, i. 208-255. On pp. 235, 253 will be 
 found instances, one from the very ancient Angevin collection, another from 
 Marculf, in which the breaker of the charter is threatened, not only with a 
 money penalty, but also with excommunication and damnation. 
 
 K. Nos. 12, 16, 32, 36, 48, 52, 56, 67, etc.
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 231 
 
 ealdorman, for they also have souls and may desire salvation 1 . 
 He is acting as a private landowner might act. Then he uses 
 terms and phrases which belong to the realm of pure private 
 law. He asserts in the most energetic of all the words that 
 the law of the lower empire could provide that he is a land- 
 owner and that he is going to transfer landownership. The 
 land in question is tellus mea* or it is terra iuris mei z . Then 
 it is the very land itself that he gives, the land of so many 
 manses, 'with all the appurtenances, fields, pastures, woods, 
 marshes.' It is no mere right over the land that he gives, but 
 the very soil itself. Next let us observe the terms in which 
 the act of conveyance is stated : perpetualiter trado et de meo 
 iure in tuo transscribo terram...ut tarn tu quam posteri tui 
 teneatis, possideatis et quaecunque volueris de eadem terra facere 
 liberam habeatis potestatem*. The Latin language of the time 
 had no terms more potent or precise than these. Or again: 
 aliquantulam agri partem...Waldhario episcopo in dominio 
 donare decrevimus*. Or again: aeternaliter et perseverabiliter 
 possideat abendi vel dandi cuicumque eligere voluerit 6 . But it is 
 needless to multiply examples. 
 
 No doubt then, if we brine 1 to the interpretation of these Does the 
 
 1-1 i 1-1 b ok rea 
 
 instruments the ideas of an earlier or of a later time, the ideas confer ow- 
 of ancient Rome or of modern Europe, we see the king as a n 
 landowner conferring on the churches landownership pure and 
 simple. The fact on which our constitutional historians have 
 laid stress, namely^ that sometimes (for we must not overstate 
 the case) the king says that the bishops and his great men aro 
 consenting to his deed, important though it may be in other 
 contexts, is of little moment here. The king is put before us 
 as the owner of the land conveyed ; it is, he says, terra mea, 
 terra iuris mei. The rule, if rule it be, that he must not give 
 away his land without the consent of bishops and nobles in no 
 way denies his ownership. However, we are at the moment 
 more concerned with the fact, or seeming fact, that what he 
 gives to the churches is ownership and nothing less. 
 
 But if we loyally accept this seeming fact and think it over, The book 
 to what conclusions shall we not be brought, when we remember ve ys a su- 
 
 periority. 
 
 i K. 131 (i. 158). 2 K. 1. 3 K. Nos. 27, 35, 77, 79, 999, 1006, 1007. 
 4 K. 35 (i. 39); E. 13; B. M. Facs. i. 2. 
 6 K. 52 (i. 59) ; E. 16 ; B. M. Facs. i. 3. 
 6 E. 4 ; B. M. Facs. iv. 1.
 
 232 England before the Conquest. 
 
 how wide were the lands which the churches acquired from the 
 kings, when we think once more how by virtue of royal gifts 
 the church of Worcester acquired a quarter of a county ? When 
 these lands were given to the church were they waste lands ? 
 It is plain that this was not the common case. Already there 
 were manses, there were arable fields, there were meadows, 
 there were tillers of the soil. One of two conclusions seems to 
 follow. Either the king really did own these large districts, 
 and the tillers of the soil were merely his slaves or coloni, 
 who were conveyed along with the soil, or else the clear and 
 emphatic language of the charters sadly needs explanation. 
 Now if we hold by the letter of the charters, if we say that 
 the king really does confer landownership upon the churches, 
 there will be small room left for any landowners in England 
 save the kings, the churches and perhaps a few great nobles. 
 This is a theory which for many reasons we can not adopt ; no 
 one can adopt it who is not prepared to believe that Britain 
 was conquered by a handful of chieftains without followers. 
 The only alternative course seems that of saying that many 
 of the land-books even of the earliest period, despite their 
 language, convey not the ownership of land, but (the term 
 must be allowed us) a 'superiority' over land and over free 
 men. 
 
 A modem Let us for a moment remember that the wording of a 
 sy ' modern English conveyance might easily delude a layman or 
 a foreigner. An impecunious earl, we will say, sells his ancient 
 family estate. We look at the deed whereby this sale is 
 perfected. The Earl of A. grants unto B. C. and his heirs all 
 the land delineated on a certain map and described in a certain 
 schedule. That in substance is all that the deed tells us. We 
 look at the map ; we see a tract of many thousand acres, which, 
 besides a grand mansion, has farm-houses, cottages, perhaps, 
 entire villages upon it. The schedule tells us the names of 
 the fields and of the farm-houses. Like enough no word will 
 hint that any one lives in the houses and cottages, or that any 
 one, save the seller, has any right of any kind in any part of 
 this wide territory. But what is the truth ? Perhaps a 
 hundred different men, farmers and cottagers, have rights of 
 different kinds in various portions of the tract. Some have 
 leases, some have 'agreements for leases,' some hold for terms 
 of years, some hold from year to year, some hold at will. The
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 233 
 
 rights of these tenants stand, as it were, between the purchaser 
 and the land that he has bought. He has bought the benefit, 
 and the burden also, of a large mass of contracts. But of these 
 things his conveyance says nothing 1 . And so again, in the brief 
 charters of the thirteenth century a feoffor will say no more 
 than that he has given manerium meurn de Westona, as though 
 the manor of Weston were some simple physical object like a 
 black horse, and yet under analysis this manerium turns out to 
 be a complex tangle of rights in which many men, free and 
 villein, are concerned. 
 
 But it will be said that all this is the result of ' feudalism.' 
 It implies just that dismemberment of the dominium which perimity U 
 
 is one of feudalism's main characteristics. Undoubtedly in i 
 the twelfth century the free tenant in fee simple who holds 
 land 'in demesne' can have, must have, a lord above him, 
 who also holds and is seised of that land and who will speak of 
 the land as his. But we are now in the age before feudalism, 
 in the seventh and eighth centuries. Are we to believe that 
 the free owner of Kernble's 'ethel, hid, or alod' might have 
 above him, perhaps always had above him, not merely a lord 
 (for a personal relation of patronage between lord and man 
 is not to the point), but a landlord : one who would speak of 
 that ' ethel, hid or alod ' as terra iuris mei : one who to save 
 his soul would give that land to a church and tell the bishop 
 or abbot to do whatever he pleased with it ? If we believe 
 this, shall we not be believing that so far as English history 
 can be carried there is no age before ' feudalism ' ? 
 
 We will glance for a moment at two transactions which iilustra- 
 took place near the end of the seventh century. Bede tells 
 how .^Ethelwealh king of the South Saxons was persuaded to 
 become a Christian by Wulfhere king of the Mercians. The 
 Mercian received the South Saxon as his godson and by way 
 of christening-gift gave him two provinces, namely the Isle 
 of Wight and the territory of the Meanwari in Wessex, perhaps 
 the hundreds of Meon in Hampshire 2 . Then the same Bede 
 
 1 Davidson, Precedents in Conveyancing, i. 88 (ed. 1874) : ' In conveying 
 estates, it is not usual to refer to the leases affecting the same, unless the leases 
 are for a long term of years, or beneficial, or otherwise not of the ordinary 
 type.' 
 
 2 Hist. Eccl. iv. c. 13 (ed. Plummer, i. 230). In the 0. E. version the words 
 are : 'Ond se cyning...him to godsuna onfeng and to tacne 'Ssere sibbe him twa
 
 234 England before the Conquest. 
 
 tells us that the same ^Ethelwealh gave to Bishop Wilfrid 
 a land of eighty-seven families, to wit, the promontory of 
 Selsey: he gave it with its fields and its men, among whom 
 were two hundred and fifty male and female slaves 1 . A 
 modern reader will perhaps see here two very different trans- 
 actions. In the one case he sees 'the cession of a province' 
 by one king to another, and possibly he thinks how Queen 
 Victoria ceded Heligoland to her imperial grandson: the 
 act is an act of public law, a transfer of sovereignty. In the 
 other case he sees a private act, the gift of an estate for pious 
 uses. But Bede and his translator saw little, if any, difference 
 between the two gifts: in each case Bede says 'donavit'; 
 the translator in the one case says ' forgeaf,' in the other ' geaf 
 and sealde.' Now it will hardly be supposed that the Isle of 
 Wight had no inhabitants who were not the slaves or the 
 coloni of the king, and, that being so, we are not bound to 
 suppose that there were no free landowners in the promontory 
 of Selsey. May it not be that what ^Ethelwealh had to give 
 and gave to Wilfrid was what in our eyes would be far rather 
 political power than private property? 
 
 What had But over the free land of free landowners what rights had 
 give? mg the king which he could cede to another king or to a prelate, 
 saying withal that the subject of his gift was land ? He had, 
 as we think, rights of two kinds that were thus alienable- 
 we may call them fiscal rights and justiciary rights, though 
 such terms must be somewhat too precise when applied to the 
 vague thought of the seventh and eighth centuries. Of jus- 
 ticiary rights we shall speak below. As to the rights that we 
 call fiscal, we find that the king is entitled to something that 
 he calls tributum, vectigal, to something that he calls pastus, 
 victus, the king's feorm ; also there is military service to be 
 done, and the king, when making a gift, may have a word to 
 say about this. 
 
 Now it must at once be confessed that the charters''of this 
 
 rights. " early period seldom suggest any such confusion between po- 
 litical power and ownership as that which we postulate. Still 
 from time to time hints are given to us that should not be 
 ignored. Thus a Kentish king shortly after the middle of the 
 
 mseg)>e forgeaf, "$8et is Wiht ealond and Meanwara meagre on West Seaxna 
 Seode.' 
 
 1 Hist. Eccl. iv. c. 13 (ed. Plummer, i. 232).
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 235 
 
 eighth century gave to the church of Rochester twenty plough- 
 lands, not only ' with the fields, woods, meadows, pastures, 
 marshes and waters thereto pertaining/ but also ' with the 
 tributum which was paid thence to the king 1 .' Such a phrase 
 would hardly be appropriate if the king were giving land of 
 which he was the absolute owner, land cultivated for him by 
 his slaves. 
 
 A little more light is thrown on the matter by the first Military 
 rude specimens of a clause that is to become common in after burden on 
 times, the clause of immunity. Already in the seventh century land> 
 Wulfhere of Mercia, having made a gift of five manses, adds: 
 ' Let this land remain free to all who have it, from all earthly 
 hardships, known or unknown, except fastness and bridge and 
 the common host 2 .' So in 732 a king of Kent says: 'And no 
 royal due shall be found in it henceforth, saving such as is 
 common to all church lands in this Kent 3 .' ^Ethelbald of 
 Mercia says : ' By my royal power I decree that it be free for 
 ever from all tribute of secular payments, labours and burdens, 
 so that the said land may render service to none but Almighty 
 God and the church 4 .' Yet more instructive, if we may rely 
 upon it, is the foundation charter of Evesham Abbey. ^Ethel- 
 weard has given twelve manses : he then says, ' I decree that 
 for the future this land be free from all public tribute, pur- 
 veyance, royal works, military service (ab omni publico vectigali, 
 a victu, ab expeditione, ab opere regio) so that all things in 
 that place which are valuable and useful may serve the church 
 of S*. Mary, that is to say, the brethren serving [God] there ; 
 save this, that if in the island belonging to the said land there 
 shall chance to be an unusual supply of mast, the king may 
 
 1 K. 114 (i. 139); E. 49: 'et cum omni tribute quod regibus inde dabatur.' 
 So by a deed of A.D. 762, K. 109 (i. 133), B. i. 272, a thegn states that king 
 ./Ethelbert gave him a villa ' cum tribute illius possidendam ' and then proceeds 
 to give this villa to a church ' cum tributo illius.' 
 
 2 E. 4 ; B. M. Facs. iv. 1 : ' et semper liber permaneat omnibus habentibus 
 ab omnibus duris secularibus, notis et ignotis, praeter arcem et pontem ac 
 vulgare militiam.' 
 
 K. 77 (i. 92) ; E. 24 ; B. M. Facs. i. 6 : ' Et ius regium in ea deinceps 
 nullum repperiatur omnino, excepto dumtaxat tale quale generale est in univer- 
 sis ecclesiasticis terris quae in hac Cantia esse noscuntur.' 
 
 4 K. 90 (i. 108); E. 40: 'Et ut ab omni tributo vectigalium operum onerum- 
 que saecularium sit libera in perpetuum, pro mercede aeternae retributionis, 
 regali potestate decernens statuo ; tantuin ut deo omnipotent! ex eodem agello 
 aecclesiasticae servitutis famulatum impendat.'
 
 236 England before the Conquest. 
 
 have pasture for fattening one herd of pigs, but beyond this 
 no pasture shall be set out for any prince or potentate 1 .' Now 
 in the first place, these charters speak as though military 
 service is due from land : I (says the king) declare this land 
 to be free from the ' fyrd,' from the expeditio or I declare 
 that it is free from all earthly burdens, except military service 
 and the duty of repairing bridge and burh. We are not 
 saying that there is already military tenure, but we do say 
 that already the ' fyrd ' is conceived as a burden on land, in 
 so much that the phrase ' This land is or is not to be free 
 of military service ' has a meaning. But after all, land never 
 fights : men fight. Of what men then is the king speaking 
 when he says that the laud is, or is not, free from the expeditio ? 
 Not of the donees themselves, for they are bishops and monks 
 and serve in no army but God's. Not of the slaves who are 
 on the land, for they are not ' fyrd- worthy.' He is speaking 
 of free men who live on the land ; he is declaring that when 
 he has, if so modern a term be suffered, 'attorned' them to 
 the church, they will still have to serve in warfare, or he is de- 
 claring that they will be free even from this duty to the state 
 in order that the land may be the more absolutely at the 
 service of God and His stewards. 
 
 The king's Then military service, along with the duty of repairing 
 bridges and fastnesses, belongs to a genus of dues, of which 
 unfortunately we get but a vague description. There are 
 vectigalia publica, opera regia, oner a saecularia, there is tri- 
 butum, there is victus. How much of the information that 
 we get about these matters from later days we may carry back 
 with us to the earliest period it is difficult to say. Apparently 
 the king, the under-king, even the ealdorman, has a certain 
 right of living at the expense of his subjects, of making a 
 progress through the villages and quartering himself, his 
 courtiers, his huntsmen, his dogs and horses upon the folk 
 of the townships, of exacting a 'one night's farm' from this 
 village, a ' two nights' farm ' from that. The men who have 
 to bear these exactions may well be free men and free land- 
 
 1 K. 56 (L 64); H. & S. iii. 278; B. i. 171. The charter is of fairly good 
 
 repute, but nothing that comes from Evesham is beyond suspicion. It is almost 
 
 . impossible to translate these early books without making their language too 
 
 definite. How, for instance shall we render 'nulli, neque principi, neque 
 
 praefecto, neque tiranno alicui pascui constituantur ' ?
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 237 
 
 owners ; still over them the king has certain rights and rights 
 that he can give away. According to our interpretation of 
 the charters, it is often enough such rights as these that the 
 king is giving when he says that he is giving terrain iuris 
 mei. He declares, it will be observed, that the land is to be 
 free from vectigalia and opera to which it has heretofore been 
 subject. But does he mean by this to benefit the occupiers 
 of the soil? No, he has no care whatever to relieve them. 
 Bent on saving his soul, his care is that the land shall be 
 wholly devoted to the service of God. As we understand the 
 matter, whatever vectigalia and opera the king has hitherto 
 exacted from these men the church will now exact. The king 
 has conveyed what he had to convey, a superiority over free 
 landowners. 
 
 It is permissible to doubt whether modern historians have Nature of 
 fully realized the extent of the rights which the king had over 
 the land of free landowners. In the middle of Ine's laws, 
 which follow each other in no rational order, we suddenly 
 come upon an isolated text, which says this : ' For 10 hides 
 "to foster" 10 vessels of honey, 300 loaves, 12 ambers of 
 Welsh ale, 30 of clear [ale], 2 old [i.e. full grown] oxen or 10 
 wethers, 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, an amber full of butter, 
 5 salmon, 20 poundsweight of fodder and a hundred eels 1 .' The 
 context throws no light upon the sentence; but in truth no 
 sentence in Ine's laws has a context. What is its meaning ? 
 We can not but think that this foster is the king's victus*. 
 Once a year from every ten hides he is entitled to this feorm. 
 Perhaps it is a 'one night's feorm'] for it may be enough to 
 support a king of the seventh century and a modest retinue 
 during twenty-four hours. Still it will be no trifling burden 
 upon the land, even if we suppose the hide to have 120 arable 
 acres or thereabouts. Suppose that the king transfers his 
 right over a single hide to some bishop or abbot, the donee 
 will be entitled to receive from that hide a rent which can 
 not' be called insignificant. We dare not argue that this law 
 is a general law for the whole of Wessex. It may refer only 
 to some newly settled and allotted districts. There are other 
 
 1 Ine, 70, 1. 
 
 2 Thorpe, Gloss, s. v. Foster, thinks that this law has to do with the fostering 
 of a child. Schmid is inclined to hold that it speaks of a rent payable to a 
 landlord.
 
 238 England before the Conquest. 
 
 hints in these laws of Ine of some large land-settlement, an 
 allotment of land among great men who have become bound 
 to bring under cultivation a district theretofore waste 1 . But 
 it is difficult to dissociate the foster of these laws from the 
 victus of the charters, and, quite apart from this disputable 
 passage, we have plenty of proof that the king's victus was an 
 incumbrance which pressed heavily upon the lands of free 
 landowners 2 . If in England the duty of feeding the king as 
 he journeys through the country developed into a regular 
 tax or rent this would not stand alone. That duty plays a 
 considerable part in the Scandinavian law-books, and in the 
 Denmark of the thirteenth century we may find arrangements 
 which are very like that set forth in Ine's law. Every hundred 
 (her ad), taken as a whole, has to contribute something towards 
 the king's support. Often it is a round sum of money ; but 
 often it will consist of provisions necessary to maintain the 
 king's household during a night or two or three nights (servicium 
 unius noctis, servicium duarum noctium). Then the ' service of 
 two nights ' is accurately denned. It consists of, among other 
 things, 26 salted pigs, 14 live pigs, 16 salted oxen, 16 salted 
 sheep, 360 fowls, 180 geese, 360 cheeses, corn, malt, fodder, 
 butter, herrings, stock-fish, pepper and salt. This revenue 
 stands apart from the revenue derived from the crown lands ; 
 it is regarded as a tax rather than a rent ; but it is to this 
 
 1 Ine, 64-6: 'He who has 20 hides must show 12 hides of cultivated laud if 
 he wishes to go away. He who has 10 hides shall show 6 hides of cultivated 
 land. He who has 3 hides let him show one and a half.' The persons 
 with whom these laws deal are certainly not ascripti glebae ; they are very great 
 men. Then we must read c. 63: 'If a gesithcundman go away, then may he 
 have his reeve with him and his smith and his child's fosterer ' ; and then c. 68 : 
 4 If a gesithcundman be driven off, let him be driven from the dwelling (botle), 
 not from the set land (naes baere setene).' The king's gesiths have been taking 
 up large grants of waste land and putting under-tenants on the soil. These , 
 great folk must not fling up their holdings until they have brought the land into 
 cultivation. If they do abandon their land, they may take away with them only 
 three of their dependants. If they are evicted by some adverse claimant this is 
 not to harm their under-tenants ; they are to be driven from the botl, that is 
 from the chief house, but not from the land that they have set out to husband- 
 men. These last are to enjoy a secure title. We must leave to linguists the 
 question whether we have rightly understood the difficult seten ; but these 
 chapters, together with c. 67, which deals with the relations between these 
 lords and their husbandmen, seem to point to some great scheme for colonizing 
 a newly-conquered district. 
 
 3 tfemble, Saxons, i. 294-8; ii. 58.
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 239 
 
 extent rooted in the soil, that the amount due from each 
 hundred (herad) is fixed 1 . There is a great deal to make us 
 think that at a quite early time in England such arrange- 
 ments as this had been made. If we look at the charters we 
 find that the king is always giving away manses in fives and 
 tens, fifteens and twenties. This symmetry, this prevalence 
 of a decimal system, we take to be artificial ; already the 
 manse, or hide, is a fiscal unit, a fraction of a district which 
 has to supply the king with food or with money in lieu of food 2 . 
 
 Whatever be the origin of the king's feorm and if we Tribute 
 find it in the voluntary gifts which yet barbarous Germans 
 make to their kings, we may none the less have to admit that 
 it has been touched by the influence of the Roman tributum 
 it becomes either a rent or a tax. We may call it the one, or 
 we may call it the other, for so long as the recipient of it is 
 the king, the law of the seventh and eighth centuries will 
 hardly be able to tell which it is 3 . The king begins to give 
 it away: in the hands of his donees, in the hands of the 
 churches, it becomes a rent. This is not all, however, that 
 the king has to give, or that the king does give, when he says 
 that he is giving land. That he may be giving away the 
 profits of justice, that he may be giving jurisdiction itself, we 
 shall argue hereafter. But probably he has even in early days 
 yet other things to give, and at any rate in course of time he 
 discovers that such is the case. He can give the right to take 
 toll, he can give market rights*. It is by no means impossible 
 that he has forest rights, some general claim to place uncultivated 
 land under his ban, if he would hunt therein, and some general 
 claim to the nobler kinds of fish 5 . Then again, in the eleventh 
 
 1 Karl Lehmann, Abhandlungen zur Germanischen Eechtsgeschichte, 1888 ; 
 Liber Census Daniae, ed. O. Nielsen, 1879. 
 
 2 Cnut's law (n. 62) about this matter seems to imply that in consequence of 
 the immunities lavishly bestowed by his predecessors, the old ' king's feorm' was 
 only leviable from lands which were deemed to be the king's lands, but that 
 Cnut's reeves had been demanding that this feorm should be supplemented by 
 other lands. The king of his grace forbids them to do this. The old feorm has 
 been changed into a rent of crown lands ; a vague claim to purveyance ' is 
 abolished, but will appear again after the Conquest. 
 
 3 In the A.-S. Chron. ann. 991, 1007, 1011, the Danegeld appears as a gafol; 
 but this is the common word for a rent paid by a tenant to his landlord. 
 
 * Kemble, Saxons ii. 73-6. 
 
 5 Already in 749 .ZEthelbald of Mercia in a general privilege for the churches 
 (H. & S. iii. 386) says, Sed nee hoc praetermittendum est, cum necessarium
 
 240 England before the Conquest. 
 
 century we find men owing services to the king which he stil! 
 receives rather as king than as landlord, and the sporadic 
 distribution of these services seems to show that they are not 
 of modern origin. Such are, for example, the ' inwards ' and 
 the ' averages ' which are done by the free men of Cambridge- 
 shire 1 . We are told in a general way that the thegn owes fyrd- 
 fare, burh-bot and brycg-bot, but that from many lands the 
 lands comprised within no privilege, no franchise ' a greater 
 land -right arises at the king's ban ' ; for there is the king's 
 deer-hedge to be made, there are warships to be provided, there 
 are sea- ward and head- ward 2 . Every increase in the needs 
 of the state, in the power of the state, gives the king new 
 rights in the land, consolidates his seignory over the land. If 
 a fleet be formed to resist the Danes, the king has something 
 to dispose of, a new immunity for sale. If a geld be levied 
 to buy off the Danes, the king can sell a freedom from this 
 tax, or he can tell the monks of S*. Edmundsbury that they 
 may levy the tax from their men and keep it for their own 
 use 3 . This, we argue, is not a new abuse, a phenomenon which 
 first appears in the evil feudal time when men began to confuse 
 imperium with dominium, kingship with landlordship, office 
 with property, tax with rent. On the contrary, we must begin 
 with confusion. In some of the very earliest land-books that 
 have come down to us what the king really gives, when he 
 says that he is giving land, is far rather his kingly superiority 
 over land and landowners than anything that we dare call 
 ownership 4 . 
 
 Mixture of Not that this is always the case. Very possible is it that 
 and superi- from the first the king had villages which were peopled mainly 
 ority- by his theows and lasts, and intertribal warfare may have 
 increased their number. But the charters, for all their ap- 
 parent precision, will not enable us to distinguish between these 
 cases and others in which the villages are full of free land- 
 
 constat aecclesiis Dei, quia JEthelbaldus Rex, pro expiations delictoruin suorum 
 et retributione mercedis aeternae, famulis Dei propriam libertatem in fructibus 
 silvarum agrorumque, sive in caeteris utilitatibus fluminum vel raptura piscium, 
 habere donavit.' 
 
 1 See above, p. 55. 2 Bectitudines c. 1 (Schmid, App. III.). 
 
 3 See above, p. 169. 
 
 * Schroder, Die Frariken und ihr Becht, Zeitsch. d. Savigny Stiftung, 
 iii. 62-82, has argued that, from the first times of the Frankish settlement 
 onwards, the king has a Bodenregal, an Obereigenthum over all land.
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 241 
 
 owners and their slaves. The charters are not engendered 
 by the English facts; they are foreign, ecclesiastical, Roman. 
 By such documents, to our thinking, the king gives what he 
 has to give. In one case it may be a full ownership of a village 
 or of some scattered steads ; in another it may be a superiority, 
 which when analyzed will turn out to be a right of exacting 
 supplies of provender from the men of the village ; in a third, 
 and perhaps a common case, the same village will contain the 
 mansi serviles of the king's slaves and the mansi ingenuiles of 
 free landowners. He no more thinks of distinguishing by the 
 words of his charter his governmental power over free men and 
 their land from his ownership of his slaves and the land that 
 they are tilling, than his successor of the eleventh or twelfth 
 century will think of making similar distinctions when he 
 bestows a 'manor' or an 'honour.' 
 
 We have been suggesting and shall continue to suggest The king's 
 that at a very early time, a time beyond which our land-books su 
 will not carry us, the king is beginning to discover that the 
 whole land which he rules is in a certain and a profitable sense 
 his land. He can give it away ; he can barter it in exchange 
 for spiritual benefits, and this he can do without wronging the 
 free landholders who are in possession of that land, for what 
 he really gives is the dues (it is too early to say the ' service ') 
 that they have owed to him and will henceforth owe to his 
 donee. Let us remember that his successors will undoubtedly 
 be able to do this. In a certain sense, Henry II., for example, 
 will have all England to give away. If we were to put an 
 extreme case, we might have to reckon with possible re- 
 bellions; but every single hide of England Henry can give 
 without wronging any one. Suppose that G has been holding 
 a tract as the king's tenant in chief by service worth 5 a 
 year, Henry can make a grant of that land to B, and by this 
 grant G will not be wronged. Henceforth G will hold of B, 
 and B of the king. Suppose that, on the occasion of this 
 grant, services worth 2 a year are reserved, then the king 
 has it in his power to grant the land yet once more : to grant 
 it, let us say, to the Abbot of A, who is to hold in frankalmoin ; 
 C will not be wronged, B will not be wronged. What the 
 king has done with one hide he can do. with every hide in 
 England; piece by piece he can give all England away. We 
 have been suggesting and shall continue to suggest that at 
 M. 16
 
 242 England before the Conquest. 
 
 a very early time, even in the first days of English Christianity, 
 the king is beginning to discover that he has some such 
 power as that which his successors will exercise. This bar- 
 barous chieftain learns that his political sway over the folk 
 involves a proprietary and alienable element of which he can 
 make profit. It involves a right to feorm and a right to 
 wites. The beef and the cheese and the Welsh ale that he 
 might have levied from a district he invests, if we may so 
 speak, in what he is being taught to regard as the safest 
 and most profitable of all securities. He obtains not only 
 remission of his sins, but also the friendship and aid of 
 bishops and clergy. And so large stretches of land are 
 'booked' to the churches. It is to be feared that if the 
 England of the sixth century had been visited by modem 
 Englishmen, the Saxon chieftains would have been awakened 
 to a consciousness of their 'booking' powers by offers of gin 
 and rifles. 
 
 Book-land In its original form and when put to its original purpose 
 right. the land-book is no mere deed of gift ; it is a dedication. Under 
 the sanction of a solemn anathema, a tract of land is devoted 
 to the service of God. A very full power of disposing of it 
 is given to the bishop or the abbot, who is God's servant. As 
 yet the law has none of those subtle ideas which in after ages 
 will enable it to treat him as 'a corporation sole' or as 'a 
 trustee,' nor can the folk-law meddle much with the affairs 
 of God. The bishop or abbot must be able to leave the land 
 to whom he pleases, to institute an heir. Thus ' book-land ' 
 stands, as it were, outside the realm of the folk-law. In all 
 probability the folk-law of this early period knows 'no such 
 thing as testamentary power. Testamentary power can only 
 be created by the words of a book, by an anathema. But lay- 
 men are not slow to see that they can make use of this new 
 institution for purposes of their own, which are not always 
 very pious purposes. By a pretext that he is going to con- 
 struct a minster, a man will obtain a book garnished with the 
 crosses of bishops. One day calling himself an abbot and the 
 next day calling himself a king's thegn, a layman among eccle- 
 siastics, an ecclesiastic among laymen, he will shirk all duties 
 that are owed to state and church. Already Bede complains 
 of this in a wise and famous letter. He advocates a resumption 
 of these inconsiderate and misplaced gifts, and reproves the
 
 Book-land and the Land-book. 243 
 
 prelates for subscribing the books 1 . His letter may have done 
 good ; but laymen still obtained books which authorized them 
 to hold land 'by church right.' Thu Offa of Mercia gave to 
 an under-king lands at Sedgebarrow 'in such wise that he 
 might have them during his life, and in exercise of full power 
 might leave them to be possessed by church right".' There- 
 upon the subregulus, as a modern English lawyer might say, 
 executed this power of appointment in favour of the church of 
 Worcester. The same Offa gave land to his thegn Dudda so 
 that by church right he might enjoy it during his life and 
 leave it on his death to whom he would 3 . 
 
 We must wait for. a later age before we shall find the Book-land 
 kings freely booking lands to their thegns without any allusion 
 to ecclesiastical purposes. Indeed it may be said that the 
 Anglo-Saxon land-book never ceases to be an ecclesiastical 
 instrument. True that in the tenth century the kings are 
 booking lands to their thegns with great liberality ; true also 
 that there is no longer any pretence that the land so booked 
 will go to endow a church ; but let us observe these books 
 and let us not ignore the recitals that they contain. Why 
 does the king make these grants ? He says that it is because 
 he hopes for an eternal reward in the everlasting mansions. 
 This has perhaps become an empty phrase : but it has a 
 history. Also it is needed in order to make the deed a logical 
 whole. Let us observe the sequence of the clauses : ' Whereas 
 the fashion of this world passeth away but the joys of heaven 
 are eternal ; therefore I give land to my thegn so that he may 
 enjoy it during his life and leave it on his death to whomsoever 
 he pleases, and if any one shall come against this charter may 
 he perish for ever ; I have confirmed this gift with the sign 
 of Christ's holy cross 4 / Some piety in the harangue (arenga) 
 is necessary in order to lead up to the anathema and the cross ; 
 
 1 Epistola ad Ecgbertum (ed. Plummer, i. 405). 
 
 2 K. 131 (i. 158). 
 
 3 K. 137 (i. 164); B. M. Facs. i. 10. A few words are illegible, but the land 
 is given ' in ius ecclesiast ieae liberal! tatis in perpetuum possid[endam]. ' 
 
 4 jEthelwnlf makes a grant to a thegn, K. 269 (ii. 48), 'pro expiatione 
 piaculorum meorum et absolutione criminum meorum.' In course of time the 
 piety of the recitals becomes more and more perfunctory. It becomes a philo- 
 sophic reflection on the transitoriness of earthly affairs and finally evaporates, 
 leaving behind some commonplace about the superiority of written over unwritten 
 .testimony. 
 
 162
 
 244 England before the Conquest. 
 
 it justifies the intervention of the bishops, who also will make 
 crosses and thereby will be denouncing the church's ban against 
 any one who violates the charter. And who, we may ask, is 
 likely to violate the charter ? The donee's kinsfolk may be 
 tempted to do this if the donee makes use of that testamentary 
 power which has been granted to him (as, for instance, by 
 leaving the land to a church) more especially because it may 
 be very doubtful whether in impeaching such a testament they 
 will not have the folk-law on their side. Such in brief outline 
 is so we think the history of book-land. It is land (or rather 
 in many cases a superiority) held by royal privilege 1 under the 
 sanction of the anathema. 
 
 2. Book-land and Folk-land. 
 What is with 'book-land' is contrasted 'folk-land.' Therefore of 
 
 folk-land ? 
 
 folk-land a few words must be said. What is folk-land ? A few 
 years ago the answer that historians gave to this question was 
 this : It is the land of the folk, the land belonging to the folk. 
 Dr Vinogradoff has argued that this is not the right answer 2 . 
 His argument has convinced us; but, as it is still new, we 
 will take leave to repeat it with some few additions of our 
 own. 
 Folk-land The term ' folk-land ' occurs but thrice in our texts. It 
 
 in the -,-, i mi 
 
 texts. occurs in one law and in two charters. Ihe one law comes 
 from Edward the Elder 3 and all that it tells us is that folk-land 
 is the great contrast to book-land. Folk-land and book-land 
 seem to cover the whole field of land tenure. Possibly this 
 law tells us also that while a dispute about folk -land will, a 
 dispute about book-land will not, come before the shiremoot: 
 but we hardly obtain even this information 4 . Then we have the 
 two charters. Of these the earlier is a deed of ^Ethelbert of 
 Kent dated in 858 5 . The king with the consent of his great 
 men and of the prelates gives to his thegn Wulflaf five plough- 
 lands at Washingwell (aliquam partem terrae iuris mei} in 
 exchange for land at Marsham. He declares that the land 
 
 1 Bede (ed. Plummer, i. 415): Mpsas quoque litteras privilegiorum suorum.' 
 
 3 Vinogradoff, Folkland, Eng. Hist. Eev. viii. 1. 
 
 Edw. i. 2. ' * Schmid, p. 575. 
 
 6 K. 281 (ii. 64); B. M. Facs. ii. 33.
 
 Book-land and Folk-land. 245 
 
 at Washingwell is to be free from all burdens save the three 
 usually excepted, the land at Marsham having enjoyed a 
 similar immunity. The boundaries of Washingwell are then 
 stated. On the west it is bounded by the king's folk-land 
 (cyninges folcland) which Wighelm and Wulflaf have. So 
 much for the deed itself. On its .back there is an endorsement 
 to the following etfect : ' This is the land-book for Washingwell 
 that JEthelbert the king granted to Wulflaf his thegn in ex- 
 change for an equal amount of other land at Marsham; the 
 king granted and booked to Wulflaf five sullungs of land at 
 Washingwell for the five sullungs at Marsham and the king 
 made that land at Marsham his folk-land (" did it him to folk- 
 land ") when they had exchanged the lands, save the marshes 
 and the salterns at Faversham and the woods that belong to 
 the salterns.' Now this deed teaches us that there was land 
 which was known as ' the king's folk-land/ and that it was in 
 the occupation of two men called Wighelm and Wulflaf,. the 
 latter of whom may well have been the Wulflaf who made an 
 exchange with the king. The endorsement tells us that when 
 the king received the land at Marsham he made it his folk- 
 land, ' he did it him to folk-land.' 
 
 The other charter is of greater value. It is the will of The will of 
 the Ealdorman Alfred and comes from some year late in the Eaiiior- * 
 ninth century 1 . He desires in the first place to state who 11 - 
 are the persons to whom he gives his inheritance and his 
 book-land. He then gives somewhat more than 100 hides, 
 including 6 at Lingfield and lO at Horsley, to his wife for her 
 life, 'with remainder,' as we should say, to their daughter. 
 More than once he calls this daughter ' our common bairn,' 
 thus drawing attention to the fact that she is not merely his 
 daughter, but also his wife's daughter. This is of importance, 
 for in a later clause we hear of a son. 'I give to my son ^Ethel- 
 wald three hides of book-land: two hides on Hwsetedune [Wad- 
 don], and one at Gatatune [Gatton] and therewith 100 swine, 
 and, if the king will grant him the folk-land with the book-land, 
 then let him have and enjoy it: but if this may not be, then let 
 her [my wife] grant to him whichever she will, either the land 
 at Horsley or the land at Liugfield.' Such are the materials 
 which must provide us with our knowledge of folk-land. 
 
 1 K. 317 (ii. 120); T. 480; B. ii. 195.
 
 246 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Comment We must examine Alfred's will somewhat carefully. The 
 ^Ju. s testator has a wife, a son, a daughter. He leaves the bulk 
 of his book-land to his wife for life with remainder to his 
 daughter. For his son he makes a small provision (only three 
 hides) out of his book-land, but he expresses a wish that the 
 king will let that son have the folk-land, and, if this wish be 
 not fulfilled, then that son is to have either ten or else six 
 hides out of the book-land previously given to the wife and 
 daughter. We see that, even if he gets these few hides, the 
 son will obtain but a small part of a handsome fortune. ' If 
 the king will grant him the folk-land ' this may suggest that 
 a man's folk-land will not descend to his heir. But another, 
 and, as it seems to us, a far more probable explanation is open. 
 The son is 'my son,' the daughter is 'our common bairn/ 
 May not the son be illegitimate, or may not his legitimacy 
 be doubtful, for legitimacy is somewhat a matter of degree ? 
 The ealdorman may have contracted a dubious or a morganatic 
 marriage. We can see that he does not feel called upon to 
 do very much for this son of his. He expresses a hope that 
 the king as supreme judge will hold the son to be legitimate, 
 or sufficiently legitimate to inherit the folk-land, which he 
 does not endeavour to bequeath. 
 
 The king The king like other persons can have both folk-land, and 
 land to 8 book-land. We have just heard of 'the king's folk-land': we 
 himself. tum fa e j m p 0r t an t deed whereby King ^Ethelwulf booked 
 land to himself 1 . Alms, it says, are the most perdurable of 
 possessions ; one ought to minister to the necessities of others 
 and so make to oneself friends of the mammon of unrighteous- 
 ness ; therefore I King ^Ethelwulf with the consent and leave 
 of my bishops and great men have booked to myself twenty 
 manses so that I may enjoy them and leave them after my 
 death to whomsoever I please in perpetuity: the land is to 
 be free from all tribute and the like, save military service 
 and the repair of bridges. Then the description of the land 
 thus booked is preceded by the statement : ' These are the 
 lands which his wise men (senatores) conceded to ^Ethelwulf.' 
 Now the full meaning of this famous instrument we can not 
 yet discuss. To put it briefly, our explanation will be that 
 over his book- land the king will have powers which he will 
 
 1 K. 260 (ii. 28) ; B. ii. 33 ; B. M. Facs. ii. 30.
 
 Book-land and Folk-land. 247 
 
 not have over his folk-land; in particular he will have that 
 testamentary power which will enable him to become friendly 
 with the mammon of unrighteousness and secure those eternal 
 mansions that he desires. But we have introduced this charter 
 here because, though it says no word of folk-land, it forms an 
 important part of the case of those who contend that folk-land 
 is land belonging to the people 1 . 
 
 Another weighty argument is derived from the fact that The con- 
 there are but very few charters of the kings which do not in 
 
 some formula or another profess that many illustrious persons 
 have consented to or have witnessed the making of the deed. 
 We have no desire to detract from the significance of this fact, 
 still we ought to examine our documents with care. Such 
 words as a charter has about 'consent' may occur in two 
 different contexts. They may occur in close connexion with 
 the words of gift, ' the operative words,' as our conveyancers 
 say, or they may occur in the eschatocol, the clause which deals 
 with the execution and attestation of the instrument. If -we 
 come across two deeds, one of which tells us how 'I king 
 ^Ethelwulf with the consent and leave of my bishops and great 
 men give land to a church or a thegn,' while the other says 
 nothing of consent until it tells us how ' This charter was 
 written on such a day his testibus consentientibus' we must 
 not at once treat them as saying the same thing in two dif- 
 ferent ways. 
 
 For this purpose we may divide our charters into three Consent 
 periods. The first begins with the few genuine charters of ness in the 
 the seventh century and ends in the reign of Egbert, the J^"*" 8 
 second endures until the reign of Edward the Elder, the third 
 until the Norman Conquest. It will be well understood that 
 we draw no hard line; each period has its penumbra; but 
 the years 800 and 900 or 925 may serve to mark very rudely 
 the two limits of the middle period. Now a clause in the 
 body of the deed stating that the gift is made by the consent 
 of the witan is characteristic of this middle period. Any ono 
 who wishes to forge a royal land-book of the ninth century 
 should insert this clause ; any one who wishes to forge a deed 
 
 1 In K. 1019 (v. 58) there is talk of Offa having booked land to himself, ami 
 in K. 1245 (vi. 58) Edgar seems to perform a similar feat without mentioning 
 the consent of the witan, though they attest the deed. See Stubbs, Const. Hist. 
 i. 145.
 
 248 England before the Conquest. 
 
 of the tenth or of the eighth century should think twice before 
 he makes use of it. To be more exact, it becomes a common 
 form under Cenwulf of Mercia and Egbert of Wessex ; it grows 
 very rare under JEthelstan 1 . In the meanwhile it serves as 
 a common form, and it appears in deeds wherein the king says 
 in forcible terms that he is disposing of his land and his in- 
 heritance 2 . During the last of our three periods all that is 
 ascribed to the great men whose crosses follow the king's cross 
 is little, if anything, more than the function of witnesses. A 
 deed of ^Ethelstan's day will end with some such formula as 
 the following: 'this book was written at such a place and 
 time, and its authority was confirmed by the witnesses whose 
 names are written below.' But very often there is no such 
 concluding formula : we have simply the list of witnesses and 
 their crosses, and of each of them it is said that he consented 
 and subscribed. Later in the tenth century the formula which 
 introduces the names of the witnesses will hardly admit 
 that they in any sense confirmed the transaction; it will say 
 merely, ' This book was written on such a day his testibus con- 
 sentientibus quorum nomina inferius caraxantur' On this will 
 follow the names and crosses; and of each bishop but not 
 as a general rule of any other witness it will be said that he 
 has done something for the stability of the deed. To convey 
 this information, the scribe rings the changes on a score of 
 Latin words subscripsi, consensi, consolidavi, corroboravi, con- 
 firmavi, conscripsi, consignavi, adquievi, praepinxi, praepunxi, 
 praenotavi, and so forth, thereby showing that he has no very 
 clear notion as to what it really is that the bishop does. But 
 this degradation of what seems to be a formula of assent into 
 a formula of attestation has been noticed by others 8 , and it 
 is more to our purpose to examine the charters of the earliest 
 period, for then, if at any time, the folk-land should have 
 appeared in its true character as the land of the people. 
 Attestation Now during our earliest period instruments which contain 
 
 of the . . ..... . 
 
 earliest in conjunction with their operative words any allusion to the 
 
 books. 
 
 1 From Alfred and Edward the Elder we have hardly enough genuine charters 
 to serve as materials for an induction, but Edward's reign seems the turning point. 
 
 2 A.D. 838, K. 1044 (v. 90): Egbeut gives 'aliquantulain terrae partem meae 
 propriae hereditatis...cum consilio et testimonio optimatum meorum.' A.D. 863, 
 K. 1059 (v. 116) : JSthelred ' cum consensu ac licentia episcoporum ac principum 
 meorum ' gives ' aliquam partem agri quae ad me rite pertinebat.' 
 
 3 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 212.
 
 Book-land and Folk-land. 249 
 
 consent of the great men of the realm are exceedingly rare 1 . 
 A commoner case is that in which the eschatocol says something 
 about consent. We will collect a few examples. 
 
 I have confirmed this with the sign of the holy cross with the counsel 
 of Laurence the bishop and of all my principes and have requested them 
 to do the like 2 . 
 
 I have impressed the sign of the holy cross and requested fit and proper 
 witnesses to subscribe 3 . 
 
 I have confirmed this gift with my own hand and have caused fit and 
 proper witnesses, my companions (commites), to confirm and subscribe*. 
 
 This formula, undoubtedly of foreign origin, was common 
 in Kent 8 . From Wessex and the middle of the eighth century, 
 we twice obtain a fuller form. 
 
 These things were done in such a year ; and that my munificent gift 
 may be the more firmly established (firmiv* roboretur) we have associated 
 with ourselves the fit and proper witnesses and ' adstipulators ' whose 
 names and descriptions are set forth below to subscribe and confirm this 
 privilege of the aforesaid estate (praedictae possessionis primlegium 6 '). 
 
 More frequently however the document has nothing that 
 can be called a clause of attestation. It simply gives us the 
 names and the crosses of the witnesses. Occasionally over 
 against each name, or each of the most important names, is 
 set some word or phrase describing this witness's act. He 
 has subscribed, or he has consented, or he has consented and 
 subscribed, or perhaps he has confirmed 7 . 
 
 1 We know of but four specimens earlier than 750. The first is a deed 
 whereby Wulfhere of Mercia makes a grant ' cum consensu et licentia amicorurn 
 et optimatum meorum': E. 4; B. M. Facs. iv. 1. The second is a deed 
 whereby Hlothar of Kent makes a grant with the consent of Abp Theodore, his 
 (Hlothar's) brother's son Eadric and all the princes ; K. 16 (i. 20); B. M. Facs. 
 i. 1. The third, known to us only through a copy, is one by which ^thelbald 
 of Mercia makes a grant 'cum consensu vel episcoporum vel optimatum 
 meorum'; K. 83 (i. 100). By a fourth deed, K. 27 (i. 30), Eadric grants land 
 'cum consensu meorum patriciorum ' ; but this also we only get from a copy. 
 
 2 K. 1 (i. 1) ; A.D. 604. ^thelbert for Rochester. 
 
 3 K. 43 (i. 50) ; B. i. 140 : A.D. 697, Wihtraad. K. 47 (i. 54) ; E. 17 ; B. M. 
 Facs. i. 4: Wihtrsed. K. 77 (i. 92); E. 24; B. M. Facs. i. 6: A.D. 732, 
 ^thelbert. K. 132 (i. 160); E. 54; B. M. Facs. ii. 4: A.D. 778, Egbert. 
 
 4 K. 85 (i. 102) ; E. 32 : Eadbert for Rochester. Of this deed we have but a 
 transcript. The formula of attestation is very curious and may have been 
 distorted either by the original scribe or the copyist. 
 
 5 K. 157 (i. 189), Offa of Mercia uses this eschatocol, but in a Kentish gift. 
 K. 1006-7 (v. 47-8); B. i. 256-7. 7 K. 79 (L 95).
 
 250 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Confirma- Now we ought not to draw inferences from these phrases 
 attesta- without knowing that in the Latin of this period such words 
 as confirmare, corroborare, adstipulari are the proper words 
 whereby to describe the act of those who become witnesses to 
 the execution of a deed 1 . Our kings are making use, though 
 it is a lax use, of foreign formulas; what is more, they are 
 adopting the formulas of private deeds. They have no chan- 
 cellor, as the Frankish kings have, and they do not, as the 
 Frankish kings do, dispense with that rogatio testium which 
 is one of the usual forms of private law 8 . On the continent of 
 Europe all this talk about confirmation, corroboration and 
 consent would by no means imply that the witnesses were 
 more than witnesses. The line which divides attestation from 
 participation is really somewhat fine, and though well enough 
 apprehended by modern lawyers, would not easily be explained 
 to a barbarian ealdorman. A witness does consent to the 
 execution of the instrument which he attests, though he may 
 be utterly ignorant of its import, and, if the law demands that 
 such an instrument shall be attested, then it may well be said 
 of the witness that by attesting it he makes it firm, he 
 confirms it. Until he attested it, it was not a valid instrument 3 . 
 Now we are not saying that the magnates, more especially the 
 bishops, who attested these ancient charters thought of them- 
 selves as mere witnesses. Had that been so, a clause expressing 
 the consent of the whole body of great men would hardly have 
 crept into the charters ; and it does creep in gradually during 
 the last half of the eighth century 4 . A similar development 
 
 1 Brunner, Bechtsgeschichte der Rom. u. German. Urkunde, pp. 220-8; 
 Giry, Manuel de diplomatique, 614. Bede in his famous letter (ed. Plumtner, 
 i. 417) uses the technical astipulari to describe the action of the prelates who 
 set their crosses to the king's charters. It occurs also in a charter of 791, 
 K. 1015 (v. 53-4). See also K. 691 (iii. 289), 'constipulatores.' 
 
 2 Brunner, op. cit. 158. Dr Brunner thinks that the precedents for A.-S. 
 charters came direct from Borne rather than, from any other quarter (p. 187); 
 but he fully admits that these charters when compared with foreign instruments 
 show a certain formlessness. 
 
 3 Under our own law we may conceive, a case in which a man would be 
 compelled to die unwillingly intestate because one of the two people present at 
 his death-bed capriciously refused to witness a will. 
 
 4 The transition is marked by the following charters. K. 104, 105, 108, 113, 
 in these we have the mere rogation of fit and proper witnesses. K. 114 (a 
 Kentish deed which Kemble ascribes to 759-765), in this the clause of attestation 
 speaks of the counsel and consent of the optimates and principes. K. 118, 
 Uhtred of the Hwiccas makes a grant with the consent and licence of Offa king
 
 Book-land and Folk-land. 251 
 
 has been noticed in the charters of the German kings. A 
 clause expressing the consent of the great folk rarely occurs 
 in the Merovingian or the early Carolingian charters, unless 
 they belong to certain exceptional classes. It is said to become 
 common under the weak rule of Lewis the Child; then for a 
 while it becomes rare again, and then once more common under 
 Henry III and Henry IV, though consent and witness are 
 hardly to be distinguished 1 . 
 
 Perhaps from the first in England the cross of at least one Function 
 bishop was much to be desired or was almost indispensable, witan. 
 for the anathema which the charter pronounces will be a solemn 
 sentence of excommunication when it comes from a bishop, 
 .while it will be at best a pious wish if it comes from the king ; 
 and it is well to have the cross f every bishop, so that the 
 breaker of the charter may find himself excommunicated in 
 every diocese. This is not all ; we may well believe that from 
 the first the king was more or less bound to consult with his 
 great men before he alienated his land. The notion that land 
 could be alienated at all may not have been very ancient, and 
 the king when giving land away may have been expected to 
 pay some regard to the welfare of his realm 2 . The discovery 
 that he had an alienable superiority over free land and free 
 landowners would sharpen this rule. Some of these early 
 donations are to our minds more like cessions of political 
 power than gifts of land ; they make over to bishops and 
 abbots rights which the king has exercised rather as king 
 than as landowner. A wholesome practice grows up which 
 is embodied in the clause that states the consent of the witan, 
 
 of the Mercians and of his (Offa's) bishops and principes. K. 120, the witnesses 
 are described as condonantes. K. 121, 122, (A.D. 774) the clause of attestation 
 says 'cum sacerdotibus et senioribus populi more testium subscribendo.' K. 131, 
 ' testium ergo et consentientium episcoporum ac principum meorum signa et no- 
 mina pro firmitatis stabilimento hie infra notabo.' A clause of this kind becomes 
 common with Offa, see K. 134, 137, 138, 148, 151, but occasionally there are 
 relapses and the signatories merely appear as ' fit and proper ' or ' religious ' 
 witnesses. But it is not until after 800 that, save as a rare exception, the 
 consent of the magnates is brought into connexion with the operative words. 
 
 1 Bresslau, Urkundenlehre, i. 697. 
 
 2 Bede's letter to Egbert (ed. Plummer, i. 405) and his account of Benedict 
 Biscop (ib. 364) show that it was expected of the king that he should provide 
 land for young warriors of noble race ; but no word implies that the land out of 
 which the provision was to be made was 'folk-land,' nor is it clear that the 
 young warrior was to have a book.
 
 252 
 
 England before the Conquest. 
 
 The king 
 and thi ' 
 people's 
 land. 
 
 and, even when this clause has disappeared, still it is in the 
 presence and with the witness of his councillors that the king 
 makes his grants. This is no purely English phenomenon. 
 When a Norman duke hands his charter to be roborated and 
 confirmed by his fideles, we do not infer that he is disposing of 
 land that is not his 1 . But it is very remarkable that in the 
 earliest English charters the consent of an overlord is treated 
 as a far more serious thing than the consent of the nobles 2 . 
 
 Of some value though this 'constitutional check' may have 
 been, we can not regard it as a relic of a time when there was 
 land which in any accurate sense of the term was owned by the 
 people. The recorded action of the witan in relation to the 
 king's grants does not become more prominent, it becomes less 
 prominent, as we go backwards and reach the heptarchic days. 
 But that is not all. Is it not marvellous that there should 
 be land owned by the people and yet that we should have to 
 discover this momentous fact from a few casual phrases occurring 
 in three documents of the ninth and tenth centuries ? Are we 
 to suppose that whenever the king is giving away land, this 
 land is the land of the people ? Why do not the charters say 
 so ? Repeatedly the king speaks of the land that he gives as 
 ' my land' (terram iuris mei), and this too in charters which state 
 that the witan give their consent to the grant. Never by any 
 chance does a scribe slip into any such phrase as terram gentis 
 meae, terram gentis Merciorum or the like. And how came 
 it about that from the very earliest time the king could devote 
 the people's land to the salvation of his own peculiar soul ? 
 But, it will be said, no doubt the king had private estates 
 besides having a power over ' the unallotted lands of the nation,' 
 and those private estates he could give away as he pleased. 
 
 1 See William's charter for Fecamp, Neustria Pia, p. 224. 
 
 2 A.D. 692-3, K. 35 (i. 39) ; B. M. Facs. i. 2 : a grant by ' Hodilredus parens 
 Sebhi...cum ipsius consensu'; 'ego Sebbi rex Eastsaxonorum pro confirmatione 
 subscripsi.' A.D. 704, K. 52 (i. 59); B. M. Facs. i. 3: 'Ego Sueabraed rex 
 Eastsaxonorum et ego Pseogthath cum licentia ^Edelredi regis.' A.D. 706, 
 K. 56 (i. 64), 'Ego 2Ethiluueard subregulus...consentiente Coenredo rege Merci- 
 orum.' A.D. 721-46, K. 91 (i. 109), JEthelbald of Mercia attests a lease made 
 by the bishop of Worcester. A.D. 759, K. 105 (i. 128) ; B. M. Facs. ii. 2 : three 
 brothers, each of whom is a regains, make a gift 'cum licentia et permissione 
 Begis Offan Merciorum.' A.D. 767, 770, K. 117-8 (i. 144-5): two gifts by 
 Uhtred, regulus of the Hwiccas, ' cum consensu et licentia Offani Begis Merci- 
 orum.' A.D. 791? K. 1016 (v. 54): 'Ego Aldwlfus dux Su'S-Saxonum...cuin 
 consensu et licentia Offae regis Merciorum.'
 
 Book-land and Folk-land. 253 
 
 But then, how are we to distinguish between those charters 
 whereby he disposed of his own and those whereby he disposed 
 of national lands ? The formula which expresses the consent 
 of the wise will certainly not serve our turn. It leads, as 
 we have seen, to a distinction between different ages, not 
 to a classification of the various charters of one and the same 
 king. 
 
 Some historians have supposed that at the outset there was King's land 
 a clear distinction between the king's private estates and those i an d. 
 national lands which were becoming the domains of the crown. 
 Now a vague distinction between what belonged to the king as 
 king and what belonged to him if we may use so modern a 
 phrase in his private capacity, we may admit, while at the 
 same time we gravely doubt whether the language or the 
 thought of the eighth or ninth century had any forms in which 
 this distinction could be precisely expressed. Even within the 
 ecclesiastical sphere, where traditions of Roman law may have 
 lingered and where dead saints presented themselves as persons 
 capable of acquiring land, it was by no means easy to distinguish 
 the bishop's property from his church's property. We may find 
 a deed whereby some king for the love of God or the salvation 
 of his soul gives land to a certain bishop, and states in strong, 
 clear words that the donee is to have the most absolute power 
 of giving and selling and even, for this sometimes occurs, of 
 bequeathing the land 1 . We shall probably believe that the 
 king intends that this land shall go to increase the territory of 
 the church, and yet we dare not make the bishop either 'a 
 trustee' or 'a corporation sole.' 
 
 As to the king, it would be on his death that the necessity Fate of the 
 of drawing some distinction between his two capacities would O n his 
 first present itself. Perhaps a brother of his would be elected death " 
 to the kingdom and his children would be passed by. Clearly 
 this brother should have those lands which have supplied the 
 king with the main part of his revenue, and yet it would be 
 hard that the dead man's children should be portionless. How- 
 ever, we may strongly suspect that in the earliest time cases of 
 this nature were settled as they arose without the establishment 
 of any general rule, and that even on the eve of the Norman 
 Conquest no definite classification of the king's estates had been 
 framed. We dare not expect the rule to be more definite than 
 
 i K. 113 (i. 137).
 
 254 England before the Conquest. 
 
 that which settled the title to the kingship, and how 
 exceedingly indefinite the latter was the historians of our 
 constitution have explained. Hereditary and elective elements 
 were mixed up in the title ; we can define neither the one nor 
 the other. That 'superiority' over all the land of his kingdom 
 of which we have spoken above, though it might be alienated 
 piecemeal among the living, would pass from the dead king to 
 his elected successor. On the other hand, some kings were 
 careful to have certain lands booked to themselves and to 
 obtain from their nobles 'an express power of testamentary 
 appointment.' But very possibly there was a wide fringe of 
 disputable matter. King Alfred's will, with all that he says 
 about what had been done by himself, his father and his brothers, 
 seems to tell us that a prudent king would obtain the consent 
 of his councillors to any disposition that he made of land that 
 was in any sort his. Also it seems to bear witness to a strong 
 feeling that the reigning king should enjoy at any rate the bulk 
 of the lands that his predecessor had enjoyed 1 . 
 
 The new In one of his charters ^Ethelred the Unready is made to tell 
 
 the'oid a long and curious story 2 : ' My father, king Edgar, gave certain 
 eir ' lands to the minster at Abingdon. On his death the wise men 
 elected as king my brother Edward, and put me in possession 
 of the lands which belonged to the king's sons. Among these 
 were the lands given to Abingdon ; they were forcibly taken 
 from the monks. Whether this was lawful or unlawful those 
 wise men know best. Then my brother Edward died and I 
 became possessed, not only of the lands which belonged to the 
 king's sons, but also of the royal lands. I do not wish to incur 
 my father's curse, and therefore I intend to substitute for his 
 gift a compensation out of my own proper inheritance. The 
 land that I am now going to dispose of I acquired by gift from 
 certain persons whose names I state.' We seem to see here 
 
 1 K. 314 (ii. 112); 1067 (v. 127); Liber de Hyda, 57. On the death of 
 jEthelbald, two of his sons, 2Ethelred and Alfred, seem to have made over the 
 lands which had been devised to them by their father to 2Ethelbert, the reigning 
 king, so that he might enjoy them during his life. Then again, on JSthelbert's 
 death, Alfred would not insist upon a partition but allowed his share to remain 
 in the possession of JSthelred, the reigning king. See also Eadred's will, Liber 
 de Hyda, 153 ; he seems to have a good deal of land of which he can dispose 
 freely. 
 
 2 K. 1312 (vi. 172).
 
 Boole-land and Folk-land. 255 
 
 three kinds of land, the regales terrae which pass from king to 
 king, the lands ' entailed/ if we may use that term, on the king's 
 family (regii pueri), and lands which come to a king by way of 
 gift or the like and constitute his propria hereditas. But the 
 wise men seem to have violated three solemn books which they 
 themselves or their predecessors had attested, and we can but 
 say with king ^Ethelred ' quam rem si iuste aut iniuste fecerint 
 ipsi sciant 1 .' There can be but little law about such matters so 
 long as the title to the kingship is indefinable 2 . 
 
 This distinction between the lands which would pass from Ancient 
 king to king and the lands which would pass from the king to an1ts"i 
 his heirs or to his devisees may have been complicated with mumt y- 
 another distinction. Domesday Book tells us that some, but by 
 no means all, of the lands held by the Confessor were and had 
 always been free of geld, and this freedom from taxation may 
 imply other immunities. It is possible that, as in later times, 
 certain 'ancient demesnes of the crown' already stood outside 
 the national system of taxation, justice and police, that the 
 ealdorman of the shire and the shire-moot had no jurisdiction 
 over them, and that they were administered by reeves yet more 
 personally dependent on the king than was the shire-reeve. It 
 is possible, however, that the two distinctions cut each other, 
 for when the king booked land to himself he, at all events on 
 some occasions, inserted in the charter a clause of immunity, the 
 very object of which was to put the land outside the general, 
 national system. To this distinction the famous exchange 
 which ^thelbert effected with his thegn Wulflaf may point. 
 It says that when, instead of Wash ing well, the king accepted 
 Marsham, ' he did it him to folk-land.' The land at Marsham 
 was no longer to enjoy that immunity which it had enjoyed 
 while it was in the hands of the thegn, it was to come under 
 the sway of the sheriff and of the national courts. However, it 
 is much easier for us to dream dreams about such a transaction 
 than to discover the truth. 
 
 If the folk-land was the land of the people and if the king Rights of 
 when he booked land to a church or a thegn was usually booking 
 
 land. 
 
 1 The violated books are in Chron. Abingd. i. 314, 317, 334. 
 
 2 Were it possible for us to say that the kingship was elective, this would be 
 but a beginning of difficulties. For example, we should raise a question which 
 in all probability has no answer, were we to ask whether a majority could 
 bind a minority.
 
 25(5 England before the Conquest. 
 
 folk-land and converting it into book-land, how are we to think 
 of the land that still is folk-land ? Is it land that has not yet 
 been brought into cultivation ; is it land in which no proprietary 
 interests, save that of the folk, exist ? Now we are far from 
 saying that the king never grants land that is waste and void 
 of inhabitants; but it is plain enough that this is not the 
 common case. The charter deals in the first instance with 
 manses, villae, vici, houses, tuns, with cultivated fields and 
 meadows. Waste land (it may be) is given in large quantities, 
 but merely as appurtenant to the profitable core of the gift. 
 We see too that individual men have rights in the folk-land; 
 Alfred the ealdorman has folk-land and hopes that on his death 
 it will pass to his son ; King ^thelbert has folk -land and it is 
 occupied by Wighelm and Wulflaf; King Edward the Elder 
 supposes that the title to folk-land may be in dispute between 
 two persons and that this dispute will come before the sheriff. 
 What then the folk owns, if it owns anything at all, is not (if 
 we may introduce such feudal terms) 'land in demesne' but 
 ' land in service,' in other words, a superiority or seignory over 
 land. We must add that it is a superiority over free men and 
 over men who have titles that can be the subject of law-suits in 
 the county court. And now we must ask, What profit does the 
 nation get out of this superiority ? Shall we say that the 
 tributum, the vectigal paid to the king is to be regarded as rent 
 paid to the nation, that the opera regia, the victus, the pastus, 
 are services rendered by the tenant to the people, or shall we 
 say that the folk's right over this land is proved by its serving 
 as the fund whereon the king can draw when he desires to save 
 his soul ? Then, if on the other hand we make the tillers of 
 the folk-land mere tenants at will, there will be little room left 
 for any landowners, for any ' peasant proprietors.' To meet this 
 difficulty it has been supposed that, at all events at a remote 
 time, there was much land that was neither folk-land nor 
 book-land. The allotments which the original settlers received 
 were neither folk-land nor book-land. 
 
 The alod. In order to describe those allotments the words alod and ethel 
 have been used, and other terms, such as ' family land ' and 'heir 
 land,' have been invented. But in the laws and the charters we 
 do not meet with these phrases. The law of Edward the Elder 
 seems to set before us book-land and folk-land as exhausting 
 the kinds of land. ' He who deforces any one of his right, be it
 
 Book-land and Folk-land. 257 
 
 in book-land, be it in 'folk-land' must pay a penalty. It is 
 difficult to believe that this law says nothing of one veiy common 
 kind of land, still more difficult to believe that already in the 
 first half of the ninth century the amount of the so-called alod, 
 ethel, or 'heir- land/ had become so small that it might be 
 neglected. So far as we can see, book -land from first to last 
 was only held by the churches and by very great men. The 
 books that we have, more especially the later books, are with 
 hardly any exceptions furnished with clauses of immunity, 
 clauses which put the land outside the national system of police, 
 and, as we think, of justice also. It is not to be imagined for 
 one moment that the numerous liberi homines who even in the 
 Conqueror's reign held land in Essex and East Anglia had books. 
 To say that book-land had consumed the ancient alod or ethel, 
 is in truth to say that all land was privileged. 
 
 We turn once more to Edward's law. Land, it would seem, Book-land 
 is either book-land or folk-land. Book-land is land held by f^e. 1 *" 
 book, by a royal and ecclesiastical privilegium. Folk-land is land 
 held without book, by unwritten title, by the folk-law. ' Folk- 
 land ' is the term which modern historians have rejected in 
 favour of the outlandish alod. The holder of folk-land is a free 
 landowner, though at an early date the king discovers that over 
 him and his land there exists an alienable superiority. Partly 
 by alienations of this superiority, partly perhaps by gifts of land 
 of which the king is himself the owner, book-land is created. 
 
 Edward's law speaks as though it were dealing with two Kinds of 
 
 T/V i ' f t i T> 11 -IT i land and 
 
 different kinds of land. But really it is dealing with two kinds of 
 different kinds of title. We, and even our statutes, habitually ng ' 
 speak of freehold land, copyhold land, leasehold land, yet we 
 know that the same piece of land may be at one and the same 
 time freehold, copyhold and leasehold. All land is freehold land; 
 every rood has its freeholder. Bracton habitually spoke of land 
 held by frankalmoin, land held by knight's service, land held in 
 socage, but he knew well enough that a single acre might be 
 held at one and the same time by many different tenures. 
 Just so, we take it, the same land might be both book-land and 
 folk-land, the book-land of the minster, the folk-land of the 
 free men who were holding not indeed 'of but still 'under* 
 the minster. They or their ancestors had held under the king, 
 but the king had booked their land (which also in a certain sense 
 was his land) to a church. The mental effort, the abstraction, 
 M. 17
 
 258 England before the Conquest. 
 
 that would be required of us were we to speak of various 
 'estates, rights and titles,' we try to avoid by speaking as 
 though the distinction that was to be indicated were a distinc- 
 tion between various material things, and as though a freehold 
 or copyhold quality were, like fertility or sterility, an attribute 
 of the soil. Even so abstract a term as ' estate' is soon debased 
 by the vulgar mouth : estates are ploughed ; men ' shoot over ' 
 their estates. ' Book-land ' is a briefer term than ' land held by 
 book-right ' ; ' folk-land ' is a briefer term than ' land held by 
 folk-right.' The same piece of land may be held by book-right 
 and by folk-right ; it may be book-land and folk-land too. 
 
 And now we must turn to consider another element in the 
 king's alienable superiority. We must speak of jurisdiction. 
 
 3. Sake and Soke. 
 
 Import- Of all the phenomena of feudalism none seems more essential 
 
 ^ nan seignorial justice. In times gone by English lawyers and 
 
 justice. historians have been apt to treat it lightly and to concentrate 
 their attention on military tenure. For them ' the introduction 
 of the military tenures ' has been ' the establishment of the 
 feudal system.' But when compared with seignorial justice, 
 military tenure is a superficial matter, one out of many effects 
 rather than a deep-seated cause. Seignorial justice is a 
 deep-seated cause of many effects, a principle which when once 
 introduced is capable of transfiguring a nation. Of the origin 
 and antiquity of this principle, however, some even of our most 
 illustrious historians have spoken with great hesitation and 
 therefore we shall spend some time in examining the texts which 
 reveal what can be known about it, admitting once for all that 
 they leave much room for differences of opinion. 
 
 Theory of Since the doctrine to which we have come would trace 
 origin of* 11 seignorial justice back to a remote time, we shall do well to 
 
 the ou tset an extreme version of the opposite doctrine, 
 a version which has been elaborately set forth in a learned and 
 spirited essay 1 . On the eve of the battle of Hastings a sei- 
 gnorial court was still a new thing in England. It was a Norman 
 
 1 Adams, The Anglo-Saxon Courts of Law (Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, 
 p. 1). Hallam, Middle Ages (ted. 1837), vol. ii. p. 416, says that of the right of 
 territorial jurisdiction 'we meet frequent instances in' the laws and records of
 
 Sake and Soke. 259 
 
 precursor of the Norman Conquest. England owes it to Edward 
 the Confessor, who was 'half-Norman by birth and wholly Norman 
 by education and sympathies.' Ii^ came to us with 'a new 
 theory of constitutional law.' From the reign of no older king 
 can any evidence be produced of the existence at any rate of 
 the legalized existence of private courts. True, there are 
 charters that give to the holders of great estates the profits of 
 jurisdiction ; but a grant of the profits of jurisdiction is one 
 thing, jurisdiction itself is another. True, that one man might 
 have soke over another, but this does not mean that he had 
 jurisdiction; at the most it means that he was entitled to the 
 profits of justice, to wites, to fines and amercements. 'No 
 instance can be found before the Norman times in which sdcn 
 means jurisdiction. Sdcn had a technical meaning of its own 
 which is always rigorously observed. The idea of jurisdiction, 
 on the other hand, was expressed by an equally technical word, 
 the meaning of which is also rigorously observed. This is sacu, 
 a. word which has strangely vanished from our legal vocabulary, 
 but is still preserved, even in its technical sense, by the German 
 sache 1 ! 
 
 Now it will not be disputed that in Domesday Book and Sake and 
 the Leges Henrici this distinction is obliterated. Soke means Norman* " 
 jurisdiction and 'sake and soke' is but a pleonastic phrase, which age- 
 means no more than soke 2 . Nor is it disputable that on the 
 vigil of the Conquest a great deal of jurisdiction was wielded 
 by the lords. Not a few of the ' hundreds ' were in private 
 hands, and, apart from hundredal jurisdiction, a lord might 
 have and often had sake and soke over his own lands. It is not 
 denied that Edward the Confessor had freely granted to churches 
 and other lords large rights of justice, not merely rights to the 
 profits of jurisdiction, but jurisdiction itself. The question is 
 whether what he did was new. 
 
 The Con 
 
 For one moment longer we may dwell on the indisputable lessor's 
 
 the Anglo-Saxons, though not in those of early date.' The one charter older 
 than Edward the Confessor that he cites is one of the Croyland forgeries. 
 Kemble's opinion seems to have fluctuated ; Saxons, i. 177 note, ii. 397, Cod. 
 Dipl. i. xliv-xlvii. K. Maurer, Krit. Ueberschau, ii. 57, thinks that the 
 existence of the private court is proved for Cnut's reign, but not for any earlier 
 time. Dr Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 119, seems to doubt whether it can be traced 
 far beyond the days of Cnut. Zinkeisen, Die Anfange der Lehngerichtsbarkeit 
 in England (1893, a Berlin doctoral dissertation), criticizes Mr Adams's theory. 
 1 Essays, pp. 43-4. a See above, p. 84. 
 
 172
 
 260 England before the Conquest. 
 
 fact that he dealt out jurisdictional rights with a lavish hand. 
 This we gather, not so much from his Latin land-books, as from 
 English writs in which he announces to the bishop, earl, sheriff 
 and great men of a county that he has given land in that 
 county to some church 'with sake and soke and toll and 
 team ' ; sometimes he adds ' with infangennethef, grithbrice, 
 foresteal, hamsocn, flymena-fyrmth,' and so forth. Sometimes the 
 donees are to have these rights in all their own lands. Some- 
 times he gives them the hundredal jurisdiction over lands that 
 are not their own. Thus to S 1 . Benet of Ramsey he gives 
 soken over all the men in a hundred and a half over all the 
 men who are 'moot-worthy, fyrd-worthy, and fold- worthy,' 
 whosesoever men they may be : that is to say (as we understand 
 it) he gives a jurisdiction over all the free men of the district, 
 the men who attend the moots, who attend the host and who 
 are not compelled by any soca faldae to send their sheep to 
 a seignorial fold, and this although those men be bound to 
 S*. Benet neither by tenure nor by personal commendation 1 . 
 Again, he concedes that the donee's tenants shall be quit of 
 shires and hundreds 2 . Again, he gives the favoured 'church 
 taxational power : whenever the king takes a geld, be it 
 army-geld, or ship-geld, the monks may impose a similar tax 
 upon the township and keep the proceeds to their own use 3 . 
 In short, it seems not too much to say that any delegation 
 and appropriation of justice of which our Norman kings were 
 guilty had an ample warrant in the practice of S*. Edward. 
 Cunt's Now the theory which would make him an innovator in 
 
 this matter receives a rude shock from a writ of Cnut 4 . The 
 king announces that the Archbishop of Canterbury is to be 
 worthy throughout his lands of his sake and soke and grithbrice, 
 . hamsocn, foresteal, infangennethef and flymena-fyrmth. Until 
 
 > K. 853 (iv. 208) ; E. 343. 
 
 2 The clearest instance is in the Waltham charter, K. 813 (iv. 154), but some 
 details of this are not beyond suspicion. See also the writs for Westminster, 
 K. 828 (iv. 191), 857 (iv. 213) ; Ordn. Facs. vol. ii. pi. 9. 
 
 3 Charter for S*. Edmund's, K. 1346 (vi 205). See the account of Bury 
 S'. Edmunds in D. B. ii. 372 : ' et quando in hundreto solvitur ad geltum 1 lib. 
 tune inde exeunt 60 den. ad victum monachorum. ' 
 
 4 First printed from a copy in the MacDurnan Gospels by J. 0. Westwood 
 in Palaeographia Sacra, with a facsimile, plate 11. Accepted by Kemble and 
 printed by him in Archaeological Journal, xiv. 61 ; Earle, 232 ; Freeman, 
 Norman Conquest, ii. 52.
 
 Sake and Soke. 261 
 
 the genuineness of this writ, which does not stand quite alone 1 , 
 be disproved, the charge that has been brought against Edward 
 fails. He was but following in the steps of the great Dane, 
 though it may be that he rushed forward where his predecessor 
 had trod cautiously. 
 
 Having seen what Cnut could do upon occasion, we turn to Cnut'siaw. 
 the famous passage in his dooms which declares what 'rights 
 the king has over all men 2 .' In Wessex and Mercia (in the 
 Danelaw the list is somewhat different) he has hamsocn, 
 foresteal, flymena-fyrmth and fyrd-wite ' unless he will honour 
 a man yet further and grant him this worship.' Now if we had 
 not before us his writ for the archbishop, we might perhaps t 
 argue that this law merely decreed that the profits of certain 
 pleas were not to be covered by the ' farms ' paid to the king by 
 the sheriffs and other national officers. But in the writ we see 
 that Cnut allows to the archbishop just the excepted rights, 
 just that 'worship' which men are not to have as a general 
 rule. Nor surely can we say that what is conceded is, not 
 jurisdiction itself, but merely the profits of jurisdiction. The 
 archbishop is to have sake as well as soke, and those who have 
 contended for the strictest interpretation of royal grants have 
 not contended that the former of these words can mean any- 
 thing but 'causes/ 'pleas,' 'jurisdiction.' Therefore when it is 
 interpreted by the aid of this writ, Cnut's law seems to imply 
 that private jurisdiction is a common thing. The king is 
 already compelled to protest that there are certain pleas of 
 the crown that are not covered by vague and general words. 
 
 Now express grants of sake and soke first become apparent The book 
 
 j f *. i ^ *T , and the 
 
 to us in documents ot a certain class, a class that we do not writ, 
 get before the last years of the tenth century. It is necessary 
 therefore that we should make a short digression into the region 
 of ' diplomatics.' The instruments of the Confessor's reign, and 
 we may add of the Norman reigns, which we loosely call royal 
 charters or royal land-books divide themselves somewhat easily 
 into two main classes, which we will call respectively (1) charters 
 and (2) writs. These names are not very happy, still they are 
 
 1 See the writ for S*. Paul's, K. 1319 (vi. 183). Mr Adams (p. 44) stigmatizes 
 this as an evident forgery; but the reasons for this severe judgment are not 
 apparent. See also K. 1321 (vi. 190), and the Latin writ of Harthacnut 
 K. 1330 (vi. 192), which may have a genuine basis. 
 
 2 Cnut, n. 12 (Schmid, p. 276).
 
 262 England before the Conquest. 
 
 the best that occur to us. If we have regard to the form of the 
 instrument, the distinction is evident. The charter is with rare 
 exceptions in Latin. It begins with an invocation of the Triune 
 God or perhaps with a sacred monogram. On the other hand, 
 there is no address to mortal men; there is no salutation. There 
 follow a pious arenga setting forth how good a thing it is to 
 make gifts, how desirable it is, since men are very wicked, that 
 transactions should be put into writing. Then the king states 
 that he gives, or has given, or will give the use of the future 
 tense is not uncommon certain land to a certain person. Then 
 comes a clause which we shall hereafter call 'the clause of 
 immunity': the land is to be free from certain burdens. Then 
 comes the anathema or damnatory clause, threatening all 
 breakers of the charter with excommunication here and torment 
 hereafter. Then in the charters of the time before the Conquest 
 the boundaries of the land are described in English. Then 
 comes the sign of the cross touched by the king's hand and 
 the crosses of the witan or nobles who ' attest ' or ' attest and 
 consent to' the grant. In the writ all is otherwise. In the 
 Confessor's day it is usually, in the Norman reigns it is some- 
 times, an English document. It begins, not with an invocation, 
 but wth a salutation; the king greets his subjects or some 
 class of his subjects : King Edward greets ' Herman bishop and 
 Harold earl and all my thegns in Dorset/ or ' Leofwin bishop 
 and Edwin earl and all my thegns in Staffordshire ' : and then 
 he tells them something. He tells them that he has granted 
 lands or liberties to a certain person. There follows a command 
 or a threat 'I command and firmly enjoin that none shall 
 disturb the grantee/ ' I will not suffer that any man wrong the 
 grantee.' The boundaries are not described. There is seldom 
 any curse. The king makes no cross. If any witnesses are 
 mentioned, they are few and they do not make crosses. 
 Differences Now these formal differences correspond more or lesj 
 bookTnd exactly to a substantial difference. As every modern lawyer 
 writ - knows, a written document may stand in one of two relations 
 to a legal transaction. On the one hand it may itself be the 
 transaction : that is to say, the act of signing, or of signing and 
 delivering, the document may be the act by which certain 
 rights are created or transferred. On the other hand, the 
 instrument may be but evidence of the transaction. Perhaps 
 the law may say that of such a transaction it will receive no
 
 Sake and Soke. 263 
 
 evidence save a document written and signed ; perhaps it may 
 say that the testimony of documents is not to be contradicted 
 by word of mouth; but still the document is only evidence, 
 though it may be incontrovertible evidence, of the transaction ; 
 the transaction may have been complete before the document 
 was signed 1 . This material distinction is likely to express 
 itself in points of form ; for instance, such a phrase as ' I 
 hereby give ' is natural in the one case ; such a phrase as 
 'Know all men by this writing that I have given' is appropriate 
 in the other. Instruments of both kinds were well enough 
 known in the Frankish kingdom ; their history has been traced 
 back into the history of Roman conveyancing 2 . It would be 
 out of place were we here to discuss the question whether the 
 Anglo-Saxon land-book was a dispositive or merely an evidential 
 document ; suffice it to say that with rare exceptions the instru- 
 ments that are of earlier date than the Confessor's reign are in 
 form charters and not writs. On the other hand, the documents 
 of the Angevin kings which treat of gifts of lands and liberties, 
 though we call them -charters, are in form (if we adopt the 
 classification here made) not charters but writs. In form they 
 are evidential rather than dispositive; they are addressed to 
 certain persons all the king's lieges or a class of the lieges 
 bidding them take notice that the king has done something, 
 has given lands, and then adding some command or some 
 threat. This command or threat makes them more than 
 evidential documents ; the Sciatis me dedisse is followed by a 
 Quare volo et firmiter praecipio ; it is not for no purpose that 
 the king informs his officers or his subjects of his having made 
 a gift; still in form they are letters, open letters, 'letters 
 patent,' and the points of difference between the Angevin 
 charter and the Angevin ' letters patent ' (strictly and properly 
 so called) are few, technical and unimportant when compared 
 with the points of difference which mark off these two classes 
 of documents from the ancient land-book*. In short before 
 
 1 Thus if a statute requires written and signed evidence of an agreement, a 
 letter in which the writer says, 'True, I made such and such an agreement, but 
 I am not going to keep it,' may be evidence enough ; see Bailey v. Sweeting, 
 9 C. B. N. S. 843. 
 
 2 Brunner, Carta nnd Notitia (Commentationes in honorem T. Mommsen) ; 
 Brunner, Zur Bechtsgeschichte der Bom. u. Germ. Urkunde. 
 
 3 Both the Angevin charter and the Angevin letters patent are in what we 
 call 'writ-form.' The main formal difference is that the charter professes tol>e
 
 264 England before the Conquest. 
 
 the end of the twelfth century, the writ-form or letter-form 
 with its salutation, its ' Know ye/ its air of conveying in- 
 formation coupled with commands, has entirely supplanted the 
 true charter-form with its dispositive words and its air of not 
 merely witnessing, but actually being, a gift of land. 
 
 But to represent this as a contrast between English 
 instruments and Norman or French instruments would be a 
 mistake. In the first place, we have a few documents in writ- 
 form that are older than the days of the Norman-hearted 
 Edward. As already said, we have a writ from Cnut and it has 
 all those features of Edward's writs which have been considered 
 distinctively foreign. We have another writ from the same 
 king. The king addresses Archbishop Lyfing, Abbot ^Elfmser, 
 ^Ethelric the shireman 'and all my thegns twelvehinde and 
 twihinde.' He tells them that he has confirmed the arch- 
 bishop's liberties and threatens with the pains of hell any one 
 who infringes them 1 . We have a writ from ^Ethelred the 
 Unready, and a remarkable writ it is. He addresses ^Elfric 
 the ealdorman, Wulfmser and ^Ethelweard and all the thegns 
 in Hampshire and tells them how he has confirmed the 
 liberties of bishop ^Elfheah and how large tracts of land are to 
 IDC reckoned as but one hide an early example of ' beneficial 
 hidation 2 .' Secondly, the solemn charter with its invocation, 
 its pious harangue, its dispositive words, its religious sanction, 
 its numerous crosses, its crowd of attesting and consenting 
 witnesses, was in use in Normandy before and after the 
 conquest of England. Thirdly, the Norman kings of England 
 used it upon occasion. Much they did by writ. The vast 
 tracts of land that they had at their disposal would naturally 
 favour the conciser form ; but some of the religious houses 
 thought it well to obtain genuine land-books of the old 
 English, and (we must add) of the old Frankish type. The 
 king's seal was not good enough for them; they would have 
 the king's cross and the crosses of his wife, sons, prelates and 
 barons. The ultimately complete victory of what we have 
 called the writ-form over what we have called the charter T form 
 may perhaps be rightly described as a result of the Conquest, 
 
 witnessed by a number of the king's councillors, while Teste Meipso does for 
 letters patent. This distinction is coming to the front about the year 1200. 
 
 1 K. 731 (iv. 9) ; T. 308. 
 
 8 K. 642 (iii. 203) ; compare D. B. i. 41.
 
 Sake and Sake. 265 
 
 an outcome, that is, of the strong monarchy founded by 
 William of Normandy and consolidated by Henry of Anjou, 
 but it can not be rightly described as the victory of a French 
 form over an English form ; and a very similar change was 
 taking place in the chancery of the French kings 1 . 
 
 We may say then that the appearance of words clearly and Sake and 
 indisputably conceding jurisdictional rights is contemporaneous when writs 
 with the appearance of a new class of diplomata, namely royal a PP ear - 
 writs as contrasted with royal charters or land-books. We 
 may add that it is contemporaneous with the appearance of 
 royal diplomata couched in the vernacular language. This 
 
 1 The Conqueror's charter for Exeter reproduced in Ordnance Facsimiles, 
 vol. ii. is a fine specimen of the solemn charters referred to above. A consider- 
 able number of specimens, genuine and spurious (for our present purpose a 
 forgery is almost as valuable as a true charter), will be found in the Monasticon, 
 e.g. i. 174, Eufus for Rochester; i. 266, Rufus for Bath; ii. 109-111, 126, 
 Henry I. for Abingdon ; i. 163, Henry I. for Rochester ; ii. 65-6, Henry I. for 
 Evesham ; ii. 267, Henry I. for Bath ; ii. 539, Henry I. for Exeter ; iii. 448, 
 Henry I. for Malvern ; vi. (1) 247, Henry I. for Merton ; iii. 406, Stephen 
 for Eye. Nor was this solemn form employed only by kings: See Monast. 
 ii. 385-6, Earl Hugh for Chester; iii. 404, Robert Malet for Eye; v. 121, 
 Hugh de la Val for Pontefract ; v. 167, William of Mortain for Montacute ; 
 v. 190, Simon of Senlis for S*. Andrew Northampton ; v. 247, Stephen of 
 Boulogne for Furness ; v. 316, Richard Earl of Exeter for Quarr ; v. 628, Ranulf 
 of Chester for Pulton. As to Normandy, see the charters in the Neustria Pia 
 and the Galh'a Christiana. A charter of Henry II. for Fontenay recites a charter 
 by which the ancestors of Jordan Tesson founded the abbey with the consent of 
 Duke William, also a charter of Duke William, ' quae cartae crucibus sunt 
 signatae secundum antiquam consuetudinem ' ; Neustria Pia, p. 80; Gallia 
 Christiana, xi. Ap. col. 82. It is probable that during the Norman reigns the 
 king's cross was considered more valuable even than the king's seal ; Monast. 
 iv. p. 18, Henry I. says, 'hanc donationem confirmo ego Henricus rex et astipu- 
 latione sanctae crucis et appositione sigilli mei'; Ibid. ii. 385-6, Earl Hugh 
 confirms a gift ' non solum sigillo meo sed etiam sigillo Dei omnipotentis, id est, 
 signo sanctae crucis.' It is not implied in our text that every specimen of each 
 of the two forms of instrument that we have mentioned will always display all 
 the characteristics that have been noticed. There is no reason, for example, 
 why in a solemn charter the king should not speak in the past tense of the act 
 of gift, and as a matter of fact he does so in some of the Anglo-Saxon books, 
 while, on the other hand, an instrument which begins with a salutation may well 
 have the words of gift in the present tense (this is by no means uncommon in 
 Anglo-Norman documents) ; nor of course is it necessary that an instrument in 
 writ-form should be authenticated by a seal instead of a cross. Again, a solemn 
 charter with crosses and pious recitals may begin with a salutation. We merely 
 point out that the diplomata of Edward the Confessor and his Norman successors 
 tend to conform to two distinct types. As to this matter see the remarks of 
 Hickes, Dissertatio Epistolaris, p. 77 ; Hardy, Introduction to Charter Rolls, 
 xiv., xxxvi.
 
 266 England before the Conquest. 
 
 may well lead us to two speculations. In the first place, is it 
 not very possible that many ancient writs have been lost ? 
 The writ was a far less solemn instrument than the land-book, 
 and it is by no means certain that the writs of the Confessor 
 were intended to serve as title-deeds or to come to the custody 
 of those for whose benefit they were issued. King Edward 
 greets the bishop of London, Earl Harold, the sheriff and all 
 the thegns of Middlesex and tells them how he has given land 
 to S*. Peter and the monks of Westminster, and how he wills 
 that they enjoy their sake and soke. The original document is 
 presented to the bishop, the earl, or the sheriff (to all of them 
 perhaps as they sit in their shire moot) and we can not be 
 certain that after this the monks ought to have that document 
 in their possession, that it ought not to be kept by the sheriff, 
 or perhaps returned to the king with an indorsement expressive 
 of obedience. Many hundred writs must King William have 
 issued in favour of his barons this is plain from Domesday 
 Book and what would we not give for a dozen of them ? 
 Secondly, it is well worth notice that ' sake and soke ' begin to 
 appear so soon as royal diplomata written in English become 
 common, and when we observe the formulas which enshrine 
 these words we find some difficulty in believing that such 
 formulas are new or foreign. Let us listen to one. 
 
 saca and scene 
 
 toll and team 
 
 griSbrice and hamsocne 
 
 and foresteal 
 
 and alle o$re gerihte 
 
 inne tid and ut of tide 
 
 binnan burh and butan burn 
 
 on strsete and of straete. 
 
 Surely this alliteration and this rude rhythm tell us that the 
 clause has long been fashioning itself in the minds and mouths 
 of the people and is no piece of a new-fangled ' chancery-style 1 / 
 And one other remark about language will occur to us. In 
 many respects the law Latin of the middle ages went on 
 becoming a better and better language until, in the thirteenth 
 century, it became a very good, useful and accurate form of 
 
 1 The curious formula, Scbmid, App. XI., already has ' ne sace ne socne. 
 This seems to suppose that it is a common thing for a man to have sake and 
 soke over his land.
 
 Sake and Soke. 267 
 
 speech. But it gained this excellence by frankly renouncing 
 all attempts after classicality, all thought of the golden or the 
 silver age, and by freely borrowing from English whatever 
 words it wanted and making them Latin by a suffix. The 
 Latin of the Anglo-Saxon land-books is for all practical 
 purposes a far worse language, just because it strives to be far 
 better. It wanted to be good Latin, and even at times good 
 Greek. The scribe of the ninth or tenth century would have 
 been shocked by such words as tainus, dreinus, smalemannus, 
 sochemannus which enabled his successors to say precisely what 
 they wanted. He gives us provincia instead of scira, satrapes 
 instead of aldermanni, and we read of tributum and census 
 when we would much rather have read of geldum and gablum. 
 It was out of the question that he should be guilty of such 
 barbarisms as saca et soca. If he is to speak to us of these 
 things, he will do so in some phrase which he thinks would not 
 have disgraced a Roman orator in a phrase, that is, which will 
 not really fit his thought. 
 
 The traditions, the legends, current in later times, can not T 
 be altogether neglected. The prelates of the thirteenth century dence of 
 often asserted that some of their franchises, and in particular 
 their hundred courts, had been given to their predecessors in 
 an extremely remote age. Thus the bishop of Salisbury 
 claimed the hundred of Ramsbury in Wiltshire by grant of 
 King Offa of Mercia 1 ; the Abbot of Ramsey claimed the 
 hundred of Clackclose in Norfolk by grant of King Edgar*. 
 On such claims we can lay but very little stress, for if the 
 church had held its 'liberties' from before the Conquest, the 
 exact date at which it had acquired them was of little 
 importance and their origin would easily become the sport of 
 guess-work and myth. But occasionally we can say that there 
 must in all probability be some truth in the tale. Such is the 
 case with the famous hundred of Oswaldslaw in Worcestershire. 
 When the Domesday survey was made this hundred belonged 
 to the church of Worcester. Worcestershire was deemed to 
 comprise twelve hundreds and Oswaldslaw counted for three of 
 them 8 . Oswaldslaw contained 300 hides, and to all seeming 
 the whole shire contained 1200 hides or thereabouts. Even 
 in the thirteenth century a certain tripleness seems to be 
 
 i B. H. ii. 231. a B. H. ii. 458. * D. B. i. 172 b.
 
 268 England before the Conquest 
 
 displayed by this hundred ; the bishop holds his hundred court 
 in three different places, namely, outside the city of Worcester, 
 at Dryhurst and at Wimborntree 1 . Now the story current in 
 S 1 . Mary's convent was that this triple hundred of Oswaldslaw 
 received its name from Oswald, the saintly bishop who ruled 
 the church of Worcester from 960 to 992. A charter was 
 produced, perhaps the most celebrated of all land-books, that 
 Altitonantis Dei largiftua dementia, which, after many centu- 
 ries, was to prove the King of England's dominion over the 
 narrow seas 2 . According to this charter Edgar, Oswald's 
 patron, threw together three old hundreds, Cuthbertslaw, 
 Wolfhereslaw, and Wimborntree to form a domain for the 
 bishop and his monks 3 . Could we accept the would-be charter 
 as genuine, could we even accept it as a true copy of a genuine 
 book (and this we can hardly do) 4 , there would be an end of 
 all controversy as to the existence of seignorial justice in the 
 year 964, for undoubtedly it contains words which confer 
 jurisdiction 6 . Upon these we will not rely: the fact remains 
 that in Domesday Book there appears this hundred of Oswalds- 
 law, that it is treated as a triple hundred, as three hundreds, 
 that the bishop has jurisdiction over it, that the sheriff has no 
 rights within it, that it looks like a very artificial aggregate of 
 land, for pieces of it lie intermixed with other hundreds and 
 
 1 E. H. ii. 283. 
 
 2 Hale, Worcester Register, pp. xxx, 21 b ; K. Appendix, 514 (vi. 237) ; 
 Hickes, Dissertatio Epistolaris, i. 86 ; at the end of his dissertation Hickes gives 
 a facsimile of the instrument. 
 
 3 A record of 825 (H. & S. iii. 596-601) mentions a place 'in provincia 
 Huicciorum ' called Oslafeshlau ; the editors of the Councils say ' Oslafeshlau is 
 probably the original name of the hundred which now, either from some act of 
 S'. Oswald or by an easy corruption, is called Oswaldslaw.' One of Oswald's 
 books (K. iii. 160) mentions ' Oswald's hlaw ' among the boundaries of Wulf- 
 ringtune, i.e. Wolverton, a few miles east of Worcester. It is very likely that 
 the true name of the hundred is Oswald's hlaw, i.e. Oswald's hill, not Oswald's 
 law, though the mistake was made at an early tune. But the story told by the 
 charter as to the fusion of three old hundreds is corroborated by Domesday, and 
 in the thirteenth century one of the three courts was still held at Wimborntree. 
 
 4 But Dr Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 118, relies on part of this charter and it is 
 not like ordinary forger's work. If, as is highly probable, there has been some 
 ' improvement ' of the charter, such improvement seems to have favoured, not 
 the church of Worcester as against the king, but the monks as against the 
 bishop. 
 
 8 ' cum tolle et teame, saca et socne, et infangenetheof, et proprii iuris 
 debitum transgressionis, et poenam delicti quae Anglice dicitur oferssawnesse, 
 et gyltwyte.'
 
 Sake and Sohe. 269 
 
 pieces of it lie surrounded by Gloucestershire. In 1086 the 
 church of Worcester had to all appearance just those rights 
 which the Altitonantis professed to grant to her; already they 
 were associated with the name of Oswald ; already they were 
 regarded as ancient privileges. ' Saint Mary of Worcester has 
 a hundred called Oswaldslaw, in which lie 300 hides, from 
 which the bishop of the said church, by a constitution of 
 ancient times, has the profits of all sokes and all the customs 
 which belong thereto for his own board and for the king's 
 service and his own, so that no sheriff can make any claim for 
 any plea or for any other cause : this the whole county 
 witnesses 1 .' Surely the whole county would not have spoken 
 thus of some newfangled device of the half-Norman Edward. 
 Such a case as this, so great a matter as the utter exclusion of 
 the sheriff from one quarter of the shire, we shall hardly 
 attempt to explain by hypothetical usurpations. These liberties 
 were granted by some king or other. If they were granted by 
 the Confessor, why was not a charter of the Confessor produced ? 
 Why instead was a charter of Edgar produced, perhaps re- 
 written and revised, perhaps concocted ? The easiest answer to 
 this question seems to be that, whatever may be the truth about 
 this detail or that, the Altitonantis tells a story that in the 
 main is true. The diplomatist's scepticism should in this and 
 other instances be held in check by the reflexion that kings 
 and sheriffs did not permit themselves to be cheated wholesale 
 out of valuable rights, when the true state of the facts must 
 have been patent to hundreds of men, patent to all the men of 
 Oswaldslaw and to ' the whole county ' of Worcester 2 . 
 
 We may now turn to the genuine books of an earlier time Criticismof 
 and patiently examine their words. It is well known that books. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 172 b: 'Ecclesia S. Mariae de Wirecestre habet unum hundret 
 quod vocatur Oswaldeslau in quo iacent ccc. hidae. De quibus episcopus ipsiua 
 ecclesiae a constitutions antiquorum temporum habet omnes redditiones soch- 
 arum et omnes consuetudines inibi pertinentes ad dominicum victum et regis 
 servitium et suum, ita ut nullus vicecomes ullam ibi habere possit querelam, 
 nee in aliquo placito, nee in alia qualibet causa. Hoc testatur totns comitatus.' 
 
 2 Another example is Edgar's charter for Ely, A.D. 970 K. 563 (iii. 56), 
 which bestows the soke over the two hundreds which lie within the Isle, five 
 hundreds in Essex, and all other lands of the monastery. Kemble was inclined 
 to accept the A.-S. version of the charter. It purports to be obtained by bishop 
 JSthelwold and, if genuine, is closely connected with the Oswaldslaw charter ; 
 both testify to unusual privileges obtained by the founders of the new 
 monasticism.
 
 270 England before the Conquest. 
 
 an Anglo-Saxon land-book proceeding from the king very 
 commonly, though not always, contains a clause of immunity. 
 Sometimes a grant of immunity is the essence of the book ; the 
 land in question already belongs to a church, and the bishop or 
 abbot' now succeeds in getting it set free from burdens to 
 which it has hitherto been subject. What is now granted to 
 him is 'freedom/ 'liberty,' 'fre61s'; the book is a fre6ls-b6c l ; 
 it may be that he is willing to pay money, to give land, to 
 promise prayers in return for this franchise, this libertas 2 . 
 Thus, for example, King Ceolwulf of Mercia grants a libertas to 
 the Bishop of Worcester, freeing all his land from the burden 
 of feeding the king's horses, and in consideration of this grant 
 the bishop gives to the king five hides of land for four lives 
 and agrees that prayers shall be said for him every Sunday 3 . 
 The clause Now in an ordinary case the clause of immunity will first 
 contain some general words declaring the land to be free of 
 burdens in general, and then some exceptive words declaring 
 that it is not to be free from certain specified burdens 4 . Both 
 parts of the clause demand our attention. The burdens from 
 which the land is to be free are described by a large phrase. 
 Usually both a substantive and an adjective are employed for 
 the purpose ; they are to be freed ab omni terrenae servitutis 
 iugo saecularibus negotiis mundiali obstaculo mundialibus 
 causis saecu laribus curis mundialibus coang ustiis cunctis 
 laboribus vitae mortalium. The adjectives are remarkable, for 
 they seem to suggest a contrast. The land is freed from all 
 earthly, worldly, secular, temporal "services. Does this not 
 mean that it is devoted to services that are heavenly, sacred, 
 spiritual 6 ? True, that in course of time we may find this 
 
 1 E.g. K. 1298 (vi. 149), ' Dis is seo freolsboc to 'San mynstre rot Byrtune.' 
 
 2 E.g. K. 277 (ii. 58), 278 (ii. 60). 
 
 A.D. 875 ; K. 306 (ii. 101) ; B. ii. 159. 
 
 4 Unsuspected charters of 'the seventh and eighth centuries are so few, that 
 we hardly dare venture on any generalities about their wording. But already in 
 a charter attributed to 674, E. p. 4, Brit. Mus. Facs. iv. 1, something very like 
 the 'common form' of later days appears; it appears also in a charter of 
 A.D. 691-2, K..32 (i. 35), E. p. 12, of which we have but a fragmentary copy, 
 and before the end of the eighth century it appears with some frequency; see 
 e.g. Offa's charter of 774, K. 123 (i. 150): 'sit autem terra ilia libera ab omni 
 saecularis rei negotio, praeter pontis, arcisve restaurationem et contra hostes 
 communem expeditionem.' 
 
 8 Occasionally the contrast is expressly drawn, e.g. by ^thelbald, K. 90 
 (i. 108): 'ut ab omni tributo vectigalium operum onerumque saecularium sit
 
 Sake arid Soke. 271 
 
 same formula used when the king is giving land, not to a 
 church, but to one of his thegns; but still in its origin the 
 land-book is ecclesiastical; 'book -right' is the right of the 
 church, ius ecclesiasticum 1 , and we may well believe that the 
 phraseology of the books, which in substance remains unaltered 
 i'rom century to century, was primarily adapted to pious gifts. 
 It is by no means improbable that in the middle of the eighth 
 century ^Ethelbald of Mercia by a general decree conceded to 
 all the churches of his kingdom just that freedom from all 
 burdens, save the trinoda necessitas, that was usually granted 
 by the clause of immunity contained in the land-books, and we 
 can hardly say with certainty that half a century before this 
 time Wihtraed had not granted to all the churches of Kent a 
 yet larger measure of liberty, a liberty which absolved them 
 even from the trinoda necessitas*. Turning from the adjectives 
 'to the substantives that are used, we find them to be wide and 
 indefinite words; the lands are to be free from all worldly 
 services, burdens, troubles, annoyances, affairs, business, causes, 
 matters and things. Sometimes a more definite word is added 
 such as tributum, vectigal, census, and clearly one main object 
 of the clause is to declare that the land is to pay nothing to 
 the king or his officers ; it is to be free of rent and taxes, 
 
 libera...tantum ut Deo omnipotent! ex eodem agello aecclesiasticae servitutis 
 famulatum inpendat.' 
 
 1 See above, p. 229. 
 
 2 Privilege of Wihtresd, A.D. 696-716, Haddan and Stubbs, iii. 238: 'Adkuc 
 addimus maiorem libertatem. Inprimis Christ! ecclesiae cum omnibus agris ad 
 earn pertinentibus, similiter Hrofensi ecclesiae cum suis, caeterisque praedictis 
 omnibus ecclesiis Dei nostri, subiciantur pro salute animae meae, meorumque 
 praedecessorum, et pro spe caelestis regni ex hac die, et deinceps concedimus et 
 donamus ab omnibus dimcultatibus saecularium servitutis, a pastu Begis, 
 principum, comitum, nee non ab operibus, maioribus minoribusve gravitatibus : 
 et ab omni debitu vel pulsione regum tensuris liberos eos esse perpetua libertate 
 statuimus." See also the act by which JSthelbald confirmed this privilege in 
 742, H. & S. iii. 340, B. i. 233-6. According to one version of this act, the 
 trinoda necessitas is, according to another it is not, excepted. The learned 
 editors of the Councils speak of 'the suspicions common to every record that 
 notices the Privilege of Wihtrsed.' We are treading on treacherous ground. 
 See also the less suspicious Act of ^thelbald, A.D. 749, H. & S. iii. 386: 
 ' Concedo ut monasteria et aecclesiae a publicis vectigalibus et ab omnibus operi- 
 bus oneribusque, auctore Deo, servientes absoluti maneant, nisi sola quae com- 
 muniter fruenda sunt, omnique populo, edicto regis, facienda iub.eutur, id est, 
 instructionibus pontium, vel necessariis defensionibus arcium contra hostes, non 
 sunt renuenda.'
 
 272 England before the Conquest. 
 
 scotfree and gafolfree 1 . Occasionally particular mention is 
 made of a duty of entertaining the king, his court, his officers, his 
 huntsmen, dogs and horses, also of a duty of entertaining his 
 messengers and forwarding them on their way 2 . Thus, for 
 example, Taunton, which belonged to the bishop of Winchester, 
 had been bound to provide one night's entertainment for the 
 king and nine nights' entertainment for his falconers and to 
 support eight dogs and a dog-ward, to carry with horses and 
 carts to Curry and to Williton whatever the king might need, 
 and to conduct wayfarers to the neighbouring royal vills. To 
 obtain immunity from these burdens the bishop had to give 
 the king sixty hides of land 3 . 
 
 Discus- No doubt it is a sound canon of criticism that, when in 
 
 wordsVf 16 a grant precise are followed by vague words, the former should 
 immunity. ^ e taken to explain, and, it may be, to restrain the latter. If, 
 for example, land be freed 'from taxes and all other secular 
 burdens,' we may well urge that the 'other secular burdens' 
 which the writer has in his mind are burdens akin to taxes. 
 And of course it is fair to say that in our days a grant of 
 private justice would be an extremely different thing from a 
 grant of freedom from fiscal dues. But what, we must ask, 
 does this freedom from fiscal dues really mean when it is 
 granted by an Anglo-Saxon land-book ? When the monks or 
 canons obtain a charter freeing this territory from all tributum 
 and census, from all pastiones and so forth, is it intended that 
 the occupiers of the soil shall have the benefit of this grant ? 
 Not so. The religious have been stipulating for themselves 
 and not for their men. The land has been freed from service 
 to the king in order that it may serve the church 4 ; the church 
 will take what the king has hitherto taken or it will take an 
 equivalent. In a writ of Edward the Confessor this appears 
 very plainly. Whenever men pay a geld to the king, be it an 
 
 1 A.D. 1066, Edward the Confessor for Westminster, K. 828 (iv. 191): 
 scotfre and gavelfre.' 
 
 2 Kemble, Codex, vol. i. Introduction liii-lvi., collects some of the best 
 instances. Offa for a valuable consideration frees certain lands belonging to 
 the church of Worcester from pastiones ; ' nee non et trium annorum ad se 
 pertinentes pastiones, id est sex convivia, libenter concedendo largitus est': 
 K. 143 (i. 173), B. i. 335. 
 
 8 A.D. 904, K. 1084 (v. 157). 
 
 4 A.D. 826, Egbert for Winchester, K 1037 (v. 81): 'Volo etiam ut haec 
 terra libera semper sit...nullique serviat nisi soli episcopo Wentano.'
 
 Sake and Soke. 273 
 
 army -geld or a ship-geld, the men of S l . Edmund are to pay a 
 like geld to the abbot and the monks 1 . Probably this principle 
 has been at work all along. The king has had no mind to free 
 the manentes, casati, tributarii of the church from any tributum 
 or vectigal. What has hitherto been paid to him, or some 
 equivalent for it, will now go to the treasuiy of the church. 
 Thus, even within the purely fiscal region, we see that the 
 object of the immunity is to give the church a grip on those 
 who dwell upon the land. But we must read the clause to its end. 
 
 As is well known, it usually proceeds to except certain The tri- 
 burdens, to declare that the land is not to be free from them. 
 These burdens, three in number, are on a few occasions spoken 
 of as the trinoda necessitas. That term has become common in 
 our own day and is useful. The land is not to be free from 
 the duty of army-service, the duty of repairing strongholds, 
 the duty of repairing bridges. An express exception of this 
 trinoda necessitas out of the general words of immunity is 
 extremely common. Moreover there are charters which speak 
 as though no lands could ever be free from the triple charge 2 , 
 and a critic should look with some suspicion upon any would- 
 be land-book which expressly purports to break this broad rule. 
 But besides some books which do expressly purport to free 
 land from the trinoda necessitas 3 , we have a considerable 
 number of others which grant immunity in wide terms and 
 make no exception of army-service, bridge-bote or burh-bote 4 , 
 and we are hardly entitled to reject them all merely because 
 they do not conform to the general principle 8 . More to our 
 
 1 K. 1346 (vi. 205). Compare Fustel de Coulanges, L'Immunite Merovin- 
 gienne, Revue historique, xxiii. 21. 
 
 2 E.g. K. 1117 (v. 231) : ' tribus semotis causis a quibus nullus nostroram 
 poterit expers fore'; K. v. pp. 259, 283, 334. 
 
 3 To this class belong the foundation charter of Evesham mentioned above, 
 p. 235, and Offa's charter for S*. Albans, K. 161 (i. 195), which Haddan and 
 Stubbs, iii. 469, are unwilling to decisively reject. Cenwulf's charter for Abingdon, 
 K. 214 (i. 269), H. & S. iii. 556, sets a limit to the amount of military service 
 that is to be demanded. JEthelstan's charter for Crediton, recently printed by 
 Napier and Stevenson, Crawford Charters, p. 5, frees land from the trinoda 
 necessitas. 
 
 4 E.g. K. i. p. 274; ii. pp. 14, 15, 24, 26, 83 ; v. pp. 53, 62, 81. 
 
 8 Observe how Bede describes a gift made by Oswy in the middle of the 
 seventh century ; Hist. Eccl. iii. 24 (ed. Plummer, i. 178) : ' donatis insuper 
 duodecim possessiunculis terrarum in quibus ablato studio militiae terrestris, ad 
 exercendam militiam caelestem etc.' 
 
 M. 18
 
 274 England before the Conquest. 
 
 purpose is it to notice that, though a grant of jurisdictional 
 powers would be an extremely different thing from a grant of 
 immunity from army-service, the duty of attending the national 
 or communal courts is extremely like the duty of attending the 
 host, and it would not be extravagant to argue that when the 
 king says 'I free this land from all secular burdens except 
 those of fyrd-fare, burh-bote and bridge-bote/ he says by 
 implication ' I free this land from suit to shires and hundreds.' 
 The dngild. But yet more important is it to notice that charters of the 
 ninth century frequently except out of the words of immunity 
 not three burdens, but four. In addition to the trinoda 
 necessitous, some fourth matter is mentioned. Its nature is 
 never very fully described, but it is hinted at by the terms 
 dngild, singulars pretium, pretium pro pretio. In connexion 
 with these charters we must read others which exempt the 
 land from 'penal causes/ or wite-rceden and others which 
 expressly grant to the donee the ' wites ' or certain ' wites ' 
 issuing from the land ; also we shall have to notice that there 
 are dooms which decree that certain ' wites ' are to be paid to 
 the land-lord or land-rica. Now dngild (singulars pretium) is 
 a technical term in common use 1 . When a crime has been 
 committed theft is the typical crime which the legislators 
 have ever before their eyes the dngild is the money com- 
 pensation that the person who has been wronged is entitled to 
 receive, as contrasted with any wite or fine that is payable to 
 the king. We find, then, a charter saying that certain land 
 not certain persons, but certain land is to be free from all 
 secular burdens save the dngild, and in some cases it will be 
 added that the land is to pay nothing, not one farthing, by 
 way of wite, or that nothing is 'to go out to wite 2 .' Of the 
 various interpretations that might possibly be put upon such 
 -words one may be at once rejected. It is not the intention of 
 the king who makes or of the church which receives the grant 
 that crimes committed on this land shall go unpunished. No 
 lord would wish his territory to be a place where men might 
 murder and steal with impunity. We may be certain then 
 that if a crime be committed, there is to be a wite ; but it is 
 
 1 The passages in the dooms which mention it are collected in Schmid, 
 Olossar, s. v. dngild. They are discussed by Maurer, Krit. Ueberschau, ii. 32. 
 
 2 The clauses of immunity which mention the dngild will be collected in a 
 note at the end of this section.
 
 Sake and Soke. 275 
 
 not to go outside the land ; the lord himself is to have it. But 
 how is the lord to enforce his right to the wite, must he sue 
 for it in the national or communal courts, or has he a court of 
 his own ? 
 
 This question is difficult. The ancient charters, however The right 
 nearly they may go to telling us that the donee will do justice the right to 
 within his territory, never go quite that length. There is, a co 
 however, a book granted by Cenwulf of Mercia in 816 to the 
 church of Worcester which adds to the clause of immunity these 
 words 'and if a wicked man be three times captured in open 
 crime, let him be delivered up at the king's tun (vicum 
 regalem) 1 .' This seems to tell us that only the worst offenders 
 will be delivered up to the royal or national officers and to 
 imply that the bishop may do justice upon all others. Then 
 there are two books in favour of the church of Abingdon, the 
 one granted by Cenwulf in 821, the other by Egbert in 835, 
 which, though their language is very obscure, seem to tell us 
 that if one of the ' men of God ' (by which phrase are meant the 
 ' vassals ' of the church of Abingdon) be accused of any crime, 
 the overseer of the church may swear away the charge by his 
 own oath, and that, if he dare not swear, he may pay the dngild 
 to the plaintiff and, this done, will have justice over the 
 offender 2 . Another ancient book suggests that the lord of an 
 immunity, when he had to pay the dngild for one of his men, 
 could not be forced to cross the boundary of his land. On that 
 boundary some mixed tribunal would meet consisting partly of 
 his men and partly of outsiders 3 . Then, again, there are the 
 books which either give the lord the funs comprehensio or else 
 exempt his land from the furis comprehensio. Now when a 
 
 1 K. 210 (i. 265); B. i. 497; H. & S. iii. 585. The clause in question is not 
 found in every copy of the charter. If some monk is to be accused of tampering 
 with the book, there seems just as much reason for charging him with having 
 omitted a clause which limited, as for charging him with inserting a clause 
 which recognized, the jurisdiction of the church. 
 
 2 These clauses will be discussed in a note at the end of this section. 
 
 3 A.D. 841, K. 250 (ii. 14): 'Liberabo ab omnibus saecularibus servitutibus... 
 regis et principis vel iuniorum eorum, nisi in confinio reddant rationem contra 
 ^alium.' Compare K. 117 (i. 144): 'nisi specialiter pretium pro pretio ad 
 terminum.' Also Leg. Henr. 57 1 : 'Si inter compares vicinos utrinque sint 
 querelae, conveniant ad divisas.' Ibid. 57 8: 'aliquando in divisis vel in 
 erthmiotis.' Ibid. 9 4: 'Et omnis causa terminetur, vel hundreto, vel comi- 
 tatu, vel hallimoto soccam habentium, vel dominorum curiis, vel divisis parium.' 
 
 See above, p. 97. / 
 
 182
 
 276 England "before, the Conquest. 
 
 writ of Cnut or Edward the Confessor tells us that a lord is to 
 have infangennethef we do not doubt that he is to have the 
 right which bore that name in later days, the right to hold a 
 court for and to hang thieves who are caught in seisin of the 
 stolen goods, and to the furis comprehensio of the older books 
 we can hardly give another meaning. And the apparent 
 equivalence of the two phrases ' You shall hold this land with 
 thief-catching' and 'You shall hold this land free of thief- 
 catching' illustrates our argument that to exempt land from 
 public or national justice is to create private or seignorial 
 justice 1 . We may see this in later days; a lord who holds 
 land ' free and quit of frankpledge ' assumes the right to hold a 
 view of frankpledge, and we can not say that he is wrong in so 
 doing 2 . 
 
 The Taun- Lastly, in a book of fairly good repute we may read of the 
 grand liberties with which in 904 King Edward endowed the 
 Bishop of Winchester's large estate at Taunton that estate 
 which in subsequent centuries was to become the classical 
 example of colossal manors. 'I have,' says the king, 'granted 
 to Christ that the men of the bishop, noble as well as non-noble, 
 living on the said land shall be worthy of the same right that is 
 enjoyed by those who dwell on the demesnes of the crown, and 
 that jurisdiction in all secular causes shall be exercised to the 
 use of the bishops in the same manner as that in which 
 jurisdiction is exercised in matters pertaining to the king 3 .' 
 This is the more important because it suggests, what like 
 enough is true, that the king himself is one of the first of all 
 ' immunists ' ; his own estates, the ancient demesne of the 
 
 1 A.D. 828, K. 223 (i. 287): 'cum furis comprehensione intus et foris'; 
 A.D. 842, K. 253 (ii. 16) 'ut... furis comprehensione... terra secura et immunis... 
 permaneat'; A.D. 850, K. 1049 (v. 95) a similar form; A.D. 858, K. 281 
 (ii. 64), a similar form; A.D. 869, K. 300 (ii. 95), a similar form; A.D. 880, 
 K. 312 (ii. 109) : ' cum furis comprehensione.' See Kemble's remarks, C. D. 
 vol. i. p. xlvi. 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 565. 
 
 3 K. 1084 (v. 157); B. ii. 272: 'Christo concessi ut episcopi homines tarn 
 nobiles quam ignobiles in praefato rure degentes hoc idem ius in omni haberent 
 dignitate quo regis homines perfruuntur regalibus fiscis commorantes, et omnia 
 saecularium rerum iudicia ad usus praesulum exerceantur eodem modo quo 
 regalium negotiorum discutiuntur iudicia.' Similar words occur in a con- 
 firmation by Edgar, K. 598 (iii. 136), which Kemble rejects. This contains an 
 English paraphrase of the Latin text.
 
 Sake and Sake. 277 
 
 crown, already stand outside the national system of finance, 
 justice and police 1 . 
 
 But so careful must we be in drawing inferences from The immu- 
 
 , ,. ,. ,1 , . ,, j nistaudthe 
 
 singular instances, so wary of forgeries, that in the end we can w j te . 
 not dispense with arguments which rest rather upon pro- 
 babilities than upon recorded facts. It is conceded that the 
 ' immunist ' (it is convenient to borrow . a term that French 
 writers have coined) is entitled to many of the fines and 
 forfeitures that arise from offences committed within his 
 territory. Is it, we must ask, probable that any ealdorman 
 or sheriff will be at pains to exact and collect these fines and 
 forfeitures for the immunist 's benefit ? Now it is true that in 
 later days a few lords enjoyed a comparatively rare franchise 
 known as amerciamenta hominum. When their men were 
 amerced in the king's court the amercements were paid into 
 the exchequer, and then the lord would petition to have them 
 paid out to him*. But this was an uncommon and an exalted 
 franchise. As a general rule, the person in whose name a court 
 is held, be he king or lord, gets the profits of the court. No 
 one in the middle ages does justice for nothing, and in the 
 ninth century the days when national officers would be paid by 
 salary were far distant. When the king declares that nothing 
 is to ' go out ' of the immunist's lands ' by way of wite,' then to 
 our thinking he declares that, save in exceptional cases, he and 
 his officers will neither meddle nor make with offences that are 
 committed within that territory. Again, though we may reject 
 this charter and that, there can be little doubt that before the 
 end of the tenth century, the territory held by a church 
 sometimes coincided with a jurisdictional district, with a 
 hundred or group of hundreds. When this was so, and the 
 church enjoyed a full immunity, it was almost of necessity the 
 lord of the court as well as the lord of the land. Why should 
 the sheriff hold that court, why should he appoint a bailiff for 
 that hundred, if never thereout could he get one penny for his 
 own or the king's use ? 
 
 We must once more remember that even in the days of full Justice and 
 grown feudalism the right to hold a court was after all rather tion. 
 a fiscal than a jurisdictional right. We call it jurisdictional, 
 
 1 Compare K. 821 (iv. 171) : ' swa freols on eallan thingan eall swa thaes 
 cinges agen innland. ' 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 570.
 
 278 England before the Conquest. 
 
 but still, at least normally, the lord was, neither in his own 
 person, nor yet in the person of his steward, the judge of the 
 court 1 . His right was not in strictness a right ius dicendi, for 
 the suitors made the judgments. When analysed it was a right 
 to preside over a court and to take" its profits. Very easy 
 therefore is the transition from a right to 'wites' to such 
 'jurisdiction' as the feudal lord enjoys. When once it is 
 established that all the fines of a hundred court are to go to 
 a bishop, that no sheriff or bailiff will get anything by going 
 to hold that court, then the court already is 'in the bishop's 
 hands.' 
 
 TbeFrank- This, however, can not be treated as a merely English 
 question. Parallel to the English freols-bdc runs the Frankish 
 carta immunitatis, and, if the former has given rise to the 
 question whether it conceded jurisdictional rights, the latter 
 has given rise, not merely to the same question, but to much 
 learned controversy. Now it is highly probable that the 
 English 'immunity' is not independent of the Merovingian 
 ' immunity ' ; still the terms of the former do not seem to have 
 been copied from those of the latter, and it is a significant fact 
 that two different formulas should be equally open to the blame 
 of not deciding just that most important question which 
 according to our ideas they ought to decide. The Frankish 
 formula is addressed by the king to his subordinates and 
 declares that no public officer (nullus index publicus) is to 
 enter the land of the immunist for the purpose of hearing 
 causes, levying freda (which answer to our ' wites '), making 
 distresses or exacting pledges; but, like our English formula, 
 it says no word of any court to be held or any jurisdiction to be 
 exercised by the immunist. It would be impertinent to give 
 here any lengthy account of the various opinions about this 
 matter that have been held by foreign scholars, still more 
 impertinent to pronounce any judgment upon them, but even 
 those writers who seem most inclined to minimize the scope of 
 the immunity are forced to admit that, as a mere matter of fact, 
 the immunist by virtue of his immunity is enabled to hold a 
 court for his territory. That seignorial courts were growing up 
 even in the Merovingian time, that such courts there were even 
 in the sixth century, there seems little or no doubt, even 
 though it be denied that they were the creatures of these 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 580.
 
 Sake and Soke. 279 
 
 clauses of immunity. On the whole, to whichever side of the 
 channel we look, we seem compelled, alike by the words of the 
 charters and by the controversies which they have occasioned, 
 to believe that in the eyes of the kings and the immunists 
 seignorial jurisdiction, that right to hold a court which seems 
 to us so strange a right, was not a matter of the first importance, 
 not worth conceding, not worth denying. Who is to have the 
 profits of justice ? that is a momentous question. But if it be 
 decided that they are to go to the bishop, then the king will 
 have no further care for them : the bishop may and must get 
 them for himself. As to the ' justiciables,' it may well be that 
 they are very indifferent about the matter, not impossible that 
 the burden of suit will be alleviated if the lord establishes a 
 court of his own, or if an old court passes into his hands 1 . 
 
 One other question should be raised, even if we can find for Seignorial 
 it no certain answer. Is not seignorial jurisdiction very closely siastical 
 connected at its root with ecclesiastical jurisdiction ? Of course { 
 in more recent times the two are thoroughly distinct from each 
 other. The bishop, besides being a spiritual judge, will be a 
 feudal lord with many manorial courts and many chartered 
 franchises; but any court that he holds as a lord will have 
 
 1 Few questions in Frankish history have been more warmly contested than 
 this, whether the immunist had a jurisdiction within his territory. On the one 
 hand, it has been contended that there is no evidence older than 840 that he 
 exercised jurisdiction even as between the inhabitants of that territory. On the 
 other hand, it has been said that already in 614 he has civil jurisdiction in 
 disputes between these inhabitants, besides a criminal jurisdiction over them, 
 which however does not extend to the graver crimes. A few references will 
 suffice to put the reader in the current of this discussion ; Loning, Geschichte 
 des Deutschen Kirchenrechts, ii. 731; Brunner, D. R. G. ii. 298; Schroder, 
 D. R. G. 174 ; Beauchet, Histoire de 1'organisation judiciaire en France, 74 ; 
 Beaudoin, fetude sur les origines du regime f6odal (Annales de 1'enseignement 
 superieur de Grenoble, vol. i. p. 43); Fustel de Coulanges, L'Immunite M6rovin- 
 gienne (Revue Historique, xxii. 249, xxiii. 1). One of the most disputed 
 points is the character of the court held by an abbot, which is put before us by 
 the very ancient Formulae Andecavenses, a collection attributed to the sixth or, 
 at the latest, to the early years of the seventh century. It has been asserted and 
 denied that this abbot of Angers is exercising the powers given to him by an 
 immunity; some have said that he, or rather his steward, is merely acting as 
 an arbitrator ; Brunner, Forschungen, 665, explains him as one of the mediocres 
 indices of decaying Roman law. On the whole, the balance of learning is 
 inclining to the opinion that, even in the Merovingian time, there were great 
 churches and other lords with courts which wielded power over free men, and 
 that the ' immunities,' even if they were not intended fro create such courts, at 
 all events made them possible, or, as Fustel says, consecrated them.
 
 280 England before the Conquest. 
 
 nothing to do with the court that he holds as a bishop. The 
 constitution and procedure of the one will differ at every point 
 from the constitution and procedure of the other. The one 
 belongs to the temporal order and is subject to the king's court, 
 the other belongs to the spiritual order and is in no sense below 
 the royal tribunal. Thus it is when feudal law and canon law 
 have reached their full stature. But even from the twelfth 
 century we may get a hint that the distinction has not always 
 been so sharply marked. We may read how in Henry I.'s day 
 the Bishop of Bath ' with his friends and barons ' heard a cause 
 in which Modbert claimed lands that were held by the monks 
 of Bath. The proceedings took place under a royal writ and 
 ought, we should say, to have been in all respects temporal 
 proceedings ; but in framing the judgment two bishops, three 
 archdeacons and several ' clerks and chaplains ' took the leading 
 part, while the lay tenants of the bishop stood by as witnesses 1 . 
 In this context we must remember that in the twelfth century 
 the clergy were contending that land given to a church in 
 frankalmoin is outside the sphere of secular justice 2 , and, while 
 this contention was being urged, it was easily possible that a 
 bishop should hold an amphibious court : Over the claim that 
 Modbert is making the bishop has jurisdiction, either because 
 the monks are holding the land of him as his tenants, or because 
 that land has been given to God and the saints by an ancient 
 book which denounced the anathema against all who should 
 violate it. Going back yet further, we see, at all events in 
 France, that the claim of the clergy to hold their lands and 
 seignories exempt from all temporal jurisdiction has been 
 intimately connected with the claim of the clergy that they 
 themselves need not answer before a lay tribunal. A learned 
 man has said that the exemption of the clergy from the 
 temporal courts was 'the first step towards the feudalization 
 of justice 3 .' If our English documents do not make this plain, 
 if the relations between church and state were more harmonious 
 in England than elsewhere (and because more harmonious 
 therefore more indefinite and to the modern student more 
 perplexing), still we can see that the main idea of the English 
 fr6ols-b6o is the liberation of a tract of ground from all secular 
 
 1 Madox, Hist. Exch. i. 109 ; Bigelow, Placita Anglo-Normannica, 114. 
 
 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 224-30. 
 
 8 Nissl, Der Gerichtsstand des Clerus im Frankischen Eeich, 247.
 
 Sake and Sake. 281 
 
 troubles, all temporal burdens, all earthly service. The land is 
 dedicated to God and the saints, or, if it is not dedicated in the 
 strictest sense, it is given for God's sake and the welfare of the 
 donor's soul ; it is within the ban of the church. And so the 
 men who sit upon the land of the church of Abingdon, laymen 
 though they be, are homines Dei, the men of God 1 . As 
 such, should they not be subject to the jurisdiction of the 
 church ? 
 
 At this point we may profitably remember that the iuris- Criminal 
 
 ..,..,.., justice of 
 
 diction which in later days appears as the criminal jurisdiction theChurch. 
 of ecclesiastical tribunals (the jurisdiction which, for example, 
 those tribunals exercise when they chastise a man for incest, 
 fornication or perjury) was but slowly disengaged from the 
 general mass of penal jurisdiction that was wielded by moots 
 in which the bishop occupied a prominent seat. Moreover, the 
 bishop's justice did not escape that fiscal taint which pervaded 
 the whole system of criminal law. As in some cases the king 
 is entitled to a wite, so in others the wite falls to the bishop. 
 For instance, we see traces of a rude concordat, which, when 
 incest or adultery is committed, subjects the woman to the 
 bishop, the man to the king 2 ; and then from Domesday Book 
 we learn that in the borough of Lewes the upshot of this 
 partition is that the king will get 85. 4>d. from the man while 
 the adulteress pays a like sum to the archbishop of Canterbury 3 . 
 And so ecclesiastical jurisdiction becomes a source of income, 
 a matter to be fought for and bargained for. The monks of 
 Battle will claim that within the banlieu of their abbey all the 
 ' forfeitures of Christianity ' belong to them and not to the 
 bishop of Chichester*. What is more, they will connect their 
 claim to purely temporal justice with their possession of ordeal 
 pits, and here we may see another link between the hundred- 
 moots and the churches 5 . The churches have made money out 
 
 1 K. 214 (i. 269); 236(1.312). 
 
 2 Edw. & Guth. 4; Leg. Henr. 11, 5. D. B. i. 26. 
 
 4 Chron. de Bello, 26-7: 'Et si forisfacturae Christianitatis quolibet modo 
 infra leugam contigerint, coram abbate definiendae referantur. Habeatque 
 ecclesia S. Martini emendationem forisfacturae; poenitentiam vero reatus sui 
 rei ab episcopo percipiant.' 
 
 5 Battle Cnstumals (Camden Soc.), 126: ' Septem hundreda non habent 
 fossas nisi apud Wy, et ideo habemus ij. denarios: Arcbiepiscopns tamen et 
 Prior de novo trahunt homines suos ad fossas: Abbas de S. Augustino non 
 habet.'
 
 282 England before the Conquest. 
 
 of the ordeal. Long after the English prelates had been 
 forbidden to hold spiritual pleas in the hundred courts, 
 Alexander III. was compelled to speak sharply to the arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury touching the conduct of archdeacons who 
 exacted thirty pence from every man or woman who went to the 
 fire or the water for purgation 1 . 
 Antiquity N O doubt the theory to which we have been led implies 
 
 of sei- .1.11 
 
 gnorial that in the eighth or even in the seventh century, there were 
 in England 'immunists' who had jurisdiction within their 
 territories, and further it implies that a royal grant of land in 
 the ninth and tenth centuries generally included, and this as 
 a matter of 'common form,' a grant of jurisdiction. We cannot 
 see either in the history of England or in the history of the 
 Frankish Empire any reason why we should shrink from these 
 conclusions. Further, it must be admitted that if the clause of 
 immunity conveys, or permits the growth of, seignorial juris- 
 diction, this jurisdiction is of an exalted kind, for no causes are 
 excepted out of it, unless it be by the words about the dngild, 
 and even those words drop out from the charters in course of 
 time. Those words about the dngild imply, to our thinking, 
 that the immunist will have jurisdiction over any dispute which 
 arises between two men of the enfranchised territory, and also 
 that if an action against one of these men be brought by a 
 ' foreigner ' in a court outside the precinct, the immunist can 
 obtain ' cognizance ' of the action by appearing in that court 
 and paying the dngild. When the words about the dngild 
 disappear, this means that the immunist is obtaining a yet 
 further measure of ' liberty ' : whenever one of his men is sued 
 he can ' crave his court ' and need not, as a condition for 
 obtaining it, offer to pay what is due to the plaintiff. The 
 highest criminal jurisdiction was probably excepted from the 
 grant. Being a grant of wites, it will not extend to the 
 ' bootless ' the ' unemendable ' crimes. But Cnut's attempt to 
 save for himself certain pleas of the crown looks to us like the 
 effort of a strong king to recover what his predecessors have 
 been losing 2 . And then Cnut himself and the Confessor, the 
 latter with reckless liberality expressly grant to the churches 
 
 1 c. 3, X. 5, 37 : ' Accepimus...quod archidiaconi Conventrensis episcopatus... 
 in examinations ignis et aquae triginta denarios a viro et muliere quaerere 
 praesumunt.' 
 
 2 Cnut ii. 12-15.
 
 Sake and SoJce. 283 
 
 just those very reserved pleas of the crown. The result is that 
 the well endowed immunist of S*. Edward's day has jurisdiction 
 as high as that which any palatine earl of after ages enjoyed. 
 No crime, except possibly some direct attack upon the king's 
 person, property or retainers, was too high for him. It is the 
 reconstruction of criminal justice in Henry II.'s time, the new 
 learning of felonies, the introduction of the novel and royal 
 procedure of indictment, that reduce the immunist's powers 
 and leave him with nothing better than an unintelligible list 
 of obsolete words 1 . In this matter of seignorial justice England 
 had little to learn from Normandy. On the contrary, the 
 Norman counts and barons were eager to secure the uncouth 
 phrases which gave to the English immunist his justice, 'haute, 
 moyenne et basse justice.' 
 
 Our next question must be whether in the days before the Justice, 
 
 .'..*". . /> vassalage 
 
 Conquest a franchise or immunity was the only root of private and tenure, 
 jurisdiction: in other words, whether any jurisdiction was 
 implied in the mere relation between lord and man or between 
 lord and tenant. This also is a question which will hardly be 
 finally answered if regard be had only to the English documents. 
 For France it is the question whether the senior, as such, has 
 jurisdiction over his vassus, or again, whether he has jurisdiction 
 over his vassus if, as is usually the case in the Carlovingian age, 
 the vassus holds a beneficium given to him by his senior. The 
 English dooms which deal with what we may call the justiciary 
 relationship between lord and man closely resemble in many 
 respects the Frankish capitularies which touch the same 
 subject; both sets of documents seem to evade the simple 
 question that we put to them. But as regards the continent it 
 may here be enough to say that, though there have been many 
 debates, the current of learning seems to have set decidedly in 
 favour of the doctrine that neither in Merovingian nor yet in 
 Carlovingian times had the senior, unless he was an immunist, 
 a jurisdiction over his men. Such a jurisdiction has not been 
 developed when the midnight hides everything from our view. 
 When the morning comes, feudal justice stands revealed, 
 though nowhere perhaps is it governed by that simple principle 
 that ultimately prevailed in England, namely, that any and 
 every lord, no matter his personal rank or the rank of his 
 tenement, has civil justice over his tenants. 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 564.
 
 284 England before the Conquest. 
 
 dut el when ^e possibility of debate about this matter is afforded by 
 his man is texts of an earlier age. which at times seem to speak of the 
 lord as ' doing justice ' when a charge is brought against any 
 of his men 1 . Our English run parallel with the Frankish 
 texts. The state in its organization of justice and police does 
 not treat the contract between man and lord, between senior 
 and vassus, as a matter of indifference, still less as a danger to 
 society. We must not think of feudalism or vassalism as of 
 something which from the very first is anti-national and 
 anarchic. In its earliest stages it is fostered by the state, by 
 the king, by national law. The state demands that the lordless 
 man of whom no right can be had shall have a lord 2 . It makes 
 the lord responsible for the appearance of his men in court 
 to answer accusations 3 . It is not unlikely that the whole 
 system of frankpledge grows out of this requirement. In some 
 instances the state may go further; it may treat the lord, 
 not merely as bound to produce his man, but as responsible 
 for his man's evil deeds. But, at all events, any one who has 
 a charge to make against a lord's man must in the first 
 instance demand justice of the lord. If without making such a 
 demand, making it repeatedly, he brings the charge before the 
 king, he must pay the same fine that the lord would have 
 paid had he been guilty of a default of justice 4 . ' Of a 
 default of justice' we say and are compelled to say. It is 
 phrases such as this that have occasioned controversy. To an 
 ear attuned to the language of feudalism they seem to imply a 
 seignorial court in which the lord ' does justice ' or ' holds full 
 right ' to the demandant. But to all appearance they have 
 gradually changed their meaning. Originally a lord 'does 
 right' to the demandant by producing in a public court the 
 man against whom the claim is urged ; or he does it by 
 satisfying the claim, and in that case he seems entitled to 
 exact from his man, not merely a sum which will compensate 
 the outlay, but also the ' wite ' or fine which in another case 
 would have gone to the king or some national officer. He has 
 thus ' done justice ' and may have the usual profit that comes 
 of doing justice. Probably we ought to distinguish between a 
 
 1 Beaudoin, op. cit. p. 94 S. 2 JEthelstan, n. 2. 
 
 * Konrad Maurer, Krit. Ueberschau, ii. 30 ff. 
 
 * .asthelstan, n. 3. Observe how in the Latin version 'se hlaford the rihtes 
 wyrne ' becomes ' dominus qui rectum difforciabit.'
 
 Sake and Soke. 285 
 
 laxer and a stricter measure of responsibility, between the 
 lord's responsibility for his men in general and his responsibility 
 for such of his men as form his familia, in the language of 
 later days his mainpast ; but our texts do not lay much stress 
 upon this distinction, and, as a matter of remote history, the 
 relation between lord and man may grow out of the relation 
 between the head of a household and the members of it 1 . 
 
 At any rate, in numberless cases the law begins to interpose Duty of the 
 a third person, namely, the wrong-doer's lord, between- the 
 wrong-doer and the wronged : it is to this lord that the 
 claimant should in the first instance address himself. The lord 
 who does his duty by the king and the nation is he who keeps 
 a tight hold on his men, who chooses them carefully, who 
 dismisses them if they are bad subjects, who ' does justice ' and 
 ' holds full right ' if any of them be accused. Then, on the 
 other hand, he has the right and duty of ' warranting ' his men. 
 If, as will often happen, the bond between a lord and his man 
 is complicated with the bond between landlord and tenant, 
 then, as in later days, if the tenant's title be impeached, he will 
 vouch his lord to warranty and the lord will defend the action. 
 But, besides this, within limits that are not well defined, the 
 lord is the man's defensor or tutor 2 . It is expected of him by 
 morality, if not by law, that he will take upon himself the 
 responsibility for his man's acts if they be not open crimes. 
 He must stand by his men and see them through all trouble 3 . 
 
 For a while the state approves all this. The dangerous The state 
 person is, not the lord, whose wide lands are some security for theTordto 
 his good behaviour, but the lordless man of whom no right can ' do rigllt ' 
 be had. Somehow or another theft must be suppressed. This 
 is the determination of our strongest kings, of our wisest 
 'witan.' That they are raising up over against the state 
 another power, the power of seignorial justice, they do not see. 
 And, after all, these 'witan' both laymen and clerks are 
 themselves great lords, and the king is the lordliest of them all. 
 Thus the foundation for a feudal jurisdiction is laid. Still 
 between the lord's duty of producing his men and his right to 
 hold a court of and for his men there is to our eyes a great 
 
 1 K. Maurer, Krit. Ueberschau, ii. 32, 40, 41. Ine, 22, is of great importance 
 on account of its antiquity. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 18 b : ' inde vocat dominum suum ad tutorem. ' See above, p. 71. 
 * Leg. Henr. 57, 8 ; 82, 4, 5, 6.
 
 286 England before the Conquest. 
 
 gulf. We have seen above that this gulf had not been bridged 
 even in the Confessor's, even in the Conqueror's day 1 . Nor to 
 our thinking would it have been bridged but for the creation of 
 'immunities' upon a grand scale. The first origin of the 
 immunity we have sought in the efforts of the clergy to obtain 
 lands which should be utterly exempt from 'all earthly burdens,' 
 ' all worldly business.' But this effort unites with the stream 
 of tendency that we have now been watching. The state 
 will tbe grateful to the church if it will ' hold all the men of 
 God to right ' and do judgment between them and upon them. 
 The land- There is also a long series of dooms going back as far as 
 
 rica as nn- 
 
 muiiist. ^thelstan's reign which give certain fines and forfeitures to 
 one who is described as the land-hldford or the land-rica. 
 Remarkable they are, for they seem to assume that wherever a 
 crime is committed there will be forthcoming some-one who 
 will answer to the title 'the land-lord' or 'the territorial 
 magnate.' In some sense or another they presuppose that 
 there is Nulle terre sans seigneur. But who is this ' landlord ' ? 
 According to our thinking, he is the lord of the hundred or 
 else the lord who has a charter of immunity comprehending 
 the land in question, and, if there be no person answering to 
 this description, then he is the king. In the first place, in 
 certain dooms relating to London we are told that, when a thief 
 is caught and slain, his property is to be divided into two parts, 
 of which his wife takes one, while the other is divided between 
 the king and ' the association ' (perhaps we may say ' the gild ') 
 which was engaged in the pursuit and capture ; ' but if it be 
 book-land or bishop's-land, the landlord takes half with the 
 association in common 2 .' This seems to mean that there will 
 be a lord to share in the proceeds of the forfeiture if, but only 
 if. the scene of the capture be land that is within an immunity. 
 It is assumed, not without warrant in the land-books, that the 
 man who has book-land always, or almost always, enjoys an 
 immunity, while as to the bishop's-land, whether the bishop be 
 holding it in demesne or have granted it out to his thegns, 
 that no doubt will be protected by an ample charter. So 
 again, in another law ' the lord ' receives the thief's wer ' if he 
 [the lord] is worthy of his wite 8 ': that is to say, the lord 
 
 1 See above, p. 89. 
 
 2 ^Ethelstan, vi. (ludicia Civitatis Lundoniae), 1. 
 * .Ethelred, i. 1, 7.
 
 Sake and Soke. 287 
 
 receives it if he is in enjoyment of an immunity which confers 
 upon him a right to ' wites.' Then again, in several cases we 
 find that the land-lord or land-rica shares the proceeds of a 
 fine with the hundred or wapentake 1 . This, as we think, 
 points to the fact that the hundreds and wapentakes are 
 passing into private hands. These laws are severe laws 
 against criminals. They urge all men to the pursuit of the 
 flying thief and they hold out a reward to those who are 
 active in this duty. The men of the hundred are to have half 
 the thief's property, while the lord (who in many cases will be 
 the lord of the hundred) is to have the other half. He is to 
 have no more, even though his charter may seem to give him 
 more. So again, in certain cases an accused person must find 
 security that he will stand a trial, and the gage is to be given 
 ' half to the land-rica, half to the wapentake 2 .' This land-rica 
 is the lord of the wapentake. In another instance the gage 
 must be given half to the land-rica and half to the king's 
 port-reeve 3 . Then there are cases in which the ' land-lord ' is 
 to take possession of cattle that have been irregularly acquired 
 and are presumably stolen, and is to preserve them until their 
 true owner shall make his appearance 4 . These provisions, 
 which seem the foundation of the ' franchise of waif and stray,' 
 suggest that the ' land-lord ' is the president of the court into 
 which the owner must go when he wishes to prove his title ; 
 were this not so, the king's reeve would be the person who 
 would have the custody of the unclaimed beasts. Certainly 
 our explanation of these passages assumes that a hundred is 
 often in private hands and it assumes that, when this is not the 
 case, then the king is regarded as the lord of the hundred. 
 But in so doing it merely assumes that the state of things 
 revealed by Domesday Book is about a century old. When in 
 that record we read that the soke of four and a half hundreds 
 in Oxfordshire 'belongs to' the royal manor of Bensington, 
 that the soke of two hundreds ' belongs to ' the royal manor of 
 Headington, that the soke of other two hundreds ' belongs to ' 
 the royal manor of Bampton, we see that the king is the lord, 
 the proprietor, of those hundreds which have no other lord 5 . 
 
 1 Edgar, i. 2, 3; in. 7 ; iv. 2, 8 ; JBthelred, i. 1; in. 3, 4, 7. 
 
 2 JEthelred, in. 3, 4. * .ffithelred, in. 7. 
 4 Edgar, iv. 2, 11 ; JEthelred, i. 3. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 154. See above, p. 92.
 
 288 England before the Conquest. 
 
 From the laws now before us we infer that this is no very new 
 arrangement. But of course it is possible that those laws have 
 divers cases in view. It may be that within the hundred there 
 is an immunity, a privileged township or manor, and that a thief 
 is caught there. Who is to have the profits which arise from the 
 crime and condemnation ? The answer is : Half shall go to 
 the hundred, half to the land-rica, that is to say, half goes to 
 the doomsmen, or perhaps to the lord, of the hundred court, 
 half to the immunist. The lord under the general words of 
 his charter might perchance claim the whole; but, in order 
 that all the hundredors may have an interest in the pursuit of 
 thieves, it is otherwise decreed. But where is justice to be 
 done, in the hundred court or in the court of the immunist ? 
 That is a question of secondary importance to which our laws 
 do not address themselves. Very probably justice will be done 
 in the hundred court, or again it is not impossible that a 
 mixed tribunal consisting partly of the men of ' the franchise,' 
 partly of the men of ' the geldable ' will meet upon the 
 boundary of the immunist's land 1 . Our main point must be 
 that the land-lord or land-rica of these laws is an immunist, or 
 is the king, who, where there is no immunity, occupies the 
 position of an immunist. 
 
 The immu- We see too that the immunist's rights extend over free men 
 rights over an ^ over ^ ree landowners. If a man is guilty of heathenry he 
 freemen. rn ust, if he be a king's thegn, pay ten half-marks, half to 
 Christ and half to the king, but if he be another ' landowning 
 man' then he pays six half-marks, half to Christ and half to 
 the land-rica*. The landowner normally has a land-lord above 
 him. We see also that the lord is made liable for the 
 payment of dues which are ultimately exigible from those 
 who are dwelling within his territory. 'If a king's thegn or 
 other land-rica makes default in paying Peter's pence, he 
 must pay ten half-marks, half to Christ and half to the 
 king ; if a " towns-man " makes a similar default, the land-rica 
 must pay the penny and take an ox from the defaulter, and if 
 the land-rica neglects to do this, then Christ and the king shall 
 receive the full b6t of twelve ores 3 .' Such is the manner in 
 
 1 See above, p. 275. 
 
 2 Northumbrian Priests' Law, Schmid, App. IL 48-9. 
 
 3 Ibid. 57, 58. See also the texts which give the lord a share with the 
 bishop in the penalty for neglect to pay tithe, viz. Edgar, n. 3 ; JSthelred, vm. 
 8 ; Cnut. i. 8.
 
 Sake and Soke. 289 
 
 which the lord's power is consolidated. He begins to stand 
 between his free men and the state, between his free men and 
 the church. 
 
 Another consequence of the argument in which we have Delegation 
 been engaged is that, at least a century before the Conquest, the clary 
 great immunists were granting immunities to their dependants. 
 From this consequence we shall not flinch. Bishop Oswald, 
 for example, was an immunist on a splendid scale, and when he 
 loaned land to a knight and said that the land was to be ' free 
 from all secular service ' save the trinoda necessitas, he loaned 
 not merely land, but immunity and jurisdiction. On one 
 occasion, adopting a formula that has lately come before us, 
 he said that nothing was to go out of the land by way of wite \ 
 By this we understand that he gave to his thegn any wites 
 which might thereafter be incurred by the inhabitants of the 
 manses which were comprised in the loan, and further that he 
 gave him the right to hold a court. Domesday Book requires 
 us to believe that such transactions had n<jt been uncommon 2 . 
 
 Will our attempt to explain the land-books create too many Number of 
 holders of sake and soke ? We do not think so, for we do not m 
 think that the number of land-books should be indefinitely 
 multiplied by our imaginations. If we look in Domesday Book 
 at the counties which lie south of the Thames, we shall indeed 
 see that the total amount of land of which the churches are 
 tenants in chief is very large. But the number of these 
 landowning churches is small. When we have named seven 
 episcopal and a dozen abbatial minsters we have disposed of by 
 far the greater bulk of the church lands in this district, and 
 these minsters are as a general rule just those which have 
 transmitted to us in cartularies and chronicles the story of 
 their acquisitions. To churches that were destroyed by the 
 Danes we may allot some charters ; but we should have no 
 warrant for the supposition that royal diplomata have perished 
 by the hundred and left no trace behind. In the shires of 
 York, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby we might allow sake and 
 soke to every English prelate who appears as a tenant in chief 
 and yet not raise to twelve 3 the number of the ecclesiastical 
 
 1 K. 498 (ii. 386). 9 See above, p. 100. 
 
 3 The Archbishop of York, the bishops of Durham, Chester, Lincoln and 
 (for one manor) Salisbury, the abbots of York, Peterborough, Bamsey, Croyland, 
 Burton and (for one manor) Westminster. * 
 
 M. 19
 
 290 England before the Conquest. 
 
 immunists who had lands in this wide region. As to the 
 lay holders of sake and soke, they were not very many though 
 they held broad lands ; also they belonged for the more part to 
 an exalted class 1 . However, here as elsewhere we must admit 
 that every attempted explanation discloses new problems. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 The Angild Clause. 
 
 As we have said above, (p. 274), there are certain charters in which the 
 clause of immunity makes mention of the dngild (pretium pro pretio, 
 singulars pretium). We will here collect the obscure texts in which this 
 difficult term occurs. 
 
 First, however, we will call attention to a passage in Domesday's 
 account of Worcestershire (D. B. i. 175 b), which throws some light on the 
 matter. Westminster Abbey holds 200 hides and Pershore Abbey holds 
 100 hides. ' The county says that the church of Pershore is entitled to 
 church-scot from all the 300 hides [its own 100 and Westminster's 200], to 
 wit, from every hide on which a free man dwells one load of corn on 
 S*. Martin's day, (if he has more hides than one, they are free), and if that 
 day be infringed [i.e. if payment be not made thereon], he who has kept 
 back the corn must pay elevenfold, but first must pay what is due [i.e. he 
 altogether pays twelve loads "God's property and the church's twelve- 
 fold" (.^Ethelb. 1.)] ; and the Abbot of Pershore will have a wite (forisfactura) 
 from his own 100 hides, such as he ought to have from his own land ; but 
 from the other 200 hides he will have the multifold payment of the corn 
 that is due (habet summam et persolutionem) and the Abbot of Westminster 
 has the wite (forisfacturam).' For solvere et persolvere, see Laws of William 
 (Select Charters) c. 5 ; for solta et persolta, see Dial, de Scac. ii. 10. 
 
 If then, a Westminster tenant fails to pay church-scot to Pershore, he 
 must make b6t (very ample b6t) to Pershore, but his wite will go to his own 
 lord ; nothing is to ' go out to wite ' from the Westminster land. We will 
 now turn to the land-books. We take them to be saying in effect that in 
 such a case as that put by Domesday the grantee of the immunity is to 
 have his man's wite, though the restitutory b6t will go to another. 
 
 (i) A.D. 767. Uhtred of the Hwiccas. K. 117 (i. 144); B. i. 286: 
 ' interdicimus ut si aliquis in hac praenominatam terram aliquid foras 
 furaverit alicui solvere aliquid nisi specialiter pretium pro pretio ad 
 terminum ad poenam nihil foras.' We should place a stop after terminum. 
 Then the last clause means ' nothing shall go out to wite.' The mention 
 of the terminus suggests a payment at the boundary of the immunist's 
 land. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 280 b ; i. 337.
 
 The Angild Clause. 291 
 
 (ii) [Questionable]. A.D. 799. Cenwulf. K. 176 (i. 213); B. i. 411: 
 ' de partibus vero et de causis singulare solvere pretium et nihil aliud de 
 hac terra.' 
 
 (iii) A.D. 799-802. Pilheard. K. 116 (i. 142); B. i. 284: 'ut ab 
 omnium fiscalium redituum operum onerumque seu etiam popularium 
 conciliorum vindictis nisi tantum pretium pro pretio liberae sint in 
 perpetuum/ 
 
 (iv) A.D. 814. Cenwulf of Merciafor the church of Worcester. K. 206 
 (i. 259) ; B. i. 489 : ' exceptis his, expeditione et pontis constructione, et 
 singulare pretium foras, nihilque ad poenam resolvat.' 
 
 (v) Cenwulf of Mercia for the church of Worcester. K. 215 (i. 271); 
 B. i. 507 : ' exceptis his, arcis et pontis constructione et expeditione et 
 singulare pretium foras adversum aliud ; ad poenam vero neque quadran- 
 tem minutam foras resolvat.' 
 
 (vi) A.D. 822. Ceolwulf of Mercia for Archbishop Wilfred. K. 216 
 (i. 272); B. i. 508: 'liberata permaneat in aefum nisi is quattuor causis 
 quae nunc nominabo, expeditione contra paganos ostes, et pontes construc- 
 tione sui [=seu] arcis munitione vel destructione in eodem gente, et 
 singulare pretium foras reddat, secundum ritam gentes illius, et tamen 
 nullam penam foras alicui persolvat.' 
 
 (vii) A.D. 831. Wiglaf of Mercia for the archbishop. K. 227 (i. 294); 
 B. i. 556: 'nisi his tantum causis, expeditione et arcis munitione pontisque 
 constructione et singulare pretium contra alium.' 
 
 (viii) A.D. 835. Egbert of Wessex for Abingdon. K. 236 (i. 312) ; B. i. 
 577 : ' de ilia autem tribulatione que witereden nominatur sit libera, nisi 
 tamen singuli pretium solverit ut talia accipiant. Fures quoque quos 
 appellant weregeldSeofas si foras rapiantur, pretium eius dimidium illi 
 aecclesiae, et dimidium regi detur, et si intus rapitur totum reddatur ad 
 aecclesiam.' 
 
 (ix) A.D. 849. Berhtwulf of Mercia for his thegn Egbert. K. 262 
 (ii. 34^; B. ii. 40: 'Liberabo ab omnibus saecularibus servitutibus. ..nisi in 
 <;onfinio rationem reddant contra alium.' 
 
 (x) A.D. 855. Burhred of Mercia for the church of Worcester. K. 277 
 (ii. 58) ; B. ii. 88 : ' nisi tantum quattuor causis, pontis et arcis, et expe- 
 ditione contra hostes, et singulare pretium contra alium, et ad poenam nihil 
 foras resolvat. 
 
 (xi) A.D. 883. jEthelred of Mercia for Berkeley. K. 313 (ii. 110); 
 B. ii. 172 : 'and >aet ic )>8et mynster fram seghwelcum gafolum gefreoge J>e 
 to J>iode hlafarde belimpeS, littles otJSe micles, cuSes ge uncuSes, butan 
 augilde wiS o]>rum and faesten gewerce and fyrd socne and brycg ge- 
 
 weorce seghwelces >inges to freon ge wiS cyning, ge wi$ ealdorman, ge 
 
 wiS gerefan aeghwelces >eodomes, lytles and micles, butan fyrd socne and 
 fsesten geworce and brycg geworce and angylde wiS oSrum and noht ut to 
 wite.' 
 
 (xii) A.D. 888. ^Ethelred of Mercia for a thegn. K. 1068 (v. 133) ; 
 B. ii. 194: 'liberam hanc terrain describimus ab omnibus causis nisi 
 singulare pretium contra aliud ponat et modum ecclesiae.' Is the modus 
 [or modius] of the church the church-scot 1 
 
 192
 
 292 England before the Conquest. 
 
 In a few other cases the immunity mentions penal causes, ' witereeden,' 
 and no express exception is made of the dngild. Thus : 
 
 (xiii) A.D. 842. J^thelwulf for a thegn. K. 253 (ii. 16); B. ii. 13: 'ut 
 regalium tributum et principali dominacione et vi coacta operacione et 
 poenalium condicionum furis comprehensione...secura...permaneat.' 
 
 (xiv) [Questionable]. A.D. 844. JSthelwulf for Malmesbury ; one of 
 the documents reciting the famous ' donation.' K. 1048 (v. 93) ; B. ii. 26 ; 
 H. & S. iii. 630: 'ut sit tutus et munitus ab omnibus saecularibus servi- 
 tutis, fiscis regalibus, tributis maioribus et minoribus, quod nos dicimus 
 witereden.' 
 
 (xv) A.D/877. Bp. Tunbert. K. 1063 (v. 121) ; B. ii. 163 : 'a taxation- 
 ibus quod dicimus wite redenne.' 
 
 The most detailed and at the same time the most hopelessly obscure 
 information that we get is such as can be obtained from two Abingdon 
 charters. 
 
 A.D. 821. Cenwulf. K. 214 (i. 269); B. i. 505; H. & S. iii. 556: 'Si 
 pro aliquo delicto accusatur homo Dei aecclesiae ille custos solus cum suo 
 iuramento si audeat ilium castiget. Sin autem ut recipiat aliam iusticiam 
 huius vicissitudinis conditionem praefatum delictum cum simple praetio 
 componat.' 
 
 A.D. 835. Egbert. K. 236 (i. 312); B. i. 577; H. & S. iii. 613. The 
 same clause, but with alienam instead of aliam. Also the following: 
 ' De ilia autem tribulatione que witereden nominatur sit libera nisi tamen 
 singuli [com singulare ?] pretium solverit ut talia accipiant [accipiat ?].' 
 
 This is very dark. Our best guess as to its meaning is this: If a man 
 of God, that is, a tenant of the church, is accused of crime, the custos of 
 the church (this may mean the abbot, but more probably points to his 
 reeve) may by his single oath purge the accused. But if he dare not do 
 this, then he (the abbot or reeve) may pay the bot that is claimed, and by 
 performing this condition he may obtain a transfer (vicissitude) of the 
 cause and do what other justice remains to be done, i.e. he may exact the 
 wite. So in the second charter the abbot may pay the b6t, the singulare 
 pretium, and so obtain a right to exact the wite : he makes the payment 
 ut talia [i.e. witereden\ accipiat. In guessing that vicissitudo points to a 
 transfer of a suit, we have in mind the manner in which the Leges 
 Henrici, 9 4, speak of the 'transition' of causes from court to court. 
 The case that is being dealt with by these charters we take to be one in 
 which an outsider in a 'foreign' court sues one of the abbot's tenants. 
 The abbot can swear away the charge, or if he dares not do this, can obtain 
 cognizance of the cause (in the language of a later day potest petere curiam 
 suam) and therewith the right to the wite, but must in this case pay the 
 restitutory bot, or rather, perhaps, find security that this shall be paid to 
 the plaintiff in case he is successful. The clause may also imply that a 
 multiple b6t can not be exacted from the immunist's men, e.g. such a b6t as 
 we saw the Abbot of Pershore exacting from the Westminster men ; but 
 this is a minor question.
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 293 
 
 4. Book-land and Loan-land. 
 
 We can not say that from the first the gift of book-land The book 
 establishes between the donee and the royal donor any such gift, 
 permanent relation as that which in later times is called tenure. 
 What the king gives he apparently gives for good and all. In 
 particular, a gift of land to a church is ' an out and out gift ' ; 
 nay more, it is a dedication. Still, even within the sphere of 
 piety and alms, we sometimes find the notion that in conse- 
 quence of t/he gift the donee should do something for the 
 donor. Cnut frees the lands of the church of Exeter from all 
 burdens except military service, bridge-repair and 'assiduous 
 prayers 1 ,' and thus the title by which the churches hold their 
 lands is already being brought under the rubric Do ut des. 
 Turning to the books granted to laymen, we see that, at all 
 events from the middle of the tenth century onwards, they 
 usually state a causa, or as we might say ' a consideration,' for 
 the gift. Generally the gift is ' an out and out gift.' Words 
 are used which expressly tell us that the donee is to enjoy the 
 land during his life and may on his death give it to whom- 
 soever he chooses. Nothing is said about his paying rent or 
 about his rendering in the future any service to the king in 
 return for the land. The ' consideration ' that is stated in the 
 instrument is, if we may still use such modern terms, ' a past 
 consideration.' The land comes rather as a reward' than as a 
 retaining fee. Sometimes indeed the thegn pays money to the 
 king and is in some sort a buyer of the land, though the king 
 will take credit for generosity and will talk of giving rather 
 than of selling 2 . More often the land comes as a reward to 
 him for obedience and fidelity or fealty. Already the word 
 fidelitas is in common use ; we have only to render it by fealty 
 and the transaction between the king and his thegn will be apt 
 to look like an infeudation, especially when the thegn is 
 described by the foreign term vassallus*. Even the general 
 
 1 K. 729 (iv. 3). 
 
 2 It is noticeable that the verb syllan usually means ' to give.' Words such 
 as vendere are avoided. 
 
 3 A.D. 941, K. 390 (ii. 234) condemned by Kemble : ' amabili vassallo meo.' 
 A.D. 952, K. 431 (ii. 302): 'cuidam vassallo.' A. D. 956? K. 462 (ii. 338) : 'meo 
 fideli vassallo.' A.D. 967, K. 534 (iii. 11): 'meo fideli vassallo.' A.D. 821,
 
 294 England before the Conquest. 
 
 rule that the king is rewarding a past, rather than stipulating 
 for a future fealty, is not unbroken. Thus as early as 801 we 
 find Cenwulf of Mercia and Cuthraed of Kent giving land to a 
 thegn as a perpetual inheritance ' but so that he shall remain a 
 faithful servant and unshaken friend to us arid our magnates 1 .' 
 So again, in 946 King Edmund gives land to a faithful minister 
 ' in order that while I live he may serve me faithful in mind 
 and obedient in deed and that after my death he may with the 
 same fealty obey whomsoever of my friends I may choose 2 .' 
 The king, it will be seen, reserves the right to dispose by will 
 of his thegn's fealty. A continuing relation is established 
 between the king and his successors in title on the one hand, 
 the holder of the book-land and his successors in title on the 
 other. 
 
 Book-land However, as already said, the gift supposes that the personal 
 vice. 86 ' relationship of lord and thegn already exists between the donor 
 and the donee before the gift is made. This relationship was 
 established by a formal ceremony; the thegn swore an oath 
 of fealty, and it is likely that he bent his knee and bowed his 
 head before his lord 3 . The Normans saw their homage in the 
 English commendation 4 The fidelity expected of the thegn is 
 not regarded as a debt incurred by the receipt of land. And if 
 the king does not usually stipulate for fidelity, still less does he 
 stipulate for any definite service, in particular for any definite 
 amount of military service. The land is not to be free of 
 military service : this is all that is said. However, to say 
 this is to say that military service is already a burden on land. 
 Already it is conceivable very possibly it is true that some 
 of the lands of the churches have been freed even from this 
 burden 5 . What is more, if we may believe the Abingdon 
 charters, the ninth century is not far advanced before the king 
 is occasionally making bargains as to the amount of military 
 
 K. 214 (i. 269) : ' expeditionem cum 12 vassallis et cum tantis scutis exerceant.' 
 After the Norman Conquest the word is very rare in our legal texts. 
 
 1 K. 179 (i. 216) : ' eo videlicet iure si ipse nobis et optimatibus nostris fidelis 
 manserit minister et inconvulsus amicus;' 
 
 2 E. 408 (ii. 263): ' eatenus ut vita comite tain fidus mente quam subditus 
 operibus mihi placabik obsequium praebeat, et meum post obitum cuicunque 
 meorum amicorum voluero eadem fidelitate immobilis obediensque fiat.' 
 
 3 The terms of the oath are given in Schmid, App. X. 
 
 4 See above, p. 69. 
 8 See above, p. 69.
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 295 
 
 service that the lands of the churches shall render. Abingdon 
 need send to the host but twelve vassals and twelve shields 1 . 
 Likewise we see that on the eve of the Conquest, though other 
 men who neglected the call to arms might escape with a fine of 
 forty shillings, it was the rule, at least in Worcestershire, that 
 the free man who had sake and soke and could 'go with his 
 land whither he would ' forfeited that land if he was guilty of a 
 similar default 2 . With this we must connect those laws of 
 Cnut which say that the man who flees in battle, as well as 
 the man who is outlawed, forfeits his book-land to the king, no 
 matter who may be his lord'. 
 
 Such rules when regarded from one point of view may well Military 
 be called feudal. Book-land having been derived from, is 
 specially liable to return to the king. It will return to him 
 if the holder of it be guilty of shirking his military duty or of 
 other disgraceful crime. To this we may add that if these rules 
 betray the fact that the holder of this king-given land may 
 none the less have commended himself and his land to some 
 other lord against whose claims the king has to legislate, 
 thereby they disclose a feudalism of the worst, of the centri- 
 fugal kind. The ancient controversy as to whether ' the 
 military tenures ' were ' known to the Anglo-Saxons ' is apt to 
 become a battle over words. The old power of calling out all 
 able-bodied men for defensive warfare was never abandoned ; but 
 it was not abandoned by the Norman and Angevin kings. The 
 holder of land was not spoken of as holding it by military 
 service ; but it would seem that in the eleventh century the king, 
 save in some pressing necessity, could only ask for one man's 
 service from every five hides, and the holder of book-land 
 forfeited that land if he disobeyed a lawful summons 4 . Whether 
 a man who will lose land for such a cause shall be said to hold 
 it by military service is little better than a question about the 
 meaning of words. At best it is a question about legal logic. 
 We are asked to make our choice (and yet may doubt whether 
 our ancestors had made their choice) between the ideas of 
 misdemeanour and punishment on the one hand and the idea 
 of reentry for breach of condition on the other. 
 
 The same vagueness enshrouds the infancy of the escheat ^/j^ 4 
 
 land. 
 
 1 K. 214 (i. 269) ; H. & S. iii. 556. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 172 ; see above, p. 159. 8 Cnut, n. 13, 77. 
 4 See above, p. 156.
 
 296 England before the Conquest. . ' 
 
 propter defectum tenentis. Already in 825 a king tells how he 
 gave land to one of his praefecti who died intestate and without 
 an heir, 'and so that land by the decree of my magnates was 
 restored to me who had before possessed it 1 .' Here we seem to 
 see the notion that when a gift has spent itself, when there is 
 no longer any one who can bring himself within the words of 
 donation, the given land should return to the giver. In another 
 quarter we may see that when the king makes a gift he does 
 not utterly abandon all interest in the land that is given. 
 Cenwulf of Mercia in a charter for Christ Church at Canterbury 
 tells us that King Egbert gave land to a certain thegn of his 
 who on leaving the country gave it to the minster; but that 
 Offa annulled this gift and gave away the land to other thegns, 
 saying that it was unlawful for a thegn to give away without 
 his lord's witness (testimonio) the land given to him by his lord 2 . 
 Cenwulf restored the land to the church ; but he took money 
 for it, and he does not say that Offa had acted illegally. There 
 is much to show that the ' restraint on alienation ' is one of the 
 oldest of the ' incidents of tenure.' Our materials do not enable 
 us to formulate a general principle, but certain it is that the 
 holders of book-land, whether they be laymen or ecclesiastics, 
 very generally obtain the consent of the king when they propose 
 to alienate their land either inter vivos or by testament. We 
 may not argue from this to any definite condition annexed to 
 the gift, or to any standing relationship between the donor and 
 the donee like the ' tenure ' of later times. After all, it is a 
 very natural thought that a reward bestowed by the king should 
 not be sold or given away. The crosses and stars with which 
 modern potentates decorate their fideles, we do not expect to 
 see these in the market 8 . The land that the king has booked 
 
 1 K. 1035 (v. 76). The charter is not beyond suspicion, but Kemble has 
 received, and the editors of the Councils (H. & S. iii. 607) have refused to 
 condemn it. 
 
 2 K. 1020 (v. 60); B. i. 409; H. <fe S. iii. 528. 
 
 3 See Brunner, Die Landschenkungen der Merowinger und der Agilolfinger, 
 Forschungen, p. 6 : ' He who receives an order acquires in the insignia of the 
 order which are delivered to him an ownership of an extremely attenuated kind. 
 He can not give them away or sell them or let them out or give them in 
 dowry. When he dies they go back to the giver. ' We are not aware of any 
 English decision on such matters as these. In a charter for Winchester (B. ii. 
 238) Edward the Elder is represented as saying that the land that he gives to 
 the church is never to be alienated. If, however, the monks must sell or
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 297 
 
 to his thegn is an ' honour ' and the giver will expect 'to be 
 consulted before it passes into hands that may be unworthy of 
 it. It may be just because the gift of book-land is made by 
 the king and corroborated by all the powers of church and state, 
 that the book is conceived as exercising a continuous sway over 
 the land comprised in it. The book, it has well been said, is 
 the lex possessionis of that land 1 . It can make the land descend 
 this way or that way, and the land will come back to the king 
 if ever the power of the book be spent. What is more, from 
 the first we seem to see a germ of our famous English rule that 
 if a gift be made without ' words of inheritance ' the gift will 
 endure only during the life of the donee : will endure, we say, 
 for a gift is no mere act done once for all but a force that 
 endures for a longer or a shorter period. Certain it is that 
 most of the charters are careful to say that the. gift is not thus 
 to come to an end but is to go on operating despite the donee's 
 death 2 . 
 
 And even when, as is generally the case, the book made in Alienation 
 
 . of book- 
 
 favour of a lay-man says that the donee is to have the power land. 
 
 of leaving the land to whomsoever he may please, or to such 
 heirs as he may choose, we still must doubt whether his 
 testamentary power is utterly unrestrained, whether he will not 
 have to consult the royal donor when he is making his will. 
 The phenomena which we have here to consider are very 
 obscure, because we never can be quite certain why it is that a 
 testator is seeking the king's aid. We have to remember that 
 the testament is an exotic, ecclesiastical institution which is 
 likely to come into collision with the ancient folk-law. From 
 an early time the church was striving in favour of the utmost 
 measure of testamentary freedom, for formless wills, for nuncu- 
 
 exchange it, then they may return it ' to that royal family by whom it was 
 given to them.' 
 
 1 Brunner, Zur Bechtsgeschichte d. rom. u. germ. Urkunde, p. 190 ; Hist. 
 Eng. Law, ii. 12. 
 
 2 See Brunner, Landschenkungen, Forschungen, p. 1. In this paper 
 Dr Brunner appealed to our English law, in order that he might settle the 
 famous controversy between Waitz and Both as to the character of the gifts 
 of land made by the Merovingians. On p. 5 he denies that our rule about 
 'words of inheritance ' should be called feudal. Its starting point is the 
 principle that the quality [an English lawyer would add and the quantity 
 also] of the 'estate' (Besitzrecht) can be determined by the donor's words, by a 
 lex donationit imposed by the donor on the land.
 
 298 England before the Conquest. 
 
 pative wills 1 . The very largeness of its claims made impossible 
 any definite compromise between church-right and folk-right. 
 So far as we can see, no precise law is evolved as to when and 
 how and over what a man may exercise a power of testation. 
 The church will support testaments of the most formless kind ; 
 on the other hand, the heirs of the dead man will endeavour, 
 despite the anathema, to break his will, and sometimes they 
 will succeed 2 . Consequently the testator will endeavour to 
 obtain the crosses of the bishops and the consent of the king. 
 He has already a book which tells him that he may leave the 
 land to a chosen heir ; but if he be prudent he will not trust to 
 this by itself. Kings change their minds. 
 
 The heriot Then the law about heriots complicates the matter. The 
 testament, heriot has its origin in the duty of the dying thegn or of his 
 heirs to return to his lord the arms which that lord has given 
 or lent to him. We have to use some such vague phrase as 
 'given or lent'; we dare not speak more precisely 3 . A time 
 comes when the king provides his thegn, no longer with arms, 
 but with land; still the heriot is rendered 4 . In the tenth 
 century this render is closely connected with the exercise of 
 testamentary power. The thegn offers a heriot with a prayer 
 that ' his will may stand.' He presents swords and money to 
 the king in order that he may be worthy of his testament 5 . 
 When we find such phrases as this, we can not always be 
 certain that the land of which the testator is going to dispose 
 is land over which a book purports to give him testamentary 
 
 1 Brunner, Geschichte der Urkunde, p. 200. 
 
 2 Heming's Cartulary, i. 259. 'Post mortem autem eius, filius eius... 
 testamentum patris sui irritum faciens....' Ibid. p. 263 : 'Brihtwinus...eandem 
 terrain Deo et Sanctae Mariae obtulit, eundemque nepotem suum monachum 
 fecit. Filius eius etiam, Brihtmarus nomine, pater ipsius iam dicti Edwini 
 monachi, cum heres patris extitisset,...ipsam...villam monasterio dedit.' Hist. 
 Eng. Law, ii. 250. 
 
 3 Brunner, Forschungen, p. 22; Hist. Eng. Law, i. 292. 
 
 4 Crawford Charters (ed. Napier and Stevenson), pp. 23, 126, Early in 
 cent. xi. a bishop in his testament declares how he gives ' to each retainer his 
 steed which he had lent him.' 
 
 5 See the wills collected by Thorpe; p. 501: gift to the queen for her 
 mediation that the will may stand. Ibid. p. 505 : ' And bishop Theodred and 
 ealdorman Eadric informed me, when I gave my lord the sword that king 
 Edmund gave me... that I might be worthy of my testament (mine guides wirde). 
 And I never... have done any wrong to my lord that it may not so be.' Ibid, 
 p. 519 : ' And I pray my dear lord for the love of God that my testament may 
 stand.' See also pp. 528, 539, 543, 552, 576.
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 299 
 
 power ; he may be hoping that the king's aid will be sufficient 
 to enable him to bequeath the unbooked land that he holds 1 . 
 In other cases he may be endeavouring to dispose of lands that 
 have merely been ' loaned ' to him for his life by the king. 
 But this will hardly serve to explain all the cases, and we so 
 frequently find the holder of book-land applying for the king's 
 consent when he is going to make an alienation of it inter 
 vivos that we need not marvel at finding a similar application 
 made when he is about to execute a testament 2 . 
 
 This having been said, we shall not be surprised to find The gift 
 that in ancient times the difference between a gift of land and j^. 
 a loan of land was not nearly so well marked as it would be by 
 modern law. The loan may be regarded as a temporary gift, 
 the gift as a very permanent, if not perpetual, loan. We know 
 how this matter looks in the law of Bracton's age. By 
 feoffment one gives land to a man for his life, or one gives it to 
 him and the heirs of his body, or to him and his heirs : but in 
 any case, the land may come back to the giver. The difference 
 between the three feoffments is a difference in degree rather 
 than in kind ; one will operate for a longer, another for a 
 shorter time ; but, however absolute the gift may be, the giver 
 never parts with all his interest in the land 3 . Or we may put 
 it in another way : in our English law usufruct is a temporary 
 dominium and dominium is a usufruct that may be perpetual. 
 Or, once more, adopting the language of modern statutes, we 
 may say that the tenant for life is no usufructuary but 'a 
 limited owner.' We are accustomed to bring this doctrine into 
 connexion with rules about dependent tenure : the donor, we 
 say, retains an interest in the land because he is the tenant's 
 lord. But, on looking at the ancient land-books, we may find 
 
 1 Thus ealdorman Alfred disposes (but with the consent of the king and all 
 his witan) of his ' heritage ' as well as of his book-land ; Thorpe, 480. Lodge, 
 Essays on A.-S. Law, p. 108, supposes a certain power of regulating the 
 descent of 'family land' within the family. 
 
 2 K. 414 (ii. 273): 'Ego Wulfricus annuente et sentiente et praesente 
 domino meo rege...concessi...terram iuris mei...qnam praefatus rex Eadredus 
 mihi dedit in perpetuam hereditatem cum libro eiusdem terrae.' K. 1130 (v. 
 254): 'Ego Eadulfus dux per concessionem domini mei regis... concede... has 
 terras de propria possessions mea quas idem... rex dedit in perpetuam heredi- 
 tatem.' K. 1226 (vi. 25): 'Ego JElfwordus minister Begis Eadgari concedo... 
 annuente domino meo rege...villam unam de patrimonio meo.' 
 
 3 Except in the cases, comparatively rare before the statute Quia Emptores, 
 in which the feoffee is to hold of the feoffor's lord.
 
 canurn. 
 
 300 England before the Conquest. 
 
 reason to suspect that the confusion of loans with gifts and 
 gifts with loans (if we may speak of confusion where in truth 
 the things confounded have never as yet been clearly dis- 
 tinguished) is one of the original germs of the rule that all 
 laud is held of the king. After all, the king and he is by far 
 the greatest giver in the country and his gifts are models for 
 all gifts never can really part with all the rights that he has 
 in the land that he gives, for he still will be king of it and 
 therefore in a sense it will always be part of his land. To 
 maintain a sharp distinction between the rights that he has as 
 king and the rights that he has as landlord, jurisprudence is 
 not as yet prepared. But we must look at the land-loan more 
 closely. 
 
 Theprc- Foreign historians have shown how after the barbarian 
 
 invasions one single form of legal thought, or (if we may 
 borrow a term from them), one single legal ' institute ' which 
 had been saved out of the ruins of Roman jurisprudence, was 
 made to do the hard duty of expressing the most miscellaneous 
 facts, was made to meet a vast multitude of cases in which, 
 while one man is the owner of land, another man is occupying 
 and enjoying it by the owner's permission. This institute was 
 the precarium. Originally but a tenancy at will, it was 
 elaborated into different shapes which, when their elaboration 
 had been completed, had little in common. For some reason 
 or another one begs (rogare) of a landowner leave to occupy a 
 piece of land ; for some reason or another the prayer is granted, 
 the grantor making a display of generosity and speaking of his 
 act as a ' benefit ' (beneficium), an act of good-nature and 
 liberality. An elastic form is thus established. The petitioner 
 may, or may not, promise to pay a rent to his benefactor ; the 
 benefactor may, or may not, engage that the relationship shall 
 continue for a fixed term of years, or for the life of the 
 petitioner or for several lives. Usually this relationship 
 between petitioner and benefactor is complicated with the 
 bond of patronage : the former has commended himself to the 
 latter, has come within his power, his protection, his trust 
 (trustis), has become his fidelis, his homo. At a later time the 
 inferior is a vassus, the superior is his senior, for the word 
 vassus, which has meant a menial servant, spreads upwards. 
 Then the precarium, as it were, divides itself into various 
 channels. One of its streams encompasses the large province
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 301 
 
 of humble tenancies, wherein the peasants obtain land from 
 the churches and other owners on more or less arduous con- 
 ditions, or reserve a right to occupy so long as they live the 
 lands that they have given to the saints. Another stream 
 sweeps onward into the domain of grand history and public 
 law. The noble obtains a spacious territory, perhaps a county, 
 from the king by way of 'benefaction'; the precarium becomes 
 the beneficium, the beneficium becomes the feudum 1 . The king 
 can not prevent the beneficia, the feuda, from becoming 
 hereditary. 
 
 The analogous English institution was the Icen or, as we The Eng- 
 now say, loan. If in translating a German book we render loan. 
 Lehn by fief, feud, or fee, we should still remember that a Lehn 
 is a loan. And no doubt the history of our ancient land-loans 
 was influenced by the history of the precarium. We come 
 upon the technical terms of continental law when King 
 ^Ethelbald forbids any one to beg for a benefit or benefice out 
 of the lands that have been given to the church of Winchester 2 . 
 There was need for such prohibitions. Edward the Elder 
 prayed the bishop of this very church to lend him some land 
 for his life ; the bishop consented, btit expressed a fervent hope 
 that there would be no more of such requests, which in truth 
 were very like commands. It would seem that some of the 
 English kings occasionally did what had been done on a large 
 scale in France by Charles Martel or his sons, namely, they 
 compelled the churches to grant benefices to lay noblemen 8 . 
 When bishop Oswald of Worcester declared how he had been 
 lending lands to his thegns, he used a foreign, technical term : 
 ' beneficium quod illis praestitum estV But it is clear that the 
 English conception of a land-loan was very lax ; it would blend 
 
 1 Fustel de Coulanges, Les origines du systeme feodal ; Brunner, D. R. G. i. 
 209-12. 
 
 2 K. 1058 (v. 115) ; B. ii. 89 : 'et nullns iam licentiam ulterius habeat Christ! 
 neque sancti Petri...neque ausus sit ulterius illam terrain praedictam rogandi in 
 beneficium.' 
 
 3 K. 1089 (v. 166); B. ii. 281. See also K. 262 (ii. 33); B. ii. 40; Birhtwulf 
 of Mercia takes a lease for five lives from the church of Worcester and assigns 
 it to a thegn. The consideration for this lease is a promise that for the future 
 he will not make gifts out of the goods of the church. 
 
 4 K. 1287 (vi. 124). The verb praestare was the regular term for describing 
 the action of one who was constituting a precarium or beneficium. In K. 1071 
 (v. 138) Bp Werferth of Worcester obtains a lease for three lives having 
 petitioned for it; 'terram...humili prece deprecatus fui.'
 
 302 England before the Conquest. 
 
 with the conception of a gift. To describe transactions of one 
 and the same kind, if such verbs as commodare and Icenan and 
 Icetan were used 1 , such words as conferre, concedere, tribuere, 
 largiri and donare were also used 8 . A loan is a temporary 
 gift, and the nature of the transaction remains the same 
 whether the man to whom the loan is made does, or does not, 
 come under the obligation of paying rent or performing 
 services. 
 
 Loans of Unfortunately our materials only permit us to study one 
 
 lands to the branch of the loan ; the aristocratic branch we may call it. 
 No doubt the lords, especially the churches, are from an early 
 time letting or 'loaning' lands to cultivators. Specimens of 
 such agricultural leases we do not see and cannot expect to see, 
 for they would hardly be put into writing. But at an early 
 time we do see the churches loaning lands, and wide lands, to 
 great men. This is a matter of much importance. One other 
 course in the feudal edifice is thus constructed. We have seen 
 the churches interposed between the king and the cultivators 
 of the soil ; the churches have become landlords with free land- 
 holders under them. And now it is discovered that the 
 churches have a superiority which they can lend to others, 
 We see already a four-storeyed structure. There are the 
 cultivator, the church's thegn, the church, the king. Very 
 great men think it no shame to beg boons from the church. 
 Already before 750 the bishop of Worcester has granted five 
 manses to 'Comes Leppa' for lives 3 ; before the century is out 
 the abbot of Medeshamstead has granted ten manses to the 
 ' princeps ' Cuthbert for lives 4 . In 855 the bishop of Worcester 
 gives eleven manses to the ealdorman of the Mercians and his 
 wife for their lives 8 ; in 904 a successor of his makes a similar 
 gift 6 . But we have seen that the king himself was not above 
 taking a loan from the church. Indeed powerful men insist on 
 having loans, and the churches, in order to protect themselves 
 against importunities, obtain from the l^ing this among their 
 other immunities, namely, that no lay man is to beg boons 
 from them, or that no lease is to be for longer than the lessee's 
 
 1 For commodare see K. v. pp. 166, 169, 171 ; for Mnan, ibid. 162 ; for l&tan, 
 ibid. 164. 
 
 2 See Bp Oswald's leases. 
 
 8 K. 91 (i. 109). * K. 165 (i. 201). 
 
 K. 279 (ii. 61). K. 339 (ii. 149).
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 303 
 
 life 1 . In such cases we may also see the working of a second 
 motive : the church is to be protected against the prodigality 
 of its own rulers. The leases made by the prelates seem 
 usually to have been for three lives. This compass is so often 
 reached, so seldom exceeded" that we may well believe that the 
 English church had accepted as a rule of sound policy, if not as 
 a rule of law, the novel of Justinian which set the limit of 
 three lives to leases of church lands 8 . 
 
 Occasionally the lease is made in consideration of a sum of The consi- 
 money paid down ; occasionally the recipient of the land comes f or t he 
 under an express obligation to pay rent. An early example loan- 
 shows us the abbot of Medeshamstead letting ten manses to 
 the 'princeps' Cuthbert for lives in consideration of a gross 
 sum of a thousand shillings and an annual pastus or ' farm ' of 
 one night*. The bishop of Worcester early in the ninth 
 century concedes land to a woman for her life on condition that 
 she shall cleanse and renovate the furniture of the church 5 . 
 On the other hand, when land is ' loaned ' to a king or a great 
 nobleman, this may be in consideration of his patronage and 
 protection ; the church stipulates for his amicitia 6 . We may 
 say that he becomes the advocatus of the church, and the 
 patronage exercised by kings and nobles over the churches is of 
 importance, though perhaps it was not quite so serious a 
 matter in England as it was elsewhere. 
 
 But from our present point of view by far the most s. Os- 
 interesting form that the loan takes is the loan to the thegn or loans, 
 the cniht. Happily it falls out that we have an excellent 
 opportunity of studying this institution. We recall the fact 
 
 1 See the charter of Cenwulf for Winchcombe, H. & S. iii. 572 and the 
 editors' note at 575. See also K. 610 (iii. 157), 1058 (v. 115), 1090 (v. 169). 
 
 2 K. 262 (ii. 33) is a lease for five lives by the church of Worcester ; but the 
 lessee is a king. 
 
 3 Nov. 7, 3. See Brunner, Zur Bechtsgeschichte der rb'm. u. germ. 
 Urkunde, 187. Theodore of Tarsus would perhaps have known this rule. It 
 does not belong to the general western tradition of Roman law, but is 
 distinctly Jnstinianic. 
 
 4 K. 165 (i. 201). The 'limitation' is not very plain ; but we seem to have 
 here a lease for two lives. 
 
 6 K. 182 (i. 220). 
 
 6 K. 262 (ii. 33) ; B. ii. 40: lease by church of Worcester to the king for five 
 lives: 'et illi dabant terram illam ea tamen conditione ut ipse rex firmius 
 amicus sit episcopo praefato et familia in omnibus bonis eorum.' K. 279 (ii. 
 61): lease by the same church to a dux and his wife with stipulation for 
 amicitia.
 
 304 England before the Conquest. 
 
 that by the gifts of kings and underkings the church of 
 Worcester had become entitled to vast tracts of land in 
 Worcestershire end the adjoining counties. Now between the 
 years 962 and 992 Bishop Oswald granted at the very least 
 some seventy loans comprising in all 180 manses or there- 
 abouts 1 . In almost all cases the loan was for three lives. In a 
 few cases the recipient was a kinsman of the bishop, in a few 
 he was an ecclesiastic; far more generally he is described as 
 'minister meus,' 'fidelis meus,' 'cliens meus,' 'miles meus,' 
 ' my knight,' ' my thegn,' ' my true man.' When the ' cause ' 
 or consideration for the transaction is expressed it is ' ob eius 
 fidele obsequium' or 'pro eius humili subiectione atque 
 famulatu': a recompense is made for fealty and service. Any 
 thing that could be called a stipulation for future service is 
 very rare. A definite rent is seldom reserved 2 . Sometimes 
 the bishop declares that the land is to be free from all earthly 
 burdens, save service in the host and the repair of bridges and 
 strongholds. To those excepted imposts he sometimes adds 
 church-scot, or the church's rent, without specifying the 
 amount. Sometimes he seems to go further and to say that 
 the land is to be free from everything save the church's rent 
 (ecclesiastics census) 3 . In so doing he gives a hint that the 
 recipients of the lands will have something to pay to, or 
 something to do for the church. Were it not for this, we 
 might well think that these loans were made solely in con- 
 sideration of past services, of obedience already rendered, and 
 that at most the recipient undertook the vague obligation of 
 being faithful and obsequious in the future, 
 waid's let- But happily for us S l . Oswald was a careful man of business 
 
 ter to 
 Edgar. 
 
 1 These are preserved in Homing's Cartulary; see K. 494-673. 
 
 2 In K. 498 (ii. 386) the aecclesiasticus census is two modii of clean grain ; 
 in K. 511 (ii. 400) the lessee must mow once and reap once 'with all his craft'; 
 in K. 508 (ii. 398) he must sow two acres with his own seed and reap it ; in 
 E. 661 (iii. 233) is a similar stipulation. 
 
 3 In many cases the clause of immunity has become very obscure owing to a 
 copyist's blunder. It is made to run thus : ' Sit autem terra ista libera omni 
 regi nisi aecclesiastici censi.' Some mistake between rei and regi may be 
 suspected. What we want is what we get in some other cases, e.g. K. 651, 652, 
 viz. ' libera ab omni saecularis rei negotio.' The following forms are somewhat 
 exceptional ; K. 530 and 612, ' butan ferdfare and walgeworc and brycgeworc 
 and circanlade ' ; K. 623, 666, ' excepta sanctae dei basilicae suppeditatione 
 et ministratione'; K. 625, ' exceptis sanctae dei aecclesiae necessitatibus et 
 utilitatibus.'
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 305 
 
 and put on record in the most solemn manner the terms on 
 which he made his land-loans. The document in which he did 
 this is for our purposes the most important of all the documents 
 that have come down to us from the age before the Conquest '. 
 It takes the form of a letter written to King Edgar. We will 
 give a brief and bald abstract of it s : 'I am (says the bishop) 
 deeply grateful to you my lord, for all your liberality and will 
 remain faithful to you for ever. In particular am I grateful to 
 you for receiving my complaint and that of God's holy Church 
 and granting redress by the counsel of your wise men 3 . There- 
 fore I have resolved to put on record the manner in which I 
 have been granting to my faithful men for the space of three 
 lives the lands committed to my charge, so that by the leave 
 and witness of you, my lord and king, I may declare this 
 matter to the bishops my successors, and that they may know 
 what to exact from these men according to the covenant that 
 they have made with me and according to their solemn promise. 
 I have written this document in order that none of them may 
 hereafter endeavour to abjure the service of the church. This 
 then is the covenant made with the leave of my lord the king 
 and attested, roborated and confirmed by him and all his wise 
 men. I have granted the land to be held under me (sub me) 
 on these terms, to wit, that every one of these men shall fulfil 
 the whole law of riding as riding men should 4 , and that they 
 shall pay in full all those dues which of right belong to the 
 church, that is to say ciricsceott, toll, and tace or swinscead, 
 and all other dues of the church (unless the bishop will excuse 
 them from any thing), and shall swear that so long as they 
 
 1 Kemble gives it in Cod. Dipl. 1287 (vi. 124) and in an appendix to vol. i. 
 of his history. Also he speaks of it in Cod. Dipl. i. xxxv., and there says that 
 it is ' a laboured justification ' by Bp Oswald of his proceedings. To my mind 
 it. is nothing of the kind. Oswald is proud of what he has done and wishes 
 that a memorial of his acts may be carefully preserved for the benefit of the 
 church. Of course, if regarded from our modern point of view, the form of the 
 document is curious. The bishop seems engaged in an attempt to bind his lessees 
 by his own unilateral account of the terms to which they have agreed. But his 
 object is to have of the contract a record which has been laid before the king 
 and the witan and which, if we are to use modern terms, will have all the force 
 of an act of parliament, to say nothing of the anathema. 
 
 2 In places its language becomes turbid and well-nigh untranslatable. 
 
 3 It may be that the bishop has just obtained from the king a grant or 
 confirmation of the hundredal jurisdiction over what is to be Oswaldslaw. 
 
 4 K vi. 125: 'hoc est ut omnis equitandi lex ab eis impleatur quae ad 
 equites pertinet.' 
 
 M. 20
 
 306 England before the Conquest. 
 
 possess the said land they will be humbly subject to the 
 commands of the bishop. What is more, they shall hold them- 
 selves ready to supply all the needs of the bishop ; they shall 
 lend their horses ; they shall ride themselves, and be ready to 
 build bridges and do all that is necessary in burning lime for 
 the work of the church 1 ; they shall erect a hedge for the 
 bishop's hunt and shall lend their own hunting spears when- 
 ever the bishop may need them. And further, to meet many 
 other wants of the bishop, whether for the fulfilment of the 
 service due to him or of that due to the king, they shall with 
 all humility and subjection be obedient to his domination and to 
 his will 2 , in consideration of the benefice that has been loaned 
 to them, and according to the quantity of the land that each of 
 them possesses. And when the term for which the lands are 
 granted has run out, it shall be in the bishop's power either to 
 retain those lands for himself or to loan them out to any one 
 for a further term, but so that the said services due to the 
 church shall be fully rendered. And in case any shall make 
 wilful default in rendering the aforesaid dues of the church, he 
 shall make amends according to the bishop's urite 3 or else shall 
 lose the gift and land that he enjoyed. And if any one 
 attempt to defraud the church of land or service, be he 
 deprived of God's blessing unless he shall make full restitution. 
 He who keeps this, let him be blessed ; he who violates this, 
 
 1 K. vi. 125 : ' et ad totum piramiticum opus aecclesiae calcis atque ad 
 pontis aedificium ultro inveniantur parati.' The translation here given is but 
 guesswork ; we suppose that piramitlcus means ' of or belonging to fire {jrvp).' 
 
 2 Ibid. : ' insuper ad multas alias indigentiae causas quibus opus est domino 
 antistiti frunisci, sive ad suum servitium sive ad regale explendum, semper illius 
 
 archiductoris dominatui et voluntati qui episcopatui praesidet subditi 
 
 fiant.' Is archiductor but a fine name for the bishop? We think not. In the 
 Confessor's day Eadric the Steersman was 'ductor exercitus episcopi ad 
 servitium regis' (Heming, i. 81), and it would seem from this that the tenants 
 were to be subject to a captain set over them by the bishop. But in the famous, 
 if spurious, charter for Oswaldslaw (see above, p. 268) Edgar says that 
 on a naval expedition the bishop's men are not to serve under the ordinary 
 officers ' sed cum suo archiductore, videlicet episcopo, qui eos defendere et 
 protegere debet ab omni perturbatione et inquietudine.' This would settle the 
 question, could we be certain that the words ' videlicet episcopo ' were not the 
 gloss of a forger who was improving an ancient instrument. For our present 
 purpose, however, it is no very important question whether the archiductor, 
 the commander in chief of these tenants, is the bishop himself or an officer of 
 his. 
 
 3 Ibid. : ' praevaricationis delictum secundum quod praesulis ius est 
 emeudet.'
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 307 
 
 let him be cursed : Amen. Once more, my lord, I express my 
 gratitude to you. There are three copies of this document; 
 one at Worcester, one deposited with the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury and one with the Bishop of Winchester.' 
 
 Now we may well say that here is feudal tenure. In the Feudalism 
 first place, we notice a few verbal points. The recipient of the 
 Icen has received a beneficium from the bishop, and if he will 
 not hold the land de episcopo, none the less he will hold it sub 
 episcopo. Then he is the bishop's fidelis, his fidus homo, his 
 'hold and true man,' his thegn, his knight, his soldier, his 
 minister, his miles, his eques. Then he takes an oath to the 
 bishop, and seemingly this oath states in the most energetic 
 terms his utter subjection to the bishop's commands. What is 
 more, he swears to be faithful and obedient because he has 
 received a beneficium from the bishop, and the amount of his 
 service is measured by the quantity of land that he has 
 received. Then again, we see that he holds his land by 
 service ; if he fails in his service, at all events if he denies his 
 liability to serve, he is in peril of losing the land, though 
 perhaps he may escape by paying a pecuniary fine. As to the 
 services to be rendered, if we compare them with those of which 
 Glanvill and Bracton speak, they will seem both miscellaneous 
 and indefinite ; perhaps we ought to say that they are all the 
 more feudal on that account. The tenant is to pay the 
 church-scot, the ecclesiasticus census of other documents. This, 
 as we learn from Domesday Book, is one load (summa) of the 
 best corn from every hide of land, and unless it be paid on 
 S*. Martin's day, it must be paid twelve-fold along with a fine 1 . 
 He must pay toll to the bishop when he buys and sells ; he 
 must pay tace, apparently the pannage of a later time, for his 
 pigs. He must go on the bishop's errands, provide him with 
 hunting-spears, erect his /deer-hedge' when he goes to the 
 chase. There remains a margin of unspecified services ; for he 
 must do what he is told to do according to the will of the 
 bishop. But, above all, he is a horseman, a riding man and 
 must fulfil ' the law of riding.' For a moment we are tempted 
 to say ' the law of chivalry.' This indeed would be an anachro- 
 nism ; but still he is bound to ride at the bishop's command. 
 Will he ride only on peaceful errands ? We doubt it. He is 
 
 1 D. B. 174. Compare the entry on f . 175 b relating to the church-scot of 
 Pershore. 
 
 202
 
 308 England before the Conquest. 
 
 bound to do all the service that is due to the king, all the 
 forinsec service 1 we may say. A certain quantity of military 
 service is due from the bishop's lands; his thegns must do it. 
 As already said, the obligation of serving in warfare is not yet 
 so precisely connected with the tenure of certain parcels of land 
 as it will be in the days of Henry II., but already the notion 
 prevails that the land owes soldiers to the king, and probably 
 the bishop has so arranged matters that his territory will be 
 fully 'acquitted' if his equites, his milites take the field. Under 
 what banner will they fight ? Hardly under the sheriff's banner. 
 Oswald is founding Oswaldslaw and within Oswaldslaw the 
 sheriff will have no power. More probably they will follow the 
 banner of S*. Mary of Worcester. This we know, that in the 
 Confessor's reign one Eadric was steersman of the bishop's ship 
 and commander of the bishop's troops 3 . This also we know, 
 that in the suit between the churches of Worcester and of 
 Evesham that came before the Domesday commissioners, one of 
 the rights claimed by the bishop against the abbot was that the 
 men of two villages, Hamton and Bengeworth, were bound to 
 pay geld and to fight along with the bishop's men 3 . And then, 
 suppose that Danes or Welshmen or Englishmen make a raid 
 on the bishop's land, is it certain that he will communicate with 
 the ealdorman or the king before he calls upon his knights to 
 defend and to avenge him ? Still we must not bring into 
 undue relief the military side of the tenure. 
 
 Oswald's These men may be bound to fight at the bishop's call, but 
 
 imgmen. gg nt j n g ^ no ^ their main business ; they are not professional 
 warriors. They are the predecessors not of the military tenants 
 of the twelfth century, but of the radchenistres, and radmanni 
 of Domesday Book, the rodknights of Bracton's text, the thegns 
 and drengs of the northern counties who puzzle the lawyers of 
 the Angevin time. Point by point we can compare the tenure 
 of these ministri and equites of the tenth with that of the 
 thegns and drengs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and at 
 point after point we find similarity, almost identity. They pay 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 217. See also D. B. i. 165 b, Hinetune. 
 
 2 Heming, i. 81 : 'Edricus qui fuit, tempore regis Edwardi, stermannus 
 navis episcopi et ductor exercitus eiusdem episcopi ad servitium regis.' D. B. 
 i. 173 b : ' Edricus stirman ' held five hides of the bishop. 
 
 3 Heming, i. 77~: 'Et [episcopus] deracionavit socam et sacam de Hamtona 
 ad suum hundred de Oswaldes lawe, quod ibi debent placitare et geldum et 
 expeditionena . . . persolvere.'
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 309 
 
 rent; they have horses and their horses are at the service of 
 their lord ; they must ride his errands, carry his stores, assist 
 him in the chase; they must fight if need be, but the exact 
 nature of this obligation is indefinite 1 . Dependent tenure is 
 here and, we may say, feudal tenure, and even tenure by knight's 
 service, for though the English cniht of the tenth century differs 
 much from the knight of the twelfth, still it is a change in 
 military tactics rather than a change in legal ideas that is 
 required to convert the one into the other. As events fell out 
 there was a breach of continuity; the English thegns and 
 drengs and knights either had to make way for Norman milites, 
 or, as sometimes happened, they were subjected to N'ornian 
 milites and constituted a class for which no place could readily 
 be found in the new jurisprudence of tenures. But had Harold 
 won the day at Hastings and at the same time learnt a lesson 
 from the imminence of defeat, some peaceful process would 
 probably have done the same work that was done by forfeitures 
 and violent displacements. The day for heavy cavalry and 
 professional militancy was fast approaching when Oswald sub- 
 jected his tenants to the lex equitandi. 
 
 Yet another of those feudal phenomena that come before us Heritable 
 in. the twelfth century may easily be engendered by these loans ; 
 we mean the precarious inheritance, the right to ' relieve ' from 
 the lord the land that a dead man held of him 2 . In speaking 
 of Oswald's loans as ' leases for three lives' we have used a loose 
 phrase which might lead a modern reader astray. Oswald does 
 not let land to a man for the lives of three persons named in 
 the lease and therefore existing at the time when the lease is 
 made; rather he lets the land to a man and declares that it 
 shall descend to two successive heirs of his. The exact extent 
 of the power that the lessee has of instituting an heir, in other 
 words of devising the land by testament, instead of allowing it 
 to be inherited ab intestato, we need not discuss ; suffice it that 
 the lessee's rights may twice pass from ancestor to heir, or from 
 testator to devisee 3 . Now such a lease may cover the better 
 
 1 Maitland, Northumbrian Tenures, Eng. Hist. Rev. v. 625. 
 
 8 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 288. 
 
 3 In this respect Oswald's leases seem to have closely resembled a form of 
 lease, known as manusfirma, which became common in the France of the 
 eleventh century: Lamprecht, Beitrage zur Geschichte des franzosischen 
 Wirthschaftslebens, pp. 59, 60.
 
 310 
 
 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Wardship 
 and mar- 
 riage. 
 
 Seignorial 
 jurisdic- 
 tion. 
 
 part of a century. A time will come when the land ought to 
 return to the church that gave it ; but for some eighty years it 
 will have ' been in one family ' and twice over it will have been 
 inherited. Is it very probable that the bishop will be able to 
 oust the third heir ? Will he wish to do so, if three generations 
 of thegns or knights have faithfully served the church ? May 
 we not be fairly certain that this third heir will get the land on 
 the old terms, if he will ' recognize ' the church's right to turn 
 him out ? As a matter of fact we see that Oswald's successors 
 have great difficulty in recovering the land that he has let 1 . In 
 the middle ages he who allows land to descend twice has often 
 enough allowed it to become heritable for good and all. Despite 
 solemn charters and awful anathemas he will have to be content 
 with a relief 2 . 
 
 But at least, it will be said, there was no ' right of wardship 
 and marriage.' We can see the beginning of it. In 983 Oswald 
 let five manses to his kinsman Gardulf. Gardulf is to enjoy 
 the land during his life ; after his death his widow is to have it, 
 if she remains a widow or if she marries one of the bishop's 
 subjects 3 . So the bishop is already taking an interest in the 
 marriages of his tenants ; he will have no woman holding his 
 land who is married to one who is not his man. And then 
 Domesday Book tells us how in the Confessor's day one of 
 Oswald's successors had disposed of an heiress and her land to 
 one of his knights 4 . 
 
 Still, it will be urged, the feudalism here displayed is 
 imperfect in one important respect. These tenants of the 
 church of Worcester hold their land under contracts cognizable 
 
 1 Heming, i. 259: 'Ac primo videndum quae terrae trium heredum tem- 
 poribus accommodatae sint, post quorum decessum iuri monasterii redderentur, 
 quaeve postea iuxta hanc conventionem redditae, quaeve iniuste sunt retentae, 
 sive ipsorum, qui eas exigere deberent, negligentia, sive denegatae sint iniquorum 
 hominum potentia.' See also the story told by Heming on p. 264. 
 
 2 Lamprecht, op. cit. p. 61, says that it was quite uncommon for the 
 French landlord to get back his land if once he let it for three lives. One of 
 the Worcester leases, but one stigmatized by Kemble (ii. 152), is a lease for 
 three lives 'nisi haeredes illius tempus prolixius a pontifice sedis illius adipisci 
 poterint. ' 
 
 8 K. 637 (iii. 194) : ' si in viduitate manere decreverit, vel magis nubere 
 voluerit, ei tamen viro qui episcopal! dignitati supradictae aecclesiae sit 
 subiectus.' 
 
 4 D. B. i. 173: 'Hanc terram tenuit Sirof de episcopo T. B. E., quo mortuo 
 dedit episcopus filiam eius cum hac terra cuidam suo militi, qui et matrem 
 pasceret et episcopo inde serviret.'
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 311 
 
 by the national courts ; they do not hold by any special feudal 
 law, they are not subject to any feudal tribunal. Now if when 
 we hear of ' feudalism/ we are to think of that orderly, central- 
 ized body of land-law which in Henry III.'s day has subjected 
 the whole realm to its simple but mighty formulas, the feudalism 
 of Oswald's land-loans is imperfect enough. But then we must 
 remind ourselves that never in this country does feudal law (the 
 Lehnrecht of Germany) become a system to be contrasted with 
 the ordinary land law (LandrechtY, and also we must observe 
 that already in Oswald's day the thegns of the church of 
 Worcester were in all probability as completely subject to a 
 private and seignorial justice as ever were any freeholding 
 Englishman. What court protected their tenure, what court 
 would decide a dispute between them and the bishop ? Doubt- 
 less it will be answered the hundred court. But in all 
 probability that court, the court of the great triple hundred of 
 Oswaldslaw was already in the hand of the bishop who gave it 
 its name 2 . The suits of these tenants would come into a court 
 where the bishop would preside by himself or his deputy, and 
 where the doomsmen would be the tenants and justiciables of 
 the bishop not indeed because tenure begets jurisdiction (to 
 such a generalization as this men have not yet come) but still, 
 the justice that these tenants will get will be seignorial justice. 
 
 Now how far we should be safe in drawing from Oswald's Oswalds- 
 loans and Oswaldslaw any general inferences about the whole of England at 
 England is a difficult question. It is clear that the bishop was arge ' 
 at great pains to regulate the temporal affairs of his church. 
 He obtained for his leases the sanction of every authority 
 human and divine, the consent of the convent, the ealdorman, 
 the king, the witan ; he deposited the covenant with the king, 
 with the archbishop of Canterbury, with the bishop of Win- 
 chester. Also we must remember that he had lived in a Frankish 
 monastery, and that, at least in things monastic, he was a radical 
 reformer. Nor should it be concealed that in Domesday Book 
 the entries concerning the estates of the church of Worcester 
 stand out in bold relief from the monotonous background. Not 
 only is the account of the hundred of Oswaldslaw prefaced by a 
 statement which in forcible words lays stress on its complete 
 subjection to the bishop, but in numerous cases the tenure of 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 214. 
 8 See above, p. 267.
 
 312 England "before the Conquest. 
 
 the nobler and freer tenants within that hundred is described 
 as being more or less precarious : they do whatever services 
 the bishop may require ; they serve ' at the will of the bishop ' ; 
 no one of them may have any lord but the bishop ; they are but 
 tenants for a time and when that time is expired their land will 
 revert to the church 1 . 
 
 inferences However, we should hesitate long before we said that 
 waid'? 8 Oswald's land-loans were merely foreign innovations. His pre- 
 loans. decessors had granted leases for lives ; other churches were 
 granting leases for lives, and the important document that he 
 sent to the king proves to us that we can not trust our Anglo- 
 Saxon lease or land-book to contain the whole of the terms of 
 that tenure which it created. Suppose that this unique docu- 
 meut had perished, how utterly mistaken an opinion should we 
 have formed of the terms upon which the thegns and knights 
 of the church of Worcester held their lands ! We should have 
 heard hardly a word of money payments, no word of the oath of 
 'subjection, of the lex equitandi, of the indefinite obligation of 
 obeying whatever commands the bishop might give. It may 
 well be that the thegns and knights of other churches held on 
 terms very similar to those that the bishop of Worcester im- 
 posed. Even if we think that Oswald was an innovator, we 
 must remember that the adviser of Edgar, the friend of Dunstan, 
 the reformer of the monasteries, the man who for thirty years 
 was Bishop of Worcester and for twenty years Archbishop of 
 York, was able to make innovations on a grand scale. What 
 such a man does others will do. The yet safer truth that what 
 Oswald did could be done, should not be meaningless for us. 
 In the second half of the tenth century there were men willing 
 to take land on such terms as Oswald has described. 
 Economic These men were not peasants. The land that Oswald gave 
 Osw t !id'8 0f tnem * ne y were n t g m g to cultivate merely by their own 
 teuauts. labour and the labour of their sons and their slaves, though we 
 
 1 D. B. i. 172 b: 'Hae praedictae ccc, hidae fuerunt de ipso doininio 
 aecclesiae, et si quid de ipsis cuicunque homini quolibet modo attributum vel 
 praestitum fuisset ad serviendum inde episcopo, ille qui earn terrain praestitam 
 sibi tenebat nullam omnino consuetudinem sibimet inde retinere poterat nisi 
 per episcopum, neque terrain retinere nisi usque ad impletum tempus quod ipsi 
 
 inter se constituerant, et nusquam cum ea terra se vertere poterat Kene- 
 
 wardus tenuit et deserviebat sicut episcopus volebat Bicardus tenuit ad 
 
 servitium quod episcopus voluit Godricus tenuit serviens inde episcopo ut 
 
 poterat deprecari Godricus tenuit ad voluntatem episcopi.'
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 313 
 
 are far from saying that they scorned to handle the plough. 
 We have in Domesday Book a description of their holdings, and 
 it is clear that in the Confessor's day, when some of Oswald's 
 leases must yet have been in operation, the lessees had what 
 we should describe as small manors with villeins and cottagers 
 upon them. Thus, for example, Eadric the Steersman, who led 
 the bishop's host, had an estate of five hides which in 1086 had 
 three villani and four bordarii, to say nothing of a priest, upon 
 it 1 . Like enough, what the bishop has been 'loaning' to his 
 thegns has been by no means always ' land in demesne,' it has 
 been ' land in service': in other words, a superiority, a seignory. 
 Thus, as we say, another course of the feudal edifice is con- 
 structed. Above the cultivator stands the thegn or the cniht, 
 who himself is a tenant under the bishop and who owes to the 
 bishop services that are neither very light nor very definite. 
 We can not but raise the question whether the cultivators, if 
 we suppose them to be in origin free landowners, can support 
 the weight of this superstructure without being depressed 
 towards serfage. But we are not yet in a position to deal 
 thoroughly with this question 2 . 
 
 We must now return for a moment to the relation that Loan-land 
 exists between the loan and the book. Lcenland is contrasted fand. ( 
 with brfcland ; but historians have had the greatest difficulty in 
 discovering the principle that lies beneath this distinction 3 . 
 Certainly we can not say that, while book-land is created and 
 governed by a charter, there will be no written instrument, no 
 book, creating and governing the Icen. We have books which 
 in unambiguous terms tell us that they bear witness to loans. 
 Nor can we say that the holder of book-land will always have a 
 perpetual right to the land, ' an estate in fee simple,' an estate 
 to him and his heirs. In many cases a royal charter will create 
 a smaller estate than this ; it will limit the descent of the land 
 
 1 D. B. 173 b. 
 
 2 Oswald's tenants closely resemble the ministeriales of foreign bishops ; see 
 Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, v. 283-350. Oswald's lex equitandi may be 
 compared with what is said (ibid. p. 293) of a bishop of Constance: 'quibus 
 omnibus hoc ius constituit, ut cum abbate eqnitarent eique domi forisque 
 ministrarent, equos suos tarn abbati quam fratribus suis quocumque necesse 
 esset praestarent, monasterium pro posse suo defensarent. ' 
 
 3 Kemble, Saxons, i. 310 ff. ; K. Maurer, Krit. Ueb. i. 104; Essays in Anglo- 
 Saxon Law, No. ii. (Lodge) ; Brunner, Geschichte d. rom. u. germ. Urkunde, 
 182.
 
 314 England before the Conquest. 
 
 to the heirs male of the donee. Moreover the written leases for 
 three lives of which we have been speaking are ' books.' Thus 
 in 977 Oswald grants three manses to his thegn Eadric for 
 three lives, and the charter ends with a statement which tells 
 us in English that Oswald the archbishop is booking to Eadric 
 his thegn three hides of land which Eadric formerly held as 
 Icenland 1 . A similar deed of 985 contains a similar statement ; 
 five hides which Eadric held as Icenland are now being booked 
 to him, but booked only for three lives 2 . In yet another of 
 Oswald's charters we are told that the donee is to hold the 
 land by way of book-land as amply as he before held it by way 
 of Icenland 3 . After this it is needless to say that book-land 
 may be burdened with rents and services. But indeed it would 
 seem that Oswald's thegns and knights held both book-land and 
 Icenland. It was book-land because it had been booked to them, 
 and yet very certainly it had only been loaned to them 4 . 
 Book-land Let us then turn to the laws and read what they say about 
 dooms, book-land. Two rules stand out clearly. ^Ethelred the Un- 
 ready declares that every wite incurred by a holder of book-land 
 is to be paid to the king 5 . Cnut declares that the book-land of 
 the outlaw, whosesoever man he may be, and of the man who 
 flies in battle is to go to the king 6 . These laws seem to put 
 before us the holder of book-land as standing by reason of his 
 land in some specially close relationship to the king. If we 
 may use the language of a later day, the holder of book-land is 
 a tenant in chief of the king, and this even though he may have 
 commended himself to someone else. On the other hand, if 
 the holder of Icenland commits a grave crime, his land reverts, 
 or escheats or is forfeited to the man who made the Icen 7 . And 
 yet, though this be so and though Oswald's thegns will in some 
 sense or another be holding book-land, we may be quite certain 
 that should one of them be outlawed the bishop will claim the 
 
 1 K. 617 (iii. 164). a K. 651 (iii. 216). 
 
 8 K. 679 (iii. 258). 
 
 4 K. 1287 (vi. 125): 'propter beneficium quod eis praestitum eat.' D. B. i. 
 173 b. It may cross the reader's mind that the leases of which Oswald speaks 
 in his letter to Edgar are not the transactions recorded in the charters that have 
 come down to us, but other and unwritten leases. But Domesday Book and the 
 stories told by Heming make against this explanation. 
 
 5 -Ethelr. i. 1, 14. 6 Cnut, n. 13, 77. 
 
 7 K. 328 (ii. 133) : A certain Helmstan is guilty of theft ' and mon gerehte 
 tJaet yrfe cinge for Son he wes cinges mon and Ordlaf feng to his londe forSan 
 hit wits his laen Sset he on saet. '
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 315 
 
 land. Indeed he is careful about this as about other matters. 
 Often he inserts in his charter a clause saying that, whatever 
 the grantee may do, the land shall return unforfeited to the 
 church. 
 
 Any solution of these difficulties must be of a somewhat Relation of 
 speculative kind. We fashion for ourselves a history of the to book- 
 book and of the land-loan which runs as follows : The written land ' 
 charter first makes its appearance as a foreign and ecclesiastical 
 novelty. For a very long time it is used mainly, if not solely, 
 as a means of endowing the churches with lands and superiorities. 
 It is an instrument of a very solemn character armed with the 
 anathema and sanctioned by the crosses of those who can bind 
 and loose. Usually it confers rights which none but kings can 
 bestow, and which even kings ought hardly to bestow save with 
 the advice of their councillors. A mass of rights held under 
 such a charter is book-land, or, if we please, the land over which 
 such rights are exercisable, is book-land for the grantee. In 
 course of time similar privileges are granted by the kings to 
 their thegns, though the book does not thereby altogether lose 
 its religious traits. It is long before private persons begin to 
 use writing for the conveyance or creation of rights in land. 
 The total number of the books executed by persons who are 
 neither kings, nor underkings, nor prelates of the church, was, 
 we take it, never very large ; certainly the number of such books 
 that have come down to us is very small. 
 
 Nothing could be more utterly unproved than the opinion Royal and 
 that in Anglo-Saxon times written instruments were commonly books, 
 used for the transfer of rights in land. Let us glance for a 
 moment at the documents that purport to have come to us 
 from the tenth century. Genuine and spurious we have near 
 six hundred. But we exclude first the grants made by the 
 kings, secondly Oswald's leases and a few similar documents 
 executed by other prelates, thirdly a few testamentary or 
 quasi-testamentary dispositions made by the great and wealthy. 
 Hardly ten documents remain. Let us observe their nature. 
 The ealdorman and lady of the Mercians make a grant, to a 
 church in royal fashion 1 ; but in every other case in which we 
 have a document which we can conceive as either transferring 
 rights in land or as being formal evidence of such a transfer, 
 the consent of the king or of the king and witan to the 
 1 K. 330 (ii. 136).
 
 316 England 'before the Conquest. 
 
 transaction is stated, and with hardly an exception the king 
 executes the document 1 . Even the holder of book-land who 
 wished to alienate it, for example, the thegn who wished to 
 pass on his book-land to a church, did not in general execute 
 a written conveyance. One of three courses was followed. 
 The donor handed over his own book, the book granted by the 
 king, and apparently this was enough ; or the parties to 
 the transaction went before the king, delivered up the old 
 and obtained a new book; or the donor executed some brief 
 instrument sometimes a mere note endorsed on the original 
 book stating how he had transferred his right 2 . But in any 
 case, according to the common usage of words, a usage which 
 has a long history behind it, it is only the man who is holding 
 under a royal privilege who has ' book-land.' It is to this 
 established usage that the laws refer when they declare that 
 the king and no lower lord is to have the wite from the holder 
 of book-land, and that when book-land is forfeited it is forfeited 
 to the king. For all this, however, if you adhere to the letter, 
 book-land can only mean land held by book. Now from a 
 remote time men have been ' loaning ' land, and prelates when 
 they have made a loan have sometimes executed a written 
 instrument, a book. A prelate can pronounce the anathema 
 and the recipient of the Icen may well wish to be protected, not 
 merely by writing, but by Christ's rood. When therefore 
 Bishop Oswald grants a written lease to one of his thegns 
 who heretofore has been in enjoyment of the land but has had 
 no charter to show for it, we may well say that in the future 
 this thegn will have book-land, though at the same time he 
 has but loan-land. We have no scruple about charging our 
 ancestors with having a confused terminology. The confusion 
 is due to a natural development; 'books' were formerly used 
 only for one purpose, they are beginning to be used for many 
 purposes, and consequently ' book-land ' may mean one thing in 
 
 1 K. 414 (ii. 273) : conveyance by Wulfric with the king's consent K. 491 
 
 (ii. 379) : conveyance by Wulfstan with consent of king and witan, who execute 
 the deed. K. 690-1 (iii. 286-8) : conveyances by JSscwig executed by king and 
 witan. K. 1124, 1130 (v. 246-54): conveyances confirmed by king and 
 bishops. K. 1201 (v. 378) : exchange with king's consent. K. 1226 (vi. 25) : 
 conveyance by a thegn reciting king's consent. A few documents we must leave 
 unclassified ; K. 499, 591, 693 ; we do not know how they were executed or 
 what was their evidential value. 
 
 4 Brunner, Geschichte d. rom. u. germ. Urkunde, p. 175.
 
 Book-land and Loan-land. 317 
 
 one context, another in another. We may say that every one 
 who holds under a written document holds book-land, or we 
 may still confine the name ' book ' to that class of books which 
 was at one time the only class. The king's charters, the king's 
 privileges, have been the only books ; they are still books in a 
 preeminent sense. Just so in later days men will speak of 
 'tenure in capite' when what they really mean is 'tenure in 
 capite of the crown by military service 1 .' 
 
 But there is a deeper cause of perplexity. Once more we The gift 
 must repeat that the gift shades off into the loan, the loan into loan 
 the gift. The loan is a gift for a time. It is by words of 
 donation (' I give,' ' I grant ') that Oswald's beneficia are 
 praestita to his knights and thegns. Conversely, the king's 
 most absolute gift leaves something owing and continuously 
 owing to him ; it may be prayers, it may be fealty and obedience. 
 And having considered by how rarely good fortune it is that 
 we know the terms of Oswald's land-loans, how thoroughly 
 we might have mistaken their nature but for the preservation 
 of a single document, we shall be very cautious in denying that 
 between many of the holders of book-land and the king there 
 was in the latter half of the tenth century a relationship for 
 which we have no other name than feudal tenure. If Oswald's 
 charters create such a tenure, what shall we say of the numerous 
 charters whereby Edred, Edwy, Edgar and JSthelred grant land 
 to their thegns in consideration of fealty and obedience ? Must 
 not these thegns fulfil the whole lex equitandi; will they not 
 lose their lands if they fail in this service? True that the 
 rights conferred upon them are not restrained within the 
 compass of three lives but are heritable ad infinitum. But 
 does this affect the character of their tenure ? Can we we 
 can not in more recent times draw any inference from 'the 
 quantum of the estate ' to ' the quality of the tenure ' ? On the 
 whole, we are inclined to believe that the practice of loaning 
 lands affected the practice of giving lands, there being no sharp 
 and formal distinction between the gift and the loan, and that 
 when Edward the Confessor died no great injustice would 
 have been done by a statement that those who held their lands 
 by royal books held their lands 'of the king. This at least we 
 know, that the formula of dependent tenure (' A holds land of 
 B ') was current in the English speech of the Confessor's day 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 212.
 
 318 England* before the Conquest. 
 
 and that some of the king's thegns held their land 'of the 
 king 1 . We may guess that those old terms 'book-land' and 
 'loan-land' would soon have disappeared even from an un- 
 conquered England, for it was becoming plain that the book 
 bears witness to a loan. A new word was wanted ; that word 
 was feudum. 
 
 5. The Growth of Seiynorial Power. 
 
 Subjection We now return to our original theme, the subjection to 
 seignorial power of free land-holders and their land, for we now 
 have at our command the legal machinery, which, when set in 
 motion by economic and social forces, is capable of effecting 
 that subjection. Let us suppose a village full of free land- 
 holders. The king makes over to a church all the rights that 
 he has in that village, reserving only the trinoda necessitous and 
 perhaps some pleas of the crown. The church now has a 
 superiority over the village, over the ceorls ; it has a right to 
 receive all that, but for the king's charter, would have gone to 
 him. 
 
 The royal In the first place, it has a right to the feorm, the pastus or 
 aiuUiis victus that the king has hitherto exacted. We should be wrong 
 land. j n thinking that in the ninth century (whatever may have 
 been the case in earlier times) this exaction was a small matter. 
 In 883 ^Ethelred ealdorman of the Mercians with the consent 
 of King Alfred freed the lands of Berkeley minster from such 
 parts of the king's gafol or feorm as had until then been unre- 
 deemed. In return for this he- received twelve hides of land 
 and thirty mancuses of gold, and then in consideration of another 
 sixty mancuses of gold he proceeded to grant a lease of these 
 twelve hides for three lives*. The king had been deriving a 
 revenue from this land ' in clear ale, in beer, in honey, in cattle, 
 
 1 K. 843 (iv. 201) : ' swa full and swa forS swa Durstan min huskarll hit 
 furrnest of me heold.' K. 846 (iv. 205) : ' swa full and swa forS swa Sweyn mi 
 may hit forinest of me held.' K. 826 (iv. 190) : 'swa JSlfwin sy nunne it heold 
 of "San minstre.' K. 827 (iv. 190) : ' swa Sihtric eorll of ftan minstre )>eowlic it 
 heold.' If K. 1237 (vi. 44) be genuine (and Kemble has not condemned it) then 
 already in the middle of the tenth century 'Goda princeps tenuit terrain da 
 rege,' nor only so, ' tenuit honorem de rege ' ; but this document is un- 
 acceptable. At best it may be a late Latin translation of an English original. 
 K. 313 (ii. 110) ; T. 129 ; B. ii. 172.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 319 
 
 in swine and in sheep.' In Domesday Book a ' one night's farm ' 
 is no trifle ; it is all that the king gets from large stretches of 
 his demesne 1 . Having become entitled to this royal right, the 
 church would proceed to make some new settlement with the 
 villagers. Perhaps it would stipulate for a one night's farm for 
 the monks, that is to say, for a provender-rent capable of sup- 
 porting the convent for a day. In the middle, of the ninth 
 century a day's farm of the monks of Canterbury comprised 
 forty sesters of ale, sixty loaves, a wether, two cheeses and four 
 fowls, besides other things 2 . When once a village is charged in 
 favour of a lord with a provender-rent of this kind, the lord's 
 grip upon the land may easily be tightened. A settlement in 
 terms of bread and beer is not likely to be stable. Some change 
 in circumstances will make it inconvenient to all parties and 
 the stronger bargainer will make the best of the new bargain. 
 The church will be a strong bargainer for it has an inexhaustible 
 treasure-house upon which to draw. We, however, concerned 
 with legal ideas, have merely to notice that the law will give 
 free play to social, economic and religious forces which are likely 
 to work in the lord's favour. 
 
 But a village charged with a ' provender-rent ' may seem far Provender 
 enough removed from the typical manor of the twelfth and th^manor- 
 thirteenth centuries. In the one we see the villagers culti- ^ econ - 
 vating each for his own behoof and supplying the lord at stated 
 seasons with a certain quantity of victuals; in the other the 
 villagers spend a great portion of their time in tilling the lord's 
 demesne land. In the latter case the lord himself appears as an 
 agriculturist : in the former he is no agriculturist, but merely a 
 receiver of rent. The gulf may seem wide ; but it is not impass- 
 able. One part, the last part, of a process which surmounts it 
 is visible. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the lords, 
 though they have much land in demesne, still reckon the whole 
 or part of what they are to receive from each manor in terms 
 of ' farms ' ; the king gets a one night's farm from this manor, 
 the convent of Ramsey gets a fortnight's farm from that manor 8 . 
 But we can conceive how the change begins. The monks are 
 not going to travel, as a king may have travelled, from village 
 
 1 In many cases the one night's farm is reckoned at 100 or thereabouts; 
 Bound, Feudal England, 112. 
 
 2 K. 477 (ii. 354) ; T. 509. 
 
 8 Vinogradoff, Villainage, 301.
 
 320 England before the Conquest. 
 
 to village feasting at the expense of the folk. They are going 
 to live in their monastery ; they want a regular supply of victuals 
 brought to them. They must have an overseer in the village, one 
 who will look to it that the bread and beer are sent off punc- 
 tually and are good. In the village over which they already 
 have a superiority they acquire a manse of their very own, a 
 mansus indominicatus as their foreign brethren would call it. 
 When once they are thus established in the village, piety 
 and other-worldliness will do much towards increasing their 
 demesne and strengthening their position 1 . 
 
 The church We have argued above that in the first instance it was not 
 a easants ^ v means f the P e tty gifts of private persons that the churches 
 amassed their wide territories. The starting point is the aliena- 
 tion of a royal superiority. Still there can be little doubt that 
 the small folk were just as careful of their souls as were their 
 rulers. They make gifts to the church. Moreover, the gift is 
 likely to create a dependent tenure. They want to give, and 
 yet they want to keep, for their land is their livelihood. They 
 surrender the land to the church : but then they take it back 
 again as a life-long loan. Thus the church has no great diffi- 
 culty about getting demesne. But further, it gets dependent 
 tenants and a dependent tenure is established. Like enough 
 on the death of the donor his heirs will be suffered to hold what 
 their ancestor held. Very possibly the church will be glad to 
 make a compromise, for it may be doubtful whether these 
 donationes post obitum*, or these gifts with reservation of an 
 usufruct, can be defended against one, who, not having the fear 
 of God before his eyes, will make a determined attack upon 
 them. Gradually the church becames more and more interested 
 in the husbandry of the village. It receives gifts ; it makes 
 loans ; it substitutes labour services to be done on its demesne 
 lands for the old feorm of provender. It is rash to draw in- 
 ferences from the fragmentary and obscure laws of Ine ; but one 
 of them certainly suggests that, at least in some district of 
 Wessex, this process was going on rapidly at the end of the 
 seventh century, so rapidly and so oppressively that the king 
 had to step in to protect the smaller folk. The man who has 
 
 1 Even T. B. W. and in a thoroughly manorial county such as Hampshire 
 we may find a village in which the lord has no demesne. See e. g. D. B. i. 41 b, 
 Alwarestoch. 
 
 8 Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 315.
 
 The Growth, of Seignorial Power. 321 
 
 taken a yard of land at a rent is being compelled not only to 
 pay but also to labour. This, says the king, he need not do 
 unless he is provided with a house 1 . 
 
 Now we are far from saying that the manorial system of rural Growth of 
 economy is thus invented. From the time of the Teutonic con- iai system, 
 quest of Eugland onwards there may have been servile villages, 
 Roman villas with slaves and coloni cultivating the owner's de- 
 mesne, which had passed bodily to a new master. We have no 
 evidence that is capable of disproving or of proving this. What 
 we think more probable is that in those tracts where true 
 villages (nucleated villages, as we have before now called them 2 ) 
 were not formed, the conquerors fitted themselves into an 
 agrarian scheme drawn for them by the Britons, and that in 
 the small scattered hamlets which existed in these tracts there 
 was all along a great deal of slavery 8 . But, at any rate, the 
 church was a cosmopolitan institution. Many a prelate of the 
 ninth and tenth centuries, Bishop Oswald for one, must have 
 known well enough how the foreign monasteries managed their 
 lands, and, whatever controversies may rage round questions of 
 remoter history, there can be no doubt that by this time the 
 rural economy of the church estates in France was in substance 
 that which we know as manorial. Foreign precedents in this 
 as in other matters may have done a great work in England 4 . 
 All that we are here concerned to show is that there were forces 
 at work which were capable of transmuting a village full of free 
 landholders into a manor fulTof villeins. 
 
 Besides the rights transferred to it by the king, the church Church- 
 iii -i 11-1 scot and 
 
 would have other rights at its command which it could employ tithe. 
 
 for the subjection we use the word in no bad sense of the 
 peasantry. By the law of God it might claim first-fruits and 
 tenths. The payment known as ciric-sceat, church-scot, is a very 
 obscure matter 6 . Certainly in laws of the tenth century it seems 
 to be put before us as a general tax or rate, due from all lands, 
 and not merely from those lands over which a church has the 
 lordship. On the other hand, both in earlier and in later docu- 
 
 1 Ine, 67. See Schmid's note. 
 
 2 See above, p. 15. 
 
 3 See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen tier Germanen, ii. 97 ff. 
 
 4 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 223. 
 
 6 The subject is treated at length by Kemble, Saxons, ii. 490 and App. D, 
 and Schmid, p. 545. 
 
 M. 21
 
 322 England before the Conquest. 
 
 ments it seems to have a much less general character. In some 
 of the earlier it looks like a due, we may even say a rent 
 (ecclesiasticus census) paid to a church out of its own lands, 
 while in the later documents, for example in Domesday Book, 
 it appears sporadically and looks like a heavy burden on some 
 lands, a light burden on others. The evidence suggests that 
 the church had attempted and on the whole had failed, despite 
 the help of kings and laws, to make this impost general. That 
 in some districts it was a serious incumbrance we may be sure. 
 On those estates of the church of Worcester to which we have 
 often referred, every hide was bound to pay upon S*. Martin's 
 day one horse-load (summa) of the best corn that grew upon it. 
 He who did not pay upon the appointed day incurred the 
 outrageous penalty of paying twelve-fold, and in addition to this 
 a fine was inflicted 1 . If the bishop often insisted on the letter 
 of this severe rule, he must have reduced many a free ceorl to 
 beggary. It is by no means certain that the duty of paying tithe 
 has not a somewhat similar history. Though in this case the 
 impost became a general burden incumbent on all lands, it may 
 have been a duty of perfect obligation for the subjects of the 
 churches, while as yet for the mass of other landowners it was 
 but a religious duty or even a counsel of perfection. At any 
 rate, this subtraction of a tenth of the gross produce of the 
 earth is no light thing : it is quite capable of debasing many 
 men from landownership to dependent tenancy. 
 
 Jurisdic- Another potent instrument for the subjection of the free 
 
 rights of landowners would be the jurisdictional rights which passed 
 )r " from the king to the churches and the thegns. At first this 
 transfer would appear as a small matter. The president of a 
 court of free men is changed : 'that is all. Where the king's 
 reeve sat, the bishop or the bishop's reeve now sits ; fines which 
 went to the royal hoard now go to the minster ; but a moot of 
 free men still administers folk-right to the justiciables of the 
 church. However, in course of time the change will have 
 important effects. In the first place, it helps to bind up suit 
 of court with the tenure of land. The suitor goes to the bishop's 
 court because he holds land of which the bishop is the lord. If, 
 as will often be the case, he wishes to escape from the burden- 
 some duty, he will pay an annual sum in lieu thereof, and here 
 is a new rent. Then again all the affairs of the territory are 
 1 D. B. i. 174. Compare Ine, 4 ; ^thelr. Tin. 11 ; Cnut, i. 10.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 323 
 
 now periodically brought under the bishop's eye ; he knows, or 
 his reeves know, all about every one's business and they have 
 countless opportunities of granting favours and therefore of 
 driving bargains. Moreover it is by no means unlikely that 
 the lord will now have something to say about the transfer of 
 land, for it is by no means unlikely that conveyances will be 
 made in court, and that the rod or festuca which serves as a 
 symbol of possession will be handed by the seller to the reeve 
 and by the reeve to the purchaser. We need not regard the 
 conveyance in court as a relic of a time when a village com- 
 munity would have had a word to" say if any of its members 
 proposed^ to assign his share to an outsider. There are many 
 reasons for conveying land in court. We get witnesses there, 
 and no mere mortal witnesses but the testimony of a court 
 which does not die. Then, again, there may be the claims of 
 expectant heirs to be precluded and perhaps they can be 
 precluded by a decree of the court. The seller's kinsfolk can 
 be ordered to assert their rights within some limited time or 
 else to hold their peace for ever after, so that the purchaser will 
 hold the land under the court's ban 1 . And thus the rod passes 
 through the hands of the president. But ' nothing for nothing ' 
 is a good medieval rule. The lord will take a small fine for 
 this land-cop, this sale of land, and soon it may seem that the 
 purchaser acquires his title to the land rather from the lord 
 than from the vendor 2 . 
 
 Yet another turn is given to the screw, if we may so speak, The lord 
 when the state and the church begin to hold the lord answer- ma n's 
 able for taxes which in the last resort should be paid by the a 
 tenant 3 . This, when we call to mind the huge weight of the 
 .danegeld, will appear as a matter of the utmost importance. 
 Before the end of the tenth century this is the picture that 
 we draw for ourselves large masses of free peasants were in 
 sore straits and were in many ways subject to their lords. 
 Many of them were really holding their tenements by a more 
 or less precarious tenure. They had taken 'loans' from their 
 lord and become bound to pay rents and work continuously on 
 his inland. Others of them may have had ancient ancestral 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 95. 
 
 2 JSthelred, in. 3 ; Schmid, App. II. 67 and Schmid, Glossar. s. v. land' 
 cedp. 
 
 s See above, pp. 55, 122. 125. 
 
 212
 
 324 England before the Conquest. 
 
 titles which could have been traced back to free settlers and 
 free conquerors ; but for centuries past a lord had wielded 
 rights over their land. The king's feorm had become the lord's 
 gafol, and this, supplemented by church-scot and by tithes, may 
 have been turned into gafol and week-work. The time came 
 for a new and heavy tax. This was a crushing burden, and even 
 had the geld been collected from the small folk it would have 
 had the effect of converting many of them from landowners into 
 landborrowers 1 . But a worse fate befell them. They were so 
 poor that the state could no longer deal with them ; it dealt 
 with their lord ; he paid for their land. It follows that in the 
 eye of the state their land is his land. Less and less^will the 
 national courts and the folk-law recognize their titles ; the lord 
 ' defends ' this land against all the claims of the state ; therefore 
 the state regards it as his^ Hence what seems the primary 
 distinction drawn by Domesday Book that between the soke- 
 man and the villanus. The villanus is not rated to the land-tax. 
 Some men are not rated to the geld because they have but 
 precarious titles ; other men have precarious titles because they 
 are not rated to the geld. A wide and a legally definable class 
 is formed of men who hold land and who yet are fast losing 
 the warranty of national law. When once the country is fall of 
 lords with sake and soke, a very small change, a very small 
 exhibition of indifference on the part of the state, will deprive 
 the peasants of this warranty and condemn them to hold, not 
 by the law of the land, but by the custom of their lord's court. 
 Depression To this depth of degradation the great mass of the English 
 ceori. ] e peasants in the southern and western counties the villani, 
 bordarii, cotarii of Domesday Book may perhaps have come 
 before the Norman Conquest. There may have been no courts 
 which would recognize their titles to their land, except the 
 courts of their lords. We are by no means certain that even 
 this was so ; but they must fall deeper yet before they will be 
 the ' serf- villeins ' of the thirteenth century. 
 
 1 See above, p. 6. In a charter of JSthelred, K. 689 (iii. 284), Abp. Sigeric, 
 the reputed inventor of the danegeld, is represented as pledging a village of thirty 
 manses in order that he may pay the money demanded by the pirates. He thus 
 raises 90 pounds of purest silver and 200 mancuses of purest gold. If the 
 mancus was the eighth of a pound (Schmid, p. 595) we have 90 pounds of 
 silver and 25 of gold, or in all perhaps 390. The whole danegeld of Kent 
 under Henry II. was less than 106. For other transactions of a similar kind, 
 see Crawford Charters, 76.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 325 
 
 However, the conditions which would facilitate such a farther The slaves. 
 fall had long been prepared, for slavery had been losing some of 
 its harshest features. Of this process we have said something 
 elsewhere 1 . What the church did for the slave may have been 
 wisely and was humanely done ; but what it did for the slave 
 was done to the detriment of the poorer classes of free men. 
 By insisting that the slave has a soul to be saved, that he can 
 be sinned against and can sin, that his marriage is a sacrament, 
 we obliterate the line between person and thing. On the other 
 hand, in the submission of one person to the will of another, a 
 submission which within wide limits is utter and abject, the 
 church saw no harm. Villeinage and monasticism are not 
 quite independent phenomena; even a lawyer could see the 
 analogy between the two 2 . And a touch of mysticism dignifies 
 slavery : the bishop of Rome is the serf of the serfs of God ; 
 an earl held land of Westminster Abbey 'like a theow 3 .' One 
 of the surest facts that we know of the England of Cnut's time 
 is that the great folk were confounding their free men with 
 their theowmen and that the king forbad them to do this. We 
 see that one of the main lines which has separated the rightless 
 slave from the free ceorl is disappearing, for the lord, as suits 
 his interest best, will treat the same man now as free and now 
 as bond*. 
 
 We might here speak of the numerous causes for which in a Growth of 
 lawful fashion a free man might be reduced into slavery, and jom r8 
 were we to do so, should have to notice the criminal law with below - 
 its extremely heavy tariff of wer and wite and bot. But of this 
 enough for the time has been said elsewhere 3 , and there are 
 many sides of English history at which we can not even glance. 
 However, lest we should be charged with a grave omission, we 
 must explain that the processes which have hitherto come 
 under our notice are far from being in our eyes the only 
 processes that tended towards the creation of manors. We 
 have been thinking of the manors as descending from above 
 (if we may so speak) rather than as growing up from below. 
 The alienation of royal rights over villages and villagers has 
 been our starting point, and it is to this quarter that we are 
 
 1 See above, p. 27. 2 Hist. Eng. Law, i. p. 416. 
 
 3 K. 1327 (iv. 190) : ' swa full and swa forft swa Sihtric eorll of San ministre 
 J>eowlic it heold.' 
 
 4 Cnut, ii. 20. 8 Hist. Eng. Law, ii. p. 458.
 
 326 England before the Conquest. 
 
 inclined to look for the main source of seignorial power. But, 
 no doubt, within those villages which had no lords and plenty 
 of such villages there were in 1065 forces were at work which 
 made in the direction of manorialisrn. They are obscure, for 
 they play among small men whose doings are not recorded. 
 But we have every reason to suppose that in the first half of the 
 eleventh century a fortunate ceorl had many opportunities of 
 amassing land and of thriving at the expense of his thriftless or 
 unlucky neighbours. Probably the ordinary villager was seldom 
 far removed from insolvency : that is to say, one raid of free- 
 booters, one murrain, two or three bad seasons, would rob him 
 of his precious oxen and make him beggar or borrower. The 
 great class of bordarii who in the east of England are subjected 
 to the sokemen has probably been recruited in this fashion 1 . 
 And so we may see in Cambridgeshire that a man will some- 
 times have half a hide in one village, a virgate in another, 
 two-thirds of a virgate in a third. He is 'thriving to 
 thegn-right.' Then, again, some prelate or some earl will 
 perhaps obtain the commendation of all the villagers, and his 
 hold over the village will be tightened by a grant of sake and 
 soke, though, if we may draw inferences from Cambridgeshire, 
 this seems to have happened rarely, for the sokemen of a village 
 have often shown a marvellous disagreement among themselves 
 in their selection of lords, and seem to have chosen light- 
 heartedly between the house of Godwin and the house of 
 Leofric as if they were but voting for the yellows or the blues. 
 We fully admit that these forces were doing an important 
 work; but they were doing it slowly and it was not nearly 
 achieved when the Normans came. Nor was it neat work. It 
 tended to produce not the true and compact manerio-villar 
 arrangement, but those loose, dissipated manors which we see 
 sprawling awkwardly over the common fields of the Cambridge- 
 shire townships 2 . 
 Theories We have been endeavouring to show that the legal, social 
 
 which con- . 
 
 nect the and economic structure revealed to us by Domesday Book can 
 manor with be accounted for, even though we believe that in the seventh 
 centur y there was in England a large mass of free landowning 
 ceorls and that many villages were peopled at that time and at 
 
 1 Chron. Petrob. 166 : ' Sunt etiam in eadem scira 15 undersetes qui nullum 
 servicium faciunt nisi husbondis in quorum terra sedent.' 
 8 See above, p. 136.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 327 
 
 later times chiefly by free landowning ceorls and their slaves. 
 We have now to examine the evidence that is supposed to point 
 to a contrary conclusion and to connect the English manor of 
 the eleventh century with the Roman villa of the fifth. Two 
 questions should be distinguished from each other (1) Have 
 we any proof that during those six centuries, especially during 
 the first three of them, the type of rural economy which we 
 know as ' manorial ' was prevalent in England ? (2) Have we 
 any proof that the tillers of the soil were for the more part 
 slaves or unfree men ? We will move backwards from Domes- 
 day Book. 
 
 In the first place reliance has been placed on the document The Recti- 
 known as Rectitudines Singularum Personarum 1 . Of the origin 
 of this we know nothing ; we can not say for certain that it is 
 many years older than the Norman Conquest. Apparently it is 
 the statement of one who is concerned in the management of 
 great estates and is desirous of imparting his knowledge to 
 others. It first sets forth the right of the thegn. He is worthy 
 of the right given to him by his book. He must do three things 
 in respect of his land, namely, fyrdfare, burh-bote and bridge- 
 work. From many lands however 'a more ample landright 
 arises at the king's ban': that is to say, the thegn is subject to 
 other burdens, such as making a deer-hedge at the king's ham, 
 providing warships 2 and sea- ward and head-ward and fyrd-ward, 
 and almsfee and church-scot and many other things. Then we 
 hear of the right of the geneat It varies from place to place. 
 In some places he must pay rent (land-gafol) and grass-swine 
 yearly, and ride and carry and lead loads, work and support his 
 lord 3 , and reap and mow and hew the deer-hedge and keep it 
 up, build and hedge the burh and make new roads for the t&n, 
 pay church-scot and almsfee, keep head-ward and horse-ward, 
 go errands far and near wherever he is directed. Next we hear 
 of the cottier's services. He works one day a week and three 
 days in harvest-time. He ought not to pay rent. He ought to 
 have five acres more or less. He pays hearth-penny on Holy 
 
 1 Schmid, App. III. p. 370 ; Seebohm, English Village Community, p. 129. 
 See also Liebennann's article in Anglia, ix. 251, where the Gerefa, which seems 
 to be a second part of this document, is printed. 
 
 2 We here adopt Schmid's conjecture : ' and scorp to MSscipe [corr. 
 fyrdscipe].' 
 
 8 Ibid. : ' and hlaford feormian,' and supply a feorm (firma) for his lord.
 
 328 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Thursday as every free man should. He ' defends ' or 
 'acquits' his lord's inland when there is a summons for sea- 
 ward or for the king's deer-hedge or the like, as befits him, 
 and pays church-scot at Martinmas. Then we have a long 
 statement as to the services of the gebur. In some places they 
 are heavy, in others light. On some land he must work two 
 days a week and three days at harvest by way of week-work. 
 Besides this there is rent to be paid in money and kind. There 
 is ploughing to be done and there are boon-works. He has to 
 feed dogs- and find bread for the swine-herd. His beasts must 
 lie 1 in his lord's fold from Martinmas to Easter. On the land 
 where this custom prevails the gebtir receives by way of outfit 
 two oxen and one cow and six sheep and seven sown acres upon 
 his yard-land. After the first year he is to do his services in 
 full and he is to receive his working tools and the furniture for 
 his house. We then hear of the special duties and rights of the 
 bee-keeper, the swine-herd, the follower, the sower, ox-herd, 
 shepherd, beadle, woodward, hayward and so forth. 
 Discus- Now, according to our reading of this document, there stand 
 
 sion of the 
 
 Bectitu- below the thegn, but above the serfs (of whom but few words 
 are said 2 ) three classes of men there is the geneat, there is the 
 gebur and there is the cotsetla. The boor and the cottier are 
 free men; the cottier pays his hearth-penny, that is his 
 Romescot, his Peter's-penny, on Holy Thursday as every free 
 man does; but both boor and cottier do week-work. On the 
 other hand the geneat does no week-work. He pays a rent, he 
 pays a grass-swine (that is to say he gives a pig or pigs in return 
 for his pasture rights), he rides, he carries, he goes errands, he 
 discharges the forinsec service due from the manor, and he is 
 under a general obligation to do whatever his lord commands. 
 He bears a name which has originally been an honourable name ; 
 he is his lord's ' fellow 3 .' His services strikingly resemble those 
 which S l . Oswald exacted from his ministri, his equites, his 
 milites*. Almost every word that is said of the geneat is true 
 of those very substantial persons who took land-loans from the 
 
 1 The text says that he must lie at his lord's fold ; but probably it refers to 
 the socafaldae. See above, p. 76. 
 
 2 Of the serfs we hear (c. 8, 9) what they are to receive, but not what they 
 ought to do ; their services are unlimited. 
 
 3 Schmid, p. 596 : Maurer, K. U. ii. 405. 
 
 4 See above, p. 305, also Maurer, K. U. ii. 406.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 329 
 
 church of Worcester. The geneat (who becomes a villanus in 
 the Latin version of our document that was made by a Norman 
 clerk of Henry I.'s reign) is a riding-man, radman, radcniht, 
 with a horse, a very different being from the villanus of the 
 thirteenth century 1 . On the other hand, in the gebtir of this 
 document we may see the .burns, who is also the colibertus of 
 Domesday Book 2 , and he certainly is in a very dependent 
 position, for his lord provides him with cattle, with instruments 
 of husbandry, even with the scanty furniture of his house. We 
 dare not indeed argue from this text that the villanus of 
 Domesday Book does not owe week-work, for the writer who 
 rendered geneat by villanus was quite unable to understand 
 many parts of the document that he was translating 3 ; but when 
 we place the Rectitudines by the side of the survey we can 
 hardly avoid the belief that the extremely dependent gebur of 
 the former is represented, not by the villanus, but by the burus 
 or colibertus of the latter. However, over and over again the 
 author of the Rectitudines has protested that customs vary. 
 He will lay down no general rule; he does but know what 
 goes on in certain places 4 . 
 
 In 956 King Eadwig gave to Bath Abbey thirty manses at he Tiden- 
 
 1 He is to 'work' for his lord; but then see how Oswald speaks of his 
 knights and radmen : 'semper illius...dominatui et voluntati...cum omni 
 humilitate et subiectione subditi fiant secundum ipsius voluntatem.' Cf. D. B. i. 
 172 b: ' deserviebat sicut episcopus volebat'...'tenuit ad servitium quod 
 episcopus voluit.' The translator who turned him into a villanus was 
 capable of turning the king's geneat of Ine's law into a colonus, a colonus with a 
 wergild of 1200 shillings ! See Schmid, p. 29. 
 
 2 See above, p. 36. 
 
 3 See e.g. cap. i., where it is pretty clear that he can not translate scorp. So 
 in the Latin version of Edgar n. c. 1 he renders geneatland by terra 
 villanorum. But about such a matter as this the testimony of the Quadripar- 
 titus is of no value. See Liebermann, Gerefa, Anglia, ix. 258. 
 
 4 Mr Seebohm, p. 130, commits what seems to me the mistake of saying 
 that the cottiers and boors are ' various classes of geneats.' To my thinking a 
 great contrast is drawn between the geneat and the gebiir both in this document 
 and in the account of Tidenham. So in Edgar n. c. 1 the contrast is between 
 laud which the great man has in hand and land which he has let to his 
 'fellows,' his equites and ministri. See Eonrad Maurer, K. U. ii. 405-6. 
 Such words as gebiir and burus are obviously very loose words and it is likely 
 that many a man who answered to the description of the gebur given by the Rec- 
 titudines appears in Domesday Book, which in general cares only about fiscal 
 distinctions, as a villanus or bordarius. But we have clear proof that the 
 surveyors saw a class of buri (=coliberti) who were distinct from the ordinary 
 villani. See above, p. 36.
 
 330 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Tidenhara in Gloucestershire 1 . A cartulary compiled in the 
 twelfth century contains a copy of his gift, and remote from 
 this it contains a statement of the services due from the men of 
 Tideiiham. It is possible, but unlikely, that this statement 
 represents the state of affairs that existed at the moment when 
 the minster received the gift; to ajl appearance it belongs to 
 a later date 2 . It begins by stating that at Tidenham there are 
 30 hides, 9 of inland and 21 'gesettes landes,' that is 9 hides 
 of demesne and 21 hides of land set to tenants. Then after an 
 account of the fisheries, which were of importance, it tells us of 
 the services due from the geneat and from the gebur. The 
 geneat shall work as well on the land as off the land, whichever 
 ' he is bid, and ride and carry and lead loads and drive droves 
 'and do many other things.' The gebur must do week- work, 
 of which some particulars are stated, and he also must pay rent 
 in money and in kind. Here again a well marked line is drawn 
 between the geneat and the gebur. Here again the geneat, like 
 the cniht or minister of Oswaldslaw, is under a very general 
 obligation of obedience to his lord ; but he is a riding man 
 and there is nothing whatever to show that he is habitually 
 employed in agricultural labour upon his lord's demesne. As 
 to the gebur, he has to work hard enough day by day, and week 
 by week, though of his legal status we are told no word. 
 The stoke In a Winchester cartulary, ' a cartulary of the lowest possible 
 character,' there stands what purports to be a copy of the 
 charter whereby in the year 900 Edward the Elder gave to the 
 church of Winchester 10 manentes of land ' set Stoce be Hysse- 
 burnan' together with all the men who were thereon at the 
 time of Alfred's death and all the men who were 'set Hisse- 
 burna' at the same period. Edward, we are told, acquired the 
 land 'set Stoce' in exchange for land 'set Ceolseldene' and 'aet 
 Sweoresholte [Sparsholt].' At the end of the would-be charter 
 stand the names of its witnesses. Then follows in English (but 
 hardly the English of the year 900) a statement of the services 
 
 1 K. 452 (ii. 327). See also Two Chartularies of Bath Abbey (Somerset 
 Eecord Society), pp. 6, 18, 19. 
 
 2 K. iii. 449; E. 375: Seebohm, 148. Both documents come from MS. 
 C.C.C. Camb. cxi. The conveyance is on f. 57, the statement of services on 
 f. 73. The statement of services immediately precedes the lease of Tidenham 
 to Stigand, K. 822 (iv. 171). Thus we have really better reason for referring 
 that statement to the very eve of the Norman Conquest than to 956. See also 
 Kemble, Saxons, i. 321, and Maurer, K. U. ii. 406. 
 
 case.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 331 
 
 which the ceorls shall do ' to Hysseburnan.' Then follow the 
 boundaries. Then the eschatocol of the charter and the list of 
 witnesses is repeated 1 . On the face of the copy are three 
 suspicious traits: (1) the modernized language, (2) the repeated 
 eschatocol, (3) the description of the services, for the like is 
 found in no other charter. This is not all. Two other docu- 
 ments in the same cartulary bear on the same transaction. By 
 the first Edward gave to the church of Winchester 50 manentes 
 !set Hysseburnan' which he had obtained by an exchange for 
 land 'set MercharnmeV By the second he gave to the church 
 of Winchester 50 manentes 'ad Hursbourne' and other 10 'ad 
 Stoke 3 .' The more carefully these three documents are ex- 
 amined, the more difficult will the critic find it to acquit the 
 Winchester monks of falsifying their 'books' and improving 
 Edward's gift. Therefore this famous statement about the 
 ceorls' services is not the least suspicious part of a highly 
 suspicious document. It is to this effect : ' From each hiivisc 
 (family or hide), at the autumnal equinox, forty pence and six 
 church mittan of ale and three sesters of loaf-wheat. In their 
 own time they shall plough three acres and sow them with their 
 own seed, and in their own time bring it [the produce of the 
 sown land] to barn. They shall pay three pounds of gafol barley 
 and mow half an acre of gafol-mead in their own time and bring 
 it to the rick ; four fothers of split gafol-wood for a shingle-rick 
 in their own time and sixteen yards of gafol-fencing in their 
 own time. And at Easter two ewes with two lambs, but two 
 young sheep may be counted for an old one; and they shall wash 
 and shear sheep in their own time. And every week they shall 
 do what work they are bid, except three weeks, one at Midwinter, 
 one at Easter and the third at the Gang Days.' Here no doubt, 
 as in the account of Tidenham, as in the Rectitudines, we see 
 what may fairly be called the manorial economy. The lord has a 
 village; he has demesne land (inland) which is cultivated for him 
 by the labour of his tenants ; these tenants pay gafol in money or 
 in kind ; some of them (the geneat of Tidenham, the geneat of 
 the Rectitudines} assist him when called upon to do so ; others 
 
 1 K. 1077 (v. 146 ; iv. 306) ; T. 143 ; Kemble, Saxons, i. 319 ; Seebohm, 160. But 
 the form of the instrument as given in the Codex Wintoniensis is best seen in 
 B. ii. 240. We have quoted above the estimate of this Codex formed by 
 Mr Haddan and Dr Stubbs (Councils, iii. 638). 
 
 a B. ii. 23a * B. ii. 239.
 
 332 England before the Conquest. 
 
 work steadily from day to day ; in many particulars the extent 
 of the work due from them is ascertained ; whether they are free 
 men, whether they are bound to the soil, whether the national 
 courts will protect them in their tenure, whether they are 
 slaves, we are not told. 
 
 inferences That such an arrangement was common in the eleventh 
 cases. century we know ; a solitary instance of it comes to us profes- 
 sedly from the first year of the tenth, and certainly from a car- 
 tulary that is full of lies. To draw general inferences from a few 
 such instances would be rash. What should we believe of ' the 
 English village of the eleventh century ' if the one village of 
 which we had any knowledge was Orwell in Cambridgeshire 1 ? 
 What should we believe of ' the English village of the thirteenth 
 century' if our only example was a village on the ancient 
 demesne ? The traces of a manorial economy that have been 
 discovered in yet remo.ter times are few, slight and dubious. A 
 passage in the laws of Ine 2 seems to prove that there were men 
 who had let out small quantities of land, ' a yard or more, 1 to 
 cultivators at rents and who were wrongfully endeavouring to 
 get from their lessees work as well as gafol. .The same law 
 may prove the highly probable proposition that some men had 
 taken ' loans ' of manses and were paying for them, not only by 
 gafol, but by work done on the lord's land. That already in 
 Ine's day there were many free men who were needy and had 
 lords above them, that already the state was beginning to 
 consecrate the relation between lord and man as a security for 
 the peace and a protection against crime is undoubted 3 . But 
 this does not bring us very near to the Roman villa. Nor shall 
 we see a villa wherever the dooms or the land-books make 
 mention of a hdm or a tun, for the meanest ceorl may have a 
 tarn and will probably have a home of his own 4 . 
 
 The villa It is said that the England of Bede's day was full of villae 
 and that Bede calls the same place now villa and now vicus 6 . 
 
 VICUS. 
 
 1 See above, p. 129. 2 Ine, 67. 
 
 8 Ine, 39. The man who leaves his lord (not his lord's land, but his lord) 
 without license, or steals himself away into another shire, is to pay 60 shillings 
 (no trivial sum) to his lord. 
 
 4 Surely the law, Hloth. and Bad. c. 15, which begins ' If a man receive a 
 guest three nights in his own home (an his agenum hame)' is not directed 
 only against the lords of manors. See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen, ii. 
 123. 
 
 6 Ashley, Translation of Fustel de Coulanges, Origin of Property, p. xvi.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 333 
 
 But before we enter on any argument about the use of such 
 words, we ought first to remember that neither Bede nor the 
 scribes of the land-books were trained philologists. London is 
 a villa 1 -, but it is also a civitas, urbs, oppidum, vicus, a wic, a 
 tun, a burh, and a port. When we see such words as these 
 used promiscuously we must lay but little stress upon the 
 occurrence of a particular term in a particular case. Suppose 
 for a moment that in England there were many villages full of 
 free landholders : what should they be called in Latin ? They 
 should, it is replied, be called vici and they should not be called 
 villae, for a villa is an estate. But it is part of the case of 
 those who have used this argument that at the time of the 
 barbarian invasions the Roman world was full of villae, so full 
 that every or almost every vicus was situated on and formed part 
 of a villa*. We are therefore exacting a good deal from Bede, 
 from a man who learnt his Latin in school, if we require him to 
 be ever mindful of this nice distinction. We are saying to him : 
 ' True it is that a knot of neighbouring houses with the appur- 
 tenant lands is habitually called a villa ; but then this word 
 introduces the notion of ownership ; the villa is an unit in a 
 system of property law, and, if your village is not also an estate, 
 a praedium, then you should call it vicus and not villa.' To 
 this we must add that, while the word villa did not until after 
 the Norman Conquest force its way into English speech, 
 the word vicus became an English word at a very early 
 period 8 . It became our word wick and it became part of a 
 very large number of place-names 4 . The Domesday surveyors 
 found herdwicks and berewicJcs in many parts of the country 8 . 
 
 1 K. 220 (i. 280) : ' ad regalem villam Lundoniae perveniens. ' 
 8 Fustel de Coulanges, L'Alleu, ch. vi. There is much to be said on the 
 other side ; see Flach, Les origines de 1'ancienne France, ii. pp. 47-62. As to 
 the villa of the Lex Salica, see Blumenstok, Entstelmng des deutschen 
 Immobiliareigenthums, i. 219 ff. 
 
 3 The suggestion that villa appears in some of our place-names as the termi- 
 nation -well runs counter, so Mr Stevenson tells me, to rules of phonology. 
 
 4 See Bosworth's Dictionary; Kemble, Cod. Dipl. iii. p. xli. In the 
 translation of S*. Mark viii. 23, 26 both wic and tun are used as equivalents for 
 vicus : 'eduxit eum extra vicum...et si in vicum introieris' = 'and laedde hine 
 
 butan J>a wic and 'Seah >u on tun ga.' Even in France the word vicus 
 
 becomes part of numerous place-names: see Flach, op. cit. i. p. 53. 
 
 5 There is something curious about the use made of wick. It is often used 
 to distinguish a hamlet or small cluster of houses separate from the main 
 village. Thus in the parish of X we shall find X-wick. The berewicks and
 
 334 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Moreover we can see that in the Latin documents villa is used 
 in the loosest manner. London is a villa ; but a single house, a 
 single ' haw/ in the city of Canterbury or the city of Rochester 
 is a villa 1 . 
 
 Notices of If we carefully attend to the wording of the land-books, we 
 tbeThar" 1 shall find the manorial economy far more visible in the later 
 ters - than in the earlier of them. The Confessor gives to Westminster 
 'Sa cotlife Perscore and Dorhurste' with all their lands and 
 all their berewicks 2 . He gives the cotlif Eversley and all 
 things of right belonging thereto, with church and mill, with 
 wood and field, with meadow and heath, with water and with 
 moor 3 . From 998 we have a gift of a ' heafod-botl,' a capital 
 mansion, we may say, and its appurtenances 4 . In earlier times 
 we may sometimes find that the subject matter of the royal 
 gift is spoken of as forming a single unit ; it is a villa, or it is a 
 vicus. But rarely is the thing that is given called a villa 
 except when the thing that is given is just a single hide 5 . 
 If a charter freely disposes of several villae, meaning thereby 
 villages, we shall probably find some other reasons for assigning 
 that charter, whatever date it may bear, to the eleventh, the 
 twelfth or a yet later century 6 . Sometimes in old books the 
 king will say that he is giving a vicus, a vicus of five or eight 
 or ten tributarii ' '. Much more frequently he will not speak 
 thus ; he will not speak as though the subject matter of his gift 
 had a physical unity and individuality. ' I give,' he will say, ' so 
 
 herdwicks of D. B. (see above, p. 114) seem to be small clusters. On the other 
 hand London is a wic; Hloth. and Bad. 16. 
 
 1 K. 1041 (v. 88): 'in Dorobernia etiam civitate unam villain donabo ad 
 quam pertinet quinque iugera terrae et duo prata.' K. 276 (ii. 57) : ' dabo unam 
 villam, quod nos Saxonice an haga dicimus.' K. 259 (ii. 26): 'villam unam ab 
 orientale parte muri Doroverniae civitatis. ' 
 
 2 K. 829 (iv. 191). 
 
 8 K. 845 (iv. 204). In a passage which has been interpolated into one copy 
 
 of the A.-S. Chronicle (Thorpe, p. 220) we read 'And se biscop bohte t>a feala 
 
 cotlif set se king.' 
 
 4 Crawford Charters, pp. 22, 125; K. 1293 (vi. 138). 
 
 5 Thus K. 109 (i. 133): 'villam unam...quae iam ad Quenegatum urbis 
 Dorovernensis in foro posita est.' It is not denied that in some quite early 
 charters a king gives a villa or villula, e.g. K. 209 (i. 264) : ' Heallinga'n cum 
 villulis suis'; see also K. 140 (i. 169), in which vi.llula and viculus are used as 
 synonyms. 
 
 6 A good example is that abominable forgery K. 984 (v. 2), Wulf here's 
 charter for Peterborough. 
 
 7 For example, K. 117-8-20 (i. 144-7).
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 335 
 
 many manentes, tributarii, or casati in the place known as X,' 
 or 'I give a certain part of my land, to wit, that of so many 
 'manentes, tributarii, or casati at the spot which men call Y' 
 Such language does not suggest that the manses thus given are 
 subservient to one dominant and dominical manse or manor ; it 
 is very unlike the language of the twelfth century 1 . Such 
 words as fundus and praedium are conspicuously absent, and 
 ager usually means but a small piece of land, an acre. Foreign 
 precedents would have suggested that when an estate was to be 
 conveyed it should be conveyed cum, servis et ancillis, or cum 
 mancipiis et accolabus; such clauses are rare in our English 
 land-books 8 . 
 
 But, it will be said, at all events the king is giving persons, The 
 
 11 i j u * * --L , andthe 
 
 men, as well as land ; he is giving manentes, casati, tributarii. manms. 
 
 What is more these are foreign words and they describe the 
 'semi-servile' occupants of the soil. Now it is true that 
 sometimes he gives manentes, casati, tributarii, though more 
 often he gives either so many manses (mansas), or ' the land of 
 so many manentes, casati, tributarii,' while in Kent he gives 
 plough-lands or sullungs. But we think it plain that in 
 England these Latin words were used simply to describe the 
 extent, or rather the rateable extent, of land, without much 
 reference to the number or the quality of its occupants. 
 The terra unius manentis, even the unus casatus when that 
 is the subject of a conveyance, is like Bede's terra unius 
 familiae, the unit known to Englishmen as the hiwisc, or hide 3 . 
 Hence it is that reference is so often made to repute and 
 estimation. ' I give,' says Egbert, ' a certain portion of land to 
 
 1 One of the earliest instances of what looks like manorial organization will 
 be found in K. 201 (i. 253) ; B. i. 485. In 814 Cenwulf gives to the Abp. of 
 Canterbury a plough-land : * et hoc aratrum cum omnibus utensilibus bonis ad 
 mansionem in grafon sea [Graveney] aBternaliter concessum est.' 
 
 a A.D. 880, K. 311 (ii. 107): 'Insuper etiam huic donationi in augmentum 
 sex homines, qui prius pertinebant ad villam regiam in Beonsinctune, cum 
 omni prole stirpeque eorum ad eandem conscripsimus aecclesiam.' A.D. 889, 
 K. 315 (ii. 117): 'cum hominibus ad illam pertinentibus.' A.D. 962, K. 1239 
 
 {vi. 49): 'vineam cum vinitoribus.' In late documents penned in English it 
 
 is common to qpnvey land ' with meat and with man.' Instances are collected 
 in Crawford Charters, 127. 
 
 3 Therefore we sometimes meet with the form cassata, while martens is 
 
 treated as a feminine word; K. i. 301; B. i. 573: 'has x. manentes 
 
 dividendas dimisit.' So Asser (ed. Camden, p. 4) says that ^Ethelwulf ordered 
 that one poor man should be fed and clothed ' per onmein hereditariam terrain 
 suam semper in x. manentibus.'
 
 336 England before the Conquest. 
 
 the amount, as I estimate, of five casati' or (it may be) ' of 
 twenty manentex 1 ' Nothing can be easier than to count 
 whether there be four, five, or six ' semi-servile ' households on 
 a given piece of land. Far easier would it be to do this than to 
 do what is habitually done, namely, to set forth the boundaries 
 of the land with laborious precision. But there is already an 
 element of estimation, of appreciation, in these units. Already 
 they are units in a system of taxation. Hence also it is that 
 so very frequently what the king gives is just exactly five, or 
 some multiple of five, of these units 2 . Rating is a rough 
 process; five and ten are pleasant numbers. 
 
 The hide. But against the argument which would see in every con- 
 veyance of ' five manentes or of ' the land of five casati ' a 
 conveyance of five semi-servile households with their land we 
 have another objection to urge. Here we will state it briefly ; 
 a fuller statement would take us far away from our present 
 theme. If the land-books of the churches are to lead up to 
 Domesday Book, the unit conveyed as terra unius manentis 
 (casati, tributarii) is a hide with some 120 acres of arable land, 
 the land appropriate to a plough-team of eight oxen. Had the 
 semi-servile manens as a general rule 120 arable acres, a plough - 
 team of eight oxen ? We do not believe it, and those who have 
 most strongly insisted on the servility or ' semi-servility ' of the 
 tillers of the soil, do not believe it. They would give the gebtir 
 but a quarter of a hide and but two beasts of the plough. That 
 being so, it should be common ground that the terra unius 
 manentis (casati, tributarii) can not be construed as 'the land 
 occupied by one semi- servile tenant.' An explanation of the 
 fact that land is conveyed by reference to units so large as the 
 hide of 120 acres and that these units are spoken of as though 
 each household would normally have one of them must be 
 sought elsewhere ; we can not here pause to find it. But in any 
 
 1 K. 1033 (v. 73): 'aliquam portionem terrae in modum videlicet ut 
 
 autumo v. cassatorum.' K. 1308 (v. 83): 'aliquam portionem terrae in 
 
 modum videlicet ut autumo xx. manentium.' K. 565 (iii. 64): 'quoddam 
 ruris clima sub aestimatione decem cassatorum.' K. 573 (iii. 87): 'rum 
 quandam particulam, denis ab accolis aestimatam mansiunculis.' K. 602 (iii. 
 146) : ' quoddam rus x. videlicet mansarum quantitate taxatum.' 
 
 2 Let us open the Cod. Dipl. at the beginning of Edmund's reign (ii. 218). 
 The number of manses given in twenty-five consecutive charters is as 
 follows : 10, 20, 10, 10, 9, 10, 15, 7, 8, 20, 10, 3, 5, 20, 30, 3, 6, 5, 3, 7, 20, 20, 
 5, 8, 5.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 337 
 
 case these foreign terms should give us little trouble. When 
 he hears such words as manens, casatus, tributarius, the man 
 who has lived in Gaul may hear some undertone of servility or 
 ' semi-servility.' We do not discuss this matter ; it may be so. 
 But look at the words themselves, what do they primarily 
 mean ? A manens is one who dwells upon land, a casatus is 
 one to whom a casa has been allotted, a tributarius pays 
 tributum ; the free English landowner pays a tributum to the 
 king 1 . We must make the best we can of a foreign, an 
 inappropriate tongue, and the best that we make is often 
 very bad, especially when we have a taste for fine writing. 
 And so England is full of villas which are Roman and satraps 
 who, no doubt, are Persian. 
 
 And whence, we must ask, comes that system of intermixed The strip- 
 ' strip-holding ' that we find in our English fields ? Who laid and the 
 out those fields ? The obvious answer is that they were laid Vllla - 
 out by men who would sacrifice economy and efficiency at the 
 shrine of equality. Each manse is to have the same number of 
 strips ; the strips of one manse must be neither better nor 
 worse than those of its neighbour and therefore must be 
 scattered abroad over the whole territory of the village. That 
 this system was not invented by men who owned large con- 
 tinuous tracts is plain. No such owner would for one moment 
 dream of cutting up his land in this ridiculous fashion, and of 
 reserving for his own manse, not a ring-fenced demesne, but 
 strips lying "here and there, 'hide-meal and acre-meal' among 
 the strips of his serfs. That is not the theory. No one 
 supposes that a Roman landowner whose hands were free 
 allowed the soil of his villa to be parcelled out in accordance 
 with this wasteful, cumbrous, barbarous plan. So his hands 
 must not be free ; the soil of which he becomes the owner must 
 already be plotted out in strips, and these strips must be so 
 tightly bound up into manses, that he scruples to overturn an 
 existing arrangement, and contents himself with appropriating 
 a few of the manses for his own use and compelling the 
 occupants of the others to labour for him and pay him rents. 
 In this there is nothing impossible ; but we have only deferred, 
 not solved the problem. Who laid out our English fields and 
 
 1 It seems almost necessary to protest that to-day our landowners are not 
 semi-servile occupants of the soil, though they pay land taxes, house taxes, 
 income taxes and rates innumerable. 
 
 M. 22
 
 338 England before the Conquest. 
 
 tied the strips into manses ? That this work was done by the 
 Britons before they were brought under the Roman yoke does 
 not seem very probable. Celtic rural economy, whenever it has 
 had a chance of unfettered development, has made for results 
 far other than those that are recorded by the larger half of the 
 map of England. If throughout England the Romans found 
 so tough a system of intermixed manses that, despite all its 
 absurdities, they could not but spare it, then the Britons who 
 dwelt in the land that was to be English were many centuries 
 in advance of the Britons who dwelt in the land that was to be 
 Welsh. To eke out this hypothesis another must be introduced. 
 The Teutonic invaders of Britain must be brought from some 
 manorialized province. So, after all, the model of the English 
 field may have been ' made in Germany.' Somehow or another 
 it was made in South Germany by semi-servile people, whose 
 semi-servility was such a half-and-half affair that they could 
 not be prevented from sacrificing every interest of their lords 
 at the shrine of equality 1 . 
 
 The lords We are far from saying that wherever there is strip-holding, 
 strips. there liberty and equality have once reigned 2 . It is very possible 
 that where a barbarian chieftain obtained a ring-fenced allot- 
 ment of conquered soil, he sometimes divided it into scattered 
 strips which he parcelled out among his unfree dependants. 
 But if he did this, he did it because his only idea of agriculture 
 was derived from a village formed by men who were free and 
 equal. The maintenance of a system of intermixed strip-holding 
 may be due to seignorial power, and a great deal of the rigidity 
 of the agrarian arrangements that we see in the England of the 
 thirteenth century may be due to the same cause. Seignorial 
 power was not, at least in origin, absolute ownership. It had 
 to make the best it could of an existing system. For the 
 lord's purposes that system was at its best when it was rigid 
 and no tenement was partible. But assuredly this plan was 
 not originally invented by great proprietors who were seeking 
 to get the most they could out of their land, their slaves and 
 their capital. 
 
 1 I can not but think that Fustel de Coulanges knew his business 
 thoroughly well, and that if the German is to be taught his proper and 
 insignificant place, the less that is said of intermixed 'strip-holding' the 
 better, though to ignore it utterly was, even in France, a bold course. 
 
 8 Meitzen, op. cit. i. 431-41.
 
 The Growth of Seignorial Power. 339 
 
 That we have not been denying the existence of slavery will The ceori 
 be plain. Indeed we may strongly suspect that the men who s i ave . 
 parcelled out our fields were for the more part slave-owners, 
 though slave-owners in a very small way. To say nothing of 
 Welshmen, there was quite enough inter-tribal warfare to 
 supply the ceorl with a captive. But it was not for the sake of 
 slaves or serfs or 'semi-servile' folk that the system of intermixed 
 strips was introduced. 
 
 Lastly, the theory which would derive the English manor The comii- 
 from the Roman villa must face the grave problem presented to Danelaw, 
 it by the account which Domesday Book, when speaking of the 
 Confessor's day, gives of the eastern and northern counties, of a 
 large quarter of all England, and of just that part of England 
 which was populous. We see swarms of men who are free men 
 but who are subject, they and their land, to various modes and 
 degrees of seignorial power. The modes are many, the degrees 
 are gentle. Personal, tenurial, justiciary threads are woven into 
 a web that bewilders us. Here we see the work of commenda- 
 tion, there the work of the land-loan, and there again what 
 comes of grants of sake and soke. We see the formation of 
 manors taking place under our eyes, and as yet the process 
 is by no means perfect. In village after village there is nothing 
 that our economic historians would consent to call a manor. 
 Now, no doubt, the difference between the east and the west is, 
 at least in part, due to Danish invasions and Danish settle- 
 ments. But how shall we picture to ourselves the action of the 
 Danes ? Is it to be supposed that they found the Anglo-Roman 
 manor-villa a prevalent and prosperous institution, that they 
 destroyed it and put something else in its place, put in its place 
 the village of free peasants -who could ' go with their land ' to 
 what lord they pleased ? If so, then we have to face the 
 question why these heathen Danes acted in a manner so different 
 from that in which their predecessors, the heathen Angles and 
 Saxons, had acted. Surely one part of the explanation is that 
 the inswarming barbarians checked the manorializing process 
 that was steadily at work in Wessex and Mercia. We do not 
 say that this is the whole explanation. We have seen how free 
 were many of the Cambridgeshire villages and have little 
 reason to believe that they had been settled by Danes 1 . The 
 west country is the country to which we shall naturally look for 
 
 1 See above, p. 139. 
 
 222
 
 340 England before the Conquest. 
 
 the most abundant traces of the Wealh theow. There it is that 
 we find numerous servi, and there that we find rather trevs than 
 villages. But also we have hardly a single land-book of early 
 date which deals with any part of the territory that became the 
 Danelaw. Many a book the Danes may have burnt when they 
 sacked the monasteries. They sacked the monasteries, burnt 
 the books and freed the land. But still we may doubt whether 
 the practice of booking lands to the churches had gone far in 
 East Anglia and the adjacent shires when they were once more 
 overwhelmed by barbarism. No doubt in course of time the 
 churches of the east became rich : Ely and St Edmunds, Peter- 
 borough and Ramsey, Croyland and Thorney. But, even when 
 supplemented by legend and forgery, their titles to wide terri- 
 tories can seldom be compared for antiquity to the titles that 
 might have been pleaded by the churches of Kent and Wessex and 
 the Severn Valley. Richly endowed churches mean a subjected 
 peasantry. And thus we may say of the Danes that if in a 
 certain, sense they freed the districts which they conquered, they 
 in the same sense enslaved the rest of England. Year by year 
 Wessex and Mercia had to strain every nerve in order to repel 
 the pagans, to fit out fleets, build burgs and keep armies always 
 in the field. The peasant must in the end bear the cost of this 
 exhausting struggle. Meanwhile in the north and the east the 
 process that makes manors has been interrupted ; it must be 
 begun once more. It was accomplished by men some of whom 
 had Scandinavian blood in their veins, but who were not 
 heathens, not barbarians : it was accomplished by Normans 
 steeped in Frankish feudalism. 
 
 6. The Village Community. 
 
 The village We have argued for an England in which there were many 
 nity. free villages. It remains for us to say a word of the doctrines 
 which would fill England with free landowning village com- 
 munities. Here we enter a misty region where arguments 
 suggested by what are thought to be ' survivals ' and inferences 
 drawn from other climes or other ages take the place of docu- 
 ments. We are among guesses and little has as yet been proved. 
 Thepopn- A popular theory teaches us that land belonged to com- 
 eory ' munities before it belonged to individuals. This theory has the
 
 The Village Community. 341 
 
 great merit of being vague and elastic; but, as it seems to 
 think itself precise, and probably owes some of its popularity 
 to its pretence of precision, we feel it our duty to point out 
 to it its real merit, its vague elasticity. 
 
 It apparently attributes the ownership of land to coin- Co-owner- 
 m unities. It contrasts communities with individuals. In so ownership 
 doing it seems to hint, and yet to be afraid of saying, that land 
 was owned by corporations before it was owned by men. The 
 hesitation we can understand. No one who has paid any 
 attention to the history of law is likely to maintain with a grave 
 face that the ownership of land was attributed to fictitious 
 persons before it was attributed to men. But if we abandon 
 ownership by corporations and place in its stead co-ownership, 
 then we seem to be making an unfortunate use of words if we 
 say that land belonged to communities before it belonged to 
 individuals. Co-ownership is ownership by individuals. When 
 at the present day an English landowner dies and his land 
 descends to his ten daughters, it is owned by individuals, by 
 ten individuals. If each of these ten ladies died intestate 
 leaving ten daughters, the land would still be owned by indivi- 
 duals, by a hundred individuals. 
 
 The distinction that modern law draws between the land- 'Communi- 
 owning corporation and the group of co-owners is as sharp as owners, 
 any distinction can be. It will be daily brought home to any 
 one who takes an active share in the management of the affairs 
 of a corporation, for example, a small college which has a 
 master, six fellows and eight scholars. A conveyance of land 
 to the college and a conveyance of land to these fifteen men 
 would have utterly different effects. A corporation may be 
 deep in debt while none of its members owes a farthing. Now 
 we may suspect, and not without warrant, that in a remote past 
 these two very different notions, namely that of land owned by 
 a corporation and that of land owned by a group of co-owners, 
 were intimately blent in some much vaguer notion that was 
 neither exactly the one nor exactly the other. We may suspect 
 that could we examine the conduct of certain men who lived 
 long ago we should be sorely puzzled to say whether they were 
 behaving as the co-owners of a tract of land or as the members 
 of a corporation which was its owner. But to fashion for 
 ourselves any clear and stable notion of a tertium quid that is 
 neither corporate ownership nor co-ownership, but partly the
 
 342 England before the Conquest. 
 
 one and partly the other, seems impossible 1 . Therefore if, in 
 accordance with the popular theory, we attribute the ownership 
 of lands to 'communities,' we ought to add that we do not 
 attribute it to corporations and that we are fully aware that 
 co-ownership can not be sharply contrasted with ownership by 
 individuals. 
 Possession Also since we are api to fall into the trick of talking about 
 
 and owner- i i , , , 
 
 ship. possession when we mean ownership or proprietary right, we 
 need not perhaps ask pardon for the remark that land owned 
 by a group of three joint tenants rnay be possessed in many 
 different ways. The three may be jointly possessing the whole; 
 each may be severally possessing a physically divided third ; 
 the whole may be possessed by one of them or by some fourth 
 person ; the possession may be rightful or wrongful. 
 
 But there is a graver question that must be raised. When 
 we say that land belonged to communities before it belonged 
 to individuals, are we really speaking of ownership or of some- 
 thing else ? 
 
 Ownership At the present day no two legal ideas seem more distinct 
 vernmental from each other than that of governmental power and that of 
 power. proprietary right. The 'sovereign' of Great Britain (be the 
 sovereignty where it may) is not the owner of Great Britain, 
 and if we still say that all land is ' held of ' the king, we know 
 that the abolition of this antique dogma, this caput mortuum, 
 might be easily accomplished without any perceptible revolu- 
 tion in the practical rules of English law. A landowner in the 
 United States does not 'hold of the State or the people or the 
 government of the State. The ' eminent domain ' of the State 
 is neither ownership nor any mode of ownership. Further, 
 we conceive that the sovereign person or sovereign body can, 
 without claiming any ownership in the soil, place many restric- 
 tions on the use that an owner may make of his land. A law 
 may prohibit owners from building on certain lands: those 
 lands are still their lands. Again, the supposed law may be not 
 a negative but a positive rule ; it may require that the 
 owners of certain lands shall build upon them, or shall till them, 
 or shall keep them as pasture 2 : still neither state nor sovereign 
 
 1 This seems to me the net outcome of the long and interesting controversy 
 which has divided the Germanists as to the nature of the German Genossenschaft. 
 
 2 This is no extravagant hypothesis. See e.g. Stat. 7 Hen. VIII. c. 1 Thacte 
 advoidyng pullyng downe of townes.
 
 The Village Community. 343 
 
 will be owner of those lands or have any proprietary interest in 
 them. Our law may subject certain lands to a land-tax to be 
 paid to the state in money, or to a tithe to be paid to the 
 church in kind, but the state will not and the church will not be 
 part-owner of those lands. Our state may habitually expropriate 
 owners, may take their lands from them because they are felons 
 or because their lands are wanted for the construction of rail- 
 ways. We may conceive it expropriating owners who have 
 done no wrong and yet are to have no compensation ; but until 
 the expropriation takes place the state does not own the land. 
 As with land, so with chattels. The owner of a cart may find 
 that it is impressed for the purpose of military transport 1 and 
 yet the cart is his and not the state's. 
 
 Similar powers may be exercised by persons or bodies that Ownership 
 
 ' I V xU f and the 
 
 are not sovereign, tor example, by the governor ot a province, powers of 
 
 by a county council or a municipal corporation. Suppose that 
 the owners of land situate within a certain borough are pro- nors - 
 hibited by a by-law from placing on their soil any buildings 
 the plans of which have not been approved by the town council. 
 Carry this supposition further : suppose that the town council 
 is a 'folk-moot' which every inhabitant of the borough may 
 attend. Still, according to our thinking, there would here be 
 no communal ownership and no division of ownership between 
 individuals and a corporation. If we thought it well to say 
 that in such a case the community would have some kind of 
 ' eminent domain ' over the land of individuals, we should have 
 to add that this kind of eminent domain was not a proprietary 
 right, but merely governmental power, a power of making general 
 rules and issuing particular commands. Nor would the case 
 be altered if the expressed object of such rules and commands 
 was the interest, it may even be the pecuniary interest, of the 
 men of the town. The erection of buildings may be controlled 
 in order that the town may be wholesome and sightly, or we 
 may conceive that landowners in the suburbs are compelled 
 to keep their land as market-gardens or as dairy-farms in 
 order that vegetables or milk may be cheap : for all this the 
 town council or community of townsfolk would have no property 
 in the land. 
 
 But though this be so, we can not doubt that could we Evolution 
 trace back these ideas to their origin, we should come to a reigntyaud 
 1 See Army Act, 1881, 44 and 45 Vic. o. 58, sec. 115. ownership.
 
 344 England before the Conquest. 
 
 time when they were hardly distinct from each other. The 
 language of our medieval law tells us that this is so. The one 
 word dominium has to cover both proprietary rights and many 
 kinds of political power ; it stands for ownership, lordship, 
 sovereignty, suzerainty. The power that Edward I. wields 
 over all England, the power that he claims over all Scotland, 
 all Gascony, the right that he has in his palace of Westminster, 
 the right that he has in his war-horse, all these are but modes 
 of dominium. Then we imagine a barbarous horde invading a 
 country, putting its inhabitants to the sword and defending it 
 against all comers. Doubtless in some sort the land is its land. 
 But in what sort ? In the sort in which Queen Victoria or the 
 British nation has lands in every quarter of the globe, the sort 
 in which all France belongs to the French Republic, or the sort 
 in which Blackacre is the land of John Styles ? Have the 
 barbarians themselves answered this question ? Have they 
 asked it 1 ? 
 
 Communal Now if we are going to confuse sovereignty with ownership, 
 imperium with dominium, political power with proprietary right, 
 why then let our socialists and collectivists cease their striving 
 and sing Te Deum. Already their ideal must be attained. 
 Every inch of the soil of France, to name one instance, 
 'belongs' to the French Republic. But, if we would not 
 be guilty of this confusion, then we must be very careful 
 before we assent to the proposition that in the normal course 
 of history (if indeed in such a context history can be said to 
 have a normal course) the ownership of land by communities 
 appears before the ownership of land by individuals. Even if 
 we put aside all such criticisms as would be legal quibbles in 
 the eyes of impatient theorists, and refuse to say whether the 
 ' community ' is a mass of men, an ideal person or tertium quid, 
 we still are likely to find that the anthropologists will be against 
 us. We are now told by one of the acutest of explorers that, if 
 we leave out of account as no true case of ownership the sort of 
 
 1 Flach, Les origines de Pancienne France, ii. 45, referring to the classical 
 passages in Caesar and Tacitus, says : Ce serait un abus de mots de dire que la 
 tribu ou que le clan sont proprie"taires. La tribu (civitas) a la souverainete du 
 territoire, les clans de leurs subdivisions ont 1'usage des parts qui leur sont 
 assignees. La conception mfime de la propriete est exclue par la nature des 
 terres : Stendue de friches toujours renaissantes et en surabondance toujours : 
 superest ager.' See also Dargun, Ursprung des Eigenthums, Zeitschrift fur 
 vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, v. 55.
 
 The Village Community. 345 
 
 inchoate sovereignty which an independent tribe of hunters may 
 exercise over a piece of the world's surface, ' ownership of land 
 by individuals ' is to be found at a much lower grade in the 
 scale of civilization than that at which ' communal ownership '" 
 makes its first appearance 1 . Communal ownership, it is said, is 
 not seen until that stage is reached at which the power of the 
 chieftain is already a considerable force and the work of centra- 
 lization is progressing. With these inductions we do not 
 meddle ; but if the anthropologist will concede to the historian 
 that he need not start from communalisin as from a necessary 
 and primitive datum, a large room will be open for our guesses 
 when we speculate about the doings of a race of barbarians who 
 have come into contact with Roman ideas. Even had our 
 anthropologists at their command materials that would justify 
 them in prescribing a normal programme for the human race 
 and in decreeing that every independent portion of mankind 
 must, if it is to move at all, move through one fated series of 
 stages which may be designated as Stage A, Stage B, Stage G 
 and so forth, we still should have to face the fact that the rapidly 
 progressive groups have been just those which have not been 
 independent, which have not worked out their own salvation, 
 but have appropriated alien ideas and have thus been enabled, 
 for anything that we can tell, to leap from Stage A to Stage X 
 without passing through any intermediate stages. Our Anglo- 
 Saxon ancestors did not arrive at the alphabet, or at the Nicene 
 Creed, by traversing a long series of 'stages'; they leapt to the 
 one and to the other. 
 
 But in truth we are learning that the attempt to construct A normal 
 a normal programme for all portions of mankind is idle and stages! 
 unscientific. For one thing, the number of such portions that 
 we can with any plausibility treat as independent is very small. 
 For another, such is the complexity of human affairs and such 
 their interdependence, that we can not hope for scientific laws 
 which will formulate a sequence of stages in any one province 
 of man's activity. We can not, for instance, find a law which 
 deals only with political and neglects proprietary arrangements, 
 or a law which deals only with property and neglects religion. 
 So soon as we penetrate below the surface, each of the cases 
 whence we would induce our law begins to look extremely 
 
 1 Dargun, Ursprung des Eigenthums, Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Rechts- 
 wissensohaft, v. 1 (1884). See also Hildebraiid, Recht und Sitte, Jena, 1896.
 
 346 
 
 England "before the Conquest. 
 
 Was land 
 owned by 
 village 
 
 unique, and we shall hesitate long before we fill up the blanks 
 that occur in the history of one nation by institutions and 
 processes that have been observed in some other quarter. If 
 we are in haste to drive the men of every race past all the 
 known 'stages,' if we force our reluctant forefathers through 
 agnatic gentes and house-communities and the rest of it, our 
 normal programme for the human race is like to become a 
 grotesque assortment of odds and ends. 
 
 It is an interesting question whether in the history of our 
 own people we ought to suppose any definite 'stage' inter- 
 ties? 1 ' 1111 " mediate between the introduction of steady agriculture and 
 the ownership of land by individuals. To say the least, we 
 have no proof that among the Germans the land was con- 
 tinuously tilled before it was owned by individuals or by those 
 small groups that constituted the households. This seems 
 to be so whether we have regard to the country in which the 
 Germans had once lived as nomads or to those Celtic and 
 Roman lands which they subdued. To Gaul and to Britain 
 they seem to have brought with them the idea that the 
 cultivable land should be allotted in severalty. In some cases 
 they fitted themselves into the agrarian framework that they 
 found; in other cases they formed villages closely resembling 
 those that they had left behind them in their older home. But 
 to all appearance, even in that older home, so soon as the village 
 was formed and had ploughed lands around it, the strips into 
 which those fields were divided were owned in severalty by the 
 householders of the village. Great pains had been taken to 
 make the division equitable; each householder was to have 
 strips equal in number and in value, and to secure equivalence 
 each was to have a strip in every part of the arable territory. 
 But our evidence, though it may point to some co-operation in 
 agriculture, does not point to a communistic division of the 
 fruits 1 . Nor does it point to a time when a village council or a 
 majority of villagers conceived that it had power to re-allot the 
 
 1 In the A.-S. laws about tithes there is really no hint of communalism. 
 When a landowner has ploughed his tenth acre, he is to assign that acre, or 
 rather the crop that it will bear next year, to the church. That is all ; and 
 though it may be a rude plan, it is compatible with the most absolute 
 individualism. Mr Seebohm, Village Community, 114, however, seems to think 
 otherwise. As to the Welsh laws, we beg an enormous question if we introduce 
 them into this context. A distribution of acres when the ploughing is done is 
 just what we do not see in England.
 
 The Village Community. 347 
 
 arable strips at regular or irregular intervals 1 . On the contrary, 
 the individual's hold upon his strips developed very rapidly into 
 an inheritable and partible ownership. No doubt this ownership 
 grew more intense as time went on. It is a common remark 
 that during yet recent ages the ownership of land that is known 
 to our law has been growing more intense. This is true and 
 patent enough ; the landowner has gained powers of alienation 
 that his predecessors did not enjoy. Possibly the only owner- 
 ship of land that was known to the Lex Salica was inalienable 
 and could be inherited only by sons of the dead owner. Then 
 again, in old days a trespass that did no harm would have been 
 no trespass. ' Nominal damages ' are no primitive institution, 
 and for a long time a man may have had no action if strange 
 cattle browsed over land on which no crop of corn was ripening 2 . 
 But this growing intensity of ownership may be seen also in the 
 case of movable goods. Indeed there is a sense in which 
 English law may be said to have known a full ownership of 
 land long ages before it knew a full ownership of chattels 3 . 
 What, however, we are concerned to observe is that the 
 German village community does not seem to have resisted 
 this development of ownership or set up for itself any an- 
 tagonistic proprietary claim. It sought no more as regards 
 the arable fields than a certain power of regulating their 
 culture, and in old times the Flurzwang, the customary 
 rotation of crop and fallow, must have appeared less as the 
 outcome of human ordinance than as an unalterable arrange- 
 ment established by the nature of things in general and of 
 acre strips in particular 4 . 
 
 1 As to the famous words of Tacitus ' Agri pro numero cultorum ab 
 uniuersis in uices [al. inuicem] occupantur ' and the proposal to read uniuersis 
 vicis, one of the best suggestions yet made (Meitzen, Siedelung, iii. 586) is that 
 
 1 Tacitus wrote merely ab uniuersis occupantur, that a copyist repeated the word 
 uniuersis, and that other copyists tried to make sense of nonsense. 
 
 2 As to the state of things represented by the Lex Salica see Blumenstok, 
 Entstehung des deutschen Immobiliareigenthums, Innsbruck, 1894, pp. 196 ff. 
 
 3 Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 155. It may be convenient now-a-days to say that 
 ownership implies a power of alienation. See Pollock, Jurisprudence, 166. 
 But to insist on this usage in such discussions as that in which we are engaged 
 would lead to needless circumlocution. The question that is before us is 
 whether as a complaint to which a court of law will give audience ' This acre is 
 mine' is more modern than 'This acre is oars.' 
 
 4 As to the whole of this matter see Meitzen, op. cit., especially iii. 574-589. 
 As regards arable land in this country the only ' survivals ' which point to 
 anything that should be called communal ownership are singularly inconclusive.
 
 348 England before the Conquest. 
 
 Meadows, Thus, so far back as we can see, the German village had 
 and wood, a solid core of individualism. There were, however, lands which 
 in a certain sense belonged to it and which were not allotted 
 for good and all among its various members. For one thing, 
 the meadows were often subjected to a more communal scheme. 
 In the later middle ages we may see them annually redis- 
 tributed by rotation or by lot among the owners of the arable. 
 The meadows, which must be sharply distinguished from the 
 pasture, were few, and, as we may see from Domesday and 
 other records, they were exceedingly valuable. Probably their 
 great but varying value stood in the way of any permanent 
 partition that would have seemed equitable. Still they were 
 allotted annually and the right to an allotment ' ran with ' the 
 house and the arable strips. But again, there were woods and 
 pastures. If we must at once find an owner for this Almende, 
 we may be inclined to place the ownership in a village com- 
 munity, though not without remembering that if this com- 
 munity may develop into a land-owning corporation, it may 
 develop into a group of co-owners. But in all likelihood 
 the question as to the whereabouts of ownership might go 
 unanswered and unasked for a long time. Rights of user 
 exercisable over these woods and pastures were attached to 
 the ownership of the houses and the arable strips, and such 
 ' rights of common ' may take that acutely individualistic form 
 which they seem to have taken in the England of the thirteenth 
 century. The freeholder of 'ancient arable,' whose tenement 
 represents one of the original shares, has a right to turn out 
 beasts on the waste, on the whole waste and every inch of it, 
 and of this right nor lord, nor community can deprive him 1 . 
 Perhaps we may attribute to our law about this matter an 
 unusual and, in a certain sense, an abnormal individualism. 
 In the much governed England of the Angevin time, the strong 
 
 They relate to small patches of arable land held by burgesses : that is to say, 
 they relate to places in which a strong communal sentiment was developed 
 during the later middle ages, and they do not relate to communities that ought 
 to be called agricultural. The ' burgess plot ' is not large enough to have been 
 any man's livelihood when cultivated in medieval fashion, and it may well be 
 modern. It is demonstrable that in one case a very ' archaic ' arrangement 
 was deliberately adopted in the nineteenth century by burgesses who preferred 
 ' allotment grounds ' to pasture rights. Maitland, Survival of Archaic Com- 
 munities, Law Quarterly Eeview, ix. 36. 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 610-12.
 
 The Village Community. 349 
 
 central power encouraged every freeholder to look to it for 
 relief against all kinds of pressure seignorial or communal. 
 Elsewhere a village moot may assume and retain some control 
 over these pasture rights. But still the untilled land, the 
 waste, the Almende, exists mainly, if not solely, for the benefit 
 of a small group of tenements that are owned and possessed in 
 severalty. As to the ownership of the land that is subject to 
 the rights of pasture, it is a nude, a very nude dominium, and 
 for a long while no one gives it a thought. 
 
 In a favourable environment the German village community The bond 
 may and will become a landowning corporation. But many n eigh. en 
 dangers lie before it : internal as well as external dangers. 
 We must not think of it as a closely knit body of men. The 
 agrarian is almost the only tie that keeps it together. Originally 
 the men who settle down in a village are likely to be kinsmen. 
 Some phrases in the continental folk-laws, and some perhaps of 
 our English place-names, point in this direction. But (explain 
 this how we will) the German system of kinship, which binds 
 men together by the sacred tie of blood-feud, traces blood both 
 through father and through mother, and therefore will not 
 suffer a 'blood-feud-kin' to have either a local habitation or 
 a name 1 . Very soon, especially if daughters or the sons of 
 daughters are allowed (and very ancient Frankish laws allow 
 them) to inherit the dead man's land, a man who lives in one 
 village will often be closer of kin to men who live in other 
 villages than to his neighbours. The village community was 
 not a gens. The bond of blood was sacred, but it did not tie 
 the Germans into mutually exclusive clans. Nor did it hold 
 them in large ' house-communities,' for the partible inheritance 
 seems as a general rule to have been soon partitioned 2 . Nor 
 again may we ascribe to the German house-father much power 
 over his full-grown sons 3 . 
 
 Moreover, the village community was not a body that Feebleness 
 could declare the law of the tribe or nation. It had no court, lage com- 
 no jurisdiction. If moots were held in it, these would be m 
 
 1 Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 238. A hypothetical practice of endogamy will hardly 
 give us the requisite explanation, for on the whole the church seems to have 
 encountered little difficulty in imposing its extravagantly exogamous canons. To 
 persuade the converts not to marry their affines was a much harder task. 
 
 2 Heusler, Institutionen, 229. 
 
 * As to the ownership of land by families,' see Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 242.
 
 350 England before the Conquest. 
 
 comparable rather to meetings of shareholders than to sessions 
 of a tribunal. In short, the village landowners formed a group 
 of men whose economic affairs were inextricably intermixed, but 
 this was almost the only principle that made them an unit, 
 unless and until the state began to use the township as its 
 organ for the maintenance of the peace and the collection of 
 taxes. That is the reason why we read little of the township 
 in our Anglo-Saxon dooms 1 . Only as the state's pressure 
 increases, does the vill become one of the public institutions of 
 the kingdom. We may even exaggerate the amount of agri- 
 cultural co-operation that was to be found within it. Beyond 
 the age in which the typical peasant is a virgater contributing 
 two oxen to a team of eight, our English evidence seems to 
 point to a time when the normal ' townsman ' held a hide and 
 had slaves and oxen enough for its cultivation. Nor in all 
 probability was the village community a large body. We may 
 doubt whether in the oldest days it usually comprised more 
 than some ten shareholders 2 . 
 
 Absence of Whatever might come in course of time, we must not 
 su PP ose that the village had much that could be called a 
 constitution. In particular, we must be careful not to carry 
 too far back the notion that votes will be counted and that 
 the voice of a majority will be treated as the voice of all. 
 When that marvellous title De migrantibus raises a corner of 
 the curtain and gives us our only glance into a village of newly 
 settled Salian Franks, the one indisputable trait that we see 
 among much that is disputable is that the new-comer must 
 leave the village if one villager objects to his presence. His 
 presence, we may suppose, might be objectionable because 
 it might add to the number of those who enjoyed wood, waste 
 and water in common ; but any one villager can insist on his 
 departure. Out of this state of things ' communal ownership ' 
 may grow ; but all the communalism that we see at present 
 is very like individualism 3 . Above all, we must not picture 
 these village lands as 'impressed with a trust' in favour of 
 
 1 See above, p. 147. 2 Of this in the next essay. 
 
 3 A valuable and interesting discussion of the proprietary system of the Lex 
 Salica will be found in Blumenstok, Entstehung des deutschen Immobiliar- 
 eigenthums, Innsbruck, 1894. This will serve as a good introduction to the 
 large literature which surrounds the De migrantibus. The least probable of all 
 interpretations seems that given by Fustel de Coulanges.
 
 The Village Community. 351 
 
 unborn generations or as devoted to 'public purposes.' If in 
 course of time small folk, cottiers, ' under-settles ' and the like, 
 are found in the village, they will have to struggle for rights in 
 the waste, and the rights, if any, that they get will be meagre 
 when compared with those of the owners of ' whole lands ' and 
 ' half lands/ An oligarchy of peasant proprietors may rule the 
 waste and the village. 
 
 Thus even in favourable circumstances there were many The Ger- 
 difficulties to be overcome if the communalism, such as it was, 
 of the village community was to be maintained and developed. ed soi1 ' 
 But where the village was founded upon conquered soil the 
 circumstances were not favourable. If the Germans invaded 
 Gaul or Britain, the very fields themselves seemed to rebel 
 against communalism and to demand a ring-fenced severalty. 
 Throughout large tracts in Gaul the barbarians " were content 
 to adapt themselves to the shell that was provided for them. 
 A certain aliquot share of every estate might be taken from 
 its former owner and be allotted to a Burgundian or a Goth 
 according to a uniform plan 1 . Throughout other large tracts 
 villages of the Germanic type were founded ; a large part of 
 northern Gaul was studded with such villages, and it may be 
 well for us to remember that some of our Norman subjugators 
 came to us from a land of villages, if others came from a land 
 of isolated homesteads 2 . There can be little doubt that in 
 Britain numerous villages were formed which reproduced in 
 all essentials the villages which Saxons and Angles had left 
 behind them on the mainland, and as little doubt that very 
 often, in the west and south-west of Britain, German kings 
 and eorls took to themselves integral estates, the boundaries 
 and agrarian arrangement whereof had been drawn by Romans, 
 or rather by Celts 3 . 
 
 Then the invasions and the long wars called for a rapid Develop- 
 development of kingship. Very quickly the Frankish kingship kingly 
 became despotism. In England also the kings became powerful p< 
 and the hereditary nobles disappeared. There was taxation. 
 The country was plotted out according to some rude scheme 
 to provide the king with meat and cheese and ale 4 . Then 
 oame bishops and priests with the suggestion that he should 
 
 1 See Meitzen, op. cit. i. 526-35. 
 
 2 Meitzen, i. 517 and the Maps 66 a, 66 6 in the Atlas. 
 
 Meitzen, ii. 97-122. See above, p. 237.
 
 352 England before the Conquest. 
 
 devote his revenues to the service of God and with forms of 
 conveyance which made him speak as if the whole land were 
 his to give away. Here, so we have argued, was the beginning 
 of a process which placed many a village under a lord. The 
 words of this lord's ' book ' told him that he was owner, or at 
 least lord, of this village ' with its woods and its pastures.' The 
 men of the village might or might not maintain all their 
 accustomed rights, but at any rate no expansion of tho'se rights 
 beyond the ancient usage was possible. The potentialities of 
 the waste (if we may so speak) had been handed over to a lord ; 
 the future was his. 
 
 Free vil- We must not, however, repeat what has been lengthily said 
 
 England, above touching the growth of the manorial system, though we 
 are painfully aware that we have neglected many phases of the 
 complicated process. Here let us remember that this process 
 was not complete in the year 1066, and let us look once more 
 at the free villages in the east; for example, at Orwell 1 . Who 
 owned the land that served as a pasture for the pecunia villae ? 
 Shall we place the ownership in the thirteen holders of the 
 arable strips into which the four hides were divided, or in a 
 corporation whereof they were the members, or in their various 
 lords, those eight exalted persons to whom they were com- 
 mended, or shall we say that here is res nullius ? The suppo- 
 sition that the lords are owners of the waste we may briefly 
 dismiss. The landholders are free to ' withdraw themselves ' 
 and seek other lords. That the land is res nullius we may also 
 positively deny, if thereby be meant that it lies open to occupa- 
 tion. Let a man of the next village turn out his beasts there 
 and he will find out fast enough that he has done a wrong. 
 But who will sue him ? Will all the villagers join as co-plaintiffs 
 or will the village corporation appear by its attorney ? Far 
 more in accordance with all that we see in later days is it to 
 suppose that any one of the men of Orwell who has a right 
 to turn out beasts can resent the invasion 3 . This brings to 
 
 1 See above, p. 129. 
 
 2 Throughout the historical time, so far as we know, the right of every com- 
 moner has been well protected against strangers. He might drive off the 
 stranger's beasts, impound them, and, at all events if he had been incommoded, 
 might sue for damages. See Marys's case, 9 Coke's Reports, lllb; Wells v. 
 Watling, 2 W. Blackstone's Reports, 1233. He needed no help from his neigh- 
 bours.
 
 The Village Community. 353 
 
 our notice the core of individualism that lies in the centre of 
 the village. The houses and the arable strips are owned in 
 severalty, and annexed to these houses and arable strips are 
 pasture rights which are the rights of individuals and which, it 
 may be believed, seem to exhaust the utility of the waste. 
 What remains to dispute about ? A nude, a very nude domi- 
 nium, which is often imperceptible. 
 
 Not always imperceptible. From time to time these Orwell The village 
 people in town meeting assembled may have taken some grave 
 resolution as to the treatment of the waste. They may now 
 and then have decided to add to the amount of arable and 
 diminish the amount of pasture. But occasional measures of 
 this sort, for which a theoretical, if not a real, unanimity is 
 secured, will not generate a regulative organ, still less a pro- 
 prietary corporation. In decade after decade a township-moot 
 at Orwell would have little to do. The moot of the Wetherley 
 hundred is the court that deems dooms for the men of OrwelL 
 If the lands of Orwell had been steadily regarded as the lands 
 of a corporation they would have passed in one lump to some 
 one Norman lord. But such corporate feeling as there was 
 was weak. The men of Orwell had been seeking lords, each 
 man for himself, in the most opposite quarters. Many of the 
 virgates that are physically in one village have, as we have 
 seen 1 , been made 'to lie in' other villages; for the free man 
 can carry his land where he pleases. When this is so, he is 
 already beginning to feel that the tie which keeps him in a 
 village community is a restraint that has, perhaps unfortunately, 
 been imposed upon him and his property by ancient history. 
 
 The fate of these lordless communities and of their waste What 
 was still trembling in the balance when King Harold fell. To become of 
 guess what would have happened had he held his own is not y 
 easy. It is possible that what was done by foreigners would 
 have been done, though less rapidly, by lords of English race, 
 and that by consolidating soke and commendation into a firm 
 landlordship and then making among themselves treaties of 
 partition, they would have acquired the ownership of the 
 pasture land subject to the rights of common. It is perhaps 
 more probable that in some cases the old indeterminate state 
 of things might have been maintained until the idea of a 
 fictitious personality had spread from the chapter-house to the 
 
 1 See above, pp. 13, 124. 
 M. 23
 
 354 England before the Conquest. 
 
 borough and from the borough to the village. Then the owner- 
 ship of the soil might have been attributed to a corporation of 
 which the freeholders in the village were the members. One 
 famous case which came to light in the seventeenth century may 
 warn us that throughout the middle ages there were here and 
 there groups of freeholders, and even of customary tenants, who 
 were managing agrarian affairs in a manner which feudalism 
 could not explain and our English law would not warrant, for 
 they were behaving as though they were members of a land- 
 owning corporation 1 . Often in the east of England the manors 
 must have been so intermixed that village meetings, not^how- 
 ever of a democratic kind, may have dealt with business which 
 lay outside the competence of any seignorial court. We know 
 little and, it is to be feared, must be content to know little of 
 such meetings. They were not sessions of a tribunal ; they 
 kept no rolls ; the law knew them not. But we dare not say 
 that if all seignorial pressure had been removed, the village 
 lands would have been preserved as communal lands for modern 
 villagers. Where there was no seignorial pressure, no joint and 
 several liability for dues, the tie was lax between the owners 
 of the strips in the village fields ; and if there was a corporate 
 element in their union, there was also a strong element of 
 co-ownership. Had they been left to themselves, we can not 
 say with any confidence that they would not sooner or later 
 have partitioned the waste. Was it not their land, and might 
 they not do what they liked with their own ? 
 
 Mark com- One other question may be touched. It was the fashion 
 in England some years ago that those who spoke of village 
 communities should say something of 'the Germanic mark.' 
 What they said seemed often to imply that the German village 
 community was a mark community. This was a mistake. It 
 seems indeed that there were parts of Germany in which the 
 word 'mark' was loosely used 2 ; but the true Markgenossenschaft 
 was utterly different from the Dorfgenossenschaft, and the lands 
 with which it dealt were just those lands that belonged to no 
 village 3 . In the country which saw the Germans becoming an 
 agricultural race, the lands belonging to the villages were but 
 oases in a wild territory. In later days some large piece of this 
 
 1 I refer to the much discussed case of Aston and Cote. See Law Quarterly 
 Eeview, ix. 214. 
 
 2 Meitzen, op. cit. i. 573. 8 Ibid. i. 122-60.
 
 * The Village Community. 355 
 
 territory is found to be under the control of a 'mark -community,' 
 whose members are dwelling here and there in many different 
 villages and exercise rights over the land (for the more part 
 it is forest land 1 ) that belongs to no village but constitutes 
 the mark. Traces of what might have become 'the mark 
 system' may perhaps be found in England; but not where 
 they have been usually sought. 
 
 We read of a tract in Suffolk which is common pasture for intercom- 
 the whole hundred of Coleness 2 . Instances in which a piece tweenviiis! 
 of land is common pasture for many vills were by no means 
 uncommon in the thirteenth century. They grow rarer as time 
 goes on. Our law provided but a precarious and unfcomfort- 
 able niche for them under the rubric common pur cause de 
 vicinage 3 . These are the traces of what in different sur- 
 roundings might have become, and perhaps were near to 
 becoming, mark communities. In the thirteenth century the 
 state seems to have been already enforcing the theory that 
 every inch of land ought to lie within the territory of some vill 4 . 
 This was a police measure. The responsibility of one set of 
 villagers was not to cease until the boundary was reached where 
 the responsibility of another set began. But even in recent 
 times there have been larger moors in the north of England 
 which 'belonged' (we will use a vague word) to two or more 
 townships in common. At any rate, we must not take back 
 this theory that the vills exhaust the land into the days of the 
 Germanic settlement 5 . In some districts the vills must have 
 been separated from each other by wide woods, and in all like- 
 lihood large portions of these woods were not proper to any 
 one village, but were regarded as belonging, in some sense or 
 another, to a group of villages. However, land of this kind 
 was just the land which was most exposed to an assertion of 
 
 1 Therefore its assembly is a Holtding, and a Holzgraf presides there: 
 Meitzen, op. cit. i. 125. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 339 b : 'In hundret de Coleness est quedam pastura communis 
 omnibus hominibus de hundret.' At Ehuddlan (D. B. i. 269) Earl Hugh has 
 given to Eobert half the castle, half the burg, and ' half of the forests which do 
 not pertain to any vill of the said manor.' This, however, is in Wales. 
 
 3 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 608. 
 
 4 Ibid. i. 547. 
 
 8 Blomefield, Hist. Norfolk, iv. 691 gives an account of an extremely 
 fertile tract of pasture known as Tilney Smeeth upon which the cattle of 
 seven 'towns' intercommoned. 
 
 232
 
 356 England before the Conquest. 
 
 royal ownership, and we imagine that a mark community had 
 from the first little chance of organizing itself in England 1 . 
 But we have already made too many guesses. 
 
 We must not be in a hurry to get to the beginning of the 
 long history of law. Very slowly we are making our way 
 towards it. The history of law must be a history of ideas. 
 It must represent, not merely what men have done and said, 
 but what men have thought in bygone ages. The task of 
 reconstructing ancient ideas is hazardous, and can only be 
 accomplished little by little. If we are in a hurry to get to 
 the beginning we shall miss the path. Against many kinds 
 of anachronism we now guard ourselves. We are careful of 
 costume, of armour and architecture, of words and forms of 
 speech. But it is far easier to be careful of these things than 
 to prevent the intrusion of untimely ideas. In particular there 
 lies a besetting danger for us in the barbarian's use of a 
 language which is too good for his thought. Mistakes then 
 are easy, and when committed they will be fatal and funda- 
 mental mistakes. If, for example, we introduce the persona 
 ficta too soon, we shall be doing worse than if we armed.Hengest 
 and Horsa with machine guns or pictured the Venerable Bede 
 correcting proofs for the press; we shall have built upon a 
 crumbling foundation. The most efficient method of protecting 
 ourselves against such errors is that of reading our history 
 backwards as well as forwards, of making sure of our middle 
 ages before we talk about the 'archaic/ of accustoming our 
 eyes to the twilight before we go out into the night. 
 
 1 If we are right in supposing that very generally a royal land-book disposes 
 of a whole village, then if it proceeds to give rights in the communis silva, it is 
 probably speaking of a wood that is not regarded as annexed to that village but 
 of one which is common to various villages. The intercommoning of vills in a 
 forest is illustrated by the famous Epping case, Commissioners of Sewers v. 
 Glasse, Law Keports, 19 Equity, 134. But for the king's rights in forest land, 
 a ' mark community ' might have grown up in Epping. On the other hand, but 
 for the king's rights, the land might long ago have been partitioned among the 
 mark-men.
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 THE HIDE. 
 WHAT was the hide ? However unwilling we may be to What was 
 
 , . , 11- . the hide? 
 
 race this dreary old question, we can not escape it. At first 
 sight it may seem avoidable by those who are interested in the 
 general drift of national life, but have no desire to solve petty 
 problems or face unnecessary difficulties. The history of weights 
 and measures, st>me may say, is probably very curious and 
 no doubt is worth study ; but we, who shall be amply satisfied 
 if we understand the grand movements and the broad traits, 
 must leave this little province, as we must leave much else, 
 to antiquarian specialists. Unfortunately, however, that ques- 
 tion about *the hide is ' pre-judicial' to all the great questions 
 of early English history. 
 
 If our choice lay between 30 and 40 acres, or again be- import- 
 tween a long and a short hundred, then indeed we might question, 
 refuse to take part in the conflict. But between the advocates 
 of big hides of 120 acres or thereabouts and the advocates 
 of little hides of 30 acres or thereabouts there should be no 
 peace. In the construction of early English history we shall 
 adopt one style of architecture if we are supplied with small 
 hides, while if our materials consist of big hides an entirely 
 different ' plan and elevation ' must be chosen. Let us take 
 one example. We find the kings giving away manses or hides 
 by fives and tens. What are they really doing? Are they 
 or are they not giving away whole villages? Obviously this 
 question is pre-judicial to many another. Our whole concep- 
 tion of the Anglo-Saxon kingship will be profoundly affected 
 by our attribution or our denial to the king of an alienable 
 superiority over villages that are full of free landowners. This 
 question, therefore, we should have upon our hands even if we
 
 358 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 Hide and 
 
 manse in 
 
 Hide and 
 manse in 
 the land- 
 books. 
 
 thought that we could rear the fabric of political and con- 
 stitutional history without first laying an economic foundation. 
 But the day for such castles in the air is passing. 
 
 Howbeit, we must not talk in this pompous way of castles 
 or foundations. We are not going to lay foundations, nor even 
 to choose a site. We hope to test a few materials and perhaps 
 to show how a site may some day be acquired. 
 
 From the Norman Conquest so far back as we can go, a 
 certain possessory unit or a certain typical tenement is being 
 thrust upon our notice by the laws, the charters, the historians 1 . 
 We may begin with Bede. When he is going to speak of the 
 area or the capacity of a tract of land, be it large or be it small, 
 he refers to a certain unit or type, namely, the land of one 
 family (terra unius familiae). The abbess Hild acquires the 
 land of one family and erects a religious house upon it 2 ; king 
 Oswy gives away twelve tracts of land, each of which consists 
 of ' the possessiones of ten families ' 3 ; the kingdom of the South 
 Saxons contains the land of 7,000 families*. We see that 
 already Bede is thinking rather of the size or capacity of a 
 tract of soil than of the number of households that happen 
 to be dwelling there. ' The measure (mensura) of the Isle of 
 Wight is, according to the English mode of reckoning, 1200 
 families 5 .' ' The isle of Thanet is no small island : that is to 
 say, according to the customary English computation, it is 
 of 600 families 6 .' Some apology is due from a scholar who 
 writes in Latin and who writes thus ; so Bede tells us that he is 
 using the English mode of reckoning ; he is literally translating 
 some English term. 
 
 When his own book is rendered into English that term 
 will reappear. Usually it reappears in the form hid, but occa- 
 sionally we have hiwisc or hiwscipe. There seems no room for 
 
 1 The word tenement will be often employed hereafter. Has it become needful 
 to protest that a tenement need not be a house? If my body is my soul's ' frail 
 tenement,' that is not because my body holds my soul (a reprobate error), but 
 because (for this is better philosophy and sound law) my soul holds my body. 
 But, to descend from these heights, it will be a thousand pities if a vulgar 
 blunder compels us to abandon the excellent tenement in favour of the feeble 
 holding or the over-worked estate. 
 
 2 Hist. Eccl. lib. 4, c. 21 (23), ed. Plummer, i. 253. 
 8 Ibid. lib. 3, c. 24, ed. cit. i. 178. 
 
 4 Ibid. lib. 4, c. 13, ed. cit. i. 230. 
 6 Ibid. lib. 4, c. 14 (16), ed. cit. i. 237. 
 Ibid. lib. 1, c. 25, ed. cit. i. 45.
 
 The Hide. 359 
 
 doubt that hiwisc and the more abstract hiwscipe mean a 
 household, and very little -room for doubt that hid springs 
 from a root that is common to it and them and has the same 
 primary meaning 1 . Elsewhere we may find an equivalence 
 between the hide and the hiwisc : ' If a Welsh man thrives 
 so that he has a hiwisc of land and can render the king's 
 gafol, then his wergild is 120 shillings; but if he attains only 
 to a half-hide then his wergild is 80 shillings 2 .' In the charters 
 also we may now and then find that the land to be conveyed 
 is a hiwisc 3 , or is the land of one familia*. However, the 
 common English term is hide, while the scribes of the land- 
 books, who as yet are above inventing a Latin hida, ring the 
 changes on half-a-dozen phrases 5 . We begin with terra unius 
 manentis, terra unius casati, terra unius tributarii, which keep 
 clearly before our eyes the fact or the theory that the normal 
 householder, the normal taxpayer, will possess one of these 
 units. At a little later time the more convenient mansa 
 (sometimes mansio 8 or mansiuncula) becomes popular, and we 
 may see also that men are beginning to speak of manents, 
 casates, tributaries 'of land,' much as they would speak of 
 acres or perches of land 7 . So far as we can see, all these 
 terms are being used as though they were absolutely equiva- 
 lent. If a clerk has to describe several different tenements, 
 he will write of manentes in one clause and casati in the 
 next, merely because a repetition of the same term would be 
 
 1 If, as Mr Seebohm suggests (Village Community, p. 398), this word meant 
 the skin of an ox, some one would assuredly have Latined it by corium, and not 
 by terra unius familiae (manentis etc.) 
 
 2 Schmid, App. VII. (Wergilds), 2, 7. By comparing this with Ine 32 we 
 get an even more explicit equation : ' Gif Wylisc mon haabbe hide londes ' = ' Gif 
 Wiliec mon gej>eo )>8et he hsebbe hiwisc landes.' 
 
 3 K. 271 (ii. 52), a forgery : 'tet Cemele tien hyda, set Domeccesige >riddehalf 
 hiwisce.' K. 1077 (v. 146): 'aet hilcan hiwisce feowerti penega.' K. iii. 431: 
 'ftses anes hiwisces boc...'3as o'Sres hiwisces.' K. 1050 (v. 98). See also Craw- 
 ford Charters, 127, for hiwscipe. 
 
 4 K. 1006 (v. 47) : ' de terra iuris mei aliquantulam portionem, iuxta mensuram 
 scilicet decem familiarum.' See also K. 1007. 
 
 5 The would-be Latin hida occurs already in K. 230 (i. 297), but is rare 
 before the Conquest. On the other hand, as an English word hid is in constant 
 use. 
 
 K. 131 (i. 159) ; K. 140 (i. 169). 
 
 7 Thus, to give one early example, K. 1008 (v. 49) : ' duodecim tributaries 
 terrae quae appellantur Ferrinig.' So in K. 124 (i. 151) we have the neuter form 
 manentia.
 
 360 The Hide. 
 
 inelegant 1 . In Kentish charters we read more of the aratrum 
 and the sullung than of the manse and the hide; but apparently 
 we have here other names for what is a similar and in some 
 sort an equivalent unit 2 ; and it is by no means unknown that 
 Kentish tenements will be called manses and hides 3 . 
 The large Now if we ask whether the type to which reference is thus 
 the e manor- made is a tenement comprising about six-score acres of arable 
 l an( l, we are asking a question of the gravest importance. 
 For let us look at some of the consequences which will flow 
 from an affirmative answer. Let it be granted that, long 
 before the Norman Conquest, the hide has become an unit 
 in an unwieldy system of taxation, which has been governed 
 by false assumptions and vitiated by caprice, until the fiscal 
 hide in a given case may widely diverge from its original or 
 indeed from any fixed type. None the less, this system has 
 for its base the theory that the typical man of Anglo-Saxon 
 law, the typical householder or taxpayer, has a hide, has land 
 enough for a team of oxen, has 120 arable acres. The language 
 of the charters supposes that this is so. No doubt the sup- 
 position is, as every supposition of this kind must be, untrue ; 
 but still it must have a core of truth, and in the remotest 
 age this core will be at its largest. Men will not fall into 
 a habit of speaking of 120 arable acres or thereabouts as the 
 tenement of one family or of one householder, unless as a 
 matter of fact the tenement of one family or of one house- 
 holder has in a preponderant number of cases some such 
 content as this. Suppose, for example, that the Anglo-Saxon 
 kingdoms of the sixth century had been composed chiefly of 
 lords, whose estates ranged from 600 acres to some much 
 larger quantity, and of ' semi-servile ' cultivators, the average 
 size of whose tenements was 30 acres, such a usage of words 
 as that which we are considering could never have struck 
 
 1 A good instance in Egbert's Dialogue, H. & S. iii. 404. For how many 
 hides may the clergy swear? A priest may swear 'secundum numerum 120 
 tributariorum ' ; a deacon ' iuxta numerum 60 manentium ' ; a monk 'secundum 
 numerum 30 tributariorum.' Here tributdrii alternates with manentes for the 
 same reason that secundum alternates with iuxta. So K. 143 (i. 173) : 'manentes 
 ...casati. . . manentes . . .casati* 
 
 2 See Schmid, p. 611. 
 
 8 See, for instance, Werhard's testament (A.D. 832), K. 230 (i. 297) : 'Otteford 
 100 hidas, Grauenea 32 hidas.' These are Kentish estates. Hereafter we shall 
 give some reasons for thinking that the Kentish sullung may have a history that 
 is all its own.
 
 The Hide. 361 
 
 root. Either the small tenement of the cultivator or the big 
 tenement of his lord must have been taken as the typical 
 'manse,' the typical 'land of one householder.' Let us at 
 once press home this argument, though at present it involves 
 a hypothesis, for in the dull disquisitions that follow we may 
 be cheered by the thought that great questions are at stake. 
 If in the oldest time the typical ' land of one householder ' 
 had 120 arable acres, the manorial system was not prevalent, 
 not dominant, in England. It will be admitted on all hands 
 that this would be much too large a tenement for a serf or 
 a semi-servile colonus. On the other hand, it is much too 
 small a tenement for any one who is going to play the part 
 of a manorial lord, unless we use the term manorial in so 
 wide a sense that it becomes useless. For how many tenants 
 will this manorial lord, who is to be taken as the typical house- 
 holder, have upon his 120 acres ? If his arrangements are at 
 all like those revealed to us by Domesday Book, he will keep 
 at least one-third of his land in demesne, and there will remain 
 but 80 acres for the coloni. Shall we give him three coloni, 
 or four or five ? We can hardly give him a larger number. 
 Furthermore, it is quite clear that this 'manorial lord' will 
 not own a village. The villages as we see them in the earliest 
 charters and thence onward into Domesday Book contain five, 
 ten, fifteen hides. Our manorial lord must be content to take 
 his hide in little scraps scattered about among the scraps of some 
 ten or twenty other ' manorial lords ' whose hides are similarly 
 dispersed in the open field of a village. All this seems to 
 follow inevitably if once we are satisfied that the hide of the 
 old days had 120 arable acres or thereabouts; for the hide is 
 the land of one typical householder 1 . 
 
 Now for a long time past there has been among historians Ourconrse. 
 
 1 Mr Seebohm, Village Community, p. 395, admits that the familia of Bede 
 and the casatum of the charters is the hide, and that the hide has 120 acres. 
 This does not prevent him from holding (p. 266) that when Bede speaks of king 
 Oswy giving to a church twelve possessiunculae, each of ten families, we must see 
 decuriae of slaves, ' the bundle of ten slaves or semi-servile tenants.' He seems 
 also to think that while the hide was ' the holding of the full free landholder,' 
 the hiwisc was the holding of a servile family. But the passage which he cites 
 in a note (Wergilds, 7) seems to disprove this, for there undoubtedly, as he 
 remarks, hiwisc = hide. It is the passage quoted above on p. 359. The Welsh- 
 man gets a wergild of 120 shillings (three-fifths of an English ceorl's wergild) 
 by' acquiring a hiwisc or (Ine 32) hide of land. Why the hide should not here 
 mean what it admittedly means elsewhere is not apparent.
 
 362 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 and antiquaries a good deal of agreement in favour of this 
 large hide, but against it appeal may be made to honoured 
 names, such as those of Kemble and Eyton 1 . Also it must be 
 confessed that in favour of much smaller hides, or at least of 
 much smaller hides for the earliest days, some weighty argu- 
 ments may be advanced. In order that they may be under- 
 stood, and perchance refuted, we must pursue a long and 
 devious course and must raise by the way many questions, 
 touching which we have no right to an opinion: questions 
 about agriculture, questions about land measurement, perhaps 
 even physiological questions. Also it is our misfortune that, 
 as we stumble through the night, we must needs stumble 
 against some of our fellow adventurers. 
 
 1. Measures and Fields. 
 
 Perma- At the present moment there is no need for arguments 
 
 change in which insist upon the immutable character of ancient agrarian 
 history 11 arrangements. If we take up a map of a common field drawn 
 in the eighteenth century, the lines that we see upon it are 
 in the main very old. The scheme seems fashioned for the 
 purpose of resisting change and compelling the men of one 
 age to till the land as their fathers tilled it. Nothing but an 
 unanimous agreement among those who are not likely to agree 
 can break up that prison-house of cells in which agriculture 
 has been cramped and confined. Rather, it may be, the student 
 who is perusing the ' estate map ' and who is fascinated by the 
 possession of a new tool for picking historical locks, should 
 warn himself that, though there has been permanence, there 
 has also been change, and that in a far-off time changes of 
 a certain sort came quickly. True that in the current of agri- 
 cultural progress there is a rapid acceleration as it flows towards 
 
 1 Though Eyton has (for some reason that we can not find in his published 
 works) allowed but 48 'gheld acres' to the 'gheld hide,' he can hardly be 
 reckoned as an advocate of the Small Hide. His doctrine, if we have caught it, 
 is that the hide has never been a measure of size. This raises the^question 
 How comes it then that the fractions into which a hide breaks are indubitably 
 called (gheld) 'acres'? Why not ounces, pints, pence?
 
 Measures and Fields. 363 
 
 our own day. We may easily go back to an age when the 
 introduction of a new process or new implement was rare. 
 On the other hand, if we fix our attention on the map of any 
 one village and contemplate its strips and balks and virgates, 
 the hazard involved in an assumption of their antiquity will 
 increase swiftly when we have left behind us the advent of 
 Duke William and are urging our inferential career towards 
 Hengest or, it may be, towards Caesar. 
 
 Let us look, for example, at the changes that take place Rapidity of 
 in some Essex villages during the twenty years that precede O id times. 
 the Domesday Inquest. The following table shows them: 
 
 Villani Bordarii Servi Lord's Men's 
 
 teams teams 
 
 Teidana 1 , T. B. E. 5 3 4 2 4 
 
 T. R. W. 1 17 3 3 
 
 Waldena 2 , T. R. E. 66 17 16 8 22 
 
 T. R. W. 46 40 20 10 22 
 
 Hame 3 , T. R. E. 32 16 3 5 8 
 
 T. R. W. 48 79 3 4 12 
 
 Benefelda 4 , T. R. E. 10 2 7 3 7 
 
 T. R. W. 9 11 4 3 4 
 
 Wimbeis 5 , T. R. E. 26 18 6 3 21 
 
 T. R. W. 26 55 3 15 
 
 These are but specimens of the obscure little revolutions 
 that are being accomplished in the Essex villages. In general 
 there has been a marked increase in the number of bordarii, at 
 the expense of the villeins on the one part and the serfs on the 
 other 6 , and this, whatever else it may represent, must tell us 
 of a redistribution of tenements, perhaps of a process that 
 substitutes the half-virgate for the virgate as the average 
 holding of an Essex peasant. The jar of conquest has made 
 such revolutions easy 7 . 
 
 But, it will be said, though the 'bundles' of strips be cut Devasta- 
 in half, the main features of the field remain constant. Let 
 us, however, look at Yorkshire, where for fifteen years an 
 immense tract of land has been lying 'waste.' Have we any 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 47 b. 2 Ibid. 61. 8 Ibid. 64. 
 
 * Ibid. 65. 5 Ibid. 69 b. 6 See above, p. 35. 
 
 7 For this reason I do not feel sure that Mr F. Baring (Eng. Hist. Rev. xi. 
 98) has conclusively proved his case when he accuses D. B. of omitting to notice 
 the free tenants on the estates of the Abbey of Burton.
 
 364 The Hide. 
 
 reason to believe that when agriculture slowly steals back into 
 this desert there will be a mere restoration of the defaced map ? 
 Surely not. If for a few years an ' open field ' lies waste, there 
 will be no mere restoration. For one thing, many of the old 
 outlines will have utterly vanished. Even if the acres were 
 already divided by the so-called ' balks ' (and we can not be sure 
 that they always were 1 ), the balk was but a narrow strip of 
 unploughed sward and would hardly be perceptible when the 
 whole field was once more a sheet of grass and weeds. For 
 another thing, new settlers would probably begin by ploughing 
 only a small portion of the old field. It is likely enough that 
 their measuring rod would not be even approximately equal 
 to the rod employed in a previous century, and they would 
 have ample opportunity for the introduction of novelties, for 
 the substitution of three fields for two and for all that such 
 a change implies. Now William's deliberate devastation of the 
 north is but one final and grandiose exploit of an ancient kind 
 of warfare. After his day agrarian history becomes more stable 
 because invasions cease and the character of civil warfare 
 changes. The strife between York and Lancaster, between 
 King and Parliament, passes like a thunderstorm over the 
 fields ; it damages the crops ; but that is all, and Bosworth 
 ' Field ' and Naseby ' Field ' will next year be tilled in the 
 same old way. A raid of the Danes, a feud between Angle 
 and Saxon, was a different affair. The peasants fought. Men, 
 women and children were sold as slaves. Also there was 
 deliberate devastation. 'They make a wilderness and call it 
 peace.' What else should they call it, when a foodless wilder- 
 ness is the most scientific of all frontiers ? Readers of the 
 English Chronicle will doubt whether there is any village in 
 England that has not been once, or more than once, a deserted 
 village. And if we must reckon with war, there is famine also 
 to be reckoned with. W T hen in a few brief words the English 
 Chronicler tells us that in 1043 there was mickle hunger in 
 the land so that the sestar of corn sold for sixty pence and 
 
 1 The antiquity and universality of the balk must not be taken for granted ; 
 see Meitzen, op. cit. i. 86 ; iii. 319. However, in recent times balks did occur 
 within the shots (this Meitzen seems to doubt) as may be seen to-day at Upton 
 S'. Leonards, Co. Gloucester. Mr Seebohm, op. cit. 4, 382, claims the word 
 balk for the Welsh ; but see New Eng. Diet, and Skeat, Etymol. Diet. In this, 
 as in many another case, the Welsh claim to an English word has broken down.
 
 Measures and Fields. 365 
 
 even more 1 , he is, like enough, telling us of a disaster which 
 depopulated many a village and forced many a villager to 
 bow his head for meat in those evil days 2 . Agrarian history 
 becomes more catastrophic as we trace it backwards. 
 
 And, putting on one side the ravages of war and famine, Village 
 we must call to mind the numerous hints that our map gives c 
 us of village colonization 3 . Men did not make two contiguous 
 villages at one time and call them both Hamton. Names are 
 given to places in order that they may be distinguished from 
 neighbouring places. So when we see two different villages, 
 called Hamton and Other Hamton, lying next each other, we 
 may be fairly certain that they are not of equal antiquity, and 
 it is not unlikely that the one is the offshoot and daughter of 
 the other 4 . There are about one hundred and fifty Newtons and 
 Newtowns in England. Every instance of colonization, every 
 new settlement in the woods, gave scope for the introduction 
 of novelties, such scope as was not to be found in after days 
 when men stood thicker on the soil and all the best land was 
 already tilled 5 . 
 
 Therefore we must not trust a method of husbandry or a Antiquity 
 scheme of land-measures much further than we can see it. three^eid 
 Nothing, for example, could be rasher than the assumption svstem - 
 that the 'three-course system' of tillage was common in the 
 England of the seventh century 6 . We have a little evidence 
 that it was practised in the eleventh 7 , perhaps some evidence, 
 
 1 A.-S. Chron. ad arm. 1043. Henry of Huntingdon, p. 192, took the sestar 
 of this passage to be a horse-load. Even if we accept his version, the price 
 would be high when compared with the prices recorded on the Pipe Rolls of 
 Henry II. ; for which see Hall, Court Life, 219, 220. But, though the point can 
 not be argued here, we may strongly suspect that the chronicler meant something 
 that is almost infinitely worse, and that his sestar was at the very least as small 
 as our bushel. We know of no English document which suggests a sextarius 
 that would be comparable with a horse-load. 
 
 2 Geatfled's will, K. 925 (iv. 263). See above, p. 14. 
 
 4 Observe the clumsy nomenclature illustrated by K. 816 (iv. 164), a deed 
 forged for the Confessor: 'Middletun et o'Ser Middletun...Horningdun et otSer 
 Horningdun...Fifehyda et ofter Fifehyda.' 
 
 5 See in this context the interesting letter of Bp. Denewulf to Edward the 
 Elder, K. 1039 (v. 166). An estate of 72 hides, a very large estate, came to the 
 bishop almost waste. He prides himself on having now tilled 90 acres! 
 
 6 A good programme of this system is given by Cunningham, Growth of 
 English Industry, i. 71. 
 
 7 Kectitudines, 4, 3 ; Seebohm, Village Community, 141. Mr Seebohm's 
 inference is ingenious and plausible. See also Andrews, Old English Manor, 
 248.
 
 366 The Hide. 
 
 that it was not unknown in the ninth 1 . But ' the two-course 
 system ' can be traced as far 2 , and seems to have been as 
 common, if not commoner, in the thirteenth century 3 . If on 
 a modern map we see a village with 'trinity fields,' we must 
 not at once decide that those who laid them out sowed two 
 in every year, for it is well within the bounds of possibility 
 that two were left idle 4 . An agriculture of this kind was not 
 unknown in the Yorkshire of the fourteenth century 8 , and in- 
 deed we read that in the eighteenth 'one crop and two fallows' 
 was the traditional course in the open field of a Suffolk village 6 . 
 Differences We have time enough on our hands. Between Domesday 
 theTiffer- Book and the withdrawal of the legions lies as long an interval 
 
 ent shires. ag fa^ wn i c h separates the Conqueror from Mr Arthur Young. 
 Also we have space enough on our hands. Any theory that 
 would paint all England as plotted out for proprietary and 
 agricultural purposes in accordance wij;h a single pattern would 
 be of all theories the least probable. We need not contrast 
 Kent with Westmoreland, or Cornwall with Norfolk, for our 
 
 1 K. 259 (ii. 26), A.D. 845 : Gift of 19 acres near the city of Canterbury, 
 6 acres in one place, 6 in another, 7 in a third. 
 
 2 K. 241 (ii. 1), A.D. 839 : Gift of 24 acres, 10 in one place, 14 in another. 
 K. 339 (ii. 149), A.D. 904 : Gift of 60 acres of arable to the south and 60 to the 
 north of a certain stream. K. 586 (iii. 118) : ' and 30 secra on 'Ssem twaem 
 felJan dallandes.' 
 
 3 See e.g. Glastonbury Rentalia (Somerset Record Soc.) pp. 14, 15, 55, 67, 
 89, 119, 128-9, 137-8, 155, 166, 192, 195, 208, 219. A system which leaves 
 half the land idle in every year is of course quite compatible with the growth of 
 both winter and spring corn. When, as is not uncommon, the villeins have to 
 do between Michaelmas and Christmas twice as much ploughing as they will do 
 between Christmas and Lady Day, this seems to point to a scheme which leaves 
 one field idle and divides the other between winter and spring corn in the 
 proportion of 2 : 1. Even in the fourteenth century a three-field system seems 
 to have been regarded in some places as 'high farming.' Larking, Domesday 
 of Kent, App. p. 23 : Extent of Addington, A.D. 1361 : 'Et sunt ibidem 60 acrae 
 terrae arabilis, de quibus duae partes possunt seminari per annum, si bene 
 coluntur.' For evidence of the three-field system, see Nasse, Agricultural 
 Community, Engl. transl. 53. 
 
 4 Meitzen, op. cit. ii. 592. 
 
 6 Turton, Forest of Pickering (North Biding Record Society), 148 ff. Twenty 
 years ago A. E. enclosed an acre ; sown eight tunes with spring corn ; value of 
 a sown acre Is., of an unsown, 4d. Twenty-two years ago E. C. enclosed a 
 rood ; sown seven times with oats, value 6d. a year ; value, when unsown, Id. a 
 year. In the same book are many instances of a husbandry which alternates 
 oats with hay. 
 
 6 Scrutton, Commons and Common Fields, 118, citing a Report to the Board 
 of Agriculture.
 
 Measures and Fields. 367 
 
 maps seem to tell us that Somerset differed from Wiltshire 
 and Dorset. The settlement of a heathen folk loosely banded 
 together under a war-lord was one thing; the conquest of a 
 new province by a Christian king who was advised by foreign 
 bishops and had already been taught that he had land to 
 ' book/ would be another thing. If, as seems possible, we read 
 in Ine's laws of a 'plantation' of some parts of Somerset effected 
 by means of large allotments made to the king's gesiths, who 
 undertake to put tillers on the soil 1 , we must not at once infer 
 that this is an old procedure, for it may be very new, and may 
 have for its outcome an agrarian arrangement strikingly unlike 
 that which existed in the heart of the older Wessex. 
 
 Moreover there are upon the face of our map many cases New and 
 which seem to tell us that in the oldest days the smallest lages. " 
 district that bore a name was often large, and therefore that 
 the territory which subserved a single group of homesteads was 
 often spacious. One example we will take from Norfolk. We 
 find a block of land that now-a-days consists of eleven 
 parishes, namely, Wiggenhall S*. Mary the Virgin, Wiggen- 
 hall S*. German, Wiggenhall S*. Peter, Wiggenhall S fc . Mary 
 Magdalen, Tilney cum Islington, Tilney All Saints, Tilney 
 S*. Lawrence, Terrington S*. Clement, Terrington S*. John, Wai- 
 pole S fc . Peter, Walpole S fc . Andrew 2 . In such a case we can 
 hardly suppose that all these villages belong to the same age, 
 even if we are not entitled to infer that the later villages were 
 not founded until the day for parish churches had arrived. This 
 being so, it is highly probable that some villages were formed 
 at all stages of the feudalizing process, and therefore that a 
 historical account of ' the ' English township, or even of ' the ' 
 English nucleated village, would of necessity be untrue. And, 
 while this East Anglian specimen is still before us, we may 
 notice another interesting trait. In the Marshland Fen there 
 is a considerable tract of ground which consists of ' detached 
 portions' of these and other villages. Each has been given 
 a block there, a fairly rectangular block. At one point the 
 partition is minute. A space of less than 36 acres has been 
 cut up so that no less than six villages shall have a piece, a 
 
 1 Ine, 63-68, 70. See above, p. 238. 
 
 2 A very fine instance is found on the north coast of Norfolk : Burnham 
 Deepdale, B. Norton, B. Westgate, B. Sutton, B. Thorpe, B. Overy. As to this 
 see Stevenson, E. H. B. xi. 304.
 
 measures. 
 
 368 The Hide. 
 
 rectangular piece of it 1 . It seems very possible that this fen 
 has at some time been common ground for all these villages, 
 and, as already said, it is in this quarter that we may perhaps 
 find traces of something that resembled the ' marks ' of Ger- 
 many 2 . The science of village morphology is still very young, 
 and we must not be led away into any discussion of its elements ; 
 but there is the more reason why we should take to heart those 
 warnings that it already gives us, because what we can read of 
 hides is to be found for the more part in documents proceeding 
 from a central power, which, for governmental and fiscal purposes, 
 endeavours to preserve fictitious continuity and uniformity in 
 the midst of change and variety. However, we must draw 
 nearer to our task. 
 
 History of As regards land measurement, we may be fairly certain that 
 in the days before the Norman Conquest there was little real, 
 though much nominal uniformity. The only measures for the 
 size of things with which nature has equipped the natural man 
 are his limbs. For the things that he handles he uses his 
 thumb, span, cubit, ell; for the ground upon which he walks, 
 his foot and his pace. For large spaces and long distances he 
 must have recourse to ' time-labour-units,' to the day's journey 
 and the morning's ploughing. Then gradually, under the 
 fostering care of government, steady equations are established 
 between these units: twelve thumbs, for instance, are to 
 make a foot. Thus the measures for land are brought into 
 connexion with the more delicate measures used for cloth and 
 similar stuff. Then an attempt to obtain some standard less 
 variable than the limb may forge a link between thumbs and 
 grains of corn. Another device is the measuring rod. One 
 rod will represent the arm of an average man; a longer rod 
 may serve to mediate between the foot which is short and 
 the acre or day's ploughing which is large. In laying out a 
 field in such wise that it shall consist of equal pieces, each 
 of which can be ploughed in a forenoon, we naturally use a 
 rod. We say, for example, that to plough a strip that is 4 rods 
 wide and 40 long is a fair day's work. For some while there is 
 
 1 Index Map of Ordnance Survey of Norfolk. Six-inch Map of Norfolk, LVI. 
 Another instance occurs near Yarmouth along the banks of the Waveney. Even 
 if the allotment was the result of modern schemes of drainage, it still might be 
 a satisfaction of very ancient claims. 
 
 2 See above, p. 355.
 
 Measures and Fields. 369 
 
 no reason why the rods employed in two neighbouring villages 
 should be strictly or even approximately equal 1 . Taxation is 
 the great force that makes for standard land measures. Then 
 
 o 
 
 a king declares how many thumbs there ought to be in the 
 cloth-ell or cloth-yard. At a later time he actually makes 
 cloth-ells or cloth-yards and distributes them, keeping an ulti- 
 mate standard in his own palace. Thenceforward all other 
 units tend to become mere fractions or multiples of this royal 
 stick. The foot is a third, the thumb or inch a thirty-sixth 
 part thereof. Five and a half cloth -measuring yards make 
 a royal land-measuring rod. Plot out a space which is four 
 rods by forty, you will have an acre. 
 
 The whole story, if ever it be told at length, will be Slow 
 intricate ; but we believe that a general persuasion that land- 
 measurements ought to be fixed by law and by reference to 
 some one carefully preserved standard is much more modern 
 than most people think. Real accuracy and the establishment 
 of a measure that is to be common to the whole realm first 
 emerge in connexion with the measurement of cloth and such 
 like. There is a delightful passage in the old Scotch laws 
 which tells us that the ell ought to contain 37 inches meted 
 by the thumbs of three men, ' )?at is to say, a mekill man and 
 a man of messurabill statur and of a lytill man 2 / We have 
 somewhere read that in Germany, if a perch of fifteen feet 
 was to be manufactured, the first fifteen people who chanced 
 to come out of church contributed each a foot towards the 
 construction of the standard. At an early time, however, men 
 were trying to find some class of small things which were of 
 a fairly invariable length and hit upon barley-corns. This 
 seems to have happened in England before the Norman 
 Conquest 3 . Instead of taking the 'thoume' of 'a man of mes- 
 surabill statur' for your inch, you are to take three barley-corns, 
 'iii bear cornys gud and chosyn but tayllis (i.e. without the 
 tails) ' 4 . But the twelfth century was drawing to an end before 
 
 1 Fines (ed. Hunter) i. 242 : ' sex acras terrae mensuratas per legalem 
 perticam eiusdem villae [de Haveresham].' 
 
 2 Acts of Parliament of Scotland, i. 309. 
 
 8 Schmid, Gesetze, App. XII. : 'three feet and three hand breadths and three 
 barley corns.' 
 
 4 Acts of Parliament of Scotland, i. 309. Compare Statutes of the Realm, 
 i. 206: 'Tria grana ordei sicca et rotunda faciunt pollicem.' This so-called 
 Statute of Admeasurement has not been traced to any authoritative source. 
 
 M. 24
 
 370 The Hide. 
 
 any decisive step was taken to secure uniformity even in the 
 measurement of cloth. In Richard L's day guardians of 
 weights and measures are to be appointed in every county, 
 city and borough ; they are to keep iron ulnae 1 . At this time 
 or a little later these ulnae, ells or cloth-yards were being 
 delivered out by a royal officer to all who might require them, 
 and that officer had the custody of the ultimate standards' 2 . 
 We may doubt whether the laws which require in general terms 
 that there shall be one measure throughout the realm had 
 measures of land in view 8 . A common standard is not nearly 
 as necessary in this case as it is in the case of cloth. Even 
 in our own day men do not buy land by the acre or the perch 
 in the same sense as that in which they buy cloth or cotton 
 by the yard. Very rarely will anyone name a price for a rood 
 and leave it to the other bargainer to decide which out of many 
 roods shall be included in the sale. Nevertheless, the distri- 
 bution of iron ulnae was important. An equation was estab- 
 lished between the cloth measure and the land measure : five- 
 and-a-half ulnae or cloth-yards make one royal perch. After 
 this we soon find that land is occasionally measured by the 
 iron ulna of the king 4 . 
 
 Superficial The scheme of computation that we know as 'superficial 
 measure. measure ' wa s long in making itself part of the mental fur- 
 niture of the ordinary man. Such terms as ' square rod ' and 
 ' square mile ' were not current, nor such equations as that 
 which tells us how 144 square inches make a square foot. 
 Whatever may have been the attainments of some cloistered 
 mathematicians, the man of business did not suppose that 
 he could talk of size without talking of shape, and indeed a 
 set of terms which speak of shapeless size is not very useful 
 until men have enough of geometry and trigonometry to 
 measure spaces that are not rectangular parallelograms. The 
 enlightened people of the thirteenth century can say that 
 
 Probably, like many of the documents with which it is associated, it is a mere 
 note which lawyers copied into their statute books. 
 
 1 Hoveden, iv. 33: 'et ulna sit ferrea.' 2 Britton, ii. 189. 
 
 8 Magna Carta is careful of wine, beer, corn and cloth ; not of land. 
 
 4 Gloucester Corporation Kecords, ed. Stevenson, p. 80. Near the year 1200 
 a grant is made of land in Gloucester measuring in breadth 30 feet ' iuxta 
 ferratam virgam Regis.' Ducange, s. v. ulna, gives examples from the Monasti- 
 con. The iron rod was an iron ell. Were standard perches ever made and 
 distributed ? Apparently the only measure of length of which any standard was 
 made was the ulna or cloth-yard.
 
 Measures and Fields. 371 
 
 if an acre is x perches long it is y perches wide 1 . They can 
 compare the size of spaces if all the lines be straight and all 
 the angles right; and for them an acre is no longer of 
 necessity ten times as long as it is broad. But they will not 
 tell us (and they do not think) that an acre contains z ' square 
 perches.' This is of some importance to students of Domesday 
 Book. Very often the size of a tract of land is indicated by 
 the length of two lines : The wood or the pasture is x leagues 
 (furlongs, perches, feet) in length and y in breadth. Now, to 
 say the least, we are hasty if we treat this as a statement 
 which gives us size without shape. It is not all one to say 
 that a wood is a league long and a league wide and to say 
 that it is two leagues long and half a league wide. The jurors 
 are not speaking of superficial content, they are speaking of 
 length and breadth, and they are either giving us the extreme 
 diameters of the irregularly shaped woods and pastures, or 
 (and this seems more probable) they are making rough esti- 
 mates of mean diameters. If we go back to an earlier time, 
 the less we think of 'superficial measure' the better 2 . 
 
 Let us recall the main features of our modern system, The mo- 
 
 . dern sys- 
 
 giving them the names that they bore in medieval Latin, tern. 
 
 Linear Measure. 
 
 12 inches (pollices) = \ foot (pes) ; 3 feet=l yard (ulna) ; 5 '5 yards 
 *=1 rod, pole, perch (virga, pertica, perca) ; 40 perches = 1 furlong (quaren- 
 tina) ; 8 furlongs = 1 mile (mille) ; 12 furlongs =1 leuua, leuca, leuga 
 (league) 3 . 
 
 Superficial Measure. 
 
 144 square inches =1 square foot; 9 square feet=l square yard; 
 3O25 square yards = 1 square perch ; 40 square perches = 1 rood ; 4 roods 
 = 1 acre 4 . 
 
 1 See the apocryphal Statute of Admeasurement, Stat., vol. i. p. 206. 
 
 2 If the jurors had superficial measure in their heads and were stating this 
 by reference to two straight lines, they would make the length of one of these 
 lines a constant (e.g. one league or one furlong). This is not done: the space 
 is 6 furlongs in length by 3 in breadth, 14 furlongs in length by 4 in breadth, 
 9 furlongs and 1 perch in length by 5 furlongs and 2 perches in breadth 
 (instances from Norfolk) or the like. They are endeavouring to indicate shape 
 as well as size. See the method of measurement adopted in K. 594 (iii. 129) : 
 4 and Saar ftaet land unbradest is fter hit sceol beon eahtatyne fota brad.' 
 
 The league of 12 furlongs has dropped out of modern usage ; it is very 
 prominent in D. B., where miles, though not unknown, are rare. 
 
 4 Our foot is -30479 meters. Our perch is very close to 5 meters. Our acre 
 40-467 ares. A hide of 120 acres would be 48 - 56 hectares. 
 
 242
 
 372 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 The an- 
 cient ele- 
 ments of 
 land mea- 
 sure. 
 
 In the thirteenth century these outlines are already drawn; 
 but, as we have seen, if we are to breathe the spirit of the 
 time, we ought to say (while admitting that acres may be 
 variously shaped) that the normal acre is 4 perches in width 
 and 40 perches (= 1 furlong) in length. The only other 
 space that we need consider is the quarter of an acre, our 
 rood. That ought to be 1 perch in width and 1 furlong 
 (=40 perches) in length. The breadth of the acre is still 
 known to all Englishmen, for it is the distance between the 
 wickets. 
 
 This system has been generated by the corelation of cloth- 
 measures and land-measures. If we are going back to remote 
 times, we must expel the cloth-measures as intruders. What 
 then is left is very simple ; it is this : the human foot, a day's 
 ploughing and a measuring stick which mediates between feet 
 and acres. That stick has had many names. Our arithmetic 
 books preserve three, ' rod, pole or perch ' ; it has also been 
 known as a gad or goad and a lug: but probably its oldest 
 name is yard (gyrd). It is of some importance that we should 
 perceive that our modern yard of three feet is not one of the 
 very ancient land-measures. It is a 'cloth-yard' not a land- 
 yard. In medieval documents the Latin name for it is ulna 1 , 
 and probably the oldest English name for it is eln, elle, ell. 
 There seems to have been a shifting of names. The measuring 
 rod that was used for land had so many names, such as perch, 
 rod, pole, goad, lug, that it could afford, if we may so speak, 
 to dispense with the additional name of yard, which therefore 
 might stand for the much shorter rod that was used by the 
 clothiers. However, even in our own century men have been 
 speaking of ' yards of land ' in a manner which implies that 
 at one time a yard, when mentioned in this context, was 
 the same thing as the perch. When they have spoken of 
 a ' yard of land ' they have meant sometimes a quarter of an 
 acre (our rood) and sometimes a much larger space. In 1820 
 a 'yard of land' means, we are told, a quarter of an acre 
 in Wiltshire, while in Buckinghamshire it stands for a tract 
 
 1 Statutes of the Realm, i. 206 : ' Tres pedes faciunt ulnam.' Though this 
 equation gets established, the ulna or cloth-yard seems to start by being an 
 arm's length. See the story that Henry I. made his own arm a standard : Will. 
 Malmesb. Gesta Begum., ii. 487. Britton, i. 189, tells us that the aune contains 
 two cubits and two thumbs (inches). Our yard seems too long to be a step.
 
 Measures and Fields. 373 
 
 which varies from 28 to 40 acres 1 . This last application of 
 the term we shall consider by and by. A yard of land or 
 rood of land (rood and rod are all one) is a quarter of an acre, 
 because an acre is four rods or ' yards ' or perches in width, 
 and, when an acre is to be divided, it is always, and for a very 
 good reason, divided by lines parallel to its long sides. So 
 though the rood or yard of land may in course of time take 
 other shapes and even become a shapeless size, it ought to be a 
 rod or ' yard ' in width a*nd forty rods or one furlong in length. 
 
 So we start with the human foot, the day's ploughing and TheGer- 
 a rod. How much borrowing there has been in this matter m 
 by race from race is an obscure question. For example, the 
 mediation of a rod between the foot and the day's work is 
 common to the Roman and the Germanic systems. Here the 
 similarity ends, and the vast differences which begin seem 
 to have exceedingly deep roots. We can not be content with 
 saying that the Roman puts two oxen in the plough and 
 therefore draws short furrows, whereas the German puts eight 
 oxen and draws long furrows. There seems to. be a radical 
 disagreement between them as to what a plough should be 
 and what a plough should do 2 . To these matters we can make 
 but the slightest reference, nor dare we touch the problems of 
 Celtic history. Somehow or another the Germans come to the 
 rule that generally an acre or day's work should be four rods 
 wide and, if possible, about forty rods long 3 . 
 
 It is very probable that in England this rule prevailed English 
 at a remote time. Throughout the middle ages and on to M 
 our own day there have been many 'acres' in England which 
 swerved markedly from what had become the statutory type, 
 and in some cases a pattern divergent from the statutory 
 pattern became 'customary' in a district. But apparently 
 these customary acres commonly agree with the royal standard 
 in involving the equation : 1 acre = 4 perches x 40 perches*. In 
 Domesday Book and thence onwards the common Latin for 
 furlong is quarentina, and this tells us of furrows that are forty 
 
 1 Second Keport of Commissioners for Weights and Measures, Parliamentary 
 Papers, 1820, Beports, vol. vii. 
 
 3 As to all this see Meitzen, op. cit. i. 272 fol. 
 
 3 The ratio 10 : 1 is not the only one that is well represented in Germany. 
 The practice of making the acre four rods wide is more universal. As we shall 
 see below, length must take its chance. 
 
 4 Morgan, England under the Normans, 19.
 
 acres. 
 
 374 The Hide, 
 
 perches long. It is when we ask for the number of feet in 
 a perch that we begin to get various answers, and very various 
 they are. The statutory number, the ugly 16'5, looks like 
 a compromise 1 between 15 and 18, both of which numbers seem 
 to have been common in England and elsewhere. This is 
 the royal equation in the thirteenth century ; it has been 
 found near the middle of the twelfth 2 ; more at present we 
 cannot say. Short perches and small acres have been very 
 common in the south of England. In 1820 some information 
 about the customary acre was collected 3 : In Bedfordshire it 
 was 'sometimes 2 roods.' In Dorsetshire 'generally 134 [in- 
 stead of 160] perches.' In Hampshire, 'from 107 to 120 
 perches, but sometimes 1804 I n Herefordshire, 'twothirds 
 of a statute acre/ but ' of wood, an acre and three-fifths or 256 
 perches.' In Worcestershire, ' sometimes 132 or 141 perches.' 
 In Sussex, '107, 110, 120, 130 or 212 perches'; 'short acre, 
 100 or 120 perches ' ; 'forest acre, 180 perches.' Then as to 
 rods, the 'lug or goad' of Dorsetshire had 15 ft. 1 in. ; in 
 Hertfordshire, 20 feet; in Wiltshire, 15 or 16 or 18. The 
 wide prevalence of rods of 15 feet can not be doubted, and 
 it seems possible that rods with as few as 12 feet have been 
 in use 4 . An acre raised from a 12 foot rod would, if feet 
 were invariable, be little more than half our modern statute 
 acre. Nowhere do we see any sure trace of a rod so short 
 as the Koman pertica of ten pedes, though the scribes of the 
 land-books will give the name pertica to the English gyrd*. 
 Large In northern districts the 'customary' acre grows larger. 
 
 In Lincolnshire it is said to be ' 5 roods, particularly for copy- 
 hold land ' ; but small acres were known there also 6 . In 
 Staffordshire, ' nearly 2^ acres.' In Cheshire, ' formerly and 
 still in some places 10,240 square yards' (pointing to a rod 
 of 24 feet). In Westmoreland, '6760 square yards ' (pointing 
 
 1 Pollock, E. H.-R. xi. 218. 
 
 2 Morgan, op. cit. 19, citing Monasticon, iv. 421. 
 
 * Second Report of the Commissioners for Weights and Measures, Parlia- 
 mentary Papers, 1820, Reports, vol. vii. The information thus obtained might 
 have been better sifted. When it is said that a certain customary perch 
 contains 15 feet 1 inch, these feet and inches are statute feet and statute inches. 
 Probably this perch had exactly 15 'customary' feet. So, again, it is likely 
 that every 'customary' acre contained 160 'customary' perches. 
 
 4 See below f p. 382. 6 Compare Meitzen, op. cit. ii. 560. 
 
 6 Morgan, op. cit. 22.
 
 Measures and Fields. 375 
 
 to a rod of 19 feet), also the so-called 'Irish acre' of 7840 
 square yards (pointing to a rod of 21 feet). There is much 
 evidence that rods of 20 and 21 feet were often used in 
 Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Rods of 18, 19, 21, 22 and 24 
 feet were known in Lancashire. A writer of the thirteenth 
 century speaks as if rods of 16, 18, 20, 22 and 24 feet 
 were in common use, and mentions none shorter 1 . As just said, 
 the Irish plantation acre was founded on a rod of 21 feet. The 
 Scotch acre also is larger than the English ; it would contain 
 about 6150'4 instead of 4840 of our square yards ; it is formed 
 from a rod of 6 Scotch ells. On the other hand, the acres 
 which have prevailed in Wales seem to be small ; one type 
 had 4320 of our square yards, another 3240. 
 
 There has been variety enough. Even if the limits of Anglo- 
 variation are given by rods of 12 and 24 feet, this will enable r odsana 
 one acre to be four times as large as another. Whether before aeres ' 
 the twelfth century there was anything that we ought to call 
 a standard rod, a royal rod for all England, must be very 
 doubtful. In royal and other land-books references are made 
 to furlongs, to acre-breadths, to yards or rods or perches, and to 
 feet as to known measures of length 2 , but whether a kingly 
 gift is always measured by a kingly rod we do not know. 
 The Carolingian emperors endeavoured to impose a rod upon 
 their dominions; it seems to have been considerably shorter 
 than our statute perch 3 . In this province we need not expect 
 many Norman novelties. We see from Domesday Book that 
 the Frenchmen introduced the ancient Gallic arpentum* as 
 a measure for vineyards 5 ; but most of the vines were of 
 
 1 Anonymous Husbandry, see Walter of Henley, ed. Lamond, p. 69. 
 
 2 K. 296 (ii. 87) : 6 virgae in length and 3 in breadth. K. 339 (ii. 149) : 
 28 roda lang and 24 roda brad. K. 507 (ii. 397): 12 gerda lang and 9 gerda 
 brad. K. 558 (Hi. 229): 'tres perticas ' = ' J>reo gyrda.' K. 772 (iv. 84): 
 12 perticae.K. 787 (iv. 115) : a pertica and a half. K. 814 (iv. 160) : dimidiam 
 virgam et dimidiam quatrentem. K. 1103 (v. 199): 75 gyrda. K. 1141 (v. 275): 
 6 gyrda. K. 1087 (v. 163): 3 furlongs and 3 mete-yards = an unknown quantity 
 + 12 yards + 13 yards + 43 yards and 6 feet + 20 yards and 6 feet + 7 yards and 
 6 feet + 5 yards. This charter is commended to geometers. We see, however, 
 that the ' yard ' in question is longer than 6 feet ; it is connected with our perch, 
 not with our cloth yard. Schmid, App. XII. : 3 miles, 3 furlongs, 3 acre- 
 breadths, 9 feet, 9 hand-breadths and 9 barley-corns. 
 
 3 Meitzen, op. cit. ii. 554. This virga regalia is set down at 4-70 meters ; 
 our statute perch stands very close to 5 meters. 
 
 4 Meitzen, op. cit. i. 278. 6 Ellis, Introduction, i. 116.
 
 376 The Hide. 
 
 their own planting, and the mere fact that they used this 
 measure only for the vineyards seems to tell us that they were 
 content with English rods and English acres 1 . In Normandy 
 the perches seem to have ranged upwards from 16 to 25 feet 2 ; 
 so that 16'5 would not have hit the average. On the whole, 
 our perch seems to speak of a king whose interests and estates 
 lay in southern England and who struck a mean between 15 
 and 18. Whoever he was, we owe him no thanks for the 
 'undecimal' element that taints our system 3 . 
 
 Customary But we must be cautious in drawing inferences from loose 
 forest D reports about ' customary ' measures. Village maps and village 
 fields have yet to be seriously studied. We may in the mean- 
 while doubt whether in some districts to which the largest 
 acres are ascribed, such acres are normal or are drawn in the 
 oldest villages. We may suspect them of being ' forest acres.' 
 If once a good many of these abnormal units are distributed 
 in a district, they will by their very peculiarity attract more 
 than their fair share of attention and will be spoken of as 
 characteristic of that district. In Germany, as well as in 
 England, we find forest acres which are much larger than 
 common acres and are meted by a rod which is longer than 
 the common rod 4 . Possibly men have found a long rod con- 
 venient when they have large spaces to measure, but we fancy 
 that the true explanation would illustrate the influence exer- 
 cised by taxation on systems of measurement. Some scheme 
 of allotment or colonization is being framed ; an equal tribute 
 is to be reserved from the allotted acres. If, however, there 
 is uncleared woodland to be distributed, rude equity, instead 
 of changing the tribute on the acre, changes the acre's size 
 and uses a long rod for land that can not at once be tilled 5 . 
 
 1 The use of quarentina for furlong may be due to the Normans. 
 
 2 Delisle, Etudes sur la condition de la classe agricole en Normandie, 531-2. 
 * We find from D. B. i. 166 that there was a royal sextarius ; but (i. 162, 
 
 238) other sextarii were in use. 
 
 4 Meitzen, op. cit. ii. 564. Thus in Koln, the Morgan is 31-72 ares, the 
 Waldmorgen 38-06 ares. In Brunswick the Feldmorgen is 25-02 ares, the 
 Waldmorgen 33 '35 ares. So in Sussex the common acres are small ; the forest 
 acre = 180 (instead of 160) perches. So in Herefordshire the common acre is put 
 down at two-thirds of the statute acre, but an acre of wood is more than an acre 
 and a half of statute measure. 
 
 5 Registr. Honor. Richemund., Ap., p. 11, Agard says : 'In the Arrentation of 
 Assarts of Forests made in Henry III.'s and Edward I.'s times, for forest ground 
 the commissioners let the land per perticam xx. pedum,' though by this time the
 
 Measures and Fields. 377 
 
 Also fields that were plotted out by Normans were likely to 
 have large acres, and as the perches of Normandy seem to 
 have been longer than most of the perches that were used 
 in France, we may perhaps infer that the Scandinavian rods 
 were long and find in them an explanation of the big acres 
 of northern England. But at present such inferences would be 
 precarious. 
 
 Whether in its origin the land-measuring rod is a mere The acre 
 representative of a certain number of feet or is some instru- 
 ment useful for other purposes seems to be dubious. One of 
 the names that it has borne in English is goad; but most of 
 our rods would be extravagantly long goads 1 . Possibly the 
 width of four oxen yoked abreast has exercised some influence 
 upon its length 2 . When a rod had once found acceptance, it 
 must speedily have begun to convert that 'time-labour-unit,' 
 the acre, into a measured space. Already in the land-books 
 we read of acres of meadow 8 ; this is no longer a contradiction 
 in terms. Still there can be no doubt that our acre, like the 
 jurnale, Tagwerk, Morgen of the Continent, has at its root the 
 tract that can be ploughed in a day, or in a forenoon : in the 
 afternoon the oxen must go to the pasture 4 . Now, when 
 
 16 - 5 foot perch was the established royal measure for ordinary purposes. In a 
 Buckinghamshire Fine levied in John's reign (Hunter, i. 242) we find acres of 
 land which are measured ' by the lawful perch of the vill,' while acres of wood 
 are measured 'by the perch of the king.' Ibid. 13, 178 : a perch of 20 feet was 
 being used in the counties of Bedford and Buckingham, though Bedfordshire is 
 notorious for small acres. The obscure processes that go on in the history of 
 measures might be illustrated from the report cited above, p. 374, note 3 ; 
 the length of the ' customary ' perch varies inversely with the difficulty of the 
 work to be done. In Herefordshire a perch of fencing was 21 feet, a perch of 
 walling 16'5. And so forth. 
 
 1 Morgan, op. cit. 27, suggests a double goad. The gad of modern Cam- 
 bridgeshire has been a stick 9 feet long ; but the surveyor put eight into the 
 acre-breadth, reckoning two of these gads to the customary pole of 18 feet. See 
 Pell, in Domesday Studies, i. 276, 296. A rod that is 18 feet long is a clumsy 
 thing and perhaps for practical purposes it has been cut in half. Meitzen, op. 
 cit., i. 90 : Two hunting-spears would make a measuring rod. See also Hanssen, 
 Abhandlungen, ii. 210. 
 
 2 Seebohm, op. cit. 119. Welsh evidence seems to point this way. 
 
 3 K. 529 (iii. 4) : '12 eeceras msedwa.' K. 549 (iii. 33). K. 683 (iii. 263). 
 
 4 When Walter of Henley, p. 8, is making his calculations as to the amount 
 of land that can be ploughed in a day, he assumes that the work will be over a 
 noune. The ' by three o'clock ' of his translator is too precise and too late. At 
 whatever hour nones should have been said, the word noon became our name for 
 twelve o'clock. See also Seebohm, op. cit. 124.
 
 378 The Hide. 
 
 compared with their foreign cousins, oar statute perch is a long 
 rod and our statute acre is a decidedly large ' day-work-unit 1 .' 
 It seems to tell of plentiful land, sparse population and poor 
 husbandry. This is of some importance. There is a good deal 
 of evidence pointing to the conclusion that, whereas in the 
 oldest days men really ploughed an acre in a forenoon, the 
 current of agricultural progress made for a while towards the 
 diminution of the space that was covered by a day's labour. 
 In JElfric's dialogue the ploughman complains that each day 
 he must till 'a full acre or more 2 .' His successor, the poetic 
 Piers, had only a half-acre to plough 2 . In monastic cartularies 
 which come from southern counties, where we have no reason 
 to suspect exceptionally large acres, the villein seems often to 
 plough less than an acre 4 . Then that enlightened agriculturist, 
 Walter of Henley, enters upon a long argument to prove to his 
 readers that you really can plough seven-eighths of an acre 
 in a forenoon, and even a whole acre if you are but engaged 
 in that light kind of ploughing which does for a second 
 fallowing 5 . Five centuries later another enlightened agri- 
 culturist, Arthur Young, discovered that 'from North Leach, 
 through Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire, and Glamorganshire, 
 light and middling turnip-land etc.' was being ploughed at the 
 rate of half an acre to one acre a day by teams of 'eight oxen; 
 never less than six; or four and two horses.' This, he says, 
 was being done ' merely in compliance with the obstinacy of 
 the low people,' for 'the labourers will not touch a plough 
 without the usual number of beasts in it 6 '. Mr Young could 
 not tell us of ' these vile remnants of barbarity without a great 
 
 1 Meitzen, op. cit., ii. 565. The rods known in Germany range upwards 
 from very short South German rods which descend from the Roman pertica to 
 much longer rods which lie between 4 meters and 5. Our statute perch just 
 exceeds 5 meters. Then the ordinary (not forest) Morgen rarely approaches 
 40 ares, while our statute acre is equivalent to 40 % 46 ares. However, the 
 Scandinavian Tonne is yet larger and recalls the big acres of northern England. 
 In France perches of 18 feet were common, and in Normandy yet longer perches 
 were used, but we do not know that the French acre or journal contained 
 160 square perches. 
 
 2 Seebohm, op. cit. 166. 
 
 3 Seebohm, op. cit. 19. 
 
 4 Thus e.g. Glastonbury Rentalia, 68 : 'if he has eight oxen he shall plough 
 every Thursday [during certain seasons] three roods [perticatas]. ' 
 
 5 Walter of Henley, 9. 
 
 8 Tour through the Southern Counties, ed. 3 (1772), pp. 298-301.
 
 Measures and Fields. 379 
 
 degree of disgust 1 '. But we are grateful. We see that an 
 acre of light land was the maximum that these 'low people' 
 with their eight oxen would plough in a day, and we take it 
 that at one time the voice of reforming science had urged men 
 to diminish the area ploughed in a given time, to plough 
 deeper and to draw their furrows closer. The old tradition 
 was probably well content with a furrow for every foot. Walter 
 of Henley proposed to put six additional furrows into the acre 2 . 
 Hereafter we shall see that some of the statistics given by 
 Domesday Book fall in with the suggestion that we are here 
 making. Also we may see on our maps that the strip which 
 a man has in one place is very often not an acre but a half- 
 acre. Now, in days when men really ploughed an acre at a 
 stretch, such an arrangement would have involved a waste 
 of time, since, when the morning's work was half done, the 
 plough would be removed from one ' shot ' to another 3 . 
 
 At length we reach the fields, and at once we learn that The real 
 there is something unreal in all our talk of acre and half-acre fields, 
 strips. In passing we may observe that some of our English 
 meadows which show by their ' beds ' that they were not always 
 meadows, seem to show also that the boundaries of the strips 
 were not drawn by straight rods, but were drawn by the plough. 
 The beds are not straight, but slightly sinuous, and such, it is 
 said, is the natural course of the old plough ; it swerves to the 
 left, and this tendency is then corrected by those who guide it*. 
 But, apart from this, land refuses to be cut into parallelograms 
 each of which is 40 rods long and 4 wide. In other words, the 
 ' real acres ' in an open field diverge widely from the ideal acre 
 that was in the minds of those who made them. 
 
 Let us recall a few features of the common field, though The 'shots.' 
 they will be familiar to all who have read Mr Seebohm's book 8 . 
 
 1 Tour through the Southern Counties, p. 127. 
 
 2 Walter of Henley, 9. 
 
 8 Young, View of Agriculture of Oxfordshire, p. 104. In Oxfordshire in the 
 early years of this century many ploughs with four horses ' go out for 3 roods,' 
 after all improvements in ploughs and in horses. 
 
 4 Meitzen, op. cit. 88. Dr Taylor in Domesday Studies, i. 61, gives a 
 somewhat different explanation. The ploughman walked backwards in front of 
 the beasts, and, when near the end of the furrow, used his right arm to pull 
 them round. 
 
 8 Among the land-books those that most clearly indicate the intermixture of 
 strips are K. 538 (iii. 19), 648 (iii. 210), 692 (iii. 290), 1158 (v. 310), 1169 
 (v. 326), 1234 (vi. 39), 1240 (vi. 51), 1276 (vi. 108), 1278 (vi. 111).
 
 380 The Hide. 
 
 A natural limit to the length of the furrow is set by the 
 endurance of oxen. From this it follows that even if the 
 surface that lies open is perfectly level and practically limitless, 
 it will none the less be broken up into what our Latin docu- 
 ments call culturae 1 . The cultura is a set of contiguous and 
 parallel acre-strips ; it tends to be a rude parallelogram ; two 
 of its sides will be each a furlong (' furrowlong ') in length, 
 while the length of the other sides will vary from case to case. 
 We commonly find that every great field (campus) is divided 
 into divers culturae, each of which has its own name. The 
 commonest English equivalent for the word cultura seems to 
 have been furlong, and this use of furlong was very natural ; but, 
 as we require that term for another purpose, we will call the 
 cultura a shot. So large were the fields, that the annual value 
 of an acre in one shot would sometimes be eight times greater 
 than that of an acre in another shot 2 . To such differences our 
 ancestors were keenly alive. Hence the dispersion of the strips 
 which constitute a single tenement. 
 
 Delimits- But to make ' shots ' which should be rectangular and just 
 shots. 40 feet long was often impossible. Even if the surface of the 
 field were flat, its boundaries were the irregular curves drawn 
 'by streams and mounds. In order to economize space, shots 
 running at right angles to other shots were introduced, and of 
 necessity some furlongs were longer than others. If, however, 
 as was often the case, men were laying out their fields among 
 the folds of the hills, their acres would be yet more irregular 
 both in size and in shape. They would be compelled to make 
 very small shots, and the various furrows if ' produced ' (in the 
 geometer's sense of that word) would cut each other at all 
 imaginable angles. On the maps we may still see them 
 struggling with these difficulties, drawing as many rectilinear 
 shots as may be and then compelled to parcel out as best they 
 can the irregularly shaped patches that remain. And then we 
 
 1 As to the names of cultura the Eamsey Cartulary may be profitably 
 consulted. Such names as Horsepelfurlange, Wodefurlonge, Benefurlange, 
 Stapelfurlange (i. 307), Mikellefurlange (321), Stanweyfurlange, Longefurlange 
 (331) are common. We meet also with -wong : Kedewonge (321), Langiwange, 
 Stoniwonge, Schortewonge, Semareswonge (341-2). Also with -leuge (appa- 
 rently 0. E. ttah, gen. dat. Uage): Wolnothesleuge, Edriches Leuge. Often the 
 cultura is known as the Five (Ten, Twenty) Acres. Sometimes in Latin this 
 sense of furlong is rendered by quarentina : ' unam rodam in quarentina de 
 Newedich ' : Fines, ed. Hunter, i. 42. 
 
 2 Glastonbury Bentalia, 180, 195, 208.
 
 Measures and Fields. 381 
 
 see that even these patches have been allotted either as acres 
 or as half-acres. 
 
 Therefore, when we are dealing with medieval documents, The real 
 we have always to remember that besides ideal acres there 
 were real acres which were mapped out on the surface of the 
 earth, and that a plot will be, and rightly may be, called an 
 acre though its size is not that of any ideal acre. To tell a 
 man that one of these acre-strips was not an acre because it 
 was too small would at one time have been like telling him that 
 his foot was no foot because it fell short of twelve inches. This 
 point is made very plain by some of the beautiful estate maps 
 edited by Mr Mowat 1 . We have a map of 'the village of 
 Whitehill in the parishe of Tackley in the countye Oxon., the 
 moitye or one halfe whereof belongeth to the presidente and 
 schollers of Corpus christi colledge in the universitye of Oxon., 
 the other moitye unto Edwarde Standerd yeoman the par- 
 ticulars whereof soe far as knowne doe plainelye appeare in 
 the platte and those which are unknowne, as wastes comons 
 and lotte meadowes are equallye divided betweene them, 
 drawne in November anno domini 1605, regni regis lacobi iij .' 
 We see four great fields divided first into shots and then into 
 strips. Each strip on the map bears an inscription assigning 
 it either to the college or to Mr Standerd, and with great 
 regularity the strips are assigned to the college and to 
 Standerd alternately. Then on each strip is set its ' estimated ' 
 content, and on each strip of the college land is also set its 
 true content. Thus looking at one particular shot in the 
 South Field we read: 
 
 ij. ac. coll. 1. 1. 36 
 Edw. Stand, ij. ac. 
 ij. ac. colL 1. 2. 2 
 Edw. Stand, ij. ac. 
 ij. ac. colL 1. 2. 2 
 Edw. Stand, ij. ac. 
 ij. ac. colL 1. 0. 39. 
 
 This means that, going along this shot, we first come to a two- 
 acre-strip of college land containing by admeasurement 1 A. 1 R. 
 36 P. ; next to a two-acre strip of Standerd's land, which the 
 surveyor, who was making the map for the college, was not 
 at pains to measure ; then to a two-acre strip of college land 
 
 1 Sixteen Old Maps : Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888.
 
 382 The Hide. 
 
 containing 1 A. 2 R. 2 P. : and so forth. Then in the margin 
 of the map has been set ' A note of the contentes of the landes 
 in Whitehille belonginge to the colledge.' It tells us how 
 ' theire groundes in the West Fielde by estimation 80 acres doe 
 conteine by statute measure 48 A. 2 R. 24 P.' The other fields 
 we may deal with in a table 
 
 A. A. E. P. 
 
 East Field estimation 75 measure 51 1 25 
 
 Middle Field 58 39 3 36 
 
 South Field 103 59 2 13 
 
 It will be seen at once that the discrepancy between the 
 two sets of figures is not to be fully explained by the suppo- 
 sition that at Whitehill men had measured land by measures 
 differing from our statutory standards 1 . The size of a 'two- 
 acres' (and the land in this instance had been divided chiefly 
 into ' two-acres ') varied not only from field to field and shot to 
 shot, but within one and the same shot. Each two-acre strip 
 has an equal breadth, but the curving boundaries of the fields 
 make some strips longer than others 2 . 
 
 Varying We turn to the admirable maps of Heyford in Oxfordshire 
 
 a Ses fthe designed in 1606. Here the land is divided among many 
 
 occupiers and cut up into a vast number of strips, to each 
 
 of which is assigned its ' estimated ' and its measured content. 
 
 Thus we read : 
 
 dim. ac. Jo. Sheres 1. 18 
 dim. ac. Bic. Elkins 1. 18 
 dim. ac. Jo. Merry 1. 18. 
 
 In this part of this shot a ' half-acre ' contains 1 R. 18 p. Some 
 of the shots in this village have fairly straight and rectangular 
 boundaries, so that we may, for example, find that many 
 successive 'half-acres' contain 1 R. 18 P. But then if we pass 
 to the next shot we shall find 1 R. 28 P. in the ' half-acre/ while 
 in a third shot we shall find but 1 R. 8 P. Yet every strip of 
 land is a 'half-acre' or an 'acre' or a 'acre and a half or a 
 'two acres' or a 'three acres.' We see further that when 
 ' acres ' occur among ' half-acres ' the strips vary in breadth 
 but not in length. 
 
 1 The rod, however, must have been very short ; perhaps it had as few as 
 12 feet. 
 
 2 For many reasons this must not be taken as a typical map. We refer to 
 it merely as showing the relation of ' estimated ' (that is of ' real ') acres to an 
 acre-measure.
 
 Measures and Fields. 383 
 
 On a map of Roxton made in 1768 we have the same thing 
 written out in English words. Thus : 
 
 Eliz. Gardner a half 0. 1. 32 
 
 Carpenter a half 0. 1. 32 
 
 Harris an acre 0. 3. 24 
 
 Carpenter a half 0. 1. 32 
 
 Jam. Gardner an acre 0. 3. 24 
 
 Makepace a half 0. 1. 34 
 
 The result of all this is that anyone who lives in a village 
 knows how many 'acres' its fields contain. He has not to 
 measure anything; he has only to count strips, for he is not 
 likely to confuse ' acres ' with ' half-acres ' and that is the only 
 mistake that he could make. 
 
 If a shot had a curved boundary, little or no pains seem irregular 
 to have been taken to equalize the strips that lay within it acres. 
 by making additional width serve as a compensation for de- 
 ficient length. The width of the so-called acre remained 
 approximately constant while its length varied. Thus, to take 
 an example from the map of Heyford, we see a shot which is 
 bounded on the one side by a straight line and on the other 
 by a curving road. At one end of it the acre contains 2 R. 8 P. ; 
 this increases to 2 R. 30 P. ; then slowly decreases until it has 
 fallen as low as 1 R. 36 P., and then again rises to 2 R. 2 P. 
 When they were dividing the field, men attempted to map 
 out shots in which approximately equal areas could be con- 
 structed ; but, when a shot was once delimited, then all the 
 acres in it were made equally broad, while their length could 
 not but vary, except in the rare case in which the shot was a 
 true rectangle 1 . 
 
 It is probable that the whole system was made yet more The seiions 
 visible by the practice of ploughing the land into ' beds ' or r 
 ridges, which has but recently fallen out of use. In our Latin 
 documents these ridges appear as seiions (seliones). In English 
 they were called ' lands,' for the French sillon struck no root in 
 our language. Anyone who has walked through English grass 
 
 1 Instructive evidence about this matter was given in a Chancery suit of 
 James I.'s reign. The deponent speaking of the fen round Ely says ' it is the 
 use and custom... to measure the fen grounds by four poles in breadth for an acre, 
 by a pole of 18 feet... and in length for an acre of the said grounds as it 
 happeneth, according to the length of the furlong of the same fens, which is 
 sometimes shorter and sometimes longer. ' Quoted by 0. C. Pell in Domesday 
 Studies, i. 296.
 
 384 The Hide. 
 
 t 
 
 fields will know what they looked like, for they triumph over 
 time and change 1 . Now it would seem that a fairly common 
 usage made four selions in each acre 2 ; in other words, each 
 acre-strip was divided longitudinally into four waves, so that 
 the distance from crest to crest or trough to trough was a 
 perch in length. Where this usage obtained, you could tell 
 how many acres a shot or field contained by merely ob- 
 serving the undulations of the surface. Even if, as was often 
 the case, the number of selions in the acre was not four, still 
 the number that went to an acre of a given shot would be 
 known, and a man might argue that a strip was an acre be- 
 cause in crossing it he traversed three or six terrestrial waves 8 . 
 Acres divi- If we look at old maps, we soon see that when an acre 
 was divided, it was always divided by a line that was parallel, 
 not to its short ends, but to its long sides. No one would 
 think of dividing it in any other fashion. Suppose that you 
 bisected it by bisecting its long sides, you would force each 
 owner of a half-acre to turn his plough as often as if he had 
 a whole acre. Besides, you would have uneconomical furrows ; 
 the oxen would be stopped before they had traversed what 
 was regarded as the natural distance for beasts to go. Divide 
 your acre into two long strips, then your folk and beasts can 
 plough in the good old way. Hence it follows that when men 
 think of dividing an acre they speak only of its breadth. 
 Hence it follows that the quarter of an acre is a ' rood ' or 
 ' yard 4 ' or virga or virgata of land. Its width is a rod or land- 
 yard, and its length but there is no need to speak of its 
 length 8 . 
 
 1 For an explanation of this mode of ploughing, see Meitzen, op. cit. 84. 
 1 Meitzen gives 6 feet as a usual width for the beds in Germany. I think 
 that in cent. xiii. our selions were usually wider than this. 
 
 3 The Gloucester Corporation Records, ed. Stevenson (1893), should be con- 
 sulted. When small pieces of land were being conveyed, the selions were often 
 enumerated. Thus (p. 124): 'and 13 acres of arable land... whereof one acre 
 lies upon Hstelege near Durand's land. ..an acre and a half being three selions... 
 half an acre being two selions... an acre of five selions... an acre being one selion 
 and a gore. ..four selions and two little gores. ..an acre being three selions and a 
 head-land.' In Mr Seebohm's admirable account of the open fields there seems 
 to me to be some confusion between the selions and the acre or half-acre strips. 
 
 4 On Mr Mowat's map of Roxton a quarter-acre strip is a yeard. 
 
 5 D. B. i. 364 : ' In Staintone habuit Jalf 5 bovatas terrae et 14 acras terrae 
 et 1 virga tarn ad geldum.' This virgate is a quarter-acre. The continuous use 
 of virgata in this sense is attested by Glastonbury Rentalia, 27. So in 
 Normandy: Delisle, Etudes sur la condition de la classe agricole, 535. So in
 
 Measures and Fields. 385 
 
 How then does it happen that these terms ' virgate ' and The vir- 
 ' yard of land,' though given to a quarter of an acre, are yet ga 
 more commonly given to a much larger quantity containing 
 30 acres or thereabouts? The explanation is simple. The 
 typical tenement is a hide. If you give a man a quarter of 
 a hide (an equitable quarter, equal in value as well as extent 
 to every remaining quarter) you do this by giving him a 
 quarter of every acre in the hide. You give him a rood, a 
 yard, a virga 1 , a virgata in every acre, and therefore a rood, 
 a yard, a virga, a virgata of a typical tenement 2 . 
 
 No doubt it is clumsy to have only one term for two The double 
 
 quantities, one of which is perhaps a hundred-and-twenty times "" g 
 
 as great as the other ; but the context will tell us which is 
 meant, and the difference between the two is so large that 
 blunders will be impossible. In course of time there will be a 
 differentiation and specification of terms. To our ears, for ex- 
 ample, rod (rood) will mean one thing, rSd another, yard a 
 third ; but even in the nineteenth century royal commissioners 
 will report that a ' yard of land ' may mean a quarter of an 
 acre or ' from 28 to 40 acres 3 .' When men have not appre- 
 hended ' superficial' measure ' (the measurement of shapeless 
 size), when their only units are the human foot, a rod, an 
 average day's work and the tenement of a typical householder, 
 their language will be poor, because their thought is poor. 
 
 We have now arrived at a not insignificant truth. The The yar<i- 
 virgate or yard-land of 30 acres or thereabouts is not a primary fraction of 
 unit like the hide, the rod, the acre. It is derivative ; it is a hlde ' 
 compound. In its origin it is a rod's breadth in every acre 
 of a hide. In course of time in this case, as in other cases, 
 size will triumph over shape. The acre need not be ten times 
 as long as it is broad ; the virgate need not be composed, per- 
 haps is rarely composed, of scattered quarter-acres ; quartering 
 acres is an uneconomical process ; it leads to waste of time. 
 
 France : Ducange, s. v. virgata from a Kegister of the Chamber of Accounts : 
 ' Quadraginta perticae faciunt virgatam : quatuor virgatae faciunt acram.,' Meit- 
 zen, op. cit. i. 95: in Kalenberg a strip that is one rod in breadth is called a 
 Gert (our yard). 
 
 1 In the Exeter Domesday virga not virgata is the common word. In the 
 Exchequer book an abbreviated form is used ; but virga appears in i. 216 b. 
 
 2 So again, if a iugum is quartered, its quarter can be called a virgate. See 
 Denman Eoss, Hist, of Landholding, 140; Bound, Feudal England, 108. 
 
 See above, p. 372. 
 
 M. 25
 
 386 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 The yard- 
 land in 
 laws and 
 charters. 
 
 But still the term will carry on its face the traces of an ancient 
 history and a protest against some modern theories. The 
 virgate in its inception can not be a typical tenement ; it is 
 a fraction of a typical tenement. 
 
 What we have here been saying seems to be borne out 
 by the Anglo-Saxon laws and charters. They barely recognize 
 the existence of such entities as yard-lands or virgates. The 
 charters, it must be confessed, deal with large tracts and 
 seldom have need to notice less than a hide. When, however, 
 they descend below the hide, they at once come down to the 
 acre, and this although the quantity that they have to specify 
 is 90, or 60 or 30 acres 1 . On the other hand, any reference 
 to such an unit as the virgate or yard-land is exceedingly 
 rare. To judge by the charters, this is a unit which was but 
 beginning to force itself upon men's notice in the last century 
 before the Conquest 2 . From a remote time there may have 
 been many tenements that were like the virgates or yard- 
 lands of later days; but the old strain of language that is 
 preserved in the charters ignores them, has no name for them, 
 and, when they receive a name, it signifies that they are 
 fractions of a householder's tenement. 
 
 1 K. 205 (i. 259) : ' circiter 30 iugera.' K. 217 (i. 274): ' 30 iugera.' K. 225 
 (i. 290): 'hoc est 30 iugerum'...'hoc est 85 segetum.' K. 234 (i. 308): '150 
 iugera.' K. 241 (ii. 1): '24 iugeras.' K. 259 (ii. 26): '19 iugera.' K. 264 (ii. 
 36): 'unum dimidium agrum...healve aker.' K. 276 (ii. 57): '10 iugera.' 
 K. 285 (ii. 70): '80 eecra.' K. 339 (ii. 150): 'sextig acera ear$londes...o'$er 
 sextig.' K. 586 (iii. 118): '30 secra on iSaem twsem feldan.' K. 612 (iii. 159): 
 ' 2 hida buton 60 scran.' K. 633 (iii. 188) : ' 3 mansas ac 30 iugerum dimen- 
 sionem.' K. 695 (iii. 295): '40 agros.' K. 759 (iv. 59): '30 akera.' K. 782 
 (iv. 106): 'fiftig tecera.' K. 1154 (v. 303): '36 sekera yrSlandes.' K. 1161 (v. 
 315): 'ter duodenas segetes' = '36 secera yrSlandes.' K. 1211 (v. 393): '25 
 Begctcs.' K. 1218 (vi. 1) : '14 bida and... 40 aecera.' 
 
 2 Probably it occurs in Ine 67 ; certainly in Eectitudines 4, 3, and in the 
 late document about Tidenham (above, p. 330). K. 369 (ii. 205) : Boundary of 
 a gyrd at Ashurst which belongs to a hide at Topsham (A.D. 937). K. 521 
 (ii. 418) : Edgar grants ' tres virgas.' K. 658 (iii. 229) : JEthelred grants 
 '3 mansas et 3 perticas.' K. 1306 (vi. 163): JSthelred grants land 'trmm sub 
 aestimatione perticarum.' K. 772 (iv. 84) : Edward Conf. grants ' 5 perticas.' 
 K. 787 (iv. 115): He grants ' unam perticam et dimidiam.' K. 814 (iv. 160): 
 He grants 'dimidiam virgam et dimidiam quatrentem.' Crawford Charters, 5, 
 9, mortgage in 1018 of a yard of land. K. 949 (iv. 284) ; 979 (iv. 307) : two 
 other examples from the eve of the Conquest. It is more likely that these 
 'yards' and 'perches' of land are quarter-hides than that they are quarter- 
 acres ; ' square ' perches seem to be out of the question. There are of course 
 many instances in the charters of a pertica, virga, gyrd used as a measure of 
 mere length. See above, p. 375, note 2, where a few are cited.
 
 Measures and Fields. 387 
 
 As an unit larger than the acre men have known nothing The hide 
 but the hide, the manse, the land of one family, the land of ameasure. 
 one householder. This is what we find in England: also it 
 is found in Germany and Scandinavia 1 . The state bases its 
 structure, its taxation, its military system, upon the theory 
 that such units exist and can be fairly treated as equal or 
 equivalent. This theory must have facts behind it, though 
 in course of time the state may thrust it upon lands that it 
 will not fit, for example, upon a land of ring-fenced property 
 where there is no approximate equality between the various . 
 tenements. In its origin a hide will not be a measure of land. 
 A measure is an idea ; a hide is a tenement. The ' foot ' does 
 not begin by being twelve inches; it begins by being a part 
 of the human body. The 'acre' does not begin by being 
 4840 square yards; it begins by being a strip in the fields 
 that is ploughed in a forenoon. But unless there were much 
 equality between human feet, the foot would not become a 
 measure; nor would the acre become a measure unless the 
 method of ploughing land were fairly uniform. A great deal 
 of similarity between the ' real ' hides or ' householder's lands ' 
 we must needs suppose if the hide becomes a measure; not 
 only must those in any one village be much alike, there must 
 be similarity between the villages. 
 
 After a certain sort the hide does become a measure. Bede The hide as 
 does not believe that if the families in the Isle of Wight were 
 counted, the sum would be just 1200. The Anglo-Saxon kings 
 are giving away half-hides or half-manses as well as manses 
 or hides. They can speak of three hides and thirty acres 2 or 
 of two hides less sixty acres 8 . Men are beginning to work 
 sums in hides and acres as they work sums in pounds and 
 pence. Indubitably such sums are worked in Domesday Book. 
 In the thirteenth century the hide can even be treated as a 
 pure superficial measure. An instance is given by an ' extent ' 
 of the village of Sawston in Cambridgeshire. The content of 
 
 1 Meitzen, op. cit. 74. In Germany the Hufe, hoba, huoba, huba, etc. is the 
 mnit. This word is said to be connected with the modern German Behuf, our 
 
 behoof; it is the sors, the portion that behoves a man. In Sweden the unit is 
 the Mantal, a man's share. The last word about the tenmannetale of Yorkshire 
 has not been said. 
 
 2 K. 633 (iii. 188). 
 
 3 K. 612 (iii. 159) : ' landes sumne deal, ftaet synd 2 hida, buton 60 scran Sat 
 hseft se arcebisceop genumen into Cymesige to his hame him to hwsetelande.' 
 
 252 
 
 a measure.
 
 388 The Hide. 
 
 about two hundred small parcels of land is given in terms of 
 acres and roods. Then an addition sum is worked and a total 
 is stated in hides, virgates and acres, the equation that is 
 employed being 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A. It is a remarkable case, 
 because the area, not only of arable land, but of meadows, 
 pasture, crofts, gardens and messuages is added up into hides. 
 The hide is here a pure measure, a mere multiple of acres 1 . 
 The men who made this ' extent ' could have spoken of a hide 
 of cloth. But this seems a rare and it is a late instance. At 
 an earlier time the hide is conceived as consisting only of 
 arable acres with appurtenances. 
 The hide as A word to explain this conception. In very old times 
 when men thought of land as the subject-matter of grants and 
 taxes they spoke only of arable land 2 . If we are to understand 
 their sayings and doings, we must think ourselves into an 
 economic arrangement very different from that in which we 
 are now immersed. We must well-nigh abolish buying and 
 selling. Every village, perhaps every hide, must be very 
 nearly self-sufficient. Now when once population has grown 
 so thick that nomadic practices are forsaken, the strain of 
 supporting mankind falls almost wholly on the ploughed land. 
 That strain is severe. Many acres feed few people. Thus 
 the arable becomes prominent. But further, arable implies 
 pasture. This is not a legal theory ; it is a physical fact. A 
 householder can not have arable land unless he has pasture 
 rights. Arable land is land that is ploughed; ploughing im- 
 plies oxen; oxen, pasture. Our householder can not use a 
 steam-plough ; what is more, he can not buy hay. If he keeps 
 beasts, they must eat. If he does not keep beasts, he has 
 no arable land. Lastly, as a general rule men do not possess 
 pasture land in severalty ; they turn out their beasts on ' the 
 common of the vill.' Therefore, in very old schemes of taxation 
 and the like, pasture land is neglected : not because it is un- 
 important, but because it is indispensably necessary. It may 
 be taken for granted. If a man has 120 acres of arable land, 
 he must have adequate pasture rights; there must be in % 
 
 1 Rot. Hund. ii. 575. After going through the whole calculation, I have 
 satisfied myself that the sum is worked in this way. 
 
 2 Hence in our law Latin the word terra means arable land. To claim unam 
 acram terrae when you meant an acre of meadow (prati) would have been a fatal 
 error.
 
 Measures and Fields. 389 
 
 Domesday's language pastura sufficiens carucis. And in the 
 common case there will be not much more than sufficient 
 pasture. If there were, it would soon be broken up to provide 
 more corn. Every village must be self-supporting, and there- 
 fore an equilibrium of arable and pasture will be established 
 in every village. Thus if, for fiscal and governmental purposes, 
 there is to be a typical tenement, it may be a tenement of 
 x arable acres, and nothing need be said of any other kind 
 of ground. 
 
 We are going to argue that the Anglo-Saxons give 120 acres, The hide of 
 arable acres, to the hide. Our main argument will be that the 
 equation 1 H. = 120 A. is implied in the fiscal system revealed 
 by Domesday Book. But, by way of making this equation 
 probable, we may notice that, if we had no evidence later than 
 the Conquest, all that we should find on the face of the Anglo- 
 Saxon land-books would be favourable to this equation. In 
 the first place, on the only occasion on which we hear of the 
 content of a hide, it is put at 120 acres 1 . In the second place, 
 when a number of acres is mentioned, it is commonly one of 
 those numbers, such as 150, 90, 80, 60, 30, which will often 
 occur if hides of 120 acres are being partitioned 2 . The force 
 of this last remark may seem to be diminished if we remember 
 how excellent a dividend is 120. It is neatly divisible by 
 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12. But then we must reflect that this 
 very quality recommended it to organizers, more especially as 
 there were 240 pence in the pound. 
 
 Supposing for a moment that we bring home this equation Real * nd 
 
 , ., *. fiscal hides. 
 
 to the Anglo-Saxon financiers, there would still remain the 
 question how far it truthfully represented agrarian facts. To 
 that question no precise answer can be given : the truth lies 
 somewhere between two extremes. We must not for one instant 
 believe that England was so neat a chess-board as a rude fiscal 
 theory paints, where every pawn stands on its square, every 
 'family' in the centre of 120 acre-strips of 4 by 40 perches. 
 The barbarian, for all his materialism, is an idealist. He is, 
 like the child, a master in the art of make-believe. He sees 
 things not as they are, but as they might conveniently be. 
 Every householder has a hide; every hide has 120 acres of 
 
 1 K. 1222 (vi. 12); T. 508: 'And io JLSelgar an an hide lond es Se 
 hauede be hundtuelti acren, ateo so he wille.' Kemble, Saxons, 117. 
 3 See above, p. 386, note 1.
 
 390 The- Hide. 
 
 arable ; every hide is worth one pound a year ; every house- 
 holder has a team ; every team is of eight oxen ; every team is 
 worth one pound. If all this be not so, then it ought to be so 
 and must be deemed to be so. Then by a Procrustean process 
 he packs the complex and irregular facts into his scheme. 
 What is worse, he will not count. He will assume that a large 
 district has a round 1200 hides, and will then ordain that those 
 hides must be found. We see this on a small scale if we 
 study manorial 'extents' or village maps. The virgates are 
 not equal ; the acres are far from equal ; but they are deemed 
 to be equal 1 . Nevertheless, we must stop short of the other 
 extreme or we shall be over-estimating the power of such 
 government and the originality of such statesmanship as 
 existed. Theories like those of which we are speaking are 
 bora of facts and in their turn generate new facts. Our fore- 
 fathers really lived in a simpler and a more chess-board-like 
 England than that which we know. There must have been 
 much equality among the hides and among the villages. When 
 we see that a 'hundred' in Cambridgeshire has exactly 100 
 hides which are distributed between six vills of 10 hides apiece 
 and eight vills of 5 hides apiece, this simple symmetry is in 
 part the unreal outcome of a capricious method of taxation, 
 but in part it is a real economic fact. There was an English 
 conquest of England, and, to all seeming, the conquest of 
 eastern England was singularly thorough. In all probability 
 a great many villages were formed approximately at one time 
 and on one plan. Conveniently simple figures could be drawn, 
 for the slate was clean 3 . 
 
 divergence However, at an early time the hide becomes an unit in a 
 from 8 real system of assessment. The language of the land-books tells 
 
 bides. 
 
 1 There can be little need of examples. Glastonbury Eentalia, 152 : ' S. tenet 
 unam virgatam terrae et dimidiarn, quae computantur pro una virgata.' Ibid. 
 p. 160 : ' H. tenet unam virgatam et 5 acras, quae omnia computantur pro una 
 virgata.' Worcester Register, 62 : A virgate consists of 13 acres in one field and 
 12^ in the other ; the next virgate of 16 acres in one field and 12 in the other. 
 In other cases the numbers are 16 and 14 j 14$ and 11 ; 13 and 12-?, ; 14 and 11 ; 
 14| and 11. Yet every virgate is a virgate. 
 
 2 At the date of Domesday we are a long way from the first danegeld and a 
 very long way from any settlement of Cambridgeshire ; still if we analyze a 
 symmetrical hundred, such as Armingford, we shall find that the average ten- 
 hide vill is just about twice as rich as the average five-hide vill in men, in teams 
 and in annual valet, though there will be some wide aberrations from this 
 norm.
 
 Measures and Fields. 391 
 
 us that this is so 1 . Already in Ine's day we hear of the amount 
 of victual that ten hides must find for the king's support*. 
 About the end of the tenth century the duty of maintaining 
 burgs is bound up with the possession of hides 8 . Before the 
 end of that century heavy sums are being raised as a tribute 
 for the Danes. For this purpose, as we shall try to show here- 
 after, ' hides ' are cast upon shires and hundreds by those who, 
 instead of counting, make pleasantly convenient assumptions 
 about the capacity of provinces and districts, and in all proba- 
 bility the assumptions made in the oldest times were the 
 furthest from the truth. Now and again the assessments of 
 shires and hundreds were corrected in a manner which, so far 
 as we are concerned, only made matters worse. It becomes 
 apparent that hides are not of one value or nearly of one value. 
 This becomes painfully apparent when Cornwall and other far 
 western lands are brought under contribution. So large sums 
 of hides are struck off the poorer counties. The fiscal ' hide ' 
 becomes a lame compromise between an unit of area and an 
 unit of value. Then privilege confounds confusion ; the estates 
 of favoured churches and nobles are ' beneficially hidated.' But 
 this is not all. Probably the real hides, the real old settlers' 
 tenements, which you could count if you looked at a village 
 and its fields, are rapidly going to pieces, and the fragments 
 thereof are entering into new combinations. In the lordless 
 villages economic forces of an easily imaginable kind will make 
 for this end. Not only may we suppose some increase of 
 population, especially where Danes swarm in, and some progress 
 in the art of agriculture, but also the bond of blood becomes 
 weaker and the familia that lives in one house grows smaller. 
 So the hides go to pieces. The birth of trade and the 
 establishment of markets help this process. It is no longer 
 necessary that every tenement should be self-sufficient; men 
 can buy what they do not grow. The formation of manors 
 may have tended in some sort to arrest this movement. A 
 system of equal (theoretically equal) tenements was convenient 
 to lords who were collecting 'provender rents' and extend- 
 ing their powers; but under seignorial pressure virgates, 
 
 1 See above, p. 336, note 1. 8 See above, p. 237. 
 
 3 This is proved by ' The Bnrghal Hidage ' of which we spoke above, p. 187, 
 and shall speak again hereafter.
 
 392 The Hide. 
 
 rather than hides, were likely to become the prominent units. 
 We may well believe that if to make two ears of corn grow 
 where one grew is to benefit mankind, the lords were public 
 benefactors, and that the husbandry of the manors was more 
 efficient than was that of the lordless townships. The clergy 
 were in touch with their fellows on the Continent ; also the 
 church's reeve was a professional agriculturist and might even 
 write a tract on the management of manors 1 . There was more 
 cooperation, more communalism, less waste. A family could 
 live and thrive upon a virgate 8 . 
 
 Effects of But, what concerns us at the present moment is the, for 
 genceof us disastrous, effect of this divergence of the fiscal from the 
 
 rea -l h^e. Even if finance had not complicated the problem, 
 we should, as we have already seen, have found many difficulties 
 if we tried to construe medieval statements of acreage. Already 
 we should have had three different ' acres ' to think of. We will 
 imagine that a village has 590 'acre strips' in its field. In 
 one sense, therefore, it has 590 acres. But the ideal to which 
 these strips tend and were meant to conform is that of acres 
 measured by a rod of 15 feet. Measured by that rod there 
 would, we will suppose, be 550 acres. Then, however, we may 
 use the royal rod and say that there are 454 acres or there- 
 abouts. But the field was divided into five tenements that 
 were known as hides, and the general theory is that a hide 
 (householder's land) contains, or must be supposed to contain, 
 120 acres. Therefore there are here 600 acres. And now a 
 partitionary method of taxation stamps this as a vill of four 
 hides. Consequently the ' hide ' of this village may have as 
 many as 150 or as few as 90 'acres.' It ought not to be so. 
 It would not be so if men were always distinguishing between 
 ' acre strips ' and measured acres, between ' real ' hides (which, 
 to tell truth, are no longer real, since they are falling to pieces) 
 and ' fiscal ' or ' geld ' hides. But it will be so. Here and there 
 we may see an effort to keep up distinctions between the 
 'carucate for gelding' and the 'carucate for ploughing,' between 
 
 1 See the Gerefa published by Dr Liebermann in Anglia, ix. 251. Andrews, 
 Old English Manor, 246. 
 
 2 The manner in which the old hides have really fallen to pieces but are 
 preserving a notional existence is well illustrated by Domesday of S'. Paul's, 
 41-47. In one case a hide forms nine tenements containing respectively 30, 30, 
 15, 15, 5, 5, 1\, 5, 7 acres. See Vinogradoff, Villainage, 249.
 
 Measures and Fields. 393 
 
 the real acre and the acre ' for defence (acra warae) 1 ' ; but men 
 tire of the^fe long phrases and argue backwards and forwards 
 between the rateable and the real. Hence some of the worst 
 puzzles of Domesday Book 2 . 
 
 Such being the causes of perplexity, it is perhaps surprising Acreage of 
 that in the thirteenth century when, we begin to obtain a large later days, 
 stock of manorial extents, ' the hide ' should still exhibit some 
 uniformity. But, unless we have been misled by a partial 
 induction, a tendency to reckon 120 rather than any other 
 number of acres to the hide is plainly perceptible. The follow- 
 ing are the equations that prevailed on the manors of Ramsey 
 Abbey, which were scattered in the eastern midlands 8 . 
 
 Huntingdonshire 
 
 Upwood with Raveley 1 n. = 4 v.= 80 A. 
 
 Wistow 1 H.=4 v. = 120A. 
 
 Broughton 1 H. = 6 v. = 208 A. 
 
 Warboys 1 H.=4 v. = 120 A. 
 
 Holy well 1 H. = 5 v.= 90 A. 
 
 Slepe (St Ives) 1 H. = 5 v.= 80 A. 
 
 Houghton with Wyton 1 H. = 6 v. = 108 A. 
 
 Hemingford 1 H. = 6 v. = 96 A. 
 
 Dillington 1 H. = 6 v. = 201 A. 
 
 Weston 1 H. = 4 v. = 112 A. 
 
 Brington 1 H. = 4 v. = 136 A. 
 
 By thorn 1 H. = 4 v. = 176 A. 
 
 Gidding 1 H. = 4 v. = 112 A. 
 
 Elton 1 H. = 6 v. = 144 A. 
 
 Stukeley 1 H. = 4 v.= 96 A. 
 Eipton with Remington 1 H. = 4 v. = 62 A. 
 
 Northamptonsh ire 
 
 Barn well 1 H. = 7 v. = 252 A. 
 
 Hemington 1 H. = 7 v. = 252 A. 
 
 Bedfordshire 
 
 Cranfield 1 H. = 4 v. = 192 A. 
 
 Barton 1 H. = 4 v.= 96 A. 
 
 Shitlingdon lH. = 4v.= 48A. 
 
 1 Vinogradoff, Villainage, 242 ; Maitland, History of an English Manor, 
 Eng. Hist. Bev. ix. 418. 
 
 2 See Pell, in Domesday Studies, i. 357. Almost at one and the same 
 moment, but in two different 'extents,' the same tenements are being described 
 as containing 15 and as containing 18 acres. Domesday of S'. Paul's, 69 : 'In 
 this manor the hide contains 120 acres ; the old inquest said that it used not to 
 contain more than 80 ; but afterwards the lands were sought out and measured 
 (exqiiisitae sunt terrae et mensuratae).' 
 
 8 Cart. Rams. iii. 208. See also the table given by Seebohm, op. cit. 37.
 
 394 The Hide. 
 
 Hertfordshire 
 
 Therfield 1 H. = 4 v. = 256 A. 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 Lawshall 1 H. = 3 v. = 156 A. 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 Brancaster 1 H.=4 v. = 160 A. 
 
 Ringstead 1 H. = 4 v. = 120 A. 
 
 Cambridgeshire 
 
 Elsworth 1 H. = 4 v. = 1 20 A. 
 
 Knapwell 1 H. = 4 v. = 160A. 
 
 Graveley Freehold 1 H. = 7 v.=unkno\*ai 
 
 Villeinage 1 H. = 6|v. = 135 A. 
 
 Over 1 H. = 4 v. = 120A. 
 
 Girton 1 H. = 4 v. = 120 A. 
 
 Burwell 1 H. = 4 v. = 1 20 A. 
 
 Here in thirty-one instances what we take to be the normal 
 equation appears but seven times, but no other equation occurs 
 more than twice. Moreover, so far as we have observed, the 
 variations in the acreage that will be ascribed to a hide are not 
 provincial, they are villar variations : that is to say, though we 
 may see that the average hide of one county would have more 
 acres than those that are contained in the average hide of another, 
 we can not affirm that the hide of a certain county or hundred 
 contains a acres, while that of another has b acres, and, on the 
 other hand, we often see a startling difference between two 
 contiguous villages. Lastly, where the computation of 120 
 acres to a hide is forsaken, we see little agreement in favour 
 of any other equation. In particular, though now and again 
 the hide of a village' will perchance have 240 acres, we can 
 find no trace of any ' double hide ' in which ingenuity might 
 see a link between the Roman and English systems of measure- 
 ment and taxation 1 . The only other general proposition which 
 our evidence suggests is that a land, which habitually displays 
 
 1 A 'double hide" of 24Q acrea plays a part in Mr Seebohm's speculations. 
 His instances of it hardly bear examination. On p. 37 he produces from Hot. 
 Hund. ii. 629 the equation 1 H. = 6 v. of 40 A. apiece. This apparently refers 
 to the Bamsey manor of Brington ; but Cart. Bams. ii. 43 gives 1 H.=4 v. of 
 40 A., while Cart. Bams. iii. 209 gives 1 H. = 4 v. of 34 A. Then Mr Seebohm, 
 p. 51, cites from ' the documents of Battle Abbey given by Dugdale ' the equation 
 1 n. = 8 v. ; but this seems to refer to the statement now printed in the Battle 
 Cartulary (Camd. Soc.) p. xiii., where 1 H. = 4 v. As to the supposed solanda 
 of two hides, see Bound, Feudal England, 103.
 
 Measures and Fields. 395 
 
 unusually large virgates will often be a land in which a 
 given area of arable soil has borne an unusually light weight 
 of taxation, and this, as we shall hereafter see, will often, though 
 not always, be a land where a given area of arable soil has been 
 deemed to bear an unusually small value. But this connexion 
 between many-acred hides and light taxation is not very 
 strongly marked in our cartularies 1 . 
 
 In the land-books which deal with Kent the aratrum or The earu- 
 sulung* is commoner than the hide or manse, and Domesday 
 Book shows us that in Kent the solin (sulung) is the fiscal 
 unit that plays the part that is elsewhere played by the hide. 
 That same part is played in Suffolk, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Lincoln- 
 shire, and the counties of Derby, Nottingham and Leicester 
 by the carucata, which has for its eighth part the bovata. These 
 terms seem to be French : that is to say, they apparently formed 
 no part of the official Latin that had been current in England 3 . 
 We may infer, however, that they translated some English, 
 or rather perhaps some Scandinavian terms, for only in Danish 
 counties do we find them used to describe the geldable units. 
 It is exceedingly doubtful whether we ought to treat this 
 method of reckoning as older than the Danish invasions. Bede, 
 himself a Northumbrian, uses the ' family-land' as his unit, no 
 matter what be the part of England of which he is speaking, 
 and his translator uses the hid or hiwisc in the same indis- 
 criminate fashion. Unfortunately the 'carucated' shires are 
 those which yield us hardly any land-books, and we do not 
 know what the English jurors said when the Norman clerks 
 wrote carucata and bovata : perhaps plough-gate and ox-gate, 
 or plough-gang and ox-gang, or, again, a plough of land, for 
 these were the vernacular words of a later age. On the whole, 
 
 1 The virgates on the Gloucestershire manors of Gloucester Abbey contain 
 the following numbers of acres: 36, 40, 36, 38, 48, 48, 48, 48, 50, 48, 40, 64, 64, 
 64, 48, 50, 60, 48, 48, 64, 18 (?), 44, 80, 48, 48, 72. See Gloucester Cartulary, 
 vol. iii. Of the taxation and wealth of the various counties we shall speak 
 hereafter. 
 
 2 Napier and Stevenson, Crawford Charters, p. 47: The 0. E. sulh (plough) 
 is ' cognate with Lat. sulcus.' 
 
 3 Both terms were in use in Normandy and some other parts of France : 
 Delisle, Etudes, 538 ; also Ducange. In a would-be English charter of the days 
 before the Conquest these words would be ground for suspicion. In K. 283 and 
 455 Eemble has printed (in documents which he stigmatizes) caractorum. But 
 apparently (see B. ii. 104, iii. 94) what stands in the cartulary is carattorum, and 
 this seems a mistake for the common casatorum. To mistake 0. E. < for r is 
 easy.
 
 396 
 
 The, Hide. 
 
 The ox- 
 gang. 
 
 The fiscal 
 carucate. 
 
 the little evidence that we have seems to point to the greater 
 antiquity in England of a reckoning which takes the 'house- 
 land' rather than the 'plough-land' as its unit 1 . 
 
 As to the bovate or ox-gang, it seems to be an unit only 
 in the same sense as that in which the virgate or yard-land is 
 an unit; the one is the eighth, the other is the fourth of an 
 unit. That, in days when eight oxen are yoked to a plough, 
 the eighth of a plough-gang should be called an ox-gang will 
 not surprise us, though, as a matter of fact, an ox never ' goes ' 
 or ploughs in solitude 2 . In our Latin documents a third part 
 of a knight's fee will be, not tertia pars feodi unius militis, but 
 far more commonly, feodum tertiae partis unius militis. We 
 do not infer from this that fractions of knights, or fractions 
 of knight's fees are older than integral knights and integral 
 fees. The bovate seems to have been much less widely known 
 than the carucate, for apparently it had no place in the com- 
 putation that was generally used in East Anglia, where men 
 reckoned by carucates, half-carucates and acres and where the 
 virgate was not absolutely unknown 3 . 
 
 In the financial system, as we have said, the carucate plays 
 for some counties the part that is played for others by the hide. 
 Fiscally they seem to be equivalent: that is to say, when 
 every hide of Wessex is to pay two shillings, every carucate 
 of Lincolnshire will pay that sum. We think also and shall 
 try to show that the Exchequer reckons 120 acres to the 
 carucate, or, in other words, that if a tenement taxed as 
 a carucate were divided into six equal shares, each share 
 would at the Exchequer be called 20 acres. The same forces, 
 however, which have made the fiscal hide diverge widely from 
 the ' real ' hide have played upon the plough-gangs of the 
 Danelaw. In the Boldon Book we read of many bovates with 
 15 acres apiece, though the figures 20, 13, 12, 12 and 8 are 
 also represented, and, when we come to the extents of the 
 thirteenth century, we seem to see in the north but a feeble 
 
 1 See Stevenson, E. H. E. v. 143. 
 
 2 In D. B. the iugum appears as a portion of a solin ; probably as a quarter 
 of the solin. D. B. i. 13 : ' pro uno solin se defendit. Tria iuga sunt infra 
 divisionem Hugonis et quartum iugum est extra.' The iugum has already 
 appeared in a few Kentish land-books. In K. 199 (i. 249), B. i. 476, we find an 
 ioclet which seems to be half a manse (mansiuncula). In K. 407 (iii. 262), B. ii. 
 572, we find 'an iuclaete et insuper 10 segetes (acres).' 
 
 3 D. B. ii. 389 : ' In Cratingas 24 liberi homines 1 carr. terrae et 1 virg.
 
 Measures and Fields. 397 
 
 tendency to any uniformity among the equations that connect 
 carucates with acres. The numbers of the acres in a bovate 
 given by a series of Yorkshire inquests is 7, 7, 8, 15, 12, 6, 12, 
 15, 15, 6, 5, 9, 10, 10, 12, 24, 4, 16, 12, 18, 8, 6, 10, 24, 32 l . 
 With a bovate of 4 acres, our carucate would have no more 
 than 32. But then, in the north we may find very long rods 
 and very large acres 2 , and, where Danes have settled, we have 
 the best reason to expect those complications which would arise 
 from the superimposition of a new set of measures upon a 
 territory that had been arranged to suit another set 8 . 
 
 Having been led into speaking of plough-gangs, we may Acreage 
 end these discursive remarks by a gentle protest against the P i ugh. y S 
 use that is sometimes made of the statements that are found 
 in the book called Fleta. It is a second-rate legal treatise of 
 Edward L's day. It seems to have fallen dead from its author's 
 pen and it hardly deserved a better fate. For the more part 
 it is a poor abstract of Bracton's work. When it ceases to 
 pillage Bracton, it pillages other authors, and what it says of 
 ploughing appears to be derived at second hand from Walter 
 of Henley 4 . Now Walter of Henley's successful and popular 
 treatise on Husbandry is a good and important book ; but we 
 must be careful before we treat it as an exponent of the tra- 
 ditional mode of agriculture, for evidently Walter was an 
 enlightened reformer. We might even call him the Arthur 
 Young of his time. Now, it is sometimes said that according 
 to Fleta ' the carucate ' would have 160 acres in ' a two course 
 manor' and 180 in 'a three course manor.' A reference to 
 Walter of Henley will show him endeavouring to convince 
 the men of his time that such amounts as these really can be 
 ploughed, if they work hard. ' Some men will tell you that 
 a plough can not till eight score or nine score acres by the 
 year, but I will show you that it can/ His calculation is 
 worth repeating. It is as follows: 
 
 1 Yorkshire Inquisitions (Yorks. Archseol. Soc.) passim. On p. 77 in an 
 account of Catterick we read of ' a capital messuage worth 5*. ; 32 bovates of 
 arable land in demesne (each bovate of 6 acres at 8s.) 12. 16s. ; 31 bovates 
 held by bondmen (each bovate of 10 acres at 13s. 4d.) 21 ;...2 bovates which 
 contain 24 acres and 32 acres called Inland worth 74s. 8d.' 
 
 2 See above, p. 375. 
 
 3 A bovate of 13 acres seems to have prevailed in Scotland : Acts of Parlia- 
 ment of Scotland, i. 387. 
 
 4 The immediate source is the Seneschaucie. See Walter of Henley, ed. 
 Lamond, p. 84. Fleta, p. 159.
 
 398 The Hide. 
 
 The year has 52 weeks. Deduct 8 for holy-days and other hindrances. 
 There remain 44 weeks or 264 days, Sundays excluded. 
 
 Two course. Plough 40 acres for winter seed, 40 for 
 spring seed and 80 for fallow (total 160) at |ths of an 
 acre per day =182f days 
 
 Also plough by way of second fallowing 80 acres at 
 an acre per day = 80 days 
 
 Total 262f days 1 . 
 
 Walter of ^ IB a strenuous and sanguine, if not an impossible, pro- 
 Henley's gramme. When harvest time and the holy weeks are omitted, 
 the plough is to 'go' every week-day throughout the year, despite 
 frost and tempest. Obviously it is a programme that can only 
 enter the head of an enthusiastic lord who has supernumerary 
 oxen, and will know how to fill the place of a ploughman who is 
 ill. We have little warrant for believing that what Walter hopes 
 to do is being commonly done in his day, less for importing his 
 projects into an earlier age. In order that he may keep his 
 beasts up to their arduous toil, he proposes to feed them with 
 oats during half the year 2 . If we inferred that the Saxon in- 
 vaders of England treated their oxen thus, we might be guilty of 
 an anachronism differing only in degree from that which would 
 furnish them with steam-ploughs. But, to come to much later 
 days, the Domesday of S*. Paul's enables us to say with some 
 certainty that the ordinary team of eight beasts accomplished 
 no such feats as those of which Walter speaks. For example, 
 at Thorpe in Essex the canons have about 180 acres of arable 
 land in demesne. These, it is estimated, can be tilled by one 
 team of ten heads together with the ploughing service that is 
 due from the tenants, and these tenants have to plough at least 
 80 acres, to wit, 40 in winter and 40 in Lent 3 . We must observe 
 that to till even 120 acres according to Walter's two-course 
 plan would mean that a plough must 'go' 180 acres in every 
 year, and that, even if it does its acre every day, more than 
 half the week-days in the year must be devoted to ploughing. 
 We may, however, seriously doubt whether a scheme which 
 
 1 Walter of Henley, pp. 6, 8, 44-5. With a three-course system the figures 
 will be somewhat different. Plough 60 acres for winter seed, 60 for spring seed, 
 60 for fallow (total 180) at the rate of th of an acre per day: Total, 205f days. 
 In second fallowing plough 60 acres at an acre per day : Grand total, 265f days. 
 Whichever system is adopted, the plough 'goes ' 240 acres. 
 
 2 Walter of Henley, p. 13, 
 
 8 Domesday of S'. Paul's, 38.
 
 Measures and Fields. 399 
 
 would plough the land thrice between every two crops had been 
 generally prevalent 1 . Nay, we may even doubt whether the 
 practice of fallowing had been universal 2 . Not unfrequently 
 in our cartularies the villein is required to plough between 
 Michaelmas and Christmas and again between Christmas and 
 Lady Day, while nothing is said of his ploughing in the summer 8 . 
 We are only beginning to learn a little about medieval agri- 
 culture. 
 
 However, we have now said all that we had to say by way 
 of preface to what we fear will be a dreary and inconclusive 
 discussion of some of those abundant figures that Domesday 
 Book supplies. A few we have endeavoured to collect in the 
 tables which will meet the reader's eye when he turns this 
 page, and which will be explained on later pages. 
 
 2. Domesday Statistics. 
 
 As a general rule the account given by Domesday Book Domes- 
 of any manor contains three different statements about it which statements, 
 seem to have some bearing upon the subject of our present 
 inquiry. (A) It will tell us that the manor is rated to the 
 geld at a certain number of units, which units will in Kent 
 be solins or sulungs and yokes (iuga), in Yorkshire, Lincoln- 
 shire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Norfolk and 
 Suffolk carucates and bovates (but bovates are, to say the least, 
 rare in East Anglia), and in the rest of England hides and 
 virgates ; but acres also will from time to time appear in the 
 statement. (B) It will tell us that the manor contains land for a 
 certain number of teams, or for a certain number of oxen. (C) It 
 will tell us that there are on the manor a certain number of 
 teams, some whereof belong to the lord and some to the men. 
 
 1 Meitzen, op. cit. i. 277 ; Andrews, op. oit. 260. 
 
 2 Gerefa, 9 (Anglia, ix. 261): 'Me maig in Maio and Jnnio and Julio on 
 sumera fealgian.' Andrews, op. cit. 257. 
 
 3 Thus e.g. Domesday of S*. Paul's, 59, Tillingham. Is it possible to fallow, 
 when, as in this case, there is no pasture for the oxen except such as is afforded 
 by the idle field? ' Non est ibi pastura nisi cum quiescit dominicum per 
 wainagium....(69) Non est ibi certa pastura nisi quando terrae dominici quiescuut 
 alternatim incultae.'
 
 400 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 TABLE I. 
 
 
 
 Recorded 
 
 Danegeld 
 
 Hides, 
 
 
 Modern 
 
 Population 
 
 circ. arm 
 
 . 
 
 Carucates, 
 
 
 Acreage 
 
 (Ellis) 
 
 1150 
 
 
 Sulungs 
 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 III 
 
 
 IV 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 d. 
 
 
 Kent 
 
 975,820 
 
 12,205 
 
 105 16 
 
 10 
 
 1,224 
 
 Sussex 
 
 932,733 
 
 10,410 
 
 217 
 
 6 
 
 3,474 
 
 Surrey 
 
 461,230 
 
 4,383 
 
 179 16 
 
 
 
 1,830 
 
 Hampshire 
 
 1,037,764 
 
 10,373 
 
 184 15 
 
 4 
 
 2,588 
 
 Berkshire 
 
 461,742 
 
 6,324 
 
 205 11 
 
 4 
 
 2,473 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 880,248 
 
 10,150 
 
 389 13 
 
 
 
 4,050 
 
 Dorset 
 
 632,272 
 
 7,807 
 
 248 5 
 
 
 
 2,277 
 
 
 
 [7,512 E] 
 
 
 
 [2,321 E] 
 
 Somerset 
 
 1,042,488 
 
 13,764 
 
 277 10 
 
 4 
 
 2,936 
 
 
 
 [13,307 E] 
 
 
 
 [2,951 E] 
 
 Devon 
 
 1,667,097 
 
 17,434 
 
 103 19 
 
 8 
 
 1,119 
 
 Cornwall 
 
 868,208 
 
 5,438 
 
 22 15 
 
 
 
 155 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 180,480 (?) 
 
 2,302 
 
 85 12 
 
 
 
 868 
 
 Hertford 
 
 406,932 
 
 4,927 
 
 110 1 
 
 4 
 
 1,050 
 
 Buckingham 
 
 475,694 
 
 5,420 
 
 204 14 
 
 7 
 
 2,074 
 
 Oxford 
 
 485,322 
 
 6,775 
 
 249 16 
 
 5 
 
 2,412 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 796,731 
 
 8,366 
 
 194 1 
 
 6 
 
 2,388 
 
 Worcester 
 
 480,342 
 
 4,625 
 
 101 6 
 
 
 
 1,189 
 
 Hereford 
 
 537,363 
 
 5,368 
 
 93 15 
 
 6 
 
 1,324 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 549,565 
 
 5,204 
 
 114 15 
 
 
 
 1,233 
 
 Huntingdon 
 
 233,928 
 
 2,914 
 
 71 5 
 
 
 
 747 
 
 Bedford 
 
 298,494 
 
 3,875 
 
 110 12 
 
 
 
 1,193 
 
 Northampton 
 
 639,541 
 
 8,441 
 
 119 10 
 
 9 
 
 1,356 
 
 Leicester 
 
 528,986 
 
 6,772 
 
 100 
 
 
 
 2,500 (?) 
 
 Warwick 
 
 578,595 
 
 6,574 
 
 128 12 
 
 6 
 
 1,338 
 
 Stafford 
 
 749,713 
 
 3,178 
 
 45 1 
 
 
 
 505 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 [499 E] 
 
 Shropshire 
 
 859,516 
 
 5,080 
 
 117 18 
 
 6 
 
 1,245 
 
 Chester 
 
 [655,036] 
 
 2,349 
 
 
 
 
 
 512 
 
 Derby 
 
 Nottingham 
 
 657,550 
 539,752 
 
 3,0411 
 5,686] 
 
 112 1 
 
 11 
 
 [679 
 (567 
 
 Rutland 
 
 [97,273] 
 
 862 
 
 11 12 
 
 
 
 37 
 
 York 
 
 [3,888,351] 
 
 8,055 
 
 165 9 
 
 5 
 
 10,095 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 1,694,907 
 
 25,305 
 
 266 
 
 
 
 4,188 
 
 Essex 
 
 985,545 
 
 16,060 
 
 236 8 
 
 
 
 2,650 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 1,315,092 
 
 27,087 
 
 330 2 
 
 2 
 
 [2,422] 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 947,742 
 
 20,491 
 
 235 
 
 8 

 
 Domesday Statistics. 
 
 401 
 
 STATISTICS. 
 
 Hides 
 Gelding 
 T. R. W. Teamlands 
 
 V VI 
 
 Teams 
 VII 
 
 Valet 
 (Pearson) 
 
 VIII 
 
 
 
 
 
 S. 
 
 d. 
 
 
 
 3,102 
 
 5,140 
 
 9 
 
 10 
 
 Kent 
 
 2,241 
 
 3,091 
 
 3,255 
 
 7 
 
 4 
 
 Sussex 
 
 706 1,172 
 
 1,142 
 
 1,524 
 
 4 
 
 9 
 
 Surrey 
 
 1,572 2,847 
 
 2,614 
 
 
 
 
 Hampshire 
 
 1,338 2,087 
 
 1,796 
 
 2,383 
 
 16 
 
 1 
 
 Berkshire 
 
 3,457 
 
 2,997 
 
 
 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 2,303 
 
 1,762 
 
 2,656 
 
 9 
 
 8 
 
 Dorset 
 
 [2,332 E] 
 
 
 [3,359 
 
 12 
 
 9E] 
 
 
 4,858 
 
 3,804 
 
 
 
 
 Somerset 
 
 [4,812 E] 
 
 
 [4,161 
 
 4 
 
 7E] 
 
 
 7,972 
 
 5,542 
 
 3,220 
 
 14 
 
 3 
 
 Devon 
 
 399 2,377 
 
 1,187 
 
 662 
 
 1 
 
 4 
 
 Cornwall 
 
 . 664 
 
 545 
 
 754 
 
 7 
 
 8 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 1,716 
 
 1,406 
 
 1,541 
 
 13 
 
 11 
 
 Hertford 
 
 2,244 
 
 1,952 
 
 1,813 
 
 7 
 
 9 
 
 Buckingham 
 
 2,639 
 
 2,467 
 
 3,242 
 
 2 
 
 11 
 
 Oxford 
 
 
 3,768 
 
 2,827 
 
 6 
 
 8 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 
 1,889 
 
 991 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Worcester 
 
 
 2,479 
 
 
 
 
 Hereford 
 
 1,676 
 
 1,443 
 
 
 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 1,120 
 
 967 
 
 864 
 
 15 
 
 4 
 
 Huntingdon 
 
 1,557 
 
 1,367 
 
 1,096 
 
 12 
 
 2 
 
 Bedford 
 
 2,931 
 
 2,422 
 
 1,843 
 
 
 
 7 
 
 Northampton 
 
 
 1,817 
 
 736 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 Leicester 
 
 2,276 
 
 2,003 
 
 1,359 
 
 13 
 
 8 
 
 Warwick 
 
 1,398 
 
 951 
 
 [516 
 
 16 
 
 3E] 
 
 Stafford 
 
 
 1,755 
 
 
 
 
 Shropshire 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Chester 
 
 762 
 
 862 
 
 461 
 
 4 
 
 
 
 Derby 
 
 1,255 
 
 1,991 
 
 
 
 
 Nottingham 
 
 
 
 
 
 ( 
 
 Eutland 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 York 
 
 5,043 
 
 4,712 
 
 
 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 
 3,920 
 
 4,784 
 
 10 
 
 8 
 
 Essex 
 
 
 4,853 
 
 4,154 
 
 11 
 
 7 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 26
 
 40U 
 
 TJie Hide. 
 
 TABLE II. 
 
 Kent 
 
 Sussex 
 
 Surrey 
 
 Hampshire 
 
 Berkshire 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 Dorset 
 
 Somerset 
 
 Devon 
 
 Cornwall 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 Hertford 
 
 Buckingham 
 
 Oxford 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 Worcester 
 
 Hereford 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 Huntingdon 
 
 Bedford 
 
 Northampton 
 
 Leicester 
 
 Warwick 
 
 Stafford 
 
 Shropshire 
 
 Chester 
 
 Derby 
 
 Nottingham 
 
 Kutland 
 
 York 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 Essex 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 Acreage 
 div. by 
 population 
 
 Acreage 
 div. by 
 teamlands 
 
 Acreage 
 div. by 
 teams 
 
 Population 
 div. by 
 teamlands 
 
 IX 
 
 X 
 
 XI 
 
 XII 
 
 79 
 
 
 314 
 
 
 89 
 
 
 301 
 
 
 105 
 
 393 
 
 403 
 
 3-7 
 
 100 
 
 364 
 
 397 
 
 3-6 
 
 73 
 
 221 
 
 257 
 
 3-0 
 
 86 
 
 254 
 
 293 
 
 2-9 
 
 80 
 
 274 
 
 358 
 
 3-3 
 
 75 
 
 214 
 
 274 
 
 2-8 
 
 95 
 
 209 
 
 300 
 
 2-1 
 
 159 
 
 365 
 
 731 
 
 2-2 
 
 78 
 
 271 
 
 331 
 
 3-4 
 
 82 
 
 237 
 
 289 
 
 2-8 
 
 87 
 
 211 
 
 243 
 
 2-4 
 
 71 
 
 183 
 
 196 
 
 2-5 
 
 95 
 
 
 211 
 
 
 103 
 
 
 254 
 
 
 100 
 
 
 216 
 
 
 105 
 
 327 
 
 380 
 
 3-1 
 
 80 
 
 208 
 
 241 
 
 2-6 
 
 77 
 
 191 
 
 218 
 
 2-4 
 
 75 
 
 218 
 
 264 
 
 2-8 
 
 78 
 
 
 291 
 
 
 88 
 
 254 
 
 288 
 
 2-8 
 
 235 
 
 536 
 
 788 
 
 2.2 
 
 169 
 
 
 489 
 
 
 [278] 
 
 
 
 
 216 
 
 862 
 
 762 
 
 3-9 
 
 94 
 
 430 
 
 271 
 
 4.4 
 
 [112] 
 [482] 
 
 
 
 
 66 
 
 336 
 
 359 
 
 5-0 
 
 61 
 
 
 251 
 
 
 48 
 
 
 270 
 
 
 46 
 
 

 
 Domesday Statistics. 
 
 403 
 
 AVERAGES. 
 
 Population Teamlands 
 div. by div. by 
 teams teams 
 
 XIII XIV 
 
 Experimental valet 
 Total valet of teamland 
 div. by [or of land 
 teamlauds tilled by 
 [or by teams] team] 
 
 XV XVI 
 
 
 
 
 
 s. 
 
 d. 
 
 
 
 s. 
 
 d. 
 
 
 3-9 
 
 
 [1 
 
 13 
 
 1] 
 
 1 
 
 14 
 
 11 
 
 Kent 
 
 3-3 
 
 
 [1 
 
 1 
 
 0] 
 
 
 
 18 
 
 3 
 
 Sussex 
 
 3-8 
 
 1-02 
 
 1 
 
 6 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Surrey 
 
 3-9 
 
 1-08 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 6 
 
 Hampshire 
 
 3-5 
 
 1-16 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 4 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 10 
 
 Berkshire 
 
 3-3 
 
 1-15 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 4 
 
 4 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 4'4 
 
 1-30 
 
 1 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 6 
 
 8 
 
 Dorset 
 
 3-6 
 
 1-27 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 15 
 
 9 
 
 Somerset 
 
 3-1 
 
 1-43 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 3 
 
 Devon 
 
 4-5 
 
 2-00 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 8 
 
 Cornwall 
 
 4-2 
 
 1-21 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 8 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 3-5 
 
 1-22 
 
 
 
 17 
 
 11 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 11 
 
 Hertford 
 
 2-7 
 
 1-14 
 
 
 
 16 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 6 
 
 Buckingham 
 
 2-7 
 
 1-06 
 
 1 
 
 4 
 
 6 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Oxford 
 
 2-2 
 
 
 [0 
 
 15 
 
 0] 
 
 [0 
 
 16 
 
 1] 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 2-4 
 
 
 [0 
 
 10 
 
 5] 
 
 [0 
 
 10 
 
 7] 
 
 Worcester 
 
 2-1 
 
 
 
 
 
 [0 
 
 9 
 
 11] 
 
 Hereford 
 
 3-6 
 
 1-16 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 9 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 3-0 
 
 1-15 
 
 
 
 15 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 12 
 
 2 
 
 Huntingdon 
 
 2-8 
 
 1-13 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 15 
 
 4 
 
 Bedford 
 
 3-4 
 
 1-21 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 9 
 
 Northampton 
 
 3-7 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 8 
 
 Leicester 
 
 3-2 
 
 1-13 
 
 
 
 11 
 
 11 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 10 
 
 Warwick 
 
 3-3 
 
 1-47 
 
 
 
 7 
 
 4 
 
 Oi 
 
 8 
 
 8 
 
 Stafford 
 
 2-8 
 
 
 
 
 
 [o 
 
 7 
 
 2] 
 
 Shropshire 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Chester 
 
 3-5 
 
 0-88 
 
 
 
 12 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 11 
 
 7 
 
 Derby 
 
 2-8 
 
 0-63 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 6 
 
 Nottingham 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Rutland 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 York 
 
 5-3 
 
 1-07 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 17 
 
 6 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 4-0 
 
 
 [1 
 
 4 
 
 4] 
 
 
 
 
 Essex 
 
 5-5 
 
 
 [0 
 
 17 
 
 1] 
 
 
 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 " 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 262
 
 404 TJie Hide. 
 
 Northern We may begin our investigation with a formula common 
 
 formulae in D erbyshire . 
 
 In M [place name] habuit K [man's name] a car[ucatas] terrae 
 ad geldum. Terra 6 car[ucarum or carucis]. Ibi nunc in dominio 
 d car[ucae] et...villani et...bordarii habent e car[ucas]. 
 
 The Lincolnshire formula is perhaps yet plainer. Instead of 
 saying 'Terra b car[ucarum],' it says, 'Terra ad b car[ucas].' 
 Still more instructive is a formula used in Yorkshire. 
 
 In M habuit K a car[ucatas] terrae ad geldum ubi possunt esse 
 b car[ucae]. Nunc habet ibi K d car[ucas] et...villanos et...bordarios 
 cum e car[ucis]. 
 
 As a variant on the phrase 'ubi possunt esse 6 car[ucae],' 
 we have, 'quas potest arare 1 car[uca],' or 'has possunt arare 
 6 carfucae] 1 .' 
 
 The teams on the demesne (d) and the teams of the tenants 
 (e) are enumerated separately. The total number of the teams 
 (d + e) we will call c. 
 
 Now occasionally we may find an entry concerning which 
 the following equation will hold good : a = b = c : in other 
 words, the same number will stand for the carucates at which 
 the manor is taxed, the 'teamlands' that there are in it (or 
 to put it another way the number of teams that ' can be there,' 
 or the number of teams that 'can plough it' 2 ) and also for 
 the teams that are actually to be found there. Thus: 
 
 Terra Roberti de Todeni In Ulestanestorp habuit Leuricus 
 
 4 car[ucatas] terrae ad geldum. Terra totidem car[ucis]. Ibi habet 
 Robertus in dominio 1 car[ucam] et 6 villanos et 3 bordarios et 
 8 sochemannos habentes 3 car[ucas] 3 . 
 
 Here a b = c. But entries so neat as this are not very 
 common. In the first place, the number (c) of teams often 
 exceeds or falls short of the number (b) of ' teamlands,' or, 
 which is the same thing, the number of teams that there 
 ' can be.' An excess of ' teamlands ' over teams is common. 
 In some parts of Yorkshire and elsewhere instead of reading 
 
 1 D. B. i. 307 b, 308. 
 
 2 It will be convenient for us to adopt this term a ' teamland ' as an equiva- 
 lent for the Terra ad unam carucam of our record, so that ' b teamlands ' shall 
 translate Terra ad b carucas. The reader is asked to accept this note as an 
 1 interpretation clause.' 
 
 3 D. B. i. 353.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 405 
 
 that there are so many teams, we read ' modo vasta est ' : 
 there are no oxen there at all. But the reverse of this case 
 is not very uncommon. Thus we may be told that there are 
 3 carucates for geld, that ' there can be there 2 teams ' and that 
 there are 4 teams 1 ; we may find a manor that contains land 
 for but 3 teams equipped with as many as 7 2 . As to the 
 relation between a and b, this is not fixed. On one and the 
 same page we may find that a is equal to, greater and less 
 than b. Thus in Lincolnshire 3 : 
 
 In Colebi habuit Siuuard 7 car. terrae ad geldum. Terra ad 
 totidem car. 
 
 In Cherchebi habuit Comes Morcar 5 car. terrae ad geldum. 
 Terra ad 4 car. 
 
 In Bodebi habuit Comes Morcar 8 car. terrae ad geldum. Terra 
 ad 9 car. 
 
 Leaving now for a while the carucated part of England Southern 
 
 3 . formulas. 
 
 and postponing our visit to Kent, we find similar formulas. 
 They tell us (A) that the manor contains a certain number of 
 units of assessment, (J5) that there is land for a certain number 
 of teams, (G) that there are so many teams upon it. But 
 we have a new set of units of assessment ; instead of carucates 
 and bovates, we have hides and virgates. The Huntingdon- 
 shire formula is particularly clear. It runs thus: 
 
 In M habet K a hidas ad geldum. Terra b car[ucarum or 
 carucis]. Ibi mine in dominio d car[ucae] et...villani et. . .bordarii 
 habentes e car[ucas]. 
 
 The number of hides that is put before us is the number of 
 hides ' for geld.' So in Cheshire and Shropshire the number of 
 hides that is put before us is the number of ' hidae geld[antes].' 
 From this we easily pass to the formula that prevails in Wilt- 
 shire, Dorset, Somerset and Devon : 
 
 K tenet M. T[empore] R[egis] E[dwardi] geldabat pro a hidis. 
 Terra est b carfucarumj. In dominio sunt d car[ucae] et...villani 
 et. . .bordarii cum e car[ucis]. 
 
 A formula common in Sussex, Surrey and several other counties 
 instead of telling us that this manor has a hides for geld, or 
 has a gelding hides, or gelds for a hides, tells us what seems 
 exactly the same thing that it 'defends itself for a hides. 
 
 i D. B. i. 308, Trectone. 2 D. B. i. 275 b, Buraulfestune. 
 
 * D. B. i 337 b.
 
 406 The Hide. 
 
 Then we pass to counties such as Middlesex, Hertford, Buck- 
 ingham and Oxford where the entry does not commonly use 
 any words which explicitly refer to geld: we are told that 
 K holds M for so many hides (pro a hidis). Lastly, we may 
 pass to counties, such as Warwickshire and Staffordshire where, 
 at first sight, the entries may seem to us ambiguous. They 
 run thus 'K holds M. There are there a hides. There is 
 land for b teams.' Here for a moment it may seem to us that 
 we have two different statements about the actual extent or 
 capacity of the manor : there are a hides there, but land for 
 b teams. But comparing the formulas in use here with those 
 in use in other counties, we can hardly doubt that they all 
 come to one and the same thing: a statement about b, the 
 capacity of the manor, is preceded by a statement about its 
 taxation, which statement may take the short form, 'There 
 are a hides there,' instead of one of the longer forms, ' It gelds, 
 or defends itself, for a hides,' or ' He holds a gelding hides, 
 or a hides for geld.' 
 
 Kentish In Kent again, we have the three statements, though here 
 
 formulas, ^e units of assessment are sulungs and yokes: the land 
 
 'defends itself for a sulungs; there is land there for b teams; 
 
 there are d teams in demesne and the men have e teams. 
 
 Relation I n * ne hidated south, as in the carucated north, the relation 
 
 thelhree De ^ ween tne three amounts is not invariable. We may find 
 
 state- that a = b = c. It is common to find that c is less than b, 
 
 ments. ,, 
 
 but occasionally it is greater; on one and the same page we 
 may find that c is equal to, is greater, is less than b. Then 
 a is often equal to b, often it is less than b, but sometimes it 
 is greater. We have therefore three statements about the 
 manor, between which there is no necessary connexion of any 
 very simple kind. 
 
 It may look pedantic, but will be convenient if, by means 
 of the letters A, B and C, we try to keep distinctly before 
 our minds ' the A statement ' about the units of assessment, 
 ' the B statement ' about the ' teamlands,' or teams for which 
 ' there is land,' and ' the C statement ' about the existing teams. 
 We shall find hereafter that there are certain counties in 
 which we do not get all three statements, at least in any of 
 their accustomed forms. In Gloucestershire, Worcestershire 
 and Herefordshire we rarely get the B statement. As to 
 Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, we seem at first sight to obtain
 
 Domesday Statistics. 407 
 
 A and not B, or B and not A, while Leicestershire will require 
 separate treatment. 
 
 Now if we are ever to understand these matters, it is introduc- 
 necessary that we should look at the whole of England. Far statistics, 
 be it from us to say that microscopic labour spent upon one 
 county or one hundred is wasted; often it is of the highest 
 value ; but such work is apt to engender theories which break 
 down the moment they are carried outside the district in which 
 they had their origin. Well would it be if the broad features 
 of Domesday Book could be set out before us in a series of 
 statistical tables. The task would be gigantic and could hardly 
 be performed except by a body of men who had plenteous 
 leisure and who would work together harmoniously. However, 
 rather to suggest what might and some day must be done, 
 than to parade what has been done rapidly and badly, some 
 figures have been set forth above in two tables 1 . That they are 
 extremely inaccurate can not be doubtful, for he who compiled 
 them had other things to do and lacks many of the qualities 
 which should be required of a good counter of hides. For 
 unmethodical habits and faulty arithmetic no excuse is pos- 
 sible ; but it will be remembered that, as matters now stand, 
 two men not unskilled in Domesday might add up the number 
 of hides in a county and arrive at very different results, be- 
 cause they would hold different opinions as to the meaning 
 of certain formulas which are not uncommon. What is here 
 set before the reader is intended to be no more than a distant 
 approach towards the truth. It will serve its end if it states 
 the sort of figures that would be obtained by careful and 
 leisurely computers, and therefore the sort of problems that 
 have to be solved*. 
 
 We .must now explain our statistics. In Column I. we Expiana- 
 give the acreage of the modern counties 3 . A warning bracket statistics, 
 will remind the reader that in the cases of Yorkshire, Cheshire Acreage. 
 and Rutland the modern does not coincide even approximately 
 with the ancient boundary. To Middlesex we give a figure 
 larger than that given by our statisticians, for they know a 
 
 1 See pp. 400403. 
 
 2 We shall not complain of our tools ; but Domesday Book is certainly not 
 impeccable. As to its omissions see Eyton, Notes on Domesday (1880) ; also 
 Bound, Feudal England, 43. 
 
 8 Agricultural Returns, 1895 (Board of Agriculture) p. 34. Tidal water 
 is excluded.
 
 408 The Hide. 
 
 county of London which has been formed at the expense of 
 its neighbours 1 . Many minor variations should be remembered 
 by those who would use Domesday Book for delicate purposes ; 
 for example, they must call to mind the merger in circum- 
 ambient shires of what were once detached pieces of other 
 counties. But of such niceties we can here take no account 2 . 
 
 Popuia- In Column II. we state the ' recorded population ' as com- 
 
 puted by Ellis. In the cases of Dorset and Somerset we also 
 state, and we sign with the letter E, the result of Eyton's 
 labours. We must not forget that these figures give us rather 
 the number of tenants or occupiers than the number of human 
 beings. Our readers must multiply them by four, five or six, 
 according to knowledge or taste, before the population of 
 England will be attained. 
 
 Danegeld. In Column in., for a reason that will become evident here- 
 after, we place the amount of danegeld charged against the 
 counties charged against them, not actually paid by them 8 
 in the middle of the twelfth century. The sources of these 
 figures are the Pipe Rolls of 31 Henry I. and 2 and 8 Henry II. 
 In these accounts the amount charged against a county is 
 approximately constant. Some of the variations are probably 
 due to a contemptuous treatment of small sums 4 ; but there 
 are cases in which a sheriff seems to have been allowed to 
 deduct 10 or so, without any recorded explanation 5 . We 
 choose the highest figures when there is any discord between 
 our three rolls. The danegeld was being levied at the rate 
 of two shillings on the hide, and therefore, if we would find 
 the number of geldant hides, we have to multiply by ten the 
 number of pounds that are set against the county. 
 
 Hides, Column iv. contains our estimate of A : in other words, of 
 
 the number of hides, carucates or sulungs. As we are arguing 
 
 1 The received figures are : Middlesex, 149,046, London, 75,442. From older 
 sources we give Middlesex, 180,480 : Population Abstract, 1833, vol. i. p. 376. 
 
 2 For some good remarks on these matters see Eyton, Notes on Domesday. 
 Lincoln, Nottingham and Northampton would require correction because of the 
 treatment that Kutland has received. The boundary of Shropshire has under- 
 gone changes. The inclusion of stretches of Welsh ground increases the 
 population without adding to the hidage of some western counties. 
 
 8 See above, p. 7. 
 
 . 4 Thus Leicester is charged with 100. 0. Od., with 99. 19. lid. and with 
 99. 19s. 4d. 
 
 6 In 8 Hen. II. several of the counties answer for about 10 less than had 
 formerly been demanded from them.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 409 
 
 for a large hide, we have thought right in doubtful cases to 
 lean in favour of inclusion rather than of exclusion. We count 
 all hides, except those ascribed to the shire's boroughs 1 , even 
 though we are told that they have 'never' gelded. Also, when 
 a hide is mentioned, we count it, even though we have a strong 
 suspicion that the same hide is mentioned again on some other 
 page. Especially in Sussex, where the rapes have recently 
 been rearranged, this may make our figures too high 2 . Then, 
 again, we have frankly begged important questions by assuming 
 that in Domesday Book the following equations are correct. 
 
 1 Hide = 4 Virgates = 120 Acres 
 1 Carucate = 8 Bovates =120 Acres 
 1 Sulung = 4 Yokes =120 Acres. 
 
 In the counties with which we have dealt, except Norfolk and 
 Essex (Suffolk we have left alone), acres are so rarely mentioned 
 that the error, if any, introduced by our hypothesis as to their 
 relation to hides and carucates will be almost infinitesimal, 
 and, even if we are wrong in supposing that the virgate 
 is the quarter of a hide and that the bovate is the eighth 
 of a carucate, the vitiation of our results that will be due to 
 this blunder will but rarely be considerable 3 . 
 
 1 The inclusion of the boroughs would have led to many difficulties. London, 
 for example, though no account is taken of it in D. B. , seems to have gelded for 
 1200 hides. (Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 14,252, f. 126.) 
 
 2 We omit the ' ingeldable carucates ' which occur in some hidated counties. 
 This may introduce a little caprice. If the jurors in one of these counties 
 ascribe twelve carucates to a manor, we do not count them. If they had spoken 
 of hides which never gelded, we should have counted them ; and yet we may 
 agree with Eyton that the two phrases would mean much the same thing. But 
 this source of error or caprice is not very important in our present context. 
 Thus we take Dorset. Eyton gives it 2321 hides and then by adding ' quasi- 
 hides ' brings up the number to 2650. The difference between these two figures 
 is not large when regarded from the point that we are occupying. I have 
 thought that the difficulty would be better met by the warning that Wiltshire, 
 Dorset, Somerset and Devon contain considerable stretches of unhidated royal 
 demesne, than by my reckoning as hides what Eyton called ' quasi-hides.' In 
 the case of Dorset, Somerset and Stafford I have placed Eyton's figures below 
 my own and signed them with the letter E. I know full well that his are 
 much more accurate than mine. He probably gave to each county that he 
 examined more months than I have given weeks to the whole of England. In 
 comparing our results, it should be remembered that, at least in Staffordshire, 
 he dealt with the county boundary in a manner which, in my ignorance, I dare 
 not adopt. 
 
 3 My calculations about Leicestershire are more than usually rough, owing 
 to the appearance of the curious ' hide ' or ' hundred ' or whatever it is. See on
 
 410 The Hide. 
 
 Eeduced Almost everywhere we may find some hides (carucates, 
 
 sulungs) that do not geld and many cases in which a tract now 
 gelds for a smaller number of hides (carucates, sulungs) than 
 that for which it formerly paid. In four counties, however, 
 Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire, we see that since 
 William's advent there has, rightfully or wrongfully, been a large 
 and generally distributed reduction in the tale of the gelding 
 hides. In our Column v. we give a rough statement of the 
 reduced number 1 . In Cornwall we read of an assessment that 
 prevailed in the Confessor's day and of a heavier assessment. 
 The figures which speak of this heavier assessment we place in 
 our Column v 2 . 
 
 The team- We now pass from A to B. In Column vi. we set the 
 number of teamlands, thus answering the question Quot caru- 
 carum [carucis] ibi est terra. We have assumed, but this 
 rarely has an appreciable effect on our calculations, that the 
 land of one ox is the eighth, the land of two oxen the fourth 
 part of the land of one team. There are certain counties 
 where we receive no statement about the teamlands, while in 
 certain others the statement, though it seems to be expected, 
 is often omitted 3 . For this reason some blanks will be found 
 in this column. In most of the other counties instances occur 
 with more or less frequency in which nothing is said of the 
 teamlands. In these cases we have thought it fair to assume 
 that there were teamlands equal in number to the teams 
 (B = C). The effect of this assumption will be to bring the 
 number of teamlands (B) somewhat closer to the number of 
 teams (C) than it would otherwise have been, but no very great 
 harm will have thus been done to our rude statistics*. 
 
 the one hand Stevenson, E. H. E. v. 95, and on the other Round, Feudal 
 England, 82. Whether this unit contained 12 or 18 carucates is not of very 
 great importance to us at the moment. But there are other difficulties in 
 Leicestershire. In Cornwall I was compelled to make an assumption as to the 
 peculiar ager or acra of that county ; but no reasonable theory about this matter 
 would seriously affect the number of Cornwall's hides. 
 
 1 The usual formula is : ' Tune se defendit pro a hidis, modo pro a'. 1 We 
 place a in Col. iv., a' in Col. v. 
 
 2 The usual formula is: ' T. B. E. geldabat pro a hidis; ibi tamen sunt a' 
 hidae.' We place a in Col. iv. and a' in Col. v. ; and we shall argue hereafter, 
 with some hesitation, that the taxation of this county has been increased under 
 William. 
 
 3 The words Terra est are written and are followed by a blank space. Many 
 instances in Kent and Sussex. 
 
 4 On the other hand, when I find a statement about B and none about C, I do
 
 Domesday Statistics. 411 
 
 .Column vii. gives the number of teams. Here we assume The teams, 
 (we shall endeavour to prove hereafter) that the cfiruca of 
 Domesday Book always means the same, namely, eight oxen 1 . 
 
 Lastly in Column VIII. we place the results attained by The values. 
 Pearson 2 and Eyton in their endeavours to add together the 
 various sums which the various estates in a shire are said to be 
 worth (valet*) or to render (reddit) in the Conqueror's day, and 
 to thus obtain a total valet for the shire. We need hardly say 
 that these values are ' annual values.' 
 
 The relations between our divers sets of figures are more The table 
 important than the figures themselves, therefore we have 
 worked the division sums the results of which are printed in 
 the second Table, the first seven columns whereof are filled by 
 quotients 8 . The last column calls for more remark. The 
 valets obtained for the various counties by Pearson and Eyton 
 are somewhat precarious. They involve theories as to the 
 relation between the values of gold and silver, as to the relation 
 between the value of a pound reckoned by tale and a po.und 
 reckoned by weight, as to ' blanched ' money and the cost of ' a 
 night's farm.' Also a good deal is included that can hardly be 
 called the value of land, since it comprehends, not only the 
 value of mills and the like, but also in some cases the revenue 
 derived from courts. In order therefore that we might compare 
 the values given to land in the various counties, we have taken 
 
 not assume that C=B; on the contrary, I read the entry to mean that C=0. 
 In other words, it is very possible that there should be teamlands without 
 teams ; but I do not think that for Domesday's purposes there can be teams 
 (i.e. teams at work) without land that is being ploughed, though it is true that 
 often, and in some counties habitually, C will be slightly greater than B. 
 
 1 One of the chief difficulties in the way of accurate computation is oc- 
 casioned by what we may call the complex entries. We start with some such 
 statement as this : ' The Bishop holds Norton. It defends itself for a hides. 
 There is land for b teams. There are d teams on the demesne and the villeins 
 have e teams.' But then we read : ' Of this land [or of these a hides] Roger 
 holds m hides ; there are n teams on the demesne and the villeins have o teams.' 
 Here the total number of hides is a, and not a+m; and I think that the total 
 number of teamlands is b, and not b + some unstated number held by Roger ; but 
 the total number of teams is d + e+n + o. Entries in this form are not very 
 uncommon, and therefore this explanation seemed to be required. 
 
 2 Pearson, History of England, ii. 665. 
 
 8 Col. ix. gives i. divided by u. Col. x. gives i. divided by vi. Col. xi. gives 
 i. divided by vii. Col. xn. gives n. divided by vi. Col. xin. gives n. divided 
 by vii. Col. xiv. gives vi. divided by vn. Col. xv. gives vin. divided by vi. [or 
 if there is no vi. for this county, then by vn.].
 
 412 The Hide. 
 
 at hazard a number of small estates in order that we might by 
 addition, and division obtain the value of a typical teamland 
 with typical appurtenances. In general we have chosen ten 
 estates each of which has one teamland, ten estates each of 
 which has two teamlands and ten estates each of which has five 
 teamlands, and then we have divided the sum of their values 
 by eighty, the number of teamlands that they comprise. On 
 the whole, the figures that we thus obtain and place in Column 
 xvi. are not widely removed from those in Column xv., which 
 represent the quotients arising from a division of Pearson's 
 ' county values ' by the number of teamlands that are contained 
 in the counties 1 . 
 
 An apo- In order that not too much credence and yet just credence 
 
 enough may be given to the figures that we have hastily put 
 together, we will set beside those that we have stated for Glou- 
 cestershire the results of a minute analysis accomplished by Mr 
 Charles Taylor 2 . We have set down : Population, 8366 (from 
 Ellis) ; Hides, 2388 ; Teams, 3768 ; Total Valet, 2827 6s. 8d. 
 (from Pearson). Mr Taylor gives: Population, 8239 s ; Hides, 
 2611 (or 2596); Teams, 3909; Total Valet, 3130 7*. lOd. 
 Now these variations are wide and may in some sort be 
 discreditable to those who differ from Mr Taylor 4 . But they 
 are not very substantial if we come to averages and ratios and 
 a comparison of counties. For the purposes for which we shall 
 use our figures, it is no great matter whether in this county 
 there are 2'1 or 2'2 'recorded men' to the plough-team 5 . The 
 broad features of Gloucestershire are that its hides fall far short 
 of its teams, that its recorded population is sparse, that the 
 
 1 In Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford and Shropshire I was compelled to adopt 
 as the divisor the number of teams instead of the number of teamlands. As it 
 is fairly certain that these counties were ' underteamed ' (B > C), the resulting 
 quotient (annual value of land actually tilled by a team) should be diminished 
 before it is compared with the figures given for other counties. 
 
 2 C. S. Taylor, Analysis of Gloucestershire Domesday (Bristol and Glou- 
 cestershire Archaeol. Soc. 1887-9). 
 
 3 But this is intended to include males only : the ancillae are left out. 
 
 4 Mr Taylor says in his preface : ' The work has occupied a large part of my 
 leisure time for five years.' There is therefore some audacity in my printing my 
 figures beside his. It is clear that we have put different constructions upon 
 some of the composite entries concerning large manors. See below, p. 457. 
 Mr Taylor, like Eyton, computes only 48 ' geld acres ' to the hide ; I reckon 
 120 acres to the hide ; that, however, is in this context a trifling matter. 
 
 6 Mr Taylor has brought out 15*. 5d. as the average valet of land tilled by a 
 team. By taking Pearson's valet and my teams I have brought out 15*. Od.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 413 
 
 average value of the land tilled by a team falls well below 
 twenty shillings, that this shire differs markedly and in certain 
 assignable respects from Wiltshire, where the hides exceed the 
 teams, from Lincoln, where, despite the fen, the population is 
 thick, from Kent, where the average value of land tilled by a 
 team rises above thirty shillings 1 . 
 
 Our figures tell of wide variations ; but we may be allowed Constancy 
 to call attention to the stability of certain ratios, a stability 
 which is gratifying to the diffident arithmetician. In twenty- 
 one counties we can divide 'the recorded population' by the 
 number of teamlands. The quotient never falls as low as 2 and 
 only twice exceeds 4 2 . For the same twenty-one counties we 
 can divide the number of teamlands by the number of teams. 
 Only twice will the quotient fall below 1 and only once will it 
 touch 2. We must not, however, be led away into a general 
 discussion of these figures. That task would require a wary 
 and learned economist. We must keep our minds bent on what 
 may be called the A B C of our subject 3 . 
 
 Now we may start with what seems to be the most objective The team, 
 of our three statements, that which gives us C, the number of 
 teams. We know that in A there is an element of estimation, 
 of assessment ; we may fear that this is true of B also ; but an 
 ox or a team ought to be a fact and not a theory. At the 
 
 1 For Dorset and Somerset my figures can be checked by Eyton's. For 
 Wiltshire, Devon, Cornwall, by the Geld Inquests. These give for Wiltshire 
 (see W. H. Jones, Domesday for Wiltshire, 158 ff.) 3955 H. 3 v. ; for Devon (see 
 Devonshire Domesday, ed. Devonsh. Assoc. p. xlix.) 1029 H. 1 v. 3 F. ; for 
 Cornwall 401 H. 3 v. 1 F. I give for Wiltshire 4050 H., for Devon 1119 H., for 
 Cornwall 399 H. 
 
 2 Lincoln, 5-0 ; Nottingham, 4-4 ; Derby, 3-9 ; Surrey, 3-7 ; Hampshire, 3-6 ; 
 Middlesex, 3-4; Dorset, 3-3; Cambridge, 3-1; Berkshire, 3-0; Wiltshire, 2-9; 
 Hertford, Northampton, Warwick, Somerset, 2-8; Huntingdon, 2-6; Oxford, 
 2-5 ; Bedford and Buckingham, 2-4 ; Cornwall and Stafford, 2-2 ; Devon, 2-1. 
 For Kent the figure would be near 3'9, for Sussex near 3-3, for apparently 
 in these counties there was approximate equality between the number of teams 
 and the number of teamlands. 
 
 3 One word about the meaning of the valets. I think it very clear from 
 thousands of examples that an estate is valued 'as a going concern.' The 
 question that the jurors put to themselves is : What will this estate bring in, 
 peopled as it is and stocked as it is ? ' In other words, they do not endeavour to 
 make abstraction of the villeins, oxen, etc. and to assign to the land what would 
 be its annual value if it were stocked or peopled according to some standard of 
 average culture. Consequently in a few years the value of an estate may leap 
 from one pound to three pounds or to five shillings or even to zero. Eyton, 
 Dorset, 56, has good remarks on this matter.
 
 414 The Hide. 
 
 outset, however, a troublesome question arises. We have 
 assumed that whenever our record speaks of a caruca it means 
 eight oxen. On the other hand, there are who maintain that 
 whereas the carucae of the demesne consisted of eight, those 
 ascribed to the villeins comprised but four oxen 1 , and others 
 have thought that the strength of Domesday's caruca varied 
 from place to place with the varying practice of divers agri- 
 culturists. 
 
 Variability But, in the first place, it is abundantly clear that the clerk 
 caruca. who compiled the account of Cambridgeshire from the original 
 verdicts held himself at liberty to substitute ' half a team ' for 
 ' four oxen ' and ' four oxen ' for ' half a team 2 .' In the second 
 place, the theory of a variable caruca would in our eyes reduce 
 to an absurdity the practice of stating the capacity of land in 
 terms of the teams and the oxen that can plough it. We are 
 carefully told about each estate that ' there is land for b teams, 
 or for b' oxen, or for b teams and b' oxen.' Now if a ' team ' has 
 always the same meaning, we have here a valuable truth. If, 
 on the other hand, a ' team ' may mean eight or may mean four 
 oxen, we are being told next to nothing. The apparently 
 precise ' there is land for 4 teams ' becomes the useless ' there 
 is land for 32 or 16 or for some number between 32 and 16 
 oxen.' What could the statesmen, who were hoping to correct 
 the assessment of the danegeld, make of so vague a statement ? 
 They propose to work sums in teams and teamlands. They 
 spend immense pains in ascertaining that here there is 'land 
 for half a team ' or ' land for half an ox.' We are accusing 
 them of laborious folly unless we suppose that they can at a 
 moment's notice convert teams into oxen. 
 
 The caruca If it be allowed that in the statement (B) about the number 
 mt ' of teamlands the term caruca has always the same meaning, 
 we cannot stop there, but must believe that in the statement ((7) 
 about the number of teams this same meaning is retained. 
 Often enough when there is equality between teamlands and 
 teams (C = B), the entry takes the following form : There is 
 land for b teams and ' they ' are there 8 . What are there ? The 
 
 1 Seebohm, Village Community, 85-6. To the contrary Bound, in Domes- 
 day Studies, i. 209, and Feudal England, 35. 
 
 2 Bound, Feudal England, 35. 
 
 s See e.g. D. B. i. 222 : ' Terra est 2 car. Has habent ibi 3 sochemanni et 12 
 bordarii.'...' Terra est 3 car. Ibi sunt ipsae cum 9 sochemannis et 9 bordariis.'
 
 Domesday Statistics. 415 
 
 teams for which ' there is land ' : those teams which are serving 
 as a measure for the capacity of land. Let us try the two modes 
 of interpretation on the first lines that strike our eye. Here 
 we have two successive entries, each of which tells us that 
 'there is land for 6 teams 1 .' If the caruca is a constant, we ' 
 have learnt that in one particular there is equality between 
 these estates. If the caruca is a variable, we have learnt 
 nothing of the kind. Let us see what we can gain by reading 
 further. In the one case there were 3 teams on the demesne 
 and the villeins had 6^ ; in the other there were 2 teams on the 
 demesne, the villeins had 2 and the sokemen 2. We want to 
 know whether the second of these estates is under-teamed or 
 over-teamed. There is land for 6 teams and there are 6 teams 
 on it ; but 2 of these teams belong to villeins and 2 to sokemen. 
 If we give the villeins but 4 oxen to the team, how many shall 
 we give the sokemen ? Shall we say 6 ? If so, there are 
 36 oxen here. Is that too many or too few or just enough for 
 the arable land that there is? That is an unanswerable 
 question, for the king's commissioners have been content with 
 the statement that the number of oxen appropriate to this 
 estate lies somewhere between 23 and 49. 
 
 Surely when we are told that 8 sokemen have ' 2 teams and The vii- 
 
 6 oxen ' or that 9 sokemen and 5 bordiers have ' 3 teams and 
 
 7 oxen 2 ,' we are being told that the teams in question have no 
 less than eight oxen apiece. Surely when we are told that 
 there are 23 villeins and 5 bordiers with 2 teams and 5 oxen 8 , 
 we are being told that the teams of these villeins are not teams 
 of four. And what are we to say of cases in which a certain 
 number of teams is ascribed to a number of persons who belong 
 to various classes, as for example when 6 villeins and 7 bordiers 
 and 2 sokemen are said to have 3 teams and 5 oxen 4 , or where 
 3 villeins, 2 bordiers, a priest and a huntsman are said to have 
 one team and 6 oxen 5 , or where 19 radknights ' with their men' 
 are said to have 48 teams 6 ? Even if we suppose that the 
 officers of the exchequer have tables which tell them how many 
 
 Ibid. i. 223 : ' Terra est 1 car. quam habent ibi 4 bordarii. ' Ibid. i. 107 b : ' Terra 
 est 7 car. et tot ibi sunt. ' 
 
 1 D. B. i. 222, Codestoche, Lidintoiie. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 289 ; 339 b, Bechelinge. * D. B. i. 842 b, Toresbi. 
 
 * D. B. i. 339, Agetorne. D. B. i. 174, Lappewrte. 
 
 8 D. B. i. 163, Berchelai.
 
 416 TJie Hide. 
 
 oxen a caruca implies when it is attributed to a Northampton- 
 shire sokeman or a Gloucestershire radknight, we are still setting 
 before them insoluble problems. The radknights of Berkeley 
 'with their men' have 48 teams: this may cover less than 
 * 200 or more than 300 oxen. And yet the record that is guilty 
 of this laxity will tell us how in Bedfordshire Terra est dimidio 
 bovi, et ibi est semibos 1 . 
 The vii- The main argument that has been urged in favour of a 
 
 leins'oxen. . _ IP i 
 
 variable caruca is that which, basing itself on later documents, 
 protests that a villein ought not to have more than two oxen 2 . 
 Now true it seems to be that if by the number of the teams 
 belonging to the villani and bordarii of Domesday Book we 
 divide the number of villani plus half the number of bordarii 
 (and this would be a fair procedure), we shall obtain as our 
 quotient a figure that will be much nearer to 2 than to 4. But 
 it must be common ground to all who read our record that some 
 villeins are much better supplied with oxen than are their 
 neighbours, and that some villeins have whole teams, whatever 
 a ' team ' may mean. There is so much difference in this respect 
 between manor and manor that we are not justified in talking 
 of any particular number of oxen as the normal outfit of the 
 villanus, and outside of Domesday Book we have far too little 
 evidence to sanction the dogma that the average number must 
 stand close to 2 3 . Even the villein virgater on the monastic 
 manors of the thirteenth century is often expected to have four 
 oxen, and his having eight is a possibility that must be con- 
 templated 4 . 
 
 1 D. B. i. 218 b, Stanford. Or let us take this case (D. B. i. 148) : ' Terra 
 est 3 car. In dominio est una et 4 villani habent aliam et tercia potest fieri.' 
 Is this third team to be a team of four or a team of eight ? 
 
 2 Seebohm, Village Community, 85. 
 
 3 As a specimen we take 10 consecutive entries from the royal demesne in 
 Surrey in which it is said that x villeins and y bordierp have z teams. We add 
 half of y to x and divide the result by z. The quotients are 10'3, 4-0, 3-7, 3-5, 
 3'4, 2'7, 2-2, 1-9, 1*8, 1'4. If we massed the ten cases together, the quotient 
 would be 2-8. We can easily find averages ; but, even if we omit cases in which 
 there is an exceptional dearth of oxen, the variations are so considerable that 
 we must not speak of a type or norm. 
 
 4 Glastonbury Bentalia, 51-2: ' S. tenet 1 virgatam terre.. et si habet 8 
 boves debet warectare.,.7 acras. Si autem pauciores habet, warectabit pro 
 unoquoque bove octavam partem 7 acrarum.' Ibid. 61 : ' B. C. tenet unam 
 virgatam. ..et habebit 4 boves cum bobus domini.' Ibid. 68: 'G. tenet 
 dimidiam hidam...et si habuerit 8 boves...' Ibid. 78 : 'L. tenet 5 acras.. .et bis 
 debet venire cum 1 bove et cum pluribus si habuerit... ' Ibid. 98-9: ' M. tenet 1
 
 Domesday Statistics. 417 
 
 That light as well as heavy ploughs were in use we have not Light and 
 denied. At a little later time we see teams of six beasts and p ^ughs. 
 teams of ten engaged in ploughing. But the compilers of 
 Domesday Book are not concerned with the methods of 
 husbandry; they are registering the number of oxen. If a 
 man has one ox which is employed as a beast of the plough, 
 they say of him : Arat cum uno bove 1 . If he and another man 
 have such an ox between them, they say : Ibi est semibos. If 
 he has four oxen, they set this down as dimidia caruca. Instead 
 of telling us that there are thirty-eight oxen, they speak of five 
 teams less two oxen 2 . Twelve pence make a shilling ; and, at 
 all events at the Exchequer, eight oxen make a team. 
 
 Very lately an argument has been advanced in favour of a The team 
 caruca, the strength of which varies from place to place. In day a^f 8 " 
 many instances the Black Book of Peterborough in its de- 
 scription of the abbatial estates will give to the demesne of a 
 particular manor exactly the same number of teams that are 
 ascribed to it by- Domesday Book, and, while in some cases the 
 later of these documents will tell us that there are eight oxen 
 to the team, in others it will speak of teams of six 3 . That there 
 is force in this argument we must admit; but many changes 
 will take place in forty years, and we can not think that the 
 correspondence between the two documents is sufficiently close 
 to warrant the inference that the caruca of Domesday can have 
 fewer beasts than eight. An exactly parallel argument would 
 serve to prove that the hide of Domesday contains a variable 
 number of fiscal ' acres.' Were it possible (but we shall see that 
 it is not) for us to regard the teamland of Domesday as a fixed 
 area, then we might afford to allow the strength of the team to 
 vary ; but if the teamland is no fixed area and the team has no 
 fixed strength, then King William's inquest ends in a collection 
 of unknown quantities. 
 
 virgatam...si habuerit quatuor boves...' Ibid. 129: ' S. tenet 1 virgatam...et 
 debet invenire domino 1 carrum et 6 boves ad cariandum fenum.' Ibid. 130 t 
 'M. tenet dimidiam virgatam...et debet invenire 2 boves.' Ibid. 189: Three 
 cases in which a virgater comes to the boon days with eight oxen. Larking, 
 Domesday of Kent, App. 33 : Customs of Hedenham : '...habebit imam virgatam 
 terrae...item habebit quatuor boves in pasturam domini.' 
 
 1 D. B. i. 2ll : ' Terra est dim. car. et unus bos ibi arat.' 
 
 2 D. B. i. 342 b, Toresbi. 
 
 8 Pollock, E. H. B. xi. 813. I venture to think that Sir F. Pollock has not 
 answered his own argument (p. 220) for a constant caruca. 
 
 M. 27
 
 418 The Hide. 
 
 The team- We turn from the team ((7) to the teamland (B), and must 
 face some perplexing questions. Reluctantly we have come to 
 the opinion that this term ' the land of (or for) one team ' does 
 not in the first instance denote a fixed areal quantity of arable 
 land. We have adopted this opinion reluctantly because we are 
 differing from some of the best expositors of our record, and 
 because it compels us to say that many of the statistical data 
 with which that record provides us are not so useful as we hoped 
 that they would be. 
 
 Fractional In the first place, we must notice that if this term stands for 
 a fixed quantity, a very rude use is being made of it. We see 
 indeed that fractional parts of a teamland can be conceived. 
 We often meet the land of (or for) half a team ; we may come 
 upon the land of or for two oxen, one ox, half an ox. But, 
 except in a few counties, any mention of fractions smaller than 
 the half of a team is rare, and even halves seldom occur. Now 
 certainly the teamland was a large unit for such treatment as 
 this. If, for instance, we suppose that it contained 120 acres, 
 then we must infer that in some shires the jurors who had to 
 describe a mass of 420 acres would have called it land for 3 or 
 else land for 4 teams, and that in most shires an odd 30 acres 
 would have been neglected or would have done duty as half a 
 teamland. The hides or the carucates (A) have often been split 
 into small fractions where the jurors distribute integral team- 
 lands. One example of this common phenomenon shall be given. 
 In Grantchester lie six estates 1 : 
 
 the first rated at 3 v. has land for 1 team, 
 
 the second rated at 2 h. 3 v. has land for 6 teams, 
 
 the third rated at 2 h. 3 v. has land for 4 teams, 
 
 the fourth rated at l v. has land for 1 team, 
 
 the fifth rated at 1 v. has land for 4 oxen, 
 
 the sixth rated at ^ v. has land for 3 oxen. 
 
 The teamland does not break up easily. As a general rule, we 
 only hear of fractional parts of it when the jurors are compelled 
 to deal with a tenement so small that it can not be said to 
 possess even one teamland 2 . 
 
 1 Inq. Com. Cant. 70. 
 
 2 Another example from a Northamptonshire column (D. B. i. 226) will show 
 what we mean. Let H stand for hides and T for teamlands, and let the virgate 
 be a quarter of a hide, then we have this series : 2 H (5 T), 2 H (4 T), 4 H (8 T), 
 li H (3 T), l/ 7 H (4 T), f H ( T), H (1 T), 2 H (6 T), 1 H (3 T), 2 H (4 T), 
 | H (3 T). We see that T is integral where H is fractional.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 419 
 
 In passing we observe that this phrase, ' There is land for Land for 
 ac teams ' finds exact parallels in two other phrases that are wood for 
 not very uncommon, namely, ' There is pasture for y sheep ' and swme< 
 ' There is wood for z pigs ' : also that the values given to y 
 and z are often large and round. It may be that the jurors 
 have in their minds equations which connect the area of a wood 
 or pasture with its power of feeding swine or sheep, but an 
 extremely lax use must be made of these equations when the 
 number of sheep is fixed at & neat hundred or the number of 
 pigs at a neat thousand, nor dare we say that the quality of the 
 grass and trees has no influence upon the computation. 
 
 Secondly, we observe that the teamland when it does break Teamiand 
 
 ... - , , . . , no areal 
 
 into fractional parts does not break into virgates, bovates, acres, unit, 
 roods, or any other units which we can regard as units in a 
 scheme of areal measurement 1 . The eighth of a teamland is 
 the land of (or for) an ox. If we wish to speak of the sixteenth 
 of a teamland, we must introduce the half-ox. Now had the 
 jurors been told to state the quantity of the arable land com- 
 prised in a tenement, they had at their command plenty of 
 words which would have served this purpose. No sooner will 
 they have told us that there is land for two teams, than they 
 will add that there are five acres of meadow and a wood which 
 is three furlongs in length by two in breadth. We infer that 
 they have not been asked to state the area of the arable. They 
 have been asked to say something about it, but not to state 
 its area. 
 
 What had they been asked to say ? Here we naturally The com 
 turn to that well-known introduction to the Inquisitio Eliensis and the 
 which professes to describe the procedure of the commissioners 
 and which at many points corresponds with the contents of 
 Domesday Book 2 . We read that the barons made inquiry 
 about the number of the hides (A) and the number of the 
 teams (C) ; we do not read any word about the teamlands (B). 
 Quot hidae they must ask; Quot carucae 3 in dominio et quot 
 hominum they must ask ; Quot carucis ibi est terra there is no 
 
 1 Exceptionally we read in Kent (i. 9) : ' Terra est dim. car. et ibidem sunt 
 adhuc 30 acrae terrae. ' And is not this a rule-proving exception ? The jurors 
 can not say simply 'land for half a team and thirty acres.' They say ' land for 
 half a team and there are thirty acres in addition.' 
 
 2 D. B. iv. 497 ; Inq. Com. Cant. 97. 
 
 3 There can be little doubt that this is the right reading. See Bound, 
 Feudal England, 134. 
 
 272 
 
 missioners 
 and the 
 teamlands.
 
 420 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 The team- 
 lands of 
 Great 
 Domes- 
 day. 
 
 The teams 
 of Little 
 Domes- 
 day. 
 
 The Lei- 
 cester- 
 -shire 
 formulas. 
 
 such question. On the other hand, the jurors are told to give 
 all the particulars thrice over (hoc totum tripliciter), once with 
 reference to King Edward's day, once with reference to the date 
 when the Conqueror bestowed the manor, and once with 
 reference to the present time. 
 
 Now, if these be the interrogatories that the justiciars 
 administered to the jurors, then the answering verdicts as they 
 are recorded in Great Domesday err both by defect and by 
 excess. On the one hand, save when they are dealing with the 
 geld or the value of a tenement, they rarely give any figures 
 from King Edward's day, and still seldomer do they speak about 
 the date of the Conqueror's feoffments. Our record does not 
 systematically report that whereas there are now four teams on 
 this manor, there were five in the Confessor's reign and three 
 when its new lord received it. On the other hand, we obtain 
 the apparently unasked for information that ' there is land for 
 five teams.' 
 
 We turn to Little Domesday and all is altered. Here the 
 words of the writ seem to be punctually obeyed. The par- 
 ticulars are stated three times over, the words tune, post and 
 modo pointing to the three periods. Thus we learn how many 
 teams there were when Edward was living and when the 
 Conqueror gave the land away. On the other hand, we are not 
 told how many teams 'could till' that land, though if the 
 existing teams are fewer than those that were ploughing in 
 time past, it will sometimes be remarked that the old state of 
 things could be ' restored 1 '. 
 
 Next we visit Leicestershire. We may open our book at a 
 page which will make us think that the account of this shire 
 will be very similar to those reports that are typical of Great 
 Domesday. We read that Ralph holds four carucates; that 
 there is land for four teams ; that there are two teams on the 
 demesne while the villeins have two 2 . But then, alternating 
 
 1 Thus, D. B. ii. 39 : ' Tune 4 carucae in dominio, post et modo 2...et 
 2 carucae possunt restaurari.' To use our symbols, in Essex, Norfolk and 
 Suffolk we obtain statements about A and about C, but learn nothing about B, 
 unless this is to be inferred from the increase or decrease that has taken place 
 in C. We shall hereafter argue that, in spite of some appearances to the 
 contrary, the carucates of East Anglia belong to the order A and not to 
 the order B. 
 
 2 Thus, D. B. i. 231 : ' Had. tenet de episcopo 4 car. terrae in Partenei. 
 Terra est 4 car. In dominio sunt 2 et...villani habent 2 car.' Just before this
 
 Domesday Statistics. 421 
 
 4 
 
 with entries which run in this accustomed form, we find others 
 which, instead of telling us that there is land for so many 
 teams, will tell us that there were so many upon it in the time 
 of King Edward 1 . Perhaps, -were this part of the survey 
 explored by one having the requisite knowledge, he would 
 teach us that the jurors of some wapentakes use the one 
 formula while the other is peculiar to other wapentakes; but, 
 as the record stands, the variation seems due to the compiling 
 clerk. Be that as it may, we can hardly read through these 
 Leicestershire entries without being driven to believe that 
 substantially the same piece of information is being conveyed 
 to us now in one and now in the other of two shapes that 
 in our eyes are dissimilar. To say, ' There were four teams here 
 in King Edward's day ' is much the same as to say, ' There is 
 land here for four teams.' Conversely, to say, 'There is land 
 here for four teams ' is much the same as to say, ' There were 
 four teams here in King Edward's day.' For an exact equi- 
 valence we must not contend ; but if the commissioners get the 
 one piece of information they do not want the other. On no 
 single occasion, unless we are mistaken, are both put on record 2 . 
 
 When we have thought over these things, we shall perhaps Origin of 
 fashion for ourselves some such guess as that which follows. abouTthe 7 
 The original scheme of the Inquest was unnecessarily cumbrous, 
 The design of collecting the statistics of the past broke down. 
 Let us imagine a similar attempt made in our own day. Local 
 
 we have the other common formula: 'Bad. tenet... 2 car. terrae in Toniscote. 
 Duae car. possunt esse et ibi sunt.' 
 
 1 Thus, D. B. i. 231 b : ' Ipsa Comitissa tenuit Dnnitone. Ibi 22 car. et 
 dimid. T. B. E. erant ibi 12 car. Modo in dominio sunt 3 et...villani...habent 
 12 car.' 
 
 2 To me- it looks as if the variations were due to a clerk's caprice. The 
 Leicestershire survey fills 30 columns. Not until the top of col. 5 has the 
 compiler, except as a rare exception, the requisite information. Then, after 
 hesitating as to whether he shall adopt the ' x car. possunt esse ' formula, he 
 decides in favour of ' Terra est x car. ' This we will call Formula I. It reigns 
 throughout cols. 5-13, though broken on three' or four occasions by what we will 
 call Formula II, namely ' T. B. E. erant ibi x car.' At the top of col. 14 
 Formula II. takes possession and keeps it into col. 16. Then I. has a short 
 turn. Then (col. 17) II. is back again. Then follow many alternations. At 
 the top of col. 24, however, a simplified version of II. appears ; the express 
 reference to the T. B. E. vanishes, and we have merely 'ibi fuerunt x car.' In 
 the course of col. 26 this is changed to ' ibi x car. fuerunt. ' These two versions 
 of II. prevail throughout the last six columns, though there is one short 
 relapse to I. (col. 28).
 
 422 The Hide. 
 
 juries are summoned to swear communal verdicts about the 
 number of horses and oxen that the farmers were keeping 
 twenty years ago. Roughly, very roughly true would such 
 verdicts be, although no foreign invasion, no influx of alien men 
 and words and manners divides us from the fortieth year of 
 Queen Victoria. In Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk some sort of 
 answer about these matters was extracted from the jurors ; but 
 frequently they report that the arrangements which exist now 
 have always existed, and by this they mean that they cannot 
 remember any change. Now, when we fail to find in Great 
 Domesday any similar figures, we may ascribe this to one of 
 two causes. Either the commissioners did not collect statistics, 
 or the compilers did not think them worthy of preservation. 
 In some cases the one supposition may be true, in other cases 
 the other. We may be fairly certain that in many or all 
 counties the horses and the pigs and the ' otiose animals ' that 
 were extant in 1086 were enumerated in the verdicts 1 . Also 
 we know that Domesday Book is no mere transcript, but is an 
 abstract or digest, and we have cause for believing that those 
 who made it held themselves free to vary the phrases used by 
 the jurors, provided that no material change was thus in- 
 troduced 2 . Howbeit, to come to the question that is im- 
 mediately before us, our evidence seems to tell us that the 
 commissioners and their master discovered that the original 
 programme of the inquest was unnecessarily cumbrous. Once 
 and again in more recent days has a similar discovery been 
 made by royal commissioners. So some interrogatories were 
 dropped. 
 
 Modifica- Then we suspect that the inquiry about the number of 
 inquiry! * oxen that were ploughing in Edward's day became a more 
 practicable, if looser, inquiry about the number of oxen capable 
 of tilling the land. The transition would not be difficult. 
 What King William really wants to know is the agricultural 
 capacity of the tenement. He learns that there are now upon 
 it so many beasts of the plough. But this number may be 
 accidentally large or accidentally small. With an eye to future 
 taxation, he wishes for figures expressive of the normal con- 
 dition of things. But, according to the dominant idea of his 
 
 1 The proof of this lies in the Inq. Com. Cant, and the.Exon Domesday. 
 
 2 This appears on a collation of D.B. with the two records mentioned in our 
 last note. See Hound, Feudal England, 26.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 423 
 
 reign, the normal condition of things is their Edwardian con- 
 dition, that in which they stood before the usurper deforced 
 the rightful heir. And so these two formulas which we see 
 alternating in the account of Leicestershire really do mean 
 much the same thing : ' There is land for x teams ' : ' There 
 were x teams in the time of King Edward.' 
 
 But if we suppose the justices abandoning the question inquiry as 
 ' How many teams twenty years ago ?' in favour of ' How many teams!" 
 teams can there be?' we see that, though they are easing 
 their task and enabling themselves to obtain answers in the 
 place of silence, they are also substituting for a matter of pure 
 fact what may easily become a matter of opinion. They have 
 left the actual behind and are inquiring about potentialities. 
 They will now get answers more speedily; but who eight 
 centuries afterwards will be able to analyze the mental pro- 
 cesses of which these answers are the upshot ? It is possible 
 that a jury sets to work with an equation which connects oxen 
 with area, for example, one which tells that a team can plough 
 120 acres. It is but too possible that this equation varies 
 from place to place and that the commissioners do not try 
 to prevent variations. They are not asking about area ; they 
 are asking about the number of teams requisite for the tillage 
 of the tenement. With this and its value as data, William's 
 ministers hope to correct the antiquated assessments. Some 
 of the commissioners may allow the jurors to take the custom 
 of the district as a guide, while others would like to force 
 one equation on the whole country. Our admiration for Domes- 
 day Book will be increased, not diminished, if we remember 
 that it is the work not of machines but of men. Some of the 
 justices seem to have thought that the inquiry about potential 
 teams (R) was not of the first importance, not nearly so im- 
 portant as the inquiries about actual teams (C) and gelding 
 units (A). In various counties we see many entries in which 
 Terra est is followed by a blank space. In Gloucester, Wor- 
 cester and Hereford we find no systematic mention of team- 
 lands, but only occasional reports which show that at certain 
 places there might be more teams than there are. At the 
 end of the account of the Bishop of Worcester's .triple hundred 
 of Oswaldslaw (an account so favourable to S 4 Mary that it 
 might have been dictated by her representative) we find the 
 remark that in none of these manors could .there be any more
 
 424 The Hide. 
 
 teams than now are there 1 . The bishop, who fully understands 
 the object of the inquest, does not mean to have his assessment 
 raised, and the justices are compelled to take the word of 
 jurors every one of whom is the vassal of S*. Mary. 
 Normal We know so little as to the commissioners' intentions, in 
 
 between particular so little as to any design on their part to force upon 
 team- Sand * ne wn l e country some one equation connecting oxen with 
 lands. area, that the task which is set before us if we would explain 
 the relation between the number of the teams (G) and the 
 number of the teamlands (B) that we find in a given county 
 is sometimes an intricate and perhaps insoluble problem. If 
 England be taken as a whole, the two numbers will stand 
 very close to each other. In some counties, for example in 
 Lincolnshire, if at the foot of each page we add up the par- 
 ticulars, we shall long remain in doubt whether B or C will be 
 the greater when our final sum is made. In county after county 
 we shall find a large number of entries in which B=C, and, 
 though there will always be some cases in which, the tenement 
 being waste, C descends to zero, and others in which C is less 
 than B, still the deficiency will be partially redressed by 
 instances in which B falls short of C. On the whole, the 
 relation between the two is that which we might expect. 
 Often there is equality ; often the variation is small ; but an 
 excess on the part of B is commoner than an excess on the 
 part of C, and when the waste teamlands have been brought 
 into the account, then in most counties B will usually exceed 
 (7 by 10 per cent, or little more. There are, however, some 
 marked and perplexing exceptions to this rule 2 . 
 
 Deficiency As we pass through the southern counties from east to west, 
 
 tLe^sonth^ tne rat ^ ^ orne by the teamlands to the teams steadily increases, 
 
 west. until ascending by leaps it reaches 1.43 : 1 (or thereabouts) in 
 
 Devon and 2 : 1 in Cornwall. Now to all seeming we are not 
 
 in a country which has recently been devastated ; it is not like 
 
 Yorkshire ; we find no large number of ' waste ' or unpopulated 
 
 or unvalued estates. Here and there we may see a tenement 
 
 which has as many teams as it has teamlands; but in the 
 
 1 D. B. i. 174 : ' In. omnibus his maneriis non possunt esse plus carucae 
 quam dictum eat.' 
 
 2 When C varies from B, the statement about G will sometimes be introduced 
 by a sed or a tamen which tells us that things are not what they might be 
 expected to be. D. B. i. 77 b : ' Terra est dimid. car. et taraen est ibi 1 car.' 
 D. B. i. 222 : ' Terra est dim. car. tamen 2 villani habent 1 car."
 
 Domesday Statistics. 425 
 
 great majority of cases the preponderance of teamlands is 
 steadily maintained. What does this mean ? One conceivable 
 explanation we may decidedly reject. It does not mean a 
 relatively scientific agriculture which makes the most of the 
 ox. Nor does it mean a fertile soil 1 . Our figures seem to 
 show that men are sparse and poor ; also they are servile. We 
 suspect their tillage to be of that backward kind which ploughs 
 enormous tracts for a poor return. Arva per annos mutant 
 et superest ager. Of the whole of the land that is sometimes 
 ploughed, they sow less than two-thirds or a half in any one 
 year: perhaps they sow one-third only, so that of the space 
 which the royal commissioners reckon as three teamlands two- 
 thirds are always idle. We must remember that in modern 
 times the husbandry that prevailed in Cornwall was radically 
 different from that which governed the English open fields. 
 It was what the agrarian historians of Germany call a Feld- 
 grasswirtschaft*. That perhaps is the best explanation which 
 we can give of this general and normal excess of teamlands 
 over teams. But to this we may add that systems of mensu- 
 ration and assessment which fitted the greater part of England 
 very well, may have fitted Devon, Cornwall and some other 
 western counties very badly 3 . Those systems are the outcome 
 of villages and spacious common fields where, without measure- 
 ment, you count the 'acres' and the plough-lands or house-lands, 
 and they refuse to register with any accuracy the arrangements 
 of the Celtic hamlets, or rather trevs of the west. 
 
 1 As a wheat-grower Devon stands in our own day at the very bottom of the 
 English counties. Its average yield per acre in 1885-95 was 21 bushels, while 
 Cambridge's was 32. Next above Devon stands Monmouth and then comes 
 Cornwall. 
 
 2 Marshall, Beview of Reports to Board of Agriculture from Southern 
 Departments, 524 : ' The management of the land is uniform ; here and there 
 an exception will be found. The whole is convertible, sometimes into arable, 
 and sometimes pasture. Arable is sown with wheat, barley, or oats, as long as 
 it will bear any; and then grass for eight or ten years, until the land is 
 recovered, and capable again of bearing corn.' See also p. 531 : the lands go 
 back to the waste ' in tenfold worse condition than [that wherein] they were 
 in a state of nature.' It is just in the country which is not a country of village 
 communities that we find this ' aration of the waste.' 
 
 3 Some parts of Worcestershire, for example, show a marked deficiency in 
 oxen. On the lands of Osbern Fitz Richard (14 entries) there are about 102 
 teams, and there ' could be ' 32 more. See D. B. i. 176 b. In some parts 
 of Cheshire also there is a great deficiency.
 
 426 The Hide. 
 
 Actual and It is by no means impossible that when the commissioners 
 team tial came to a county which was very sparsely peopled (and in Corn- 
 lands. wa u eac jj 'recorded man' might have had near 160 acres of 
 some sort or another all to himself) their question about the 
 number of teamlands or about the number of teams ' that could 
 plough there' became a question about remote possibilities, 
 rather than about existing or probable arrangements, and that 
 the answer to it became mere guesswork. On one occasion 
 in Cornwall they are content with the statement that there 
 "is land for 'fifteen or thirty teams 1 .' In the description of a 
 wasted tract of Staffordshire we see six cases close together 
 in which two different guesses as to the number of the potential 
 teamlands are recorded 2 : ' There is land for two teams ' , but 
 ' or three ' is interlined. Five times ' or two ' is written above 
 'one.' Now this is of importance, for perhaps we may see in 
 it the key to the treatment that wasted Yorkshire receives. 
 How much arable land is there in this village ? Well, if by 
 ' arable land ' you mean land that is ploughed, there is none. 
 If you do not mean this, if you are speaking of a ' waste ' vill 
 where no land has been ploughed these fifteen years, then you 
 must be content with a speculative answer 3 . If the ruined 
 cottages were rebuilt and inhabited, if oxen and men were 
 imported, then employment might be found for four or five 
 teams. Called to speculate about these matters, the Yorkshire 
 jurors very naturally catch hold of any solid fact which may 
 serve as a base for computations. This fact they seem to find 
 in the geld assessment. This estate is rated to the geld at 
 two carucates; the assessment seems tolerably fair; so they 
 say that two teams would plough the land. Or again, this 
 estate is rated to the geld at four carucates ; but its assessment 
 is certainly too high, so let it be set down for two teamlands 4 . 
 
 1 D. B. i. 122 b: 'Luduham... Terra 15 car. vel 30 car.' In the Exeter 
 book (D. B. iv. 240) two conflicting estimates are recorded: c Luduam...In ea 
 sunt 3 hidae terrae et reddidit gildum pro 1 hida. hanc possunt arare 15 
 carrucae. hanc tenet Ricardus de Comite. in ea sunt 3 hidae terrae et reddidit 
 gildum pro 1 hida. hanc possunt arare 30 carrucae. hanc tenet Eicardus de 
 Comite.' a D. B. i. 246 b. 
 
 3 Often a Yorkshire entry touching a waste vill gives no B. Therefore in 
 my Tables I have omitted the number of the Yorkshire teamlands, lest hasty 
 inferences should be drawn from it, I believe it falls between 5000 and 6000. It 
 is much smaller than A, much greater than C. 
 
 4 Be it remembered that these waste vills can not send deputations to meet
 
 Domesday Statistics. 427 
 
 Even in other parts of the country the jurors may sometimes 
 avail themselves of this device. In particular there are tracts 
 in which they are fond of reporting that the number of team- 
 lands is just equal to (B = A) or just twice as great (B = ^A) 
 as the number of gelding carucates. We very much fear, 
 though the ground for this fear can not be explained at this 
 stage of our inquiry, that the figure which the jurors state 
 when questioned about potential teams is sometimes dictated 
 by a traditional estimate which has been playing a part in 
 the geld assessment, and that the number of teamlands is but 
 remotely connected with the agrarian arrangements of 1086. 
 All our other guesses therefore must be regarded as being 
 subject to this horrible suspicion, of- which we shall have more 
 to say hereafter 1 . 
 
 This makes it difficult for us to construe the second great The land of 
 .aberration from the general rule that the number of the teams. 
 teamlands in a county will slightly exceed the number of 
 teams. In Derby and Nottingham apparent 'understocking' 
 becomes the exception and ' overstocking ' the rule. In Derby 
 there is a good deal of ' waste ' where we have to reckon team- 
 lands but no teams, and yet on many pages the number of 
 teams is the greater (C>B). In Nottingham there seem to 
 be on the average near 200 teams where there are but 125 
 teamlands. In many columns of the Lincolnshire survey, and 
 therefore perhaps in some districts of that large and variegated 
 county, the teams have a majority, though, if we have not 
 blundered, they are beaten by the teamlands when the whole 
 shire has been surveyed. It is very possible that a similar 
 phenomenon would have been recorded in Essex and East 
 Anglia if the inquiry in those counties had taken the form that 
 was usual elsewhere, for the teams seem to be thick on the 
 land. Now to interpret the steady excess of teams that we see 
 in Derby and Nottingham is not easy. We can hardly suppose 
 that the jurors are confessing that they habitually employ a 
 superfluity of oxen. Perhaps, however, we may infer that in 
 
 the justices, and that the representatives of the wapentakes may never have 
 seen some of those deserts of which they have to speak. ' All of these vills,' 
 they say on one occasion (i. 301), 'belong to Preston. In sixteen of them 
 there are a few inhabitants; but how many we do not know. The rest are 
 waste.' 
 
 1 See below, p. 471.
 
 428 The. Hide. 
 
 this district a given area of land will be ploughed by an 
 unusually large number of teams, whereas in Devon and Corn- 
 wall a given area will be ploughed, though intermittently, by 
 an unusually small number. In every way the contrast between 
 Devon and Cornwall on the one hand, Lincoln, Nottingham 
 and Derby on the other, is strongly marked. Of the quality of 
 soils some'thing should, no doubt, be said which we are too 
 ignorant to say. An acre would yield more corn in Nottingham 
 and Derby, to say nothing of Lincoln, than in Devon and 
 Cornwall, though the valets that we find in the three Danish 
 shires are by no means so high as those that are displayed by 
 some of the southern counties. But if we ask how many 
 households our average teamland is supporting, then among 
 all the counties that we have examined Lincoln, Nottingham 
 and Derby stand at the very top, while Devon and Cornwall 
 stand with the depopulated Stafford at the very bottom of the 
 list 1 . Then, again, we see the contrasts between village and 
 trev, between Dane and Celt, between sokeman and slave. 
 Possibly Northampton, Derby and parts of Lincoln really are 
 ' over-teamed ' : that is to say, were the land of these counties 
 to come to the hands of lords who held large and compact 
 estates, the number of plough-teams would be reduced. Where 
 there is freedom there will be some waste. The tenements 
 split into fractions, and the owner of a small piece must keep 
 oxen enough to draw a plough or trust to the friendliness and 
 reciprocal needs of his neighbours. Manorialism has this 
 advantage : it can make the most of the ox. Another possible 
 guess is that the real carucates and bovates of this district 
 (by which we mean the units which locally bear these names 
 and which are the units in the proprietary or tenurial scheme) 
 have few acres, fewer than would be allowed by some equation 
 which the royal commissioners for these counties carry in their 
 minds. Being assured (for example) that the bovates in a 
 certain village or hundred have few acres, they may be allowing 
 the jurors to count as three team-lands ('of imperial measure') 
 
 1 Devon, 2-1; Cornwall, 2*2; Derby, 3-9; Nottingham, 4-4; Lincoln, 5-0. 
 The figure for Stafford is about as low as that for Cornwall ; but Stafford has 
 been devastated. See Eyton, Staffordshire, 30. Kent and Surrey would stand 
 high. Kent would perhaps stand as high as Derby. But Lincoln has no peer, 
 unless it be Norfolk, Suffolk, or Essex. Our reason for not speaking of these 
 last three counties will appear by and by.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 429 
 
 a space of arable that has been locally treated as four. So, 
 after all, the rule that normally each teamland should have its 
 team and that each team should till its teamland may be 
 holding good in these counties, though the proprietary and 
 agrarian units have differed from those that the commissioners 
 treat as orthodox. 
 
 One last guess is lawful after what we have seen in Attempts 
 Leicestershire. These Nottinghamshire folk may be telling the^xcesa 
 how many teams there were in King Edward's time and re- of teams - 
 cording a large increase in the number of oxen and therefore 
 perhaps in the cultivated area. In this case, however, we 
 should expect to find the valet greater than the valuit, while 
 'really we find that a fall in value is normal throughout the 
 shire. 
 
 We must here say one parenthetical word about the account Digression 
 of East Anglia. In one respect it differs from the account Angiia. 
 of any other district 1 . We are told of the various land- 
 holders that they* hold so many carucates or so many acres. 
 Analogy would lead us to suppose that this is a statement 
 touching the amount of geld with which they are charged. 
 Though there is no statement parallel to the Terra est b carucis 
 which we find in most parts of England, still there are some 
 other counties remote from East Anglia Gloucester, Worcester, 
 Hereford where no such statement is given to us. In other 
 words, a natural first guess would be that in Norfolk and 
 Suffolk we are informed about A and not about B. But then, 
 it is apparent that some information about A is being given to 
 us by a quite different formula such as we shall not meet 
 outside East Anglia. We are told about a vill that when the 
 hundred pays 20s. for the geld this vill pays so many pence 
 seven pence halfpenny, it may be, or eight pence three farthings. 
 This is the formula which prescribes how much geld the land- 
 holders of the vill must pay and it says nothing of carucates or 
 of acres. Now this might make us think that the carucates 
 and acres which are attributed to the landholders are 'real' 
 and not ' rateable ' areas, and are to be put on a level with the 
 teamlands (J5) rather than with the hides or gelding carucates 
 (A) of other counties. Nevertheless, on second thoughts we 
 
 1 An essay by Mr W. J. Corbett which I had the advantage of seeing some 
 time ago, and which will I hope soon be in print, will throw much new light on 
 this matter.
 
 430 The Hide. 
 
 may return to our first opinion. If these carucates are equi- 
 valent to the teamlands of other counties, Norfolk and Suffolk 
 not only differ but differ very widely from the rest of England l . 
 In Norfolk we make about 2,422 carucates and about 4,853 
 teams, and, however wide of the mark these figures may be 2 , 
 the fact that there are upon an average about two teams to 
 every carucate is apparent on page after page of the record; 
 often the ratio is yet higher. We have seen a phenomenon of 
 the same kind, though less pronounced, in Nottingham ; but 
 then, if in Norfolk we proceed to divide the 'recorded popu- 
 lation' by the number of carucates, we shall get 11 as our 
 quotient. This is so very much higher than anything that we^ 
 have seen elsewhere that we are daunted by it; for, even 
 though we recall the possibility that a good many tenants in 
 this free county are counted twice because they hold under two 
 lords, still this reflection will hardly enable ns to make the 
 requisite allowance. To this it may be added that if we divide 
 the acreage of Norfolk by its carucates and treat the carucates 
 as teamlands, the quotient will place Norfolk among the 
 counties in which the smallest part of the total area was under 
 the plough. Further, it will be observed that the statement 
 about the geldability of the vills does not enable us to bring 
 home any particular sum to any given man. Be it granted 
 that the sum due from a vill is fixed by the proposition that it 
 contributes thirteen pence to every pound levied from the 
 hundred, we have still to decide how much Ralph and how 
 much Roger, two landholders of the vill, must contribute ; and 
 our decision will, we take it, be dictated by the statement that 
 
 1 I have roughly added up the carucates and teams of Norfolk, a laborious 
 task, and have seen reason to believe that the figures for Suffolk would be of the 
 same kind. 
 
 2 In dealing with Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk an equation connecting the 
 hide or (as the case may be) carucate with the acre becomes of vast importance. 
 I have throughout assumed that 120 acres make the hide or carucate. If this 
 assumption, about which something will be said hereafter, is unjustified, my 
 whole computation breaks down. Then in Norfolk there are (especially I think 
 in certain particular hundreds) a good many estates for which no extent (real or 
 rateable) is given. I have made no allowance for this. On the other hand, I 
 believe that I have carried to an extreme in Norfolk the principle of including 
 everything. I doubt, for example, whether some of the acres held by the parish 
 churches have not been reckoned twice over. Also both in Essex and Norfolk I 
 reckoned in the lands that are mentioned among the Invasiones, and in so doing 
 ran the danger of counting them for a second time.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 431 
 
 Ralph has one carucate and Roger 60 acres. We fear therefore 
 that here again we can not penetrate through the rateable to 
 the real 1 . 
 
 About the ' land for one team ' we can hardly get beyond The team- 
 vague guesswork, and may seriously doubt whether the inquiry areai'mea- 
 as to the number of possible ploughs was interpreted in the sure- 
 same manner in all parts of the country. Here it may have 
 been regarded as a reference to the good old time of King 
 Edward, here to the local custom ; there an attempt may have 
 been made to enforce some royal ' standard measure,' and there 
 again men were driven to speculate as to what might happen if 
 a wilderness were once more inhabited. But unless we are 
 mistaken, the first step towards a solution of the many problems 
 that beset us is taken when we perceive that the jurors have 
 not been asked to state the areal extent of the tilled or the 
 tillable land. 
 
 Far other, as is well known, was the doctrine of one whom Eyton's 
 all students of Domesday revere. For Mr Eyton the teamland 
 was precisely 120 of our statute acres 2 . The proof offered of 
 this lies in a comparison of the figures given by Domesday with 
 the superficial content of modern parishes. What seems to us 
 to have been proved is that, if we start with the proposed 
 equation, we shall rarely be brought into violent collision with 
 ascertained facts, and that, when such a collision seems im- 
 minent, it can almost always be prevented by the intervention 
 of some plausible hypothesis about shifted boundaries or neg- 
 lected wastes. More than this has not been done. Always at 
 the end of his toil the candid investigator admits that when he 
 has added up all the figures that Domesday gives for arable, 
 meadow, wood and pasture, the land of the county is by no 
 means exhausted. Then the residue must be set down as 
 4 unsurveyed ' or ' unregistered ' and guesses made as to its 
 whereabouts 3 . Then further, this method involves theories 
 
 1 Also we may remark that in many respects the survey of Essex is closely 
 akin to the survey of East Anglia; but in Essex nothing is said about the 
 geldability of vills and therefore, unless the Essex hides and acres belong to the 
 order of geldable units (.4), our record tells us nothing as to the geld of Essex: 
 an unacceptable conclusion. 
 
 2 Dorset, 15, 23-24. 
 
 3 In Dorset 22,000 acres are ' designedly omitted ' ; in Somerset nearly 
 178,000 ; in Staffordshire nearly 246,000. Mr C. S. Taylor puts the deficiency 
 in Gloucestershire at 200,000 or thereabouts.
 
 432 The Hide. 
 
 about lineal and superficial measurements which are, in our 
 eyes, precarious. 
 
 Domes- One word about this point must be said, though we can 
 
 measure?* 1 not devote much room to it. The content of various spaces, 
 such as woods and pastures, is often indicated by a reference 
 to linear standards, leagues, furlongs, perches, feet, and there 
 seems to be little doubt that the main equations which govern 
 the system are these: 
 
 1 league = 12 furlongs or quarentines or acre-lengths 
 = 480 perches. 
 
 Now we read numerous statements which take the following 
 form: 'It is x leagues (furlongs, perches) long and y wide,' 
 or, to take a concrete example, 'The wood is 1 league long 
 and 4 furlongs wide.' The question arises whether we are 
 justified in making this mean that here is a wood whose 
 superficial content is equal to that of a rectangular paral- 
 lelogram 480 statute perches long by 160 statute perches wide. 
 We are rash in imposing our perch of 16'5 feet on the whole 
 England of the eleventh century, even though we are to 
 measure arable land. We are rasher in using that perch for 
 the measurement of woodland. But perhaps we are rasher 
 still in supposing that the Domesday jurors have true super- 
 ficial measurement in their minds 1 . We strongly suspect that 
 they are thinking of shape as well as of size, and may be giving 
 us the extreme diameters of the wood or some diameters that 
 they guess to be near the mean. If a clergyman told us that 
 his parish was 3 miles long by 2 wide, we should not accuse 
 him of falsehood or blunder if we subsequently discovered 
 that in shape it was approximately a right-angled triangle and 
 contained only some 3 superficial miles. And now let us 
 observe how rude these statements are. The Nqrfolk jurors 
 are in the habit of recording the length and the breadth of 
 the vills. Occasionally they profess to do this with extreme 
 accuracy 2 . However, we reckon that in about 100 out of 
 550 cases they say that the vill is one league long by a half- 
 league wide. This delightfully symmetrical county therefore 
 should have quite a hundred parishes, each of which contains 
 
 1 See above, p. 370. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 160 b : A certain vill is 1 league 10 perches long, and 1 league 
 4^ feet wide. Surely such a statement would never come from men who could 
 use and were intending to use a system of superficial measurement.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 433 
 
 close upon 720 acres. Among the 800 parishes of modern 
 Norfolk there are not 70 whose size lies between 600 and 
 800 acres. We are not saying that time spent over these 
 lineal measurements is wasted, but an argument which gets 
 to the size of the teamland by postulating in the first place that 
 our statute perch was commonly used for all purposes throughout 
 England, and in the second that these lineal can be converted 
 into superficial measurements by simple arithmetic, is not very 
 cogent and is apt to become circular, for the teamland contains 
 its 1,20 acres because that is the space left for it by parochial 
 boundaries when we have measured off the woods and pastures, 
 and our measurement of the woods and pastures is correct 
 because it will leave 120 acres for every teamland. 
 
 One more word about these lineal measurements. In Measured 
 Norfolk and Suffolk the total area of the vills is indicated by lands. 
 them, and so it is in Yorkshire also. Now, unless we err, it 
 sometimes happens that if we arithmetically deduce the total 
 area from its recorded length and breadth, and then subtract 
 from that area the content of any measured woods and pastures 
 that there may be, we shall be left with too little space to 
 give each East Anglian carucate or each Yorkshire teamland 
 120 acres and with far too little to allow a similar area to 
 each East Anglian team. Try one experiment. At S Hereford in 
 Norfolk we have to force at least one carucate on which there 
 are two teams into a space that is 3 furlongs in length by 
 3 in breadth 1 . That means, if our method be sound, that 
 each team has at the utmost 45 acres to till. Try we York- 
 shire. There also we. shall find entries which to all appearance 
 will not suffer us to give 120 acres to the teamland. 
 
 In Andrebi...9 carucates for geld; there may be 6 teams... The 
 whole half a league long and half [a league] wide 2 . 
 
 In Hotone and Bileham...a manor of 10 carucates for geld; 
 there may be 10 teams.... The whole 10 quarentines long and 8 wide 3 . 
 
 In Warlavesbi 6 carucates for geld ; there may be 4 teams.... 
 The whole half a league long and half [a league] wide*. 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 170. Or take Westbruge (ii. 206) : Two carucates ; two teams 
 and a half ; ' this vill is 5 furlongs in length by 3 in breadth.' If every inch of 
 the vill is ploughed, the carucate can only have 75 acres, and each team tills 
 but 60. I have noted many cases in which this method will not leave 120 acres 
 for the team. a D. B. i. 310. 3 D. B. i. 307 b. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 310. In these Yorkshire cases it is needless for us to raise the 
 question whether the totum that is being measured is the manor or the vill. 
 
 M. 28
 
 434 The Hide. 
 
 It would seem then that in these cases the utmost limit 
 for the teamland is 60, 80, 90 acres. Then again, there are 
 a few precious instances in which lineal measures are used 
 in order to indicate the size of a piece of land the whole of 
 which is arable. This occurs so rarely that we may fairly 
 expect something exceptional. The result is bewildering. At 
 Thetford we hear of land that is half a league long and half 
 a league wide: 'the whole of this land is arable and 4 teams 
 can plough it 1 .' Here then, but 90 acres are assigned to the 
 teamland. We journey to Yorkshire and first we will take 
 an entry which suits the Eytonian doctrine well enough. 
 'There are 13 carucates of land less one bovate for geld; 
 8 teams can plough them ... Arable land 10 quarentines long 
 and equally broad 2 .' In this case we have 1000 acres to divide 
 among 8 teamlands, and this would make each teamland 
 125 acres : we could hardly expect a pleasanter quotient. 
 But on the same page we have an entry which tells of a manor 
 with 60 carucates and 6 bovates for geld and 35 teamlands 
 where the ' arable land ' is described as being ' 2 leagues long 
 and 2 [leagues] wide 3 .' This gives nearly 165 acres to the team- 
 land. There are two Lincolnshire entries which, when treated 
 in a similar way, give 160* and 225 5 acres to the teamland. 
 Then there is a Staffordshire entry which gives no less than 
 360 acres to each teamland, though it gives only 160 to each 
 existing team 6 . The suspicion can not but cross our minds 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 118 b. 2 D. B. i. 303 b (Yorkshire, Oleslec). 
 
 8 D. B. i. 303 b (Othelai). 
 
 4 D. B. i. 346 b (Bastune) ; 4 carucates for geld; land for 4 teams; arable 
 land 8 quar. by 8. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 346 b (Langetof) ; 6 carucates for geld ; land for 6 teams ; arable 
 land 15 quar. long and 9 wide. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 248 b (Kolvestune) ; 2^- hides ; land for 8 teams ; 18 teams ex- 
 isting ; arable land 2 leagues long and 1 [league] wide. Eyton (Staffordshire, 
 48) has a long note on this entry which makes against his doctrine that the 
 teamland is 120 acres. He suggests that the statement by linear measure is a 
 correction of the previous statement that there is land for 8 teams. Un- 
 fortunately, as we have seen, this entry does not stand alone. Morgan, op. 
 cit. 34, speaks of some of these entries. Those which he mentions and which 
 we have not noticed do not seem quite to the point. Thus (D. B. i. 263 b) 
 of Edesberie we read ' land for 6 ploughs... this land is a league long and equally 
 wide.' We are not here expressly told that all the ' land ' thus measured by 
 lineal measure is arable. The cases of Dictune, Winetun, Grif and Bernodebi, 
 which he then cites, are beside the mark, for what is here measured by lineal 
 measure seems to be the whole area of the manor.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 435 
 
 that as regards the amount of land that had 8 oxen for its 
 culture there may have been as wide a difference between the 
 various shires in the days of the Confessor as there was in 
 the days of Arthur Young; only, whereas in the eighteenth 
 century a little space ploughed by many oxen was a relic of 
 barbarism, it was in the eleventh an index of prosperity, 
 freedom, a thick population and a comparatively intense agri- 
 culture. But theories about the facts of husbandry will not dispel 
 the whole of the fog which shrouds the Domesday teamland. 
 
 That, if all England be taken as a whole, the average Amount of 
 teamlaud of Domesday Book would contain about 120 acres landln 
 seems possible, arid since we ourselves are committed to the ug 
 belief that the old traditional hide had arable acres to this 
 number, it may be advisable that we should examine some 
 districts of ancient England through the medium of the 
 hypothesis that Domesday's teamlaud has a long-hundred of 
 our statute acres. In Column I. of the following table we 
 place the result obtained if we multiply a county's tearnlarids 
 (or in the case of Sussex and Gloucester the teams) by 120 ; 
 and in the following columns we give the figures which show 
 the state of the county in 1895. In order to make a rough 
 comparison the easier, we give round figures and omit three 
 noughts, so that, for example, 371 stands for 371,000 acres 1 . 
 
 
 i 
 
 S 
 
 I 
 
 C oo 
 
 Mountain am 
 Land used 
 grazing (1 
 
 crt 
 
 ij 
 P 
 
 if 
 
 1000 Acres 
 
 1000 Acres 
 
 1000 Acres 
 
 1000 Acres 
 
 1000 Acres 
 
 1000 Acres 
 
 Sussex 
 
 371 
 
 298 
 
 381 
 
 9 
 
 124 
 
 933 
 
 Surrey 
 
 141 
 
 133 
 
 152 
 
 12 
 
 54 
 
 461 
 
 Berkshire 
 
 251 
 
 204 
 
 163 
 
 1 
 
 36 
 
 462 
 
 Dorset 
 
 280 
 
 188 
 
 300 
 
 18 
 
 38 
 
 632 
 
 Somerset 
 
 577 
 
 207 
 
 653 
 
 48 
 
 46 
 
 1042 
 
 Devon 
 
 957 
 
 581 
 
 633 
 
 138 
 
 86 
 
 1667 
 
 Buckingham 
 
 269 
 
 165 
 
 236 
 
 2 
 
 32 
 
 476 
 
 Oxford 
 
 317 
 
 228 
 
 188 
 
 1 
 
 27 
 
 485 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 589 
 
 269 
 
 387 
 
 7 
 
 58 
 
 797 
 
 Bedford 
 
 187 
 
 155 
 
 100 
 
 1 
 
 13 
 
 298 
 
 Northampton 
 
 352 
 
 215 
 
 344 
 
 
 
 28 
 
 640 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 605 
 
 1017 
 
 501 
 
 2 
 
 43 
 
 1695 
 
 1 To make safer, I take the Dorset and Somerset teamlands from Eyton, the 
 Gloucester teams from Mr Taylor. In the modern statistics the ' arable ' covers 
 
 282
 
 436 The Hide. 
 
 Decreaseof These figures are startling enough. We are required to 
 
 arable. believe that in many counties, even in Sussex where the forest 
 still filled a large space, there were more acres ploughed 
 T. R. W. than are ploughed T. R. V., while in some cases the 
 number has been reduced by one half during the intervening 
 centuries. Were the old acres in Oxfordshire as large as 
 our own, a good deal more than three-fifths of that county was 
 ploughed. Much might be said of the extreme futility of 
 ancient agriculture. Then we should have to remember the 
 ' inclosures ' of the sixteenth century ; also the movement which 
 in our own day threatens to carry us back to ' the pastoral 
 state 1 .' We should have to scrutinize those abundant marks 
 of the plough which occur in our meadows and on our hill- 
 sides, even where we least expect them, and to distinguish 
 those which were being made in the days of the Norman 
 conqueror from those which tell of a much later age when 
 'the Corsican tyrant' threatened our shores. 
 
 The food And then there is the great food problem. At this point 
 
 em ' we might desire the aid of a jury of scientific experts. We 
 are, indeed, but ill prepared to deliver a charge or to define 
 a clear issue, but the main question may be roughly stated 
 thus : South of Yorkshire and Cheshire we have some 275,000 
 'recorded men,' some 75,000 recorded teams and (if we allow 
 120 statute acres to every team) some 9,000,000 statute acres of 
 arable land 2 . Is this supply of arable adequate or excessive for 
 the population ? Unfortunately, however, the question involves 
 more than one unknown quantity. 
 
 What was In the first place, by what figure are we to multiply the 
 
 the popula- 
 tion? 'bare fallow' and 'grasses under rotation ' ; the 'permanent pasture' includes 
 'grass for hay,' but excludes ' mountain and heath land used for grazing' ; the 
 total acreage includes everything but ' tidal water.' To bring up the particulars 
 to the total, we should have to add (1) a little for orchards and market gardens, 
 and having thus obtained the sum of all the land that is within the purview of 
 the Board of Agriculture, we should still have to add (2) the sites of towns, 
 houses, factories, etc. , (3) tenements of less than an acre whereof no statistics 
 are obtained, (4) roads, railways, etc., (5) waste not used^ for pasture, rocks, 
 sea-shore, etc., (6) non-tidal water. The area not accounted for by our figures 
 will be smallest in an inland county which has no large towns ; it will be raised 
 by sea-shore or by manufacturing industry. 
 
 1 Agricultural Beturns, 1895, p. xiii : 'The actual loss. of arable area in the 
 interval covered by the last two decades... is 2,137,000 acres.' 
 
 2 Mr Seebohm, Village Community, p. 103, seems to think that D. B. testifies 
 to no more than 5 million acres of arable. But, even if we stop at the Humber, 
 we shall have 9 million if a team tills 120.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 437 
 
 number of ' recorded men ' before we shall obtain the total 
 population? Here we have to remember that nothing is said 
 by our record about some of the largest towns and that the 
 figures which we obtain from Norwich 1 suggest that the 
 inhabitants of London, Winchester and the like should not be 
 neglected, even by those who are aiming at the rudest com- 
 putation. Then what we read of Bury St Edmunds 2 suggests 
 that around every great abbey were clustered many artificers, 
 servants and bedesmen who as a general rule were not 
 enumerated by the jurors. We must also remember the monks, 
 nuns and canons and the large households of barons and 
 prelates 3 . Again, it is by no means unlikely that, despite a 
 high rate of mortality among children, the household of the 
 ordinary villein was upon an average larger than is the house- 
 hold of the modern cottager or artizan, for the blood-bond was 
 stronger than it is now-a-days. Married brothers with their 
 wives and children may not unfrequently have dwelt in one 
 house and may be described in our record as a single villanus 
 because they hold an undivided inheritance. On the other 
 hand, we have seen reason to think that in the eastern villages 
 many men may be counted more than once 4 . Shall we, for the 
 sake of argument, multiply the recorded men by 5 ? This would 
 give us a population of 1,375,000 souls 8 . 
 
 What portion of the arable land shall we suppose to be sown What was 
 in any one year? Some grave doubts may occur to us before sy stem?" 
 we put this portion higher than one half 6 . Common opinion 
 would perhaps strike a balance between two-field and three- 
 field husbandry. So we will suppose that out of 9 million acres 
 5 million are sown. 
 
 Then comes the insoluble question about the acre's yield. What was 
 Even could we state an average, this would not be very yield ? re ' 
 serviceable, for every district had to feed itself in every year, 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 116 : T. B. E. there were 1320 burgemes. 
 
 2 D. B. ii. 372. 
 
 3 It seems probable that in many cases the parish priest is reckoned among 
 . the townsmen, the villani. 
 
 * See above, p. 20. 
 
 8 While historical economists can still dispute as to whether the population 
 in 1346 was 5 millions, or only 2 (Cunningham, Eng. Industry, i. 304) guesses 
 about 1085 are premature. M. Fabre has lately estimated the population of 
 England under Henry II. at 2,880,000. But aa to this calculation, see Lieber- 
 mann, Eng. Hist. Kev. xi. 746. 
 
 6 See above, p. 366.
 
 438 The Hide. 
 
 and the statistics of the later middle ages suggest that the 
 difference between good and bad years was very large, while the 
 valuations of the manors in Domesday Book seem to tell us 
 that the difference between fertile and sterile, forward and 
 backward counties was much Avider in the eleventh century 
 than it is in our own day. The scientific agriculturist of the 
 thirteenth century proposed to sow an acre with two bushels of 
 wheat and regarded ten bushels as the proper return 1 . Walter 
 of Henley proved by figures that a three-fold return would not 
 be remunerative, unless prices were exceptionally good, but he 
 evidently thought of this exiguous yield as a possibility 2 , and 
 yet, as we have seen, he represents the ' high farming ' of his 
 time and in his two-course husbandry would plough the land 
 thrice over between every two crops. In the first half of the 
 next century we can not put the average as high as 8 bushels 3 . 
 To eyes that look for 29 or 30, a yield of from 6 to 10 may seem 
 pitiful ; and the ' miserable husbandry ' that Arthur Young saw 
 in the west of England was producing from 15 to 20 4 . However, 
 there are countries in which a crop of wheat which gave 10 of 
 our bushels to one of our acres would not be very small 5 . For 
 our present purpose, the figure that we should wish to obtain 
 would be, not that which expressed the yield of an average 
 year, but that which was the outcome of a bad year, for we 
 have to keep folk alive and they can not wait for the good 
 times. Let us then take our hypothesis from Walter of 
 Henley. We suppose a yield of 6 bushels, 2 of which must 
 be retained for seed. This would give us 20 million bushels as 
 food, or, we will say, 15 bushels for every person. 
 
 Of beer. Now, had we to deal with modern wheat and modern mills, 
 
 we might argue that the bushel of wheat would weigh 60 
 
 1 Walter of Henley, pp. 67, 71. 
 
 2 Walter of Henley, p. 19. 8 Bogers, Hist. Agric. i. 50-1. 
 
 4 Tour in the Southern Counties, ed. 3 (1767), p. 158. See also p. 242. 
 
 5 Agricultural Beturns, 1895, p. 239. The figures given under the year 1894 
 which express the average yield of a statute acre in imperial bushels are for 
 Australasia, 8-18; India, 9-00; Bussia in Europe, 10'76; United States, 12-79." 
 Apparently in South Australia 1,577,000 acres can produce as little as 7,781,000 
 bushels. As I understand, Sir J. B. Lawes and Sir J. H. Gilbert reckon that 
 for an unmanured acre in England 16 bushels would be an average return, but 
 that if the same acre is continuously sown with wheat, the yield will decline at 
 the rate of nearly a quarter of a bushel every year. See Journ. Agricult. Soc., 
 3rd Ser. vol. iv. p. 87.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 439 
 
 pounds, that the weight of flour would be 72 per cent, of the 
 weight of grain 1 , and that every human mouth could thus 
 be provided with a little more than 28 ounces of flour every 
 day, or, to put it another way, with bread amounting to nine- 
 sixteenths of a four pound loaf 2 . Some large, but indefinable, 
 deduction should be made from this amount on the score of 
 poor grain and wasteful processes. As the sum stands, we 
 are at present proposing to give to each person a great deal 
 more wheat-flour than would be obtained if the total amount 
 consumed now-a-days in the tlnited Kingdom were divided by 
 the number of its inhabitants 8 . But it need hardly be said 
 that the problem is far more complex than are our figures. 
 In the first place, we have to withdraw from the men of 
 1086 a large quantity, perhaps more than a half, of the 
 wheat-flour that we have given them in order to supply its 
 place with other cereals 4 , in particular with barley and oats, 
 much of which, together with some of the wheat 5 , will be 
 consumed in the form of beer. And who shall fathom that 
 ocean? Multum biberunt de cerevisia Anglicana, as the pope 
 said. Their choice lay for the more part between beer and 
 water. In the twelfth century the corn-rents paid to the bishop 
 of Durham often comprised malt, wheat and oats in equal 
 quantities 6 . In the next century the economy of the canons of 
 
 1 This calculus was officially adopted in 1891 ; see a paper by Sir J. B. 
 Lawes and Sir J. H. Gilbert in Journ. Agric. Soc., 3rd Ser., voL iv. p. 102. I 
 desire to express my thanks to the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture for 
 directing my attention to this paper. 
 
 2 I understand that the average number of loaves that can be made from 
 280 Ibs. of flour may be put at about 90. 
 
 3 Agricultural Keturns, 1895, pp. 166, 90, 198. The old rough estimate of a 
 quarter of wheat per head is much too high ; the average is about 5 -65 bushels. 
 See the paper cited in note 1. Now-a-days we can further allot to each 
 inhabitant of the United Kingdom an amount of cereal matter other than 
 wheat, to wit, barley, oats, beans, peas, maize, etc. which would take for its 
 production perhaps as much as 1-5 times the area of the land that is required 
 for the growth of the' wheat that we have allotted to him. But much of this 
 only feeds him by feeding animals that he eats ; much only feeds him very 
 indirectly by feeding horses engaged in the production or transport of food ; and 
 some of it can not be said to feed him at all. Then, on the other hand, large 
 quantities of potatoes, sugar and rice are being eaten. 
 
 4 Wheat, oats, barley and peas are mentioned in D. B. ; also rye (i. 257 b). 
 6 Hale, Worcester Register, p. civ. 
 
 e Boldon Book, D. B. iv. 580-5. So in D. B. i. 69 the sheriff of Wiltshire 
 receives equal quantities of wheat and malt and a larger quantity of oats. See 
 also D. B. i. 179 b.
 
 440 The Hide. 
 
 S*. Paul's was so arranged that for every 30 quarters of wheat 
 that went to make bread, 7 quarters of wheat, 7 of barley and 
 32 of oats went to make beer 1 . The weekly allowance of every 
 canon included 30 gallons 2 . In one year their brewery seems to 
 have produced 67,814 gallons from 175 quarters of wheat, a like 
 quantity of barley and 708 quarters of oats 3 . With such figures 
 before us, it becomes a serious question whether we can devote 
 less than a third of the sown land to the provision of drink. 
 The monk, who would have growled if Jie got less than a gallon 
 a day, would, we may suppose, consume in the course of a year 
 20 bushels of barley or an equivalent amount of other grain : in 
 other words, the produce, when seed-corn is deducted, of from 
 two to three acres of land ; and perhaps to every mouth in 
 England we must give half a gallon daily 4 . 
 
 TheEng- But if we can not make teetotallers of our ancestors (and in 
 diet!"* very truth we can not) neither may we convert them to vege- 
 tarianism. What we can read of the provender-rents paid in 
 the days before the Conquest suggests that those who were 
 well-to-do, including the monks, consumed a great deal of 
 mutton, pork, poultry, fish, eels, cheese and honey 8 . This would 
 relieve the arable of part of the pressure that it would otherwise 
 have borne, for, though we already hear of two manors which 
 between them supply 6000 dog-loaves for the king's hounds 6 , 
 
 1 Domesday of S'. Paul's, 164*. See also Cart. Rams. iii. 231. 
 
 2 Ibid, cxxxiv. 173. 3 Ibid. 173. 
 
 4 Calculations are difficult and may be misleading, not only because of the 
 variability of medieval measures, but also because of the varying strength of 
 beer. Mr Steele, the Chief Inspector of Excise, has been good enough to 
 inform me that a bushel of unmalted barley weighing 42 Ibs. would yield about 
 19*5 gallons of beer at 58. The figures from S'. Paul's seem to point to a 
 strong brew, since they apparently derive but 8 gallons from the bushel of mixed 
 grain. The ordinances of cent. xiii. (Statutes, i. 200, 202) seem to suppose that, 
 outside the cities, the brewer, after deducting expenses and profit, could sell 8 to 
 12 gallons of beer for the price "of a bushel of barley. If we suppose that the 
 bushel of barley gives 18 gallons, the man who drinks his gallon a day consumes 
 20 bushels a year, and when the acre yields but 6 bushels of wheat, it will 
 hardly yield more than 7 of barley. There is valuable learning in J. Bickerdyke, 
 The Curiosities of Ale, pp. 54, 106, 154. 
 
 5 As to both meat and drink see Ine 70, 1 ; T. 460, 468, 471, 473, 474 ; E. 
 118 ; ^Ethelstan, n. 1. 1 ; D. B. i. 169, rents of the shrievalty of Wiltshire. 
 Attempts to measure the flood of beer break down before the uncertain content 
 of the amber, modius, sextarius. etc. In particular I can not believe that the 
 amber of ale contained (Schmid, p. 530 ; Robertson, Hist. Essays, 68) 4 of our 
 bushels ; but, do all we can to reduce it, the allowance of beer seems laige. 
 
 8 D. B. ii. 162 b : Cheltenham and King's Barton.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 441 
 
 and also read of pigs that are fattened with corn 1 , it is not very 
 probable that any beasts, save those that laboured, got much 
 from the arable, except the straw, and the stubble which we may 
 suspect of having been abundantly mixed with grass and weeds. 
 It is likely, however, that the oxen which were engaged in 
 ploughing were fed at times with oats. Walter of Henley would 
 keep his plough-beasts at the manger for five-and-twenty weeks 
 in the year and would during that time give 70 bushels of oats 
 to every eight of them 2 . At this rate our 75,000 teams would 
 require 5,250,000 bushels of oats, and on this score we might 
 have to deduct some 4 million bushels of wheat 3 from our 
 20 millions and reduce by one-fifth each person's allowance of 
 grain. But then, it is by no means certain that we ought to 
 transplant Walter's practices into the eleventh century; we 
 have seen that he expected much of his oxen 4 . 
 
 At first sight it may seem incredible that the average is the 
 human being annually required the produce of nearly seven l^r- 
 acres. But observe how rapidly the area will disappear. We abundant? 
 deduct a half for the idle shift ; a third of the remainder we set 
 apart as beer-land. We have not much more than two acres 
 remaining, and may yet have -to feed oxen and horses. But 
 suppose that we concede to every human mouth the wheat of 
 two full acres ; we can not say for certain that we are giving it 
 a quarter of grain, even though we suppose each acre to yield 
 more than was to be had always and everywhere in the four- 
 teenth century 5 . 
 
 Our doubt about the food of the oxen makes it difficult for Amount of 
 us to state even the outlines of another important problem. 
 Are we leaving pasture enough for the beasts ? Their number 
 was by no means small. South of the southern frontier of 
 Cheshire and Yorkshire we must accommodate in the first place 
 some 600,000 beasts of the plough, and in the second place and 
 for their maintenance a sufficiency of bulls, cows and calves. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 205. The abbot of Peterborough is bound to find pasture for 120 
 pigs for the abbot of Thorney. If he can not do this, he must feed and fatten 
 60 pigs with corn (de annona pascit et impinguat 60 porcos). 
 
 2 Walter of Henley, 13. Every week each ox is to have 3 garbs of oats, and 
 10 garbs would yield a bushel. 
 
 3 Now-a-days the average acre in England will produce about 29 bushels of 
 wheat or 40 of oats. Agricultural Returns, 1895, pp. 66, 70. 
 
 4 See above, p. 398. 
 
 5 Rogers, op. cit. i. 51.
 
 442 The Hide. 
 
 Now-a-days England keeps 4,723,000 head of cattle, but we have 
 been excluding from view near a quarter of England. Then there 
 are other animals to be provided for. Their number we can 
 not guess, for apparently the statistics that we obtain from the 
 south-western and eastern counties give us only the stock that 
 is on the demesne of the manors 1 . We have seen that the 
 peasants in East Anglia had sheep enough to make their ' fold- 
 soke' an important social institution 2 . Also we have much 
 evidence of large herds of pigs belonging to the villeins, though 
 these we may send to the woods. But, attending only to the 
 dominical stock, we will begin by looking at the manor which 
 stands first in the Cambridgeshire Inquest. The lord has 
 5 teams, 8 head of not-ploughing cattle, 4 rounceys, 10 pigs 
 and 480 sheep. Then, in the accompanying table we will give 
 some figures from various counties which show the amount of 
 stock that is kept where there are 200 teams or thereabouts. 
 
 Teams (De- 
 mesne and 
 Tenants') 
 
 Beasts not 
 of the 
 Plough 
 
 Horses 
 
 Goats 
 
 Pigs 
 
 Sheep 
 
 Essex 
 
 207 
 
 267 
 
 34 
 
 107 
 
 777 
 
 1657 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 200 
 
 196 
 
 30 
 
 295 
 
 676 
 
 1705 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 202 
 
 132 
 
 44 
 
 200 
 
 672 
 
 5673 
 
 Dorset 
 
 202 
 
 159 
 
 47 
 
 281 
 
 479 
 
 . 6160 
 
 Somerset 
 
 202 
 
 82 
 
 16 
 
 49 
 
 198 
 
 1506 
 
 Devon 
 
 205 
 
 282 
 
 16 
 
 135 
 
 173 
 
 1553 
 
 Cornwall 
 
 200 
 
 62 
 
 35 
 
 52 
 
 26 
 
 1445 
 
 Total 1418 1180 222 1119 3001 19699 
 
 Even if we look only at the flocks which belong to the 
 holders of manors, we may have to feed a million sheep south 
 of the Humber, and, though all England now maintains more 
 than 15 millions, it does this by devoting a large portion of its 
 arable to the growth of turnips and the like. No doubt, the 
 
 1 Clearly so in some cases. See e.g. the first entry in Inq. Com. Cant. The 
 teams of lord and villeins having been mentioned, we then read that the 
 ' pecunia in dominio ' consists of so many pigs, sheep, etc. Moreover, if all the 
 cattle not of the plough were enumerated under the title animalia, there would 
 not be nearly enough to renew the number of beasts of the plough. Again, 
 when the capacity of the wood is stated in terms of the pigs that it will 
 maintain, the number thus given will in general vastly exceed the number of 
 pigs whose existence is recorded. Lastly, we see that at Crediton (iv. 107) 
 where the lord has but 57 pigs, he receives every year 150 pigs from certain 
 porcarii, whose herds are not counted. Throughout Sussex the lord takes one 
 pig from every villein who has seven (i. 16 b). See also Morgan, op. cit. 56. 
 
 2 See above, p. 76.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 443 
 
 medieval sheep were wretched little animals ; also large num- 
 bers of them were slaughtered and salted at the approach of 
 winter ; but from the arable they got only the stubble, and 
 every extension of the ploughed area deteriorated the quality 
 besides diminishing the quantity of the pasture that was left 
 for their hungry mouths. As already said, our forefathers did 
 not live on bread and beer; bacon must have been plentiful 
 among them 1 . Also many fleeces were needed for their 
 clothing. As to meadow land (pratum), that is, land that was 
 mown, it was sparse and precious 2 ; the supply of it was often 
 insufficient even for the lord's demesne oxen. At least in 
 Cambridgeshire, we find traces of a theory which taught that 
 every ox should have an acre of meadow ; but commonly this 
 was an unrealized ideal 3 . In Dorset now-a-days there will be 
 near 95,000 acres growing grass for hay, whereas there were 
 not 7,000 acres of meadow in 1086 4 . Therefore we are throwing 
 a heavy strain on the pasture 5 . 
 
 Lastly, we must not neglect, as some modern calculators do, Area of the 
 the sites of the villages, the straggling group of houses with V1 
 their court-yards, gardens and crofts, for this deducts a sensible 
 piece from the conceivably tillable area. An exceedingly 
 minute account of Sawston in Cambridgeshire which comes 
 from the year 1279 shows us a territory thus divided : Mes- 
 suages, Gardens, Crofts, etc., 85 acres: Arable, 1243 acres: 
 
 1 Before we have gone through a tenth of the account of Essex, we have read 
 of 'wood for' near 10,000 pigs. If the woods were full and this rate were 
 maintained throughout the country, the swine of England would be as * 
 numerous T. E. W. as they now are. No doubt Essex was exceptionally 
 wooded and many woods were understocked ; still this mode of reckoning the 
 capacity of wood-land would only occur to men who were accustomed to see 
 large herds. 
 
 2 In the thirteenth century it is common to find that the acre of meadow ia 
 deemed to be twice or three times as valuable as the best arable acre of the 
 same village, and a much higher ratio is sometimes found. 
 
 3 This appears from the parallel account of Westley given in D. B. and 
 Inq. Com. Cant. (p. 19) where 'pratum 2 bobus'='2 ac. prati.' Entries such 
 as the following are not uncommon (I. C. C. p. 13) : ' Terra est 4 car. ; in 
 dominio est una et villani habent 3 car. Pratum 1 car." See Morgan, op. cit. 
 53-5. 
 
 4 Eyton, Dorset, 146. 
 
 5 In the above table all vaccae, animalia and animalia ociosa are reckoned 
 in the third column. I believe that the two last of these terms cover all beasts of 
 the bovine race that are not beaats of the plough. The horses are mostly 
 runcini and are kept for agricultural purposes. It may be doubted whether 
 destriers and palfreys are enumerated.
 
 444 The Hide. 
 
 Meadow, 82 acres: Several Pasture, 30 acres. The neigh- 
 bouring village of Whittlesford shows us : Messuages, Gardens, 
 Crofts, etc., 35 acres : Arable, 1363 acres : Meadow, 44 acres : 
 Several Pasture, 35 acres. In both cases we must add some 
 unspecified quantity of Common Pasture 1 . The core of the 
 village was not large when compared with its fields; but it 
 can not be ignored. 
 Produce Recurring for a moment to our food problem, we may 
 
 and value. 
 
 observe that the values that are set on the manors in Domesday 
 Book seem to point to a very feeble yield of corn. Without 
 looking for extreme cases, we shall often find that the value 
 of a teamland is no more than 10 shillings. Now let us 
 make the hypothesis most favourable to fertility and suppose 
 that this 'value' represents a pure, net rent 2 . We will make 
 another convenient but extravagant assumption; we will say 
 that 24 bushels of wheat will make 365 four-pound loaves. If 
 then a lord is to get one such loaf every day from each team- 
 land that is valued at 10 shillings, the price of wheat will be 
 a good deal less than 5 pence the bushel ; if two daily loaves are 
 to be had, the price of the bushel must be reduced below 2^ 
 pence, for the cost of grinding and baking is not negligible. 
 Whether this last price could be assumed as normal must be 
 very doubtful, for the little that Domesday tells us about the 
 price of grain is told in obscure and disputable terms 3 . How- 
 ever, the evidence that comes to us from the twelfth 4 and 
 thirteenth centuries 8 suggests a rough equivalence between an 
 ox and two quarters of "wheat; and in the eleventh the traditional 
 price of the ox was 30 pence. But at any rate, the lord who 
 has a small village with five teamlands, and who lets it to a 
 firmarius, will receive a rent which, when it is stated in loaves, 
 is by no means splendid. He will not be much of a hldford, or 
 have many ' loaf-eaters ' if his whole revenue is 2. 10s. or, in 
 other words, if he is lord of but one small village in the midlands. 
 
 1 Hot. Hund. ii. 570, 575. The calculation which gave these results was 
 laborious ; but I believe that they are pretty correct. 
 
 2 On the whole, the valet of D. B., so far as it is precise, seems to me an 
 answer to the question, What rent would a firmarius pay for this estate stocked 
 as it is ? But there are many difficulties. 
 
 3 See the important but difficult account of the mill at Arundel : D. B. i. 23. 
 
 4 Hall, Court Life, 221-3. The Glastonbury Inquests (Roxburgh Club) show 
 that 36d. is the settled price for the ox. 
 
 * Rogers, Hist. Agric. i. 226, 342.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 445 
 
 Here we must leave this question to those who are expert Varying 
 in the history of agriculture ; but if some relief is required, it ^res. 
 may be plausibly obtained by a reduction in the size of the 
 ancient acre. A small piece off the village perches will mean 
 a great piece off the 2,600 teamlands of Oxfordshire, and we 
 seem to have the best warrant for a recourse to this device 
 where it is most needed. The pressure upon our space appears 
 to be at its utmost in Oxfordshire, and just for that county we 
 have first-rate evidence of some very small acres 1 . On the 
 other hand, in Lincolnshire and generally in the north, where 
 we read of abnormally large acres, we seem to have room 
 enough for them. And here may be a partial explanation of the 
 apparent fact that the teamland of Oxfordshire does not support 
 three, while that of Lincolnshire supports five recorded men. 
 
 In these last paragraphs we have been speaking of averages The team- 
 struck for large spaces ; but if we come to some particular 
 districts we shall have the greatest difficulty in allowing 120 shire ' 
 acres to every teamland. This is the case in southern Cam- 
 bridgeshire. In that county Domesday's list of vills is so 
 nearly the same as the modern list of parishes that we run no 
 great risk in comparing the ancient teamlands with the modern 
 acreage vill by vill, if we also compare them hundred by 
 hundred. The general result will be to make us unwilling to 
 bestow on every teamland a long-hundred of acres. One 
 example shall be given. The Whittlesford Hundred 2 contains 
 five vills and we can not easily concede to it more land than is 
 now within its boundary. In the following table we give for 
 each vill its modern acreage, then the number of its teamlands, 
 then the result of multiplying that number by 120. 
 
 WHITTLESFORD HUNDRED. 
 
 Sawston 1884 10 1200 
 
 Whittlesford 1969 11 1320 
 
 Duxford 3232 21 s 2520 
 
 Hinxton 1557 16* 1920 
 
 Ickleton 2695 24J 2940 
 
 The Hundred 11337 82 9900 
 
 In two cases out of five we have already come upon sheer 
 physical impossibility. But let us suppose some rearrangement 
 
 1 See above, p. 382. 2 Inq. Com. Cant. 38. 
 
 3 Or a little less. 
 
 4 Perhaps too small. One estate was valued in Essex.
 
 446 The Hide. 
 
 of parish boundaries and look at the whole hundred. We are 
 giving it 9900 acres of arable and leaving 1437 for other 
 purposes. Then we are told of 'meadow for' 37 teams and 
 this at the rate usual in Cambridgeshire 1 , means 296 acres, so 
 that we have only 1141 left. On this we must place the sites 
 of five villages, houses, farmyards, fourteen water-mills, cottages, 
 gardens. Probably we want 250 acres at least to meet this 
 demand. Not 900 acres remain for pasture. The dominical 
 flocks and herds were not large, but the lords were receiving 
 divers ploughshares in return for the pasture rights accorded to 
 the tenants and in some of the vills there was not nearly 
 enough meadow for the oxen of the villeins. It is difficult to 
 believe that 87 per cent, of a Cambridgeshire hundred was 
 under the plough, and that less than 8 per cent, was pasture. 
 However, we know too little to say that even this was im- 
 possible. In the twelfth century we read of manors in which 
 there is no pasture, except upon the arable field that is taking 
 its turn of idleness 2 . We must remember that this idle field 
 was not fallowed until the summer 8 ; also we may suspect that 
 much that was not corn grew on the medieval corn-land. 
 
 Saddened by our encounter with the teamlands (E) and 
 The hides our last word about them is not yet said we turn to the hides, 
 day. E carucates and sulungs (A). With a fair allowance for errors 
 we feel safe in believing that the total number mentioned 
 by Domesday Book falls short of 70,000 and yet time was 
 when we spoke of 60,000 knight's fees of 5 hides apiece 4 . Let 
 us then recall once more those tales of taxation that are told by 
 the chronicler 5 . If Cnut raised a geld of 72,000, then, even if 
 we allow him something from those remote northern lands 
 which William's commissioners did not enter, the rate 'of the 
 impost can hardly have been less than a pound on the hide. 
 We are not told that he raised this sum in the course of a 
 single year ; but, even if we suppose it spread over four years, 
 
 1 See above, p. 443. 
 
 2 Domesday of S'. Paul's, 59, 64, 69. See above, p. 399 note 3. 
 
 3 Hanssen, Abhandlungen, i. 163. 
 
 4 After making an allowance of 22,000 for Suffolk (which I have not counted) 
 and adding 500 for the land between Ribble and Mersey (which owing to some 
 difficult problems, I have omitted), the sum would fall a little short of 68,000. 
 The hides of London and other boroughs would raise the total. Pearson, 
 History, i. 658, guessed 90,000 to 100,000. 
 
 8 Above, p. 3.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 447 
 
 it is a monstrous exaction, and we can hardly fancy that in 
 earlier days the pirates had waited long for the 24,000 or 
 30,000 that were the price of their forbearance. And yet, as 
 already said, our choice seems to lie between believing these 
 stories and charging the annalist with reckless mendacity. 
 Hereafter we shall argue that some ancient statements about 
 hidage, even some made by Bede himself, deserve no credit ; 
 but it is one thing for a Northumbrian scholar of the eighth 
 century to make very bad guesses about the area of Sussex, 
 and another for a chronicler of the eleventh to keep on telling 
 us that a king levies 21,099 or 11,048 or the like, if these 
 sums are wildly in excess of those that were demanded. . As to 
 the value of money, the economists must be heard ; but' it is 
 probable that the sea-rovers insisted on good weight 1 , and 
 when in the twelfth century we can begin to trace the move- 
 ment of prices, in particular the price of oxen, they are not 
 falling but rising. However, we have already said our say 
 about the enormity of the danegeld. 
 
 We are now to investigate the ' law ' of A and its relation Relation 
 to B. We shall soon be convinced that we are not dealing with ^e and 
 two perfectly independent variables. There will often be wide teamiand. 
 variations between the two ; A may descend to zero, while B is 
 high, and in some counties we shall see a steady tendency, 
 which makes A decidedly higher or decidedly lower than B. 
 And yet, if we look at England as a whole, we can not help 
 feeling that in some sense or another A ought to be equal to 
 B, and that, when this equation holds good, things are in a 
 condition that we may call normal. Perhaps, as we shall see 
 hereafter, the current notion has been that the teamiand should 
 be taxed as a hide if it lies in a district where a teamiand will 
 usually be worth about a pound a year. But for the time we 
 will leave value out of account, and, to save words, we will 
 appropriate three terms and use them technically. When 
 A = B, there is ' equal rating ' ; when A > B, there is ' over- 
 rating ' ; when A < B there is ' under-rating.' We shall find, 
 then, that in many counties there are numerous cases of equal 
 rating. Thus in Buckinghamshire we count 
 
 cases of under-rating 136 
 
 cases of equal rating 102 
 
 cases of over- rating 115 
 1 A.8 to the magnum pondus Narmannorum, see Crawford Charters, 78.
 
 448 The Hide. 
 
 In Lincolnshire we may find an unbroken series of fourteen 
 entries each of which gives us an instance of equal rating 1 . 
 In both Lincolnshire and Yorkshire such cases are common, 
 but, while in Lincolnshire over-rating is rare, in Yorkshire 
 under-rating is very rare. Fewer are the over-rated than the 
 under-rated counties ; but there are some for which the figures 
 can not be given, and, as immense Yorkshire is set before us as 
 much over-rated, the balance must be nearly redressed. But 
 further, we may see that the relation between A and B is apt 
 to change somewhat suddenly at the border of a county. The 
 best illustration is given by the twin shires of Leicester and 
 Northampton, the one over- rated, the other grossly under-rated. 
 Another good illustration is given by the south-western coun- 
 ties. Wiltshire is heavily over-rated ; Dorset, as a whole, very 
 equally rated ; Somerset decidedly under-rated, while when we 
 come to Devon arid Cornwall we enter a land so much under- 
 rated that, had we only the account of these two counties, the 
 assumption that is implied in our terms 'under-rated' and 
 'over-rated' would never have entered our heads. 
 TJnhidated Now for one cause of the aberration of A from B we have 
 
 estates. 
 
 not far to seek ; it is a cause which will make A less than 
 B and which may reduce A to zero. It is privilege. Certain 
 estates have been altogether exempt from geld. In particular 
 many royal estates have been exempt. ' Nescitur quot hidae 
 sint ibi quia non reddidit geldum' ' Nunquam geldavit nee 
 scitur quot hidae sint ibi ' ' Rex Edwardus tenuit ; tune 20 
 hidae sed nunquam geldaverunt': such and such like are 
 the formulas that describe this immunity. The number of 
 actually geldant hides is here reduced to zero, and sometimes 
 the very term 'hides,' so usually does it imply taxation, is 
 deemed inappropriate. But these royal estates do not stand 
 alone. Often enough some estate of a church has been utterly 
 freed from taxation. The bishop of Salisbury, for example, 
 has a great estate at Sherborne which has gelded for 43 hides ; 
 but 'in this same Sherborne he has 16 carucates of land ; this 
 land was never divided into hides nor did it pay geld 2 .' 
 Beneficial But then again, we have the phenomenon which has aptly 
 been called ' beneficial hidation.' Without being entirely freed 
 from the tax, a manor has been rated at a smaller number 
 of hides than it really contains. 'There are 5 hides' says 
 1 D. B. i. 351. 2 D. B. i. 77.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 449 
 
 a Gloucestershire entry, '3 of them geld, but by grant of 
 the Kings Edward and William 2 of them do not geld 1 .' 
 ' There are 8 hides there ' says another entry ' and the ninth 
 hide belongs to the church of S*. Edward ; King ^Ethelred gave 
 it quit [of geld] 2 .' ' There are 20 hides ; of these 4 were quit 
 of geld in the time of King Cnut 3 .' 'The Bishop [of Win- 
 chester] holds Fernham [Fareham] in demesne; it always 
 belonged to the bishopric ; in King Edward's day it defended 
 itself for 20 hides, and it does so still ; there are by tale 30 
 hides, but King Edward gave them thus [i.e. granted that 
 they should be 20 hides] by reason of the vikings, for it 
 [Fareham] is by the sea 4 .' ' Harold held it of King Edward ; 
 before Harold had it, it defended itself for 27 hides, afterwards 
 for 16 hides because Harold so pleased. The men of the 
 hundred never heard or saw any writ from the king which 
 put it at that figure 5 .' We have chosen these examples because 
 they give us more information than we can often obtain; 
 they take us back to the days of Cnut and of JCthelred ; they 
 tell us of the depredations of the vikings ; they show us a 
 magnate fixing the rateable value of his estate ad libitum, 
 suum. But our record is replete with other instances in which 
 we are told that by special royal favour an estate has 
 been lightly taxed 6 . What is more, there are many other 
 instances in which we can hardly doubt that this same cause 
 has been at work, though we are not expressly told of it. 
 When in a district which as a whole is over-rated, or but 
 moderately under-rated, we come upon a few manors which 
 are extravagantly under-rated, then we may fairly draw the 
 inference that there has been 'beneficial hidation.' 
 
 Certainly this will account for much, and we have reason Effect of 
 to believe that this disturbing force had been in operation P1 
 for a long time past and on a grand scale. There is an undated 
 writ of ^Ethelred 7 , which ordains that an immense estate of 
 the church of Winchester having Chilcombe for its centre 
 and containing 100 hides shall defend itself for one hide. In 
 
 1 D. B. i. 165, Alvestone. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 165 b, Malgeresberiae. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 252 b, Wenloch. D. B. i. 40 b. 
 8 D. B. i. 32 : postquam habuit pro 16 hidis ad libitum Heraldi.' 
 
 6 Round, in Domesday Studies, i. 98-110. 
 
 7 K. 642 (iii. 203). 
 
 M. 29
 
 450 The Hide. 
 
 Domesday Book Chilcombe does defend itself for one hide 
 though it has land for 88 teams 1 . But further, ^Ethelred is 
 decreeing nothing new; his ancestors, his 'elders,' have 'set 
 and freed' all this land as one hide 'be the same more or 
 less.' Behind this writ stand older charters which are not 
 of good repute. Still we can see nothing improbable in the 
 supposition that ^Ethelred issued the writ ascribed to him and 
 that what he said in it was substantially true. Before his 
 day there may have been no impost that was known as a 
 ' geld ' ; but there may have been, as we have endeavoured to 
 show, other imposts to which land contributed at the rate of 
 so much per hide. We suspect that ' beneficial hidation ' had 
 a long history before Domesday Book was made. 
 
 Divergence But it will not account for all the facts that are before us ; 
 from d team- indeed it will serve for few of them. Privilege can account for 
 laud. exceptional cases; it will not account for steady and con- 
 sistent under-rating; still less will it account for steady and 
 consistent over-rating. We must look elsewhere, and for a 
 moment we may find some relief in the reflection that by the 
 operation of natural and obvious causes an old rate-book 
 will become antiquated. There will be more 'teamlands' than 
 there are gelding hides because new land has been brought 
 under cultivation ; on the other hand, land will sometimes 
 go out of cultivation and then there will be more gelding 
 hides than there are teamlands. Now that there is truth 
 here we do not doubt. As we have already said 2 , the stability 
 of agrarian affairs in these early times may easily be over- 
 estimated. But we can not in this direction find the explanation 
 of changes that take place suddenly at the boundaries of 
 counties. 
 
 Partition A master hand has lately turned our thoughts to the right 
 geld. 6 quarter. There can we think be no doubt that, as Mr Round 
 has argued, the geld was imposed according to a method 
 which we have called the method of subpartitioned provincial 
 quotas 3 . A sum cast upon a hundred has been divided among 
 that hundred's vills; a sum cast upon a vill has been divided 
 among the lands that the vill contains. It is in substance 
 
 1 D. B. i. 41. 2 See above, p. 362. 
 
 3 I have chosen ' subpartitioned,' because ' repartitioned ' might have intro- 
 duced the idea of periodical or occasional rearrangement, and this it is desirable 
 to exclude in the present state of our knowledge.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 451 
 
 the method which still governs our land-tax, and in this very 
 year our attention has been pointedly called to its inequitable 
 results. But, whereas in later centuries men distributed 
 pounds, shillings and pence among the counties, our remoter 
 ancestors distributed hides or carucates or acres. The effect 
 was the same ; and it is not unlikely that they could pass with 
 rapidity from acres to pence, because the pound had 240 
 pence in it and the fiscal hide had 120 acres. So the com- 
 plaint urged this year that Lancashire is under-taxed and 
 Hertfordshire over-taxed 1 would have been in their mouths 
 the complaint that too many hides had been cast on the one 
 county and too few on the other. 
 
 We will not repeat Mr Round's convincing arguments. Distribu- 
 Just to recall their character, we will notice the beautiful MASS. 
 hundred of Armingford in Cambridgeshire 2 . In Edward's day 
 it had 100 hides divided among fourteen vills, six of which 
 had 10 hides apiece, while eight had 5 hides apiece. Before 
 1085 the number of hides in the hundred had been reduced 
 from 100 to 80 ; the number of hides in each of the ' ten- 
 hide vills ' had been reduced to 8 ; and each ' five-hide vill ' 
 had got rid of one of its hides. Obviously such results as 
 these are not obtained by a method which begins by in- 
 vestigating the content of each landholder's tenement. The 
 hides in the vill are imposed from above, not built up from 
 below 3 . 
 
 We have no wish to traverse ground which must by this The Wor- 
 time be familiar to all students of Domesday. But, having hidage. 
 in our eye certain ancient statements about the hidage of 
 England, we will endeavour to carry the argument one step 
 further. 
 
 In Worcestershire we have strong evidence of a neat 
 arrangement of a whole county. In the first place, we are 
 told that 'in this county there are twelve hundreds, whereof 
 seven, so the shire says, are so free that the sheriff has nothing 
 in them, and therefore, so he says, he is a great loser by his 
 farm 4 .' Then we are told that the church of Worcester has 
 a hundred called Oswaldslaw in which lie 300 hides. Then 
 
 1 See a speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer reported in The Times 
 for 10 July, 1896. 
 
 '- Bound, Feudal England, 50. 
 
 8 See also Pollock, E. H. E. xi. 222. * D. B. i. 172. 
 
 292
 
 452 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 we remember that notorious charter (Altitonantis) which tells 
 how this triple hundred of Oswaldslaw was made up of three 
 old hundreds, called Cuthbertslaw, Wulfhereslaw and Wim- 
 borntree 1 . Then, turning to the particulars, we find that 
 exactly 300 hides are ascribed to the various estates which 
 S*. Mary of Worcester holds in this triple hundred. Those 
 particulars are the following: 
 
 25 \ 
 
 The 
 Worcester 
 estate. 
 
 Chemesege 
 Wiche 
 Fledebirie 
 
 24 \ 
 15 
 40 
 
 
 Breodun 
 
 35 
 
 
 Rippel 
 Blochelei 
 
 25 
 38 
 
 
 Tredinctun 
 
 23 / 
 
 Norwiche 
 Overberie 
 Segesbarue 
 Scepwestun 
 Herferthun 
 Grimanleh 
 Halhegan 
 Cropetorn 
 
 6 >> 
 4 
 2 
 3 
 3 
 7 
 
 -25 V 100 
 
 200 
 
 50 > 
 
 We have here preserved the order in which Domesday Book 
 names the estates, but have added some brackets which may 
 serve to emphasize the artificiality of the system. Then, looking 
 back once more at our Altitonantis, we see Edgar adding lands 
 to the 50 hides at Cropthorn, so that ' a perfect hundred ' may 
 be compiled, and the lands that he adds seem to be juSt those 
 which in our table are bracketed with the Cropthorn estate. 
 The West- Thus we have disposed of three out of those twelve ' hun- 
 estate* dreds ' f which Worcestershire is composed and also of 300 
 hides of land. Next we perceive that the church of West- 
 minster is said to hold 200 hides. Reckoning up the par- 
 ticulars, we find, not indeed 200, but 199. 
 
 H. v. 
 5 
 
 10 
 1.3 
 4 
 6 
 7 
 
 4. 2 
 6. 2 
 9 
 
 10 
 3 
 
 15 
 2 
 
 199 . 
 
 
 H. V. 
 
 
 Persore 
 
 2 
 
 Pidelet 
 
 Wiche 
 
 6 
 
 Newentune 
 
 Pendesham 
 
 2 
 
 Garstune 
 
 Berlingeham 
 Bricstelmestune 
 
 3. 1 
 10 
 
 Pidelet 
 Peritune 
 
 Depeforde 
 Aichintune 
 Beford 
 Longedune 
 Poiwic 
 
 10 
 16 
 10 
 30 
 3 
 
 Garstune 
 Piplintune 
 Piplintune 
 Cumbrintune 
 Cumbrintune 
 
 Snodesbyrie 
 Husentre 
 
 11 
 6 
 
 Broctune 
 Stoche 
 
 Wich 
 
 1 
 
 Cumbrintune 
 
 Dorroestun 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 1 See above, 
 
 p. 268. .
 
 Domesday Statistics. 453 
 
 Then the church of Pershore has just 100 hides ; they are The 
 distributed thus:- 
 
 Persore 26 
 
 Beolege 21 
 
 Sture 20 
 
 Bradeweia 30 
 
 Lege 3 
 
 100 
 
 It is easy to divide these manors into two groups, each of 
 which has 50 hides. The county also tells us that the church 
 of Pershore ought to have the church-scot from 'the whole 
 300 hides/ that is, as well from the 200 allotted to West- 
 minster as from the 100 which Pershore holds 1 . 
 
 Then Evesham Abbey has, we are told, 65 hides in the The 
 hundred of Fissesberge. ' In that hundred,' it is added, ' lie estate. 
 20 hides of Dodingtree and 15 hides in Worcester make up 
 the hundred.' The 65 hides which Evesham holds are allotted 
 thus : 
 
 25 
 
 Evesham 
 
 3 
 
 .0 V 
 
 Lenchewic 
 
 1 
 
 .0 
 
 Nortune 
 
 7 
 
 .0 
 
 Offenham 
 
 1 
 
 .0 ! 
 
 Liteltune 
 
 6 
 
 .0 I 
 
 Bratfortune 
 
 6 
 
 .0 
 
 Aldintone 
 
 1 
 
 .0 ) 
 
 Wiqwene 
 
 3 
 
 .Ox 
 
 Bratfortune 
 
 6 
 
 .0 
 
 Badesei 
 
 6 
 
 2 
 
 Liteltune 
 
 7 
 
 .0 
 
 Huniburne 
 
 2 
 
 .2] 
 
 Ambreslege 
 
 15 
 
 .0 
 
 25 
 
 65.0 
 We have dealt heretofore with 665 hides. Let us now Theresidue 
 
 of Worces- 
 
 reckon up all the hides in Worcestershire that we have not tershire. 
 yet counted. The task is not perfectly straightforward, for 
 we have to meet a few difficult questions. In order that our 
 account may be checked by others, we will set forth its details. 
 We will go through the survey noting all the hides which we 
 have not already reckoned. 
 
 1 The estate at Matma which is in the Dodingtree hundred will be accounted 
 for below.
 
 454 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 Worcester city 
 
 15 
 
 . 
 
 More 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Glese 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Bremesgrave 
 
 30 
 
 . 
 
 Betune 
 
 3 . 
 
 2 
 
 Merlie 
 
 
 
 . 1 
 
 J Suchelei 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 More 
 
 . 
 
 1 
 
 Wich 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Grastone 
 
 3 
 
 . 2 
 
 Edboldelege 
 
 2 . 
 
 2 
 
 Escelie 
 
 4 
 
 . 
 
 Cochesei 
 
 2 
 
 . 2 
 
 Eslei 
 
 6 . 
 
 
 
 Nordfeld 
 
 6 
 
 . 
 
 Willingewic 
 
 2 
 
 . 3 
 
 Eslei 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Franchelie 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Celdvic 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Eidmerlege 
 
 1 . 
 
 2 
 
 Welingewiche 
 
 
 
 . 3 
 
 Chideminstre 
 
 20 
 
 . 
 
 Celdeslai 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Escelie 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Terdeberie 
 
 9 
 
 . 
 
 Estham 
 
 3 . 
 
 
 
 Werwelie 
 
 
 
 . 2 
 
 Clent 
 
 9 
 
 . 
 
 ^Ehneleia 
 
 11 . 
 
 
 
 Cercehalle 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Wich 
 
 
 
 . 2 
 
 Wich 
 
 10 . 
 
 
 
 Bellem 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Olive 
 
 10 
 
 . 2 
 
 Sudtune 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Hageleia 
 
 5 
 
 . 2 
 
 Fepsetanatun 
 
 6 
 
 . 
 
 Mamele 
 
 . 
 
 2 
 
 Dudelei 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Crohlea 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 Broc 
 
 . 
 
 2 
 
 Suineforde 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Hambyrie 
 
 14 
 
 . 
 
 Colingvic 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Pevemore 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Stoche 
 
 10 
 
 . 
 
 Mortune 
 
 4 . 
 
 
 
 Cradeleie 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Huerteberie 
 
 20 
 
 . 
 
 Stotune 
 
 3 . 
 
 
 
 Belintones 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 Ulwardelei 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 Stanford 
 
 2 . 
 
 2 
 
 Witone 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Alvievecherche 
 
 13 
 
 . 
 
 Scelves 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Celvestune 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Ardolvestone 
 
 15 
 
 . 
 
 Chintune 
 
 5 . 
 
 
 
 Cochehi 
 
 2 
 
 . 2 
 
 Boclintun 
 
 8 
 
 . 
 
 Beretune 
 
 2 . 
 
 
 
 Osmerlie 
 
 1 
 
 .0 
 
 Cuer 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Tamedeberie 
 
 3 . 
 
 
 
 Costone 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Inteberga 
 
 15 
 
 . 2 
 
 Wich 
 
 . 
 
 2 
 
 Beneslei 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Wich 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Clistune 
 
 3 . 
 
 
 
 Udecote 
 
 1 
 
 . 2 
 
 Salewarpe 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Chure 
 
 3 . 
 
 
 
 Russococ 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 Tametdeberie 
 
 
 
 . 2 
 
 Stanford 
 
 1 . 
 
 2 
 
 Stanes 
 
 6 
 
 . 
 
 Wich 
 
 
 
 . 2 
 
 Caldeslei 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Lundredele 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Matma 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 Cuer 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Hatete 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 2 Mortune 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 Hamme 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Hamtune 
 
 4 
 
 . 
 
 Achelenz 
 
 4 
 
 . 2 
 
 Sapie 
 
 3 . 
 
 
 
 Hortune 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Buintun 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Carletune 
 
 1 . 
 
 1 
 
 Cochesie 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Circelenz 
 
 4 
 
 . 
 
 Edevent 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Brotune 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Actune 
 
 6 
 
 . 
 
 Wicelbold 
 
 11 . 
 
 
 
 Urso's hide 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Lenche 
 
 4 
 
 . 
 
 Elmerige 
 
 8 . 
 
 
 
 Uptune 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Wich 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Croelai 
 
 5 . 
 
 
 
 Witune 
 
 
 
 . 2 
 
 Ludeleia 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Dodeham 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 Hantune 
 
 4 
 
 . 
 
 Hala 
 
 10 
 
 . 
 
 Redmerleie 
 
 1 . 
 
 2 
 
 Tichenapletreu 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Salewarpe 
 
 5 
 
 . 
 
 Hanlege 
 
 1 . 
 
 2 
 
 Cedeslai 
 
 25 
 
 . 
 
 Wermeslai 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Hanlege 
 
 3 . 
 
 
 
 Hilhamatone 
 
 
 
 . 1 
 
 Linde 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Alretune 
 
 1 . 
 
 2 
 
 Fecheham 
 
 10 
 
 , o 
 
 Halac 
 
 1 
 
 . 
 
 Hadesore 
 
 2 . 
 
 
 
 Holewei 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Dunclent 
 
 3 
 
 . 
 
 Holim 
 
 1 . 
 
 
 
 3 Mertelai 
 
 13 
 
 . 
 
 Alvintune 
 
 2 
 
 . 
 
 Stilledune 
 
 . 
 
 2 
 
 
 539 
 
 . 
 
 1 Possibly this and the four next entries should be omitted. 
 
 2 We here omit the estates at Ham ton and Benge worth, about which the 
 churches of Worcester and Evesham were disputing, for we believe that they 
 have already been included in the Worcester estate of Cropthorn. See Bound 
 in Domesday Studies, ii. 545. 
 
 3 Perhaps add 5 hides at Suchelei ; but apparently these have been already 
 included in the account of the King's Land.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 455 
 
 We have here therefore 539 hides to be added to the 665 
 of which we rendered an account above. We thus bring out a 
 grand total of 1204 hides. Perhaps the true total should be 
 exactly 1200 ; but at any rate it stands close to that beautiful 
 figure. And now we remember how we were told that there 
 were ' twelve hundreds ' in Worcestershire from seven of which 
 the sheriff got nothing. Of these twelve the church of Wor- 
 cester had three in its 'hundred' of Oswaldslaw, the church 
 of Westminster two, the church of Pershore one, and the 
 church of Evesham one. But the Evesham or Fissesberge 
 hundred was not perfect; it required 'making up' by means 
 of 15 hides in the city of Worcester and 20 in the hundred of 
 Dodingtree. Thus five hundreds remain to be accounted for, 
 and in its rubrics Domesday Book names just five, namely, 
 Came, Clent, Cresselaw, Dodingtree and Esch. We can not 
 allot to each of these its constituent hides, for we never can 
 rely on Domesday Book giving all the ' hundredal rubrics ' 
 that it ought to give, and the Worcestershire hundreds were 
 subjected to rearrangement before the day of maps had dawned 1 . 
 An intimate knowledge of the county might achieve the re- 
 construction of the old hundreds. But, as it is, we seem to 
 see enough. We seem to see pretty plainly that Worcestershire 
 has been divided into twelve districts known as hundreds each 
 of which has contained 100 hides. It is an anomaly to be 
 specially noted that one of the jurisdictional hundreds, one 
 which has been granted to the church of Evesham, has only 
 65 hides and can only be made up into a 'hundred' for 
 financial purposes by adding to it 20 hides lying in another 
 jurisdictional hundred and the 15 hides at which the city of 
 Worcester is rated. 
 
 The moment has now come when we may tender in evi- The County 
 dence an ancient document which professes to state the hidage 
 of certain districts. There are three such documents which 
 should not be confused. We propose to call them respectively 
 (1) The Tribal Hidage, (2) The Burghal Hidage, and (3) The 
 County Hidage ; and this is their order of date. For the two 
 oldest we are not yet ready. The youngest professes to give 
 us a statement about the hidage of thirteen counties. We 
 
 1 A large hundred called Halfshire Hundred was formed. In Latin records 
 it is Hundredum Dimidii Comitatus. For some light on the constitution of 
 Dodingtree, see Round, Feudal England, 61.
 
 456 The Hide. 
 
 have it both in Latin and in Old English. It has come down 
 to us in divers manuscripts, which do not agree very perfectly. 
 We will here give its upshot, placing in a last column the 
 figures at which we have arrived when counting the hides 
 in Domesday. 
 
 THE COUNTY HIDAGE. 
 
 Cotton, Claudivr, 
 vii. f. 204b;Keml 
 Saxons, i. 493 
 
 Cotton, Vespasiai 
 A. xviii. f. 112 b ; 
 Kemble, Saxons, 
 i. 494 
 
 Gale, Scriptores x 
 p. 748 from a 
 Croyland MS. 
 
 MS. Jes. Coll. Ox. 
 Morris. Old Englii 
 Miscellany, p. 14 
 
 Domesday Book 
 (boroughs ornittec 
 
 4800 
 
 4800 
 
 4800 
 
 4800 
 
 4050 
 
 1200 
 
 1000 
 
 1200 
 
 1200 
 
 1193 
 
 2500 
 
 2500 
 
 2005 
 
 2500 
 
 . 1233 
 
 850 1 
 
 850 1 
 
 800 
 
 850 
 
 747 
 
 3200 
 
 ' 4200 
 
 3200 
 
 3200 
 
 1356 
 
 2400 
 
 2000 
 
 2400 
 
 3400 
 
 2388 
 
 1200 
 
 1500 
 
 1200 
 
 1200 
 
 1189 
 
 1500 
 
 1500 
 
 1005 
 
 1200 
 
 1324 
 
 1200 
 
 1200 
 
 1200 
 
 1200 
 
 1338 
 
 2400 
 
 2400 
 
 2400 
 
 2400 
 
 2412 
 
 2300 
 
 2400 
 
 2400 
 
 2400 
 
 1245 
 
 1300 
 
 1200 
 
 1200 
 
 1200 
 
 512 
 
 500 
 
 500 
 
 .... 
 
 500 
 
 505 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 Bedfordshire 
 
 Cambridgeshire 
 
 Huntingdonshire 
 
 Northamptonshire 3200 
 
 Gloucestershire 
 
 Worcestershire 
 
 Herefordshire 
 
 Warwickshire 
 
 Oxfordshire 
 
 Shropshire 
 
 Cheshire 
 
 Staffordshire 
 
 Pate of the D r Liebermann has said that the text whence these figures 
 
 document. . 111 -i i -n T i -, -, 
 
 are derived was probably compiled in English and in the 
 eleventh century 2 . If we put faith in it, we shall be inclined 
 to set its date at some distance before that of Domesday Book. 
 But our first question should be whether it merits credence ; 
 whether it was written by some one who knew what he was 
 about or whether it is wild guesswork. Now when we .see 
 that the scrupulous Eyton brought out the hides of Stafford- 
 shire at 499, or rather at 499 H 2 v, and that this document 
 makes them 500, we shall begin to take it very seriously, 
 without relying on our own 505, the result of hasty addition. 
 We have also seen enough to say that 1200 for Worcestershire 
 is very near the mark. As regards other counties, we set so 
 little reliance upon our own computation, that we are not very 
 willing to institute a comparison ; but we have given Bedford- 
 
 1 ' In Huntedunescyre sunt dccc hide et dimid.' This means eight and a half 
 hundreds. 
 
 - Leges Anglorum, p. 7.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 457 
 
 shire 1193 hides 1 and this document gives it 1200; we have 
 given Oxfordshire 2412 and this document gives it 2400 ; we 
 have given Gloucestershire 2388 a and two versions of this 
 document give it 2400. Having seen so much agreement, we 
 must note some cases of violent discord. For Wiltshire 4800 
 seems decidedly too high, though we have brought the number 
 of its hides above 4000. The figure given to Cambridgeshire 
 is almost twice that which Domesday would justify, and the 
 figures given to Cheshire, Shropshire and Northamptonshire 
 are absurdly large when compared with the numbers recorded 
 in 1086. These cases are enough to show that, though no doubt 
 some or all of the transcribers of The County Hidage must 
 be charged with blunders, the divergence of the copies from 
 Domesday can not be safely laid to this account. About 
 certain counties there is just that agreement which we might 
 expect, when we remember how precarious our own figures 
 are. About certain other counties there is utter disagreement. 
 We infer therefore that the original document did not truly 
 state the hidage as it stood in 1086 ; but may it not have 
 represented an older state of things? 
 
 Let us take one case of flagrant aberration. Three copies The North- 
 tell us that Northamptonshire has 3200 hides ; one that it Geld Koii. 
 has 4200. The balance of authority inclines therefore to 
 3200. Domesday will not give us half that number. But 
 let us turn to the Northamptonshire Geld Roll 3 , the date of 
 which Mr Round places between the Conquest and 1075 4 . It 
 gives the county 2663 hides. So here we have a case in 
 which between 1075 and 1086 a county was relieved of about 
 half of its hides 8 . Also at 2664 we are within a moderate 
 
 1 On a re-count I made 1185. 
 
 2 Mr Charles Taylor gives 2595. See above, p. 412. Therefore I have once 
 more gone through the county with his book before me. The difference between 
 us is not altogether due to my faulty arithmetic ; but arises from the different 
 constructions that we put upon a few composite entries. In particular I can 
 not allow the bishop of Worcester anything like the 231 hides that Mr Taylor 
 gives him. When I find an entry in this form : ' Sancta Maria tenet H. Ibi 
 sunt x hidae...De hac terra huius manerii Turstinus tenet y hidas in 0,' I 
 believe that x includes y, and this no matter how far the place called may be 
 from the place called H. My 2388 is I think a trifle too low ; but I believe the 
 number lies very close to 2400 on one side or the other. 
 
 3 Ellis, Introduction, i. 184. 4 Feudal England, 148. 
 
 5 After a re-count I think that my 1356 is a little too large, and should not 
 be surprised if the 2663 had been exactly halved.
 
 458 The Hide. 
 
 distance of 3200 But the Geld Roll does more than this. 
 It represents Northamptonshire as composed of 28 districts ; 
 22 of these are called 'hundreds'; two are 'two-hundreds'; 
 four are ' other-half hundreds,' or, as we might say, ' hundred- 
 and-a-halfs.' We work a sum : 
 
 (22+4+6) x 100 = 3200. 
 
 The result will increase our respect for The County Hidage. 
 Now, when the Geld Eoll was made, some of the ' hundreds ' 
 of Northamptonshire contained their 100 hides apiece, but 
 others were charged with a smaller number, which generally 
 was round, such as 80, 60, 40 hides ; and this arrangement is 
 set before us as that which existed ' in the days of Edward the 
 king.' If therefore we put faith in The County Hidage and its 
 3200 hides, we must hold that it speaks to us from the earlier 
 part of the Confessor's reign or from some yet older time. 
 Value of Is it too good, too neat to be true ? Before we pass a 
 
 Hidage! 1 y condemnatory judgment we must recall the case of Worcester- 
 shire, its twelve 'hundreds' and 1200 hides. Also we must 
 recall the case of the Armingford hundred in Cambridgeshire, 
 where we have seen how in William's reign an abatement 
 of 20 per cent, was equitably apportioned among the fourteen 
 villages, and the 100 hides were reduced to 80 1 . Moreover, 
 if in Domesday Book we pass from Northamptonshire to the 
 neighbouring county of Leicester, we see a startling contrast. 
 The former is decidedly ' under-rated' ; the latter is ' over-rated.' 
 Leicestershire has about 2500 carucates, while Northamptonshire 
 has hardly more than half that number of hides. The explana- 
 tion is that Northamptonshire has obtained, while Leicestershire 
 is going to obtain a reduction. The Pipe Rolls of the twelfth 
 century show us that either under Rufus or under Henry I. this 
 sadly over- taxed county was set down for exactly 1000 carucates. 
 Eeductions As to the other cases in which there is a strident discord 
 k e ween Domesday and The County Hidage, the case of Chester, 
 where the contrast is between some 500 hides and a round 
 1200 will not perhaps detain us long, for we may imagine, 
 if we please, that the Chestershire of Cnut's day was much 
 larger than the territory described under that name in 1086 2 . 
 
 1 See above, p. 451. This is but one instance. Several other hundreds had 
 been similarly relieved. See Round, Feudal England, 51. 
 
 2 My 500 (or a trifle more) for Cheshire does not include the land between 
 the Eibble and the Mersey. The figures given for that district are, as is well
 
 Domesday Statistics. 459 
 
 The 2500 hides attributed to Cambridgeshire and the 2400 
 attributed to Shropshire may shock us, for, if they are correctly 
 stated, they point to reductions of 50 per cent, or thereabouts. 
 But we have seen some and are going to see some other 
 large abatements. 
 
 On the whole, we believe that this County Hidage, though The county 
 it has come to us in transcripts some or all of which are qi 
 careless, is an old and trustworthy document, that it is right 
 in attributing to the counties neat sums of hides, such as 1200 
 and 2400, and that it is right in representing the current of 
 change that was flowing in the eleventh century as setting 
 towards a rapid reduction in the number of hides. Only in 
 one case, that of Warwickshire, have we any cause to believe 
 that it gives fewer hides to a county than are given by Domes- 
 day ; here the defect is not very large, and, besides the possi- 
 bility of mistranscription, we must also remember the possibility 
 of changed boundaries 1 . 
 
 There is one other feature of this document that we ought Thehun- 
 to notice. Let us compare the number of hides which it gives 
 to a county with the number of ' hundreds ' which that county 
 contains according to Domesday Book. The latter number we 
 will place in brackets 2 . 
 
 Bedfordshire 1200 hides [12 hundreds] : Northamptonshire 3200 [28 
 hundreds which, however, have been reckoned to be 32 3 ] : Worcestershire 
 1200 [12] : Warwickshire 1200 [12] : Cheshire 1200 [12] : Staffordshire 
 500 [5]: Wiltshire 4800 [40] : Cambridgeshire 2500 [17] : Huntingdonshire 
 850 [4] : Gloucestershire 2400 [39 4 ] : Herefordshire 1500 [19] : Oxfordshire 
 2400 [uncertain, but at least 19] : Shropshire 2400 [13]. 
 
 known, very difficult. If we take the final statement (D. B. i. 270) about the 
 79 ' hides ' as a grand total and hold that each of these contains 6 carucates 
 (Feudal England, 86) and that each of these carucates pays geld equivalent 
 to that of one ordinary hide, then we have here 474 units to be added to the 
 Cestrian 500, and yet more northerly lands may have been gelding along with 
 Chester in Cnut's day. 
 
 1 The various copies disagree as to whether Herefordshire shall have 1200 
 or 1500 hides. My figure stands about halfway between these two ; but many 
 hides were not gelding in 1086. I can not bring the Warwickshire hides down 
 to 1200. 
 
 2 I take the numbers of the hundreds from Dr Stubbs, Const. Hist. 106. I 
 take them thence in order that I may not be tempted to make them rounder 
 than they are. 
 
 3 See above, p. 457. 
 
 < Mr C. S. Taylor, op. cit. 31, finds 41.
 
 460 The Hide. 
 
 
 In six out of thirteen cases we seem to see a connexion of 
 the simplest kind between the hides and the hundreds. Now 
 in the eyes of some this trait may be discreditable to The 
 County Hidage, for they will infer that its author was possessed 
 by a theory and deduced the hides from the hundreds. But, 
 after all that we have seen 1 of symmetrical districts and re- 
 ductions of hidage, we ought not to take fright at this point. 
 Other people besides the writer of this list may have been 
 possessed by a theory which connected hides with hundreds, 
 and they may have been people who were able to give effect 
 to their theories by decreeing how many hides a district must 
 be deemed to contain. Is it not even possible that we have 
 here, albeit in faded characters, one of their decrees? But 
 the history of the hundreds can not be discussed in a pa- 
 renthesis. Some further corroboration this County Hidage will 
 receive when hereafter we set it beside The Burghal Hidage, 
 and we may then be able to carry Worcester's 1200 and 
 Oxford's 2400 hides far back into the tenth century. 
 Compari- Meanwhile, making use of our terms ' equally rated ' 
 
 Domlsday (4 = -B), 'over-rated' (A > B), and 'under-rated' (A<B\ let 
 kidage ug briefly survey the counties as they stand in Domesday. 
 Bolls. Some help towards an estimation of their hidage is given to 
 us by those few Pipe Rolls of the twelfth century which 
 contain accounts of a danegeld. But we must not at once 
 condemn as false the results of our own arithmetic merely 
 because they do not square with the figures on these rolls. 
 One instance will be enough to prove this. The Henries have 
 to be content with 166 or thereabouts from Yorkshire, or, 
 in other words, to treat it as having 1660 ' carucates for geld.' 
 We give it a little more than 10,000 and shall not admit that 
 we have given it 8000 too many. This poor, wasted giant 
 has been relieved and has been set below little Surrey. So 
 again, though Leicestershire will account to Henry I. and his 
 grandson for but 100, it most certainly had more than 1000 
 and more than 2000 carucates when William's commissioners 
 visited it. On the other hand, there seem to be cases in a 
 small group of counties in which his sons were able to recover 
 a certain amount of geld which had been, rightfully or wrong- 
 fully, withheld or forborne during his own reign. But, taking 
 the counties in mass, we hope that our figures are sufficiently 
 1 Bound, Feudal England, 44 ft.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 461 
 
 consonant with those upon the Pipe Rolls. Absolutely con- 
 sonant they ought not to be, for we have endeavoured to include 
 the hides that are privileged from gelding, and in some shires 
 (Hereford, for example) their number is by no means small. 
 Also some leakage in an old tax may always be* suspected, and 
 the Pipe Rolls themselves show some unexplained variations 
 in the amount for which a sheriff accounts, and some arith- 
 metical errors 1 . 
 
 But now we will make our tour and write brief notes as 
 we go. 
 
 Kent is scandalously under-rated. Of this there can be Under- 
 no doubt, though, since in many cases blanks are left where over-rated 
 the number of the teamlands should stand, the figures can not counties - 
 be fully given. There has in a few instances been a reduction 
 in the number of geldable sulungs since the Conquest, but 
 this does not very greatly affect the result. The under-rating 
 seems to be generally distributed throughout the county. It 
 had not been redressed in Henry I.'s day. Indeed on the Pipe 
 Rolls Kent appears as paying but 105, while Sussex pays 
 twice as much. Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire 
 appear to have all been over-rated. In the Conqueror's day, 
 however, they shuffled off large numbers of their geldant hides 
 and were paying for considerably fewer hides than they had 
 teamlands. Some part of this reduction was perhaps un- 
 authorized. At any rate the sums that appear on the Pipe 
 Rolls seem to show that in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire 
 more hides were gelding under Henry I. than had been recently 
 gelding when the survey was made ; but the recovery was not 
 sufficient to restore the state of things that existed under 
 the Confessor. Wiltshire, so far as we can see, has always 
 been a sorely over-rated county. It obtains no reduction under 
 William. In the Pipe Rolls it stands at the very head of the 
 counties. Dorset, taken as a whole, is exceedingly fairly rated. 
 Eyton seems to have made 2321 hides and 2332 teamlands; 
 
 1 Both statements might be illustrated from the Dorsetshire accounts. 
 Between 2 and 8 Hen. II. the geld seems to rise from 228. os. to 248. 5s. 
 but there is a blunder in the addition of the pardons in the latter roll. I 
 believe that Mr Round has already mentioned this case somewhere. The 
 correspondence between the Pipe Bolls and Domesday is sufficiently close to 
 warrant our saying that the story told by Orderic of a new and severer 
 valuation made by Bufus can have but little, if any, truth behind it. See 
 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 327.
 
 462 The Hide. 
 
 but if the royal demesne (much of which is unhidated) be left 
 out on both sides of the account, there will be slight over- 
 rating. Somerset is very much under-rated, even if no notice 
 be taken of the royal demesne. Devon is grossly under-rated. 
 Cornwall is enormously under-rated. To all appearance con- 
 siderably more than 1000 teamlands have stood as 400 hides, 
 and even this light assessment seems to be the work of the 
 Conqueror, for in the Confessor's day the whole county seems 
 to have paid for hardly more than 150 hides 1 . Middlesex 
 is decidedly over-rated; but Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, 
 Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Cambridge,. Huntingdon, 
 Bedford are under-rated. The ratio borne by hides to team- 
 lands varies from county to county. We believe that it be- 
 comes small in Gloucester and Worcester and falls much below 
 1 : 2 in Hereford 2 . This ratio is very small again in Warwick, 
 Stafford, Shropshire and Cheshire. The two sister counties 
 of Northampton and Leicester have, as already said, been very 
 differently treated. Northampton is escaping easily, while 
 Leicester, if we are not much mistaken, is over-rated 3 . Then 
 however the Pipe Rolls show that before the end of Henry 
 I/s reign Leicester has succeeded in largely reducing its geld- 
 ability. We have seen reason to believe that a similar re- 
 duction had been made in Northamptonshire shortly before 
 the compilation of Domesday Book. Derby is under-rated ; 
 Nottingham is much under-rated. Lincoln, though under-rated, 
 is an instance of a county in which we long doubt whether 
 the under-rating of some will not be compensated by the 
 over-rating of other estates. So far as we can tell, Yorkshire 
 had been heavily over-rated ; but then, the teamland of York- 
 shire is very often a merely potential teamland, and we can 
 not be certain that the jurors will give to the waste vills as 
 many teamlands as they had before the devastation. In the 
 end a very small sum of geld is exacted. 
 Hidageand y? e nav e seen enough in the case of Northampton to make 
 
 1 The common formula is : ' T. B. E. geldabat pro a hidis ; ibi tamen sunt 
 a' hidae ' and a' is largely greater than a. I infer that a' represents a new and 
 increased assessment, for the Geld Inquest seems to show Cornwall paying for 
 401 hides and a fraction while I make a' =399. 
 
 2 For these three counties we can not give &uy B, but must draw inferences 
 from C. Clearly in Hereford G was often thought to be much less than B. 
 
 3 As already said (above, p. 420) what we take to be Leicester's equivalent 
 for B is sometimes given by an unusual formula.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 463 
 
 us hesitate before we decide that the arrangement of hides 
 
 set forth by Domesday Book is in all cases very ancient. 
 
 That book shows us two different assessments of Cornwall ; 
 
 it shows us Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire relieving 
 
 themselves or obtaining relief in the Conqueror's time ; it 
 
 shows us some Cambridgeshire hundreds disburdened of their 
 
 hides. But of the great reduction in Northamptonshire we 
 
 should have learnt nothing from its pages. Therefore in other 
 
 cases we must be cautious, even in the scandalous case of 
 
 Kent, for we can not tell that there has not been a large 
 
 reduction of its sulungs in quite recent years. However, 
 
 behind all the caprice and presumable jobbery, we can not help 
 
 fancying that we see a certain equitable principle. We have 
 
 talked of under-rating and over-rating as if we held that 
 
 every teamland in the kingdom should pay a like amount. 
 
 But such equality would certainly not be equity. The average 
 
 teamland of Kent is worth full thirty shillings a year ; the 
 
 average teamland of Cornwall is barely worth five; to put 
 
 an equal tax on the two would be an extreme of injustice. 
 
 Now we have formed no very high estimate of the justice or 
 
 the statesmanship of the English witan, and what we are 
 
 going to say is wrung from us by figures which have dissipated 
 
 some preconceived ideas; but they hardly allow us to doubt 
 
 that the number of hides cast upon a county had been affected 
 
 not only by the amount, but also by the value of its teamlands. 
 
 If, starting at the east of Sussex, we journey through the 
 
 southern counties, we see that over-rating prevails in Sussex, 
 
 Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset. We see 
 
 also that the valet of the average teamland stands rather above 
 
 than below one pound. We pursue our journey. The ratio 
 
 that A bears to B begins to decline rapidly and at the same 
 
 time the valets descend by leaps and bounds. When we have 
 
 reached Devon we are in a land which could not with any 
 
 show of justice be taxed at the same rate per acre as that 
 
 which Wiltshire might bear without complaint. Every test 
 
 that we can apply shows the extreme poverty of the country 
 
 that once was ' West Wales.' That poverty continues through 
 
 the middle ages. We look, for example, at the contributions 
 
 to the tax of 1341 and compare them with the acreage of 
 
 the contributing counties. Equal sums are paid by 1020 acres 
 
 in Wiltshire, 1310 in Dorset, 1740 in Somerset, 3215 in
 
 464 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 Devon, 3550 in Cornwall 1 . We look at the subsidy of 1294 2 , 
 and, in order that Devon and Cornwall may not be put at a 
 disadvantage by moor and sea-shore, we take as our dividend 
 the number of acres in a county that are now-a-days under 
 cultivation 8 , and for our divisor the number of pence that the 
 county pays. The quotients are, for Wiltshire 2'7, for Dorset 
 2'8, for Somerset 2'5, for Devon 6'4, for Cornwall 5'2. Retain- 
 ing the same dividend, we try as a divisor the ' polls ' for which 
 a county will answer in 1377 4 . Cornwall here makes a better 
 show ; but Devonshire still displays its misery. The quotients 
 are, for Wiltshire 16, for Dorset 14, for Somerset 15, for Devon 
 27, for Cornwall 17. These figures we have introduced because 
 they support the inferences that we should draw from the valets 
 and valuits of Domesday Book, a study of which has convinced 
 us that the distribution of fiscal hides has not been altogether 
 independent of the varying value of land. 
 
 Connexion But in order that we may not trust to vague impressions, 
 
 hidage and let us set down in one column -the number of hides (carucates 
 
 or sulungs) that we have given to twenty counties and in 
 
 another column the annual value of those counties in the 
 
 time of King Edward as calculated by Mr Pearson 8 . 
 
 Kent 
 
 Hides, 
 Carucates, 
 Sulungs 
 1224 
 
 Value 
 in 
 Pounds 
 3954 
 
 Oxford 
 
 Hides, 
 Carucates, 
 Sulungs 
 
 2412 
 
 Value 
 in 
 Pounds 
 2789 
 
 Sussex 
 
 3474 
 
 3467 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 2388 
 
 2855 
 
 Surrey 
 Berkshire 
 Dorset 
 
 1830 
 2473 
 
 2277 
 
 1417 
 
 2378 
 2564 
 
 Worcester 
 Huntingdon 
 Bedford 
 
 1189 
 747 
 1193 
 
 1060 
 900 
 1475 
 
 Devon 
 Cornwall 
 
 1119 
 399 
 
 2912 
 729 
 
 Northampton 
 Leicester 
 
 1356 
 2500 
 
 1407 
 491 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 868 
 
 911 
 
 Warwick 
 
 1338 
 
 954, 
 
 Hertford 
 Buckingham 
 
 1050 
 2074 
 
 1894 
 1785 
 
 Derby 
 
 Essex 
 
 679 
 2650 
 
 631 
 
 4079 
 
 33240 
 
 38652 
 
 1 Bogers, Hist. Agricult. i. 110. 
 
 2 Yorkshire Lay Subsidy (Yorksh. Archseol. Soc.) p. xxxii. 
 
 3 Total acreage under all kinds of crops, bare fallow and grass, excluding 
 (1) nursery gardens, (2) woods and plantations, (3) mountain and heath land. 
 
 4 Powell, East Anglia Rising, 121-3. 
 
 8 As we are giving or trying to give the fullest number of hides whose 
 existence is attested by D. B., and not the number gelding in 1086, we compare 
 with it the values given by Pearson (Hist. Engl. i. 665) for the T. B. E. His 
 values for the T. B. W. are given above, p. 401.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 465 
 
 No one can look along these lines of figures without fancying Oneponnd 
 
 . . . j / ^ one hide. 
 
 that some force, conscious or unconscious, has made for ' One 
 pound, one hide/ But we will use another test, which is in 
 some respects fairer, if in others it is rude. The total of the 
 valets or valuits of a county sometimes includes and sometimes 
 excludes the profit that the king derives from boroughs and from 
 county courts ; also the rents of his demesne manors are some- 
 times stated in disputable terms. Therefore from every county 
 we will take eighty simple entries, some from the lands of 
 the churches, some from the fiefs of the barons, and in a large 
 county we will select our cases from many different pages. In 
 each case we set down the number of gelding hides (carucates, 
 sulungs) and the valuit given for the T. R. E. 1 . Our method 
 will not be delicate enough to detect slight differences ; it will 
 only suffice to display any general tendency that is at work 
 throughout England and to stamp as exceptional any shires 
 which widely depart from the common rule, if common rule 
 there be. Using this method we find the values of the hide 
 (carucate, sulung) to have been as follows, our figures standing 
 for pounds and decimal fractions of a pound. We begin with 
 the lowest and end with the highest valuit. 
 
 Leicester 0'26, York 0'34, Surrey 0'68, Northampton 075, Wiltshire 
 0-77, Sussex 0-81, Chester 0'82, Warwick O84, Somerset 0-85, Bucking- 
 ham 0-86, Oxford 0'87, Dorset 0'88, Berkshire 0'89, Hereford 0'91, 
 Gloucester 0'99, Lincoln 0'99, Derby TOO, Huntingdon 1-02, Shropshire 
 1-02, Bedford 1O9, Hampshire 1-10, Worcester 1-10, Middlesex M5, 
 Essex 1-41, Devon 1'52, Hertford 1'69, Cambridge 1'73, Nottingham 1-76, 
 Kent 3-25, Cornwall 3'92. 
 
 Now ' One pound, one hide ' seems to be the central point Equiva- 
 of this series, the point of rest through which the pendulum p^und and 
 swings. Our experiment has been much too partial to tell *" 
 us whether a shire is slightly over-taxed or slightly under- 
 taxed; but, unless we have shamefully blundered, it tells us 
 that in some twenty out of thirty counties the aberration 
 from the equivalence of pound and hide will not exceed twenty- 
 
 1 Suffolk and Norfolk are omitted because the relation between their 
 carucates and the villar geld pence is as yet uncertain. Stafford does not 
 provide valuits enough to give a stable average ; but in general the valets and 
 valuits for its hides are high. I have excluded (1) royal demesne, (2) cases in 
 which there is any talk of 'waste,' (3) cases in which a particular manor is 
 obviously privileged. In Lincolnshire it is difficult to obtain good figures, 
 because of the way in which the sokes are valued. 
 
 M. 30
 
 466 The Hide. 
 
 five per cent. : in other words, the value of the normal hide 
 will not be less than 15 nor more than 25 shillings. Also we 
 have brought our counties into an admirable disorder. We 
 have snapped all bonds of race and of neighbourhood. For 
 example, we see the under-taxed Hampshire in the midst of 
 over-taxed counties ; we have divorced Nottingham from Derby 
 and Leicester from Northampton. The one general remark 
 that we can make about the geographical distribution of 
 taxation is that, if East Anglia is under-taxed (and this is 
 likely), then Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge and 
 Hertford would form a continuous block of territory that is 
 escaping easily. 
 
 Cases of The markedly exceptional cases are the most interesting. 
 
 taxation. First let us look at the worst instances of- immunity. In Kent 
 we seem to see ' beneficial hidation ' on a gigantic scale ; but 
 on the whole, though the evidence is not conclusive, we do 
 not think that this is due to any modern privilege. We can 
 not doubt that for a long time past the Kentish churches 
 have been magnificently endowed, and yet the number of 
 manses and sulungs that their land-books bestow upon them 
 is not very large, and the number attributed to any one place 
 is usually small, perceptibly smaller than the number of hides 
 that will be comprised in a West Saxon charter. If a royal 
 land-book condescends to mention acres (iugera, segetes) 1 it 
 will almost certainly be a Kentish charter, and we may guess 
 that its acres are already fiscal acres of wide extent. To say 
 more would be perilous. The title-deeds of Christ Church 
 can not be readily harmonized with Domesday Book 3 ; perhaps 
 we ought to add that this is much to their credit ; but the 
 documents which come to us from S*. Augustin's and Rochester 
 suggest that the arrangement of sulungs which exists in the 
 eleventh century is ancient, or, at any rate, that the monks 
 knew of no older computation which dealt out these units 
 with a far more lavish hand 3 . In Kent the churches were 
 
 1 See above, p. 386, note 1. 
 
 2 Werhard's testament, K. 230 (i. 297), tells us of a great estate of 100 hides 
 at Otford, of 30 hides at Graveney and so forth. The figures are so little in 
 harmony with D. B. and with the other Canterbury charters that we may 
 suspect the 100 manses at Otford of covering many smaller estates, each of 
 which appears elsewhere with a name of its own. 
 
 3 In D. B. i. 12 b S'. Augustin holds 30 solins at Norborne. In 618 Eadbald 
 ofjient, K. 6 (i. 9), gave 30 aratra at Nortburne; but the deed is spurious. In
 
 Domesday Statistics. 467 
 
 powerful and therefore may have been able to preserve a 
 scheme of assessment which unduly favoured a rich and pros- 
 perous shire ; but we can not be certain that the hide and 
 the Kentish sulung have really had the same starting-point, 
 nor even perhaps that Kent was settled village-wise by its 
 Germanic invaders 1 . 
 
 Devon and Cornwall ought to be ' under-rated ' ( A < B) West 
 
 Wales. 
 
 for they are very poor. What we find is that they are so much 
 under-rated that the hide is worth a good deal more than a 
 pound. Here again we are inclined to think that this under- 
 rating is old, perhaps as old as the subjection of West Wales. 
 Such land-books as we obtain from this distressful country 
 point in that direction, for they give but few hides and con- 
 descend to speak of virgates 2 . Among them is a charter pro- 
 fessing to come from ^Ethelstan which bestows ' one manse ' 
 Tipon the church of S*. Buryan ; but clearly this one manse 
 is a wide tract. Also this would-be charter speaks to us of 
 land that is measured by the arpent, and, whether or no it 
 was forged by French clerks after the Norman Conquest, it 
 may tell us that this old Celtic measure has been continuously 
 used in the Celtic west 8 . Be that as it may, when we are 
 speculating about the under-taxation of Devon and Cornwall, 
 
 D. B. 5 b, Rochester has 3 solins at Totesclive, 6 at Hallinges, 2 at Goclestane, 
 3 at Mellingetes, 6 at Bronlei. In 788 Offa, K. 152 (i. 183), gave 6 aratra at 
 Trottesclib. Egbert, K. 160 (i. 193), gave 10 at Hallingas. In 880 JSthelstan, 
 K. 312 (ii. 109), B. ii. 168, gave 3 at Cucolanstan. Edmund, K. 409 (ii. 265), 
 gave 3 at Meallingas. In 998 JEthelred, K. 700 (iii. 305), gave 6 at Brunleage. 
 The Rochester deeds therefore may point to some reduction ; but they do not 
 tell of any startling change. 
 
 1 Meitzen, op. cit. ii. 101, holds that the Euti who invaded Kent fitted 
 themselves into an agrarian framework prepared by Celts. They came not, like 
 the great mass of Saxons and Angles, from a country in which villages of the 
 Germanic type had grown up, but from an originally Celtic land, which they 
 while still in the pastoral state had seized and subjugated. It is an interesting 
 though hazardous speculation. Certainly some cause or another keeps Kent 
 apart from the rest of England. 
 
 2 Thus, K. 371 (ii. 207) : .ffithelstan gives to the church of Exeter 6 perticae 
 (yard-lands?). B. ii. 433 : he gives one cassate to St Petroc. K. 787 (iv. 115) : 
 the Confessor gives a pertica and a half in Cornwall. Crawford Charters, pp. 
 1-43 : ^Ethelheard gives 20 cassates at Crediton ; that is, a dozen of our 
 parishes. Ibid. p. 9 : a single yard of land is gaged for 30 mancuses of gold. 
 K. 1306 (vi. 163) : in 739 .Ethelred gives 3 perticae to Athelney. K. 1324 (vi. 
 188) : Cnut gives to Athelney duas mansas sine ( = et) unam perticam. 
 
 3 K. 1143 (v. 278); B. ii. 527. For the arepennis see Meitzen, op. cit. 
 i. 278, where an explanation derived from the Irish laws is given of its name. 
 
 302
 
 468 The Hide. 
 
 we may remember that where the agrarian outlines were 
 drawn by Welsh folk, the hide, though it might be imposed 
 from above as a piece of fiscal machinery, would be an intruder 
 among the Celtic trevs and out of harmony with its en- 
 vironment. The light taxation of Cambridgeshire is perhaps 
 more wonderful, for our figures represent the hidage of the 
 Confessor's time, and we have seen 1 how some of the hundreds 
 in this prosperous shire (our champion wheat-grower) obtained 
 a large abatement from the Conqueror 2 . If, in accordance with 
 The County Hidage, we doubled the number of Cambridge- 
 shire's hides, though it would be over-taxed, it would not be 
 so heavily taxed as are some other counties. 
 
 Cases of Extreme over-taxation is far more interesting to us at the 
 
 Son." a " present moment than extreme under-taxation. The latter may 
 be the result of privilege, and in the middle ages privileges 
 will be accorded for value received in this world or promised 
 in another. But what are we to say of Leicester? On the 
 face of our record it seems to have been in Edward's day the 
 very poorest of all the counties and yet to have borne a 
 crushing number of carucates. Under William it was be- 
 ginning to prosper but still was miserably poor 3 . We have 
 bethought ourselves of various devices for explaining this dif- 
 ficult case of saying, for instance, that the Leicestershire 
 ' carucate of land ' is not a carucate for geld 4 . But this case 
 does not stand quite alone. The Yorkshire carucates, and they 
 are expressly called ' carucates for geld,' had been worth little. 
 It is likely that the figure that we have given for Yorkshire 
 is not very near the true average for that wide territory ; but 
 we examined an unusually large number of entries and avoided 
 any which showed signs of devastation in the present or the 
 past. Also we see that in Northamptonshire, if we take the 
 Edwardian valuit and the number of hides existing in 1086, we 
 
 1 See above, p. 451. 
 
 2 The lords of Cambridgeshire may have done good service during the 
 campaign in the Isle of Ely. 
 
 3 Pearson's valuit is 491 ; his valet 736. 
 
 4 The appearance of the curious hida may lead to the guess that if the geld 
 be at two shillings, it is the Leicestershire hida, hot the Leicestershire carucata 
 which pays this sum. But (1) if the hida contains 18, or even 12, carucates we 
 shall then have on our hands a case of extreme under-taxation ; and (2)" this 
 will not account for the fact that an exceedingly small value is given to the 
 land that a team ploughs.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 469 
 
 have an over- taxed county; and yet we have reason to believe 
 that since 1075 it had been relieved of about half its hides. 
 Had this not been done, it would have stood along with 
 Yorkshire, and, if it once had those 3200 of which The County 
 Hidage speaks, it would have stood along with its sister, the 
 wretched Leicestershire. We might find relief in the sup- 
 position that the Leicestershire of Edward's time had been 
 scourged by war or pestilence; but unfortunately the jurors 
 often tell us how many teams were then upon the manors, 
 and in so doing give a marvellously small value to the land 
 that one team tilled. Such reports as the following are 
 common 1 . 
 
 Teams Teams Valuit Valet 
 
 Caruoates T. R. E. T. B. W. sol. sol. 
 
 Werditone 4 5 3 1 20 
 
 Castone 9 10 7 40 140 
 
 Wortone 6 6 5 40 100 
 
 Tuicros 6 6 7 < 3 40 
 
 Gopeshille 3 3 3 1 30 
 
 Scepa 2 3 3 2 30 
 
 What can these figures mean? They can not mean that a 
 tract of land was being habitually tilled by three teams and 
 yet was producing in the form of profit or rent no more than 
 the worth of one or two shillings a year. An organized attempt 
 to deceive King William into an abatement seems out of the 
 question, for he is being told of a rapid increase of prosperity. 
 Our best, though an unwarranted, guess is that the Leicester- 
 shire valuit speaks not of the Confessor's day, but of some 
 time of disorder that followed the Conquest, for in truth it 
 seems to give us but 'prairie values.' However, if we take, 
 not the valuit, but the valet, we still have carucates that are 
 worth much less than a pound, and it seems clear that the 
 carucate had been worth much less than a pound in the as 
 yet unravaged Yorkshire. On the whole, these cases, to- 
 gether with what we can learn of Lancashire, will dispose us 
 to receive with more favour than we might otherwise have 
 shown certain statements about the hidage of England that 
 have yet to be adduced. In Yorkshire, Lancashire, Leicester- 
 shire and Northamptonshire we may perhaps see the unreformed 
 relics of an age when the distribution of fiscal units among 
 
 1 D. B. i. 233.
 
 470 The Hide. 
 
 the various provinces of England was the sport of wild guess- 
 work 1 . 
 
 Equity and We have spoken of a tendency on the part of the hide to 
 be worth a pound. Now we have no wish to represent this 
 equitable element as all powerful or very powerful ; the case 
 of Kent is sufficient to show that it may be overruled by 
 favouritism or privilege. There has been a 'beneficial hi- 
 dation ' of shires as there has been a ' beneficial hidation ' of 
 manors. Still that the kings and wi tan have considered the 
 value as well as the number of teamlands seems fairly plain. 
 Probably they have considered it in a rough, ' typical ' fashion. 
 Any one who peruses Domesday Book paying attention to 
 the valets will be struck in the first place by their round- 
 ness. If a teamland is not worth 20, it is worth 10 or 30, 
 5 or 40 shillings. The jurors seem to keep in their minds 
 as types the ' one-pound-teamland,' the ' half-pound-teamland ' 
 and so forth. Bi\t then, whereas in one county ' twenty shillings ' 
 will stand for ' fair average ' and in another for ' rather poor,' 
 in a third it will indicate unusual excellence. Similarly we 
 imagine that when fiscal hides have been distributed or re- 
 distributed, there has been talk of typical qualities of land, of 
 first-rate and fourth-rate land. Any tradition of Roman taxa- 
 tion which had perdured in Britain or crossed the sea from 
 Frankland would have taught men that this was the right 
 method of procedure. But it is by no means certain that we 
 can carry back this equitable principle very far 2 . Long ago 
 the prevailing idea may have been that teamland, house-land, 
 pound-land and fiscal hide were, or ought normally to be, all 
 one ; and then the discovery that there are wide tracts in which 
 the worth of an average teamland is much less or somewhat 
 
 1 At the end of the account of the land between Eibble and Mersey (i. 240) 
 we are told that there were altogether 79 hidae which T. E. E. were worth 
 145. 2s. 2d. This would give a very small value for the carucate, if the hida of 
 this district had six carucates ; and in many cases 2s. 8d. is the value assigned 
 to the carucate. If to a two-shilling geld the hida paid but two shillings, this 
 is a bad, though not unprecedented, case of under-taxation. On the other 
 hand, if the carucate paid two shillings, its value has been stated in some 
 abnormal fashion. 1 do not think it out of the question that the hidae of 
 Leicestershire and Lancashire are modern arrangements designed to give relief 
 in some manner or another to districts which have been too heavily burdened 
 with carucates. 
 
 2 It may, however, have been applied to the conquered West Wales from 
 an early time. See above, p. 467.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 471 
 
 greater than a pound may have come in as a disturbing and 
 differentiating force and awakened debates in the council of the 
 nation. We may, if we like such excursions, fancy the conser- 
 vatives arguing for the good old rule ' One teamland, one hide,' 
 while a party of financial reformers has raised the cry 'One 
 pound, one hide.' Then ' pressure was brought to bear in influen- 
 tial quarters/ and in favour of their own districts the witan in 
 the moots jobbed and jerrymandered and rolled the friendly log, 
 for all the world as if they had been mere modern politicians. 
 
 But, to be serious, it is in some conjecture such as this 
 that we may perchance find aid when we are endeavouring hides and 
 to loosen one of Domesday's worst knots. We have hinted 
 before now 1 that there are districts in which the teamland (B) 
 seems to be as artificial and as remote from real agrarian life 
 as is the hide or the gelding carucate (A). To any one who 
 thinks that when we touch Domesday's teamland we have 
 always freed ourselves from the geld system and penetrated 
 through the rateable to the real, the following piece of the 
 survey of Rutland may be commended. ' In Martinesleie 
 Wapentake there is a hundred in which there are 12 carucates 
 for geld and there can be 48 teams.' Now there is nothing 
 curious in the fact that 48 'real' teamlands are rated at 12 
 carucates. But let us look closer. Beside one smaller estate 
 there are in this wapentake three manors. Their arrangement 
 is this 3 : 
 
 Carucates 
 for geld 
 Ocheham 4 
 
 Teamlands 
 16 
 
 Villeins and 
 bordiers 
 157 
 
 Demesne 
 teams 
 2 
 
 Men's 
 teams 
 
 37 
 
 Hameldune 
 
 4 
 
 16 
 
 153 
 
 5 
 
 40 
 
 Redlinctune 
 
 4 
 
 16 
 
 196 s 
 
 4 
 
 30 
 
 Subtenancy 
 
 
 
 24 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 12 48 530 127 
 
 Now surely the three sixteens are just as artificial as the three 
 fours, and in what possible sense can we affirm that there is 
 land for only 48 teams when we see that 530 tenants are 
 actually ploughing it with 127 teams? Behind this there 
 must be some theory or some tradition that we have not yet 
 fathomed 4 . 
 
 1 See above, p. 427. a D. B. i. 293 b. 
 
 3 And two sokemen with two teams. 
 
 4 The artificiality or traditionally of the teamland is even more obvious 
 in D. B. than it is in our statement. At Okeham are 4 hides ; land for 16 
 teams. The men have 37. The king has 2 in his demesne ' et tamen aliao
 
 472 The Hide. 
 
 Area and We strongly suspect that in the work of distributing and 
 
 elements reducing the geld, 'the land for one team' has been playing 
 of geida a p ar t f or some time past. In order to decide, for example, 
 whether a claim for abatement was just, the statesman had 
 to consider two elements, the number of the teamlands and 
 their value. He would be content with round figures, indeed 
 no others would content him or be amenable to his rude ma- 
 nipulation. So it is decided that some province or district 
 has, or must be deemed to have, y teamlands. Also it is 
 decided at this or at some other time, or perhaps from time 
 to time, that the land in this district (regard being had to 
 its state of cultivation) is or must be deemed to be first-class, 
 or, as the case may be, third-class land. Then a combination 
 of these propositions induces the conclusion that the district 
 has x hides or carucates for geld. Then inside the district, 
 when the process of subpartitionment begins, a similar method 
 is pursued. There are x hides or carucates for geld to be 
 distributed. They ought to be distributed with reference to 
 the number and value of real teamlands. The work is rudely 
 done in the subpartitionary fashion. A certain sub-district has 
 
 sr *K 
 
 - hides thrown upon it ; a sub-sub-district has -=- ; but this 
 
 a ab 
 
 apportionment is obtained by combining a proposition about 
 value with a partitionment of the y teamlands. The sub-sub- 
 
 ff* fti 
 
 district has -r hides, because , teamlands fall to its share 
 ab cd 
 
 and because its land is assigned to a certain class. Then, 
 perhaps for the purpose of future rearrangements, the number 
 
 / y\ 
 
 of teamlands A I is remembered as well the number of hides 
 \cdj 
 
 (x \ 
 ;}. The result is that every manor 
 CLO/ 
 
 in a certain district has four hides and sixteen teamlands. It 
 is very pretty ; it was never (except for technical purposes) 
 very true, and every year makes it less true 1 . 
 
 quatuor possunt esse.' So what is land for 16 teams is not only stocked but 
 insufficiently stocked with 39. The manor of one carucate held by Leuenot 
 seems to be another infringement of the traditional scheme, unless that 
 carucate has been already reckoned among the four at Okeham. 
 
 1 Many other instances suggesting the artificiality of B might be given from 
 northern counties ; e.g. in Northampton (i. 227) we have five consecutive entries 
 in which A=2, 2, 2, 0-5, 4; J5=5, 5, 5, 1'25, 10; C=3, 2, 5, 1, 8. See also 
 Bound, Feudal England, 90.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 473 
 
 That exactly this was done, we do not say and do not The eqnit- 
 think ; but something like it may have been done. As already f an< 3. e 
 remarked, we gravely doubt whether that question which the 
 commissioners put about potential teams was understood in 
 the same way in different counties, but we are sadly afraid 
 that some of the answers that they obtained were references, 
 not to existing agrarian facts, but to a fiscal history which 
 already lay in the past and is now hopelessly obscure. A 
 mystery of iniquity is bad, but the mysteries of archaic equity 
 are worse. In many Anglo-Saxon arrangements we find a 
 curious mixture of clumsiness and elaboration. 
 
 We can not quit this part of our subject without adding Artificial 
 that there are cases in which the valuits and valets look as 
 artificial and systematic as the hides and the teamlands. On 
 a single page we find a description of five handsome Yorkshire 
 manors 1 . We wish to know their value in the past and the 
 present, and what we learn is this: Brostewic valuit 56, 
 valet 10 ; Chilnesse valuit 56, valet 10 ; Witfornes valuit 
 56, valet 6 ; Mapletone valuit 56, valet 6 ; Hornesse valuit 
 56, valet 6 ; and yet between these manors there are large 
 variations in the number of the carucates and the number 
 of the teamlands. Then we look about and see that it has 
 been common for the first-class manor of Yorkshire, if it is 
 the centre of an extensive soke, to be worth precisely 56 2 . 
 We can not but fear that the value of these manors is a 
 legal fiction, though a fiction that is founded upon fact. Their 
 supposed worth seems fixed at a figure that will fit into some 
 scheme, the clue to which we have not yet recovered. Every- 
 where we are baffled by the make-believe of ancient finance. 
 
 The obscure forces which conspired to determine the quotas The new 
 of the various counties might be illustrated by an episode ments of 
 in the reign of Henry II. The old danegeld is still being 
 occasionally levied, and in the main the old assessment prevails. 
 But alongside of this we see a newer tax. From time to time 
 the king takes a gift (donum, assisa, gersuma) from the 
 counties. A certain round number of marks is demanded from 
 every shire. For this purpose a new tariff is employed, and 
 
 1 D. B. i. 323 b. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 299 Walesgrif 56 ; 299 b Poclinton 56 ; 309 Ghellinghes 56 ; 
 305 Witebi 112. It will be remembered that, as our hundred-weight (112 Ibs) 
 shows, 112 can be called a hundred.
 
 474 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 yet it is not wholly independent of the old, for we can hardly 
 look at it without seeing that it is so constructed as to redress 
 in a rude fashion the antiquated scheme of the danegeld. In 
 the first column of the following table we give, omitting 
 fractions, the pounds that the counties contribute when a 
 danegeld is levied, in the second and third the half-marks 
 (6s. 8d.} that they pay by way of gift on two different occasions 
 early in the reign of Henry of Anjou 1 . 
 
 
 
 
 Kent 
 
 106 
 
 Sussex 
 
 217 
 
 Surrey 
 Hampshire 
 Berkshire 
 
 180 
 185 
 206 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 390 
 
 Dorset 
 
 248 
 
 Somerset 
 
 278 
 
 Devon 
 
 104 
 
 Cornwall 
 
 23 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 86 
 
 Hertford 
 
 110 
 
 Buckingham 
 Bedford 
 
 205 
 111 
 
 Oxford 
 
 250 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 194 
 
 Worcester 
 
 101 
 
 Hereford 
 
 94 
 
 Cambridge 
 Huntingdon 
 Northampton 
 Leicester 
 
 115 
 
 71 
 120 
 100 
 
 Warwick 
 
 129 
 
 Stafford 
 
 45 
 
 Shropshire 
 Derby \ 
 Nottingham / 
 York 
 
 118 
 112 
 165 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 266 
 
 Essex 
 
 236 
 
 Norfolk 
 
 330 
 
 Suffolk 
 
 235 
 
 half-marks 
 320 
 202 
 160 
 
 148 
 200 
 
 200 
 368 
 
 160 
 
 1000 2 
 540 
 400 
 400 I 
 240 
 
 Pr* 
 
 half-marks 
 240 
 160 
 160 
 200 
 120 
 160 
 
 300 
 300 
 
 80 
 
 240 
 
 200 
 260 
 120 
 140 
 
 280 
 160 
 240 
 100 
 140 
 
 280 
 
 1000 
 600 
 400 
 
 400 
 
 1 Pipe Eolls, 2. 3. 4. 5. Hen. II. In a few cases the earlier donum includes 
 a composition ' for murders and pleas.' That from Yorkshire is partly paid by 
 Yoik, that from Gloucestershire by Gloucester. 2 Nearly.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 475 
 
 The variable tariff of dona hits most heavily just those 
 counties which have been too favourably treated; Kent and 
 Devon must make large ' gifts ' because they pay little geld. 
 Yorkshire, which once more is becoming prosperous, heads the 
 new list, though it pays less geld than Surrey; and, on the 
 other hand, Wiltshire, which makes the largest of all contri- 
 butions to the ancient tax, is leniently treated. When men 
 have acquired a vested right in an iniquitous assessment, the 
 fertile politician neither reforms nor abolishes the old, but 
 invents a new impost. 
 
 And now, after all these inconclusive meanderings, we will Acreage of 
 
 the fiscal 
 
 state our cheerful belief that the hide of Domesday (A) is hide. 
 always 1 composed of 120 acres and that the carucate for geld 
 of Domesday (A) is always composed of 120 acres. We are 
 speaking only of a fiscal system. Let us forget for a time 
 that the terms that we are using can be employed to describe 
 masses of land. Let us treat them as red and white counters. 
 In the game played at the Exchequer the red counter called 
 a hide is the equivalent of 120 white counters called acres. 
 
 If Domesday Book is to serve its primary purpose, if it Equation 
 is to tell the 'king's officers how much geld is due, it is abso- hide and 
 lutely necessary that by some ready process they should be acres * 
 able to work sums in hides and acres and in carucates and 
 acres. They must understand such statements as the fol- 
 lowing : 'it defends itself for 2 hides and 5 acres 2 ': 'it gelded 
 for 3 hides, 1 virgate and 1 acres 8 ': 'he has 5 bovates, 13 
 acres and 1 virgate for geld 4 .' Now it is conceivable that 
 the treasury contains a book of tables which will teach the 
 clerks that a hide has a acres in Surrey and b acres in Devon ; 
 but this seems highly improbable. As we have already said 5 , 
 the variations between the numbers of ' real ' acres that go 
 to make 'real' hides are not provincial, they are villar va- 
 riations. That the financiers at Winchester should consider 
 villar variations is out of the question. Therefore if we can 
 prove that in one district they employed a given equation, 
 there is a strong presumption that they used it in other 
 districts. And unfortunately our proof has to be of this kind, 
 for in many counties acres are rarely mentioned and we get 
 
 1 Except the ' hides,' if hides they be, of Leicestershire and Lancashire. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 35 (Surrey). 8 D. B. i. 49 b (Hants). 
 4 D. B. i. 364 (Lincoln). 8 See above, p. 394.
 
 476 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 Evidence 
 from Cam- 
 bridge- 
 shire. 
 
 no sums that are worked in acres and hides. But further, if 
 we see one equation holding good in a considerable number 
 of cases, we shall still believe that this is the one true equation, 
 though other cases occur in which it breaks down. We have 
 to remember the possibility of mistranscription, the possibility 
 of bad arithmetic, the possibility of a haughty treatment of 
 small numbers : the actual existence of all these dangers can 
 be amply proved. Therefore if once we have inductively ob- 
 tained an equation which serves in many instances, we shall 
 hold by it, unless the instances in which it fails point either 
 to some one other equation or to the conclusion that the 
 equation varies from parish to parish. 
 
 Now the Cambridgeshire Inquest professes to give us the 
 total hidage of a vill and then proceeds to allot the hides 
 among the various tenants in chief. Sometimes when it does 
 this it speaks of virgates and acres and thus gives us an 
 opportunity of seeing how many acres are reckoned to the 
 hide or to the virgate. The equation 1 H. = 4 v. is implied 
 in many entries. - But further, there are at least ten cases 
 which assume one or both of the following equations : namely, 
 IH. = 120 A. and 1 v. = 30 A. On the other han'd, there are 
 some cases in which the sum that is put before us is not rightly 
 worked if these equations be correct; but in some of these 
 cases the Inquisitio and Domesday Book contradict each other 
 and in some a small quantity is neglected. The very few 
 remaining cases point to no one rival equation, and are not 
 too numerous to be ascribed to carelessness 1 . 
 
 Evidence A similar test can be applied to a part of Cambridgeshire 
 isle of Ely. that is not included in the Cambridgeshire Inquest but is 
 included in the Inquisitio Eliensis. We speak of the Isle of 
 Ely. There are entries which, having told us how many hides 
 a manor contained, proceed to allot these among their various 
 occupants, and, as in some of these cases a calculation by acres 
 is mixed up with a calculation by hides, they hold out a hope 
 that we may be able to discover how many acres were reckoned 
 to the hide. We will begin with Ely itself. ' Ely defends 
 itself for 10 hides. ...... In demesne there are 5 hides and 
 
 1 This part of the evidence is set out in Mr Round's Feudal England, 37-44. 
 I have gone through all the calculations. His results are hardly different from 
 those which I have obtained and therefore I dwell no longer on this part of the 
 case, for it has been well stated.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 477 
 
 there are 40 villeins with 15 acres apiece and 18 cottiers 
 
 and 20 serfs 1 .' Now if from the total of 10 hides we subtract 
 the 5 that are in demesne, this leaves 5 others, and if we divide 
 these 5 among the 40 villeins this gives to each villein -|th of 
 a hide ; but we are told that each villein has 15 acres ; therefore 
 it follows that 120 acres make a hide. We reckon that in 
 eight other cases 2 the same method of computation is followed, 
 though in one of these a hide divided among 17 villeins 
 is said to give them 7 acres apiece and this shows us how a 
 single acre may be neglected in order to avoid a very ugly 
 fraction 3 . Against these cases must be set seven which give 
 less pleasing results 4 . In at least one of these no possible theory 
 will justify the arithmetic of our record as it stands 5 , and 
 there is no accord between the remaining five. 
 
 At first sight the survey of Middlesex seems to offer ma- Evidence 
 
 J from Mid- 
 
 terials similar to those that come to us 'from Cambridgeshire, diesex. 
 Very curious and instructive they are. A Middlesex entry 
 will usually give us the number of hides (A), the number of 
 teamlands (), the number of teams (G), and also certain par- 
 ticulars which state the quantity of land that there is in 
 demesne and the quantities held by divers classes of tenants. 
 The sum of these particulars we may call P. Now we begin 
 by hoping that P will be equal to A, and, since the particulars 
 often contain acres as well as hides and virgates, we hope also 
 to discover the equation that is involved in the sum. As an 
 example we will take a case in which all goes well. At Cowley 
 a manor defends itself for two hides ; in demesne are one aud 
 a half hides ; two villeins have a half hide. Here A = 2 H. 
 and P = 1^ H. + f H. ; so all is as it should be. But we soon 
 come upon cases in which, though we make no assumption 
 about the relation of the acre to the hide, our P refuses to 
 be equal to our A. Then perhaps we begin to hope that P 
 will be equal to B : in other words, that the sum^of the quan- 
 tities ascribed to lord and tenants will be equal to the number 
 
 1 D. B. i. 192 ; iv. 107. The Inquisitio Eliensis puts the number of cottiers 
 at 18, while Domesday gives 28. See Hamilton's edition, p. 119. 
 
 2 Downham, Witchford, Sutton, 'Helle,' Wilburton, Stretham, Stuntney, 
 Doddington. 
 
 3 Wichford, D. B. i. 192 ; iv. 507 ; Hamilton, 119. 
 
 4 Witcham, Whittlesey,. Lindon, Wentworth, Chatteris, Wisbeach, Little* 
 port. 
 
 6 Wisbeach, 3J H. + 1 v. + 150 A. + 2 H. = 10 H.
 
 478 'The Hide. 
 
 of teamlands. But this is more fallacious than the former 
 
 hope. We will put a few specimens in a table 1 . 
 
 Hides Teamlands Sum of particulars 
 
 Harrow (Abp. Canterbury) 100 70 46n. + 13 v. + 13 A. 
 
 Stepney (Bp. London) 32 25 18n. + 48v. 
 
 Fulham (Bp. London) 40 40 41^H. + 30v. 
 
 Westminster (Abbot) 13 11 10n. + 14v. + 5 A. 
 
 Sunbury (Abb. Westminster) 7 6 4n. + 10v. 
 
 Shepperton (Abb. Westminster) 8 7 3 H. + 1 7 v. + 24 A. 
 
 Feltham (C. Mortain) 12 10 6n. + 16v. 
 
 Chelsea (Edw. of Salisbury) 2 5 ln. + 4v. 
 
 Meaning We seem to have here three independent statements, and, 
 
 dieses; ' " though throughout the county P shows a tendency to keep 
 entries. ne ar to A, still we must not make calculations which suppose 
 that the ' hide ' of A is the ' hide ' of P. Take Chelsea for 
 example. We must not say : 2 H. = 1 H. + 4 v. + 5 A., and there- 
 fore four virgates and five acres make a hide. No, it seems 
 possible that in these Middlesex 'particulars ' we do at last touch 
 real agrarian arrangements. At Fulham the bishop has 13 hides 
 in demesne; 5 villeins have 1 hide apiece; 13 villeins have 
 1 virgate apiece; 34 have a half-virgate apiece; 22 cottiers 
 have in all a half-hide ; Frenchmen and London burgesses 
 have 23 hides ; so there are 41 hides and 30 virgates. That 
 we take to be the real arrangement of the manor, though we 
 are far from saying that all its hides are equal. But it gelds 
 for only 40 hides. A virgate can not be a negative quantity. 
 Therefore we need say no more of these Middlesex entries, 
 only in passing let us observe that the discrepancy between 
 P and B is often considerable, and this seems to show that 
 the teamlaiid of these Middlesex jurors is not in very close 
 touch with the agrarian and proprietary allotments. 
 Evidence To yet one other quarter we have hopefully turned only 
 inquests, to be disappointed, namely, to the so-called Geld Inquests, 
 copies of which are placed at the beginning of the Exeter 
 Domesday. They tell us of a geld that obviously is being 
 levied at the rate of six shillings on the hide, and sometimes 
 they seem to tell us expressly or implicitly the amount that an 
 acre pays. For a moment we may think that we are obtaining 
 
 1 In giving the sum of the particulars I add hides to hides, virgates to 
 virgates, acres to acres, but I make no assumption as to the number of acres or 
 virgates in the hide.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 479 
 
 valuable results. Thus at Domerham we find that 14 hides 
 minus 4 acres pay 4. 3s. 8d. We conclude that each acre is 
 taxed at one penny and that 72 A. = 1 H. *. Then at Celeberge 
 20 H. minus 4 A. is taxed at 5. 19*. Qd. We conclude that each 
 acre is taxed at three-half-pence and that 48 A. = 1 H. 2 . But 
 vsre soon come to sums which are absurd and discover that 
 as regards small quantities these documents are for our 
 present purpose quite useless. For the Wiltshire hundreds 
 we have three different documents. They do not agree in 
 their arithmetic. Probably they represent the efforts of three 
 different computers. Indubitably one or more of them made 
 blunders. To give one example : one of our documents begins 
 its account of Mere by saying that it contains 85 hides, ^ a hide 
 and a virgate ; the other two documents say 86 hides, ^ a hide 
 and 1 virgate 3 . This is by no means the only instance of such 
 discrepant results. But mere clerical or arithmetical errors 
 are not the only obstacle to our use of these accounts. It 
 soon becomes quite evident that small amounts are dealt with 
 in an irregular fashion. Thrice over we are assured that 
 loH. v. paid the king 4. Us. OdL 4 ; but they should have 
 paid 4. 10s. 9d., if four virgates make a hide. Thrice over 
 we are assured that 64 H. paid 19. 6s. Wd. 6 . All suppo- 
 sitions as to acres and virgates apart, 64 H. should have paid 
 19. 7s. Qd. In Somersetshire the calculations do not speak 
 of acres, but they introduce us to the fertinus or farthing, 
 which is certainly meant to be the quarter of a virgate. 
 Numerous entries show us that 4 fertini = 1 virgate, and yet 
 when a mass of land expressed in terms of hides, virgates and 
 farthings is said to pay a certain sum for geld, we find that the 
 odd farthings are reckoned as paying, sometimes 3d., sometimes 
 4>d., sometimes 4|d, sometimes 5d., sometimes Qd. per farthing 8 . 
 So again, when additions are made, odd acres are ignored. We 
 are told that in a certain hundred the barons have 20 hides in 
 demesne, and then that this amount is made up by the following 
 particulars, 8 H. + 1 V. + 3 H. + 3 v. + 4 \ H. 4 A. + 3 H. It 
 is obvious that these particulars when added together do not 
 make 20 hides, though they may well make 20 hides and 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 4, 9, 16. D. B. iv. 22. 
 
 3 D. B. iv. 1, 6, 13. D. B. iv. 3, 8, 15 (Melchesham). 
 
 D. B. iv. 3-4, 9, 15 (Chinbrige). D. B. iv. 61-2-3.
 
 480 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 Kesult of 
 the evi- 
 dence. 
 
 4 acres 1 . A study of these Geld Inquests has brought us re- 
 luctantly to the conclusion that, though they amply prove 
 that 4 v. = 1 H., they afford no proof as to the number of acres 
 that are reckoned to the virgate 2 . 
 
 Treatment One word to explain that the apparent rudeness with which 
 quantities, small figures are^ treated is not due to any persuasion that 
 they may be safely disregarded, but is rather the natural out- 
 come of a partitionary method of taxation. Little quantities 
 are lost in the process. It is known that a certain hundred 
 should have, for example, 80 hides and a certain vill 5 hides : 
 but when you come to add up the particulars you can not 
 bring out these round figures, perhaps because many years 
 ago a small error was made by some one when an estate of 
 2| hides was being divided into 7 shares. If a mistake be 
 made, it can never be corrected ; the landowner who has once 
 or twice paid for 47 acres will refuse to pay for 48 and will 
 tell you that the deficient acre does not lie on his land. 
 
 The ignes fatui which dance over the survey of Middlesex 
 and the Geld Inquests of the south-western counties have for 
 a while led us from our straight path. We have seen that 
 in Cambridgeshire the equation 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A. is employed 
 on at least twenty occasions. Now as to the rest of England 
 it must at once be confessed that we have no such convincing 
 evidence. In many counties acres of arable land are but rarely 
 mentioned; parcels of land which geld for less than a hide 
 are generally expressed in terms of hides and virgates; we 
 read, for example, not of so many acres, but of the ninth 
 part of a hide or of two third parts of a virgate. Thus we 
 are compelled for the more part to fall back upon the pre- 
 sumption that the treasury has but one mode of reckoning 
 for the whole of England. 
 
 But we would not rest our case altogether upon probability. 
 In Essex we find one fairly clear case in which our equation 
 is used 3 . Sometimes, again, we read that a tract of land is, 
 
 1 D. B. iv. 23 (Hunesberge) ; see also Langeberge on the same page. 
 
 2 Bound in Domesday Studies, i. 212 : ' I have worked through the Inqui- 
 sitio Geldi with this special object, but found to my disappointment that the 
 odd acres which paid geld on this occasion did not pay at a uniform rate, some 
 paying twice as much as others.' 
 
 3 D. B. ii. 19: 'Batendunam tenuit S. Adelred T. E. E....pro 20 hidis. 
 Modo pro 16 hidis et dimidia....Et 30 acras tenet Siward de S. Adelred. Modo 
 tenet Eanulfus Piperellus de rege, set hundret testator de abbatia. Et 3 hidas 
 
 Evidence 
 from 
 
 Essex.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 481 
 
 or gelds for, or defends itself for x hides and z acres, or for 
 x hides, y virgates and z acres. Now in any entry which takes 
 the first of these forms we have some evidence that z acres are 
 less than one hide, and from any entry which takes the second of 
 these forms we may infer that z acres are less than one virgate. 
 Of course from such a statement as that 'A holds 90 or 115 
 or 240 acres ' we draw no inference. It is common enough in 
 our own day to speak of things costing thirty shillings or 
 eighteen pence. But we never speak of things costing one 
 pound and thirty shillings, or one shilling and eighteen pence, 
 and we should require much proof before we thought so meanly 
 of our ancestors as to suppose that they habitually spoke in 
 this clumsy fashion. 
 
 Let us use this best. Happily in Essex we very frequently 
 have a tract of land described as being x hides and z acres. 
 
 Now we read of 
 
 a half hide and 30 acres 1 , 
 
 a hide and a half and 31 acres 2 , 
 
 a half hide and 35 acres 3 , 
 
 a half hide and 37 acres 4 , 
 
 a hide and a half and 40 acres 5 , 
 
 a hide and a half and 45 acres 6 , 
 
 a half hide and 45 acres 7 , 
 
 two hides and a half and 45 acres 8 , 
 
 a half hide and 48 acres 9 , 
 
 x hides and 80 acres 10 , 
 
 nine hides and 82 acres 11 . 
 
 We have here cited twenty instances in which, as we think, 
 the hide exceeds 60 acres (we might have cited many others) 
 and twelve in which it exceeds 80 acres. We might further 
 adduce instances in which our record speaks of a virgate and 
 10 acres, a virgate and 15 acres, and even of a virgate and 
 20 acres 12 , and when we read of two hides less 30 acres and 
 two hides less 40 acres 13 we infer that a hide probably has 
 
 et 30 acras quas tenuit ecclesia et Leuesunus de ea T. It. E. modo tenet Eudo 
 de abbate.' I think that this involves the statement : 
 16|H. + 30A. + 3n. +30 A. =20 H. 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 3, 11, 33, 63 b, 78 b, and in many other places. 
 
 2 Ibid. 31. 3 Ibid. 6 b, 42 b. 4 Ibid. 46. 
 Ibid. 48. Ibid. 6 b, 49, 60. ' Ibid. 43. 
 8 Ibid. 74. 9 Ibid. 1 b. 
 
 10 Ibid. 11 b, 30 b, 31, 47 b. u Ibid. 72. 
 
 12 Ibid. 21 b. 13 Ibid. 16, 15. 
 
 M. 31
 
 482 The Hide. 
 
 not only more but considerably more than the 30, 40 or 48* 
 acres that are allowed to it by Kemble and Eyton. Our argu- 
 ment is based on the belief that men do not habitually adopt 
 extremely cumbrous forms of speech. From a single instance 
 we should draw no inference, and therefore when we just once 
 read of ' three hides and a half and 80 acres ' we do not infer 
 that 80 acres are less than half a hide 1 . 
 Evidence But more can be made of these returns from Essex. We 
 
 fromEssex .-,,, , , c / i i i M i i 
 
 continued, will take a large number ot tracts of land described in the 
 formula ' sc hides and z acres ' ; we will observe the various 
 numbers for which z stands, and if we find some particular 
 number frequently repeating itself we shall be entitled to 
 argue that this number of acres is some very simple fraction 
 of a hide. We will take at hazard 100 consecutive entries 
 which contain this formula ' x hides + z acres/ where x is 
 either an integral number or |. The result is that in 37 
 cases z is 30, in 12 it is 15, in 8 it is 40 ; then 35 and 20 occur 
 5 times; 80, 50, 45, 37, 18, 10 occur thrice, and 38 and 15 
 twice; eleven other numbers occur once apiece. There can 
 we think be but one explanation of this. The hide contains 
 that number of acres of which 30 is the quarter, 40 the third, 
 15 the eighth 2 . 
 
 Further But Essex, it must be confessed, lies next to Cambridgeshire, 
 
 lce ' and for the rest of England we have less evidence. Still there 
 are entries which make against any theory which would give to 
 the hide but- 30, 40 or 48 acres. In Hertfordshire we read of 
 ' a hide and a half and 26 acres 8 .' In the same county we read 
 of. 'a half virgate and 10 acres,' and this seems to tell of a hide 
 of at least 88 acres 4 . In Gloucestershire we read of a manor of 
 one hide and are told that ' in this hide, when it is ploughed, 
 there are but (non sunt nisi) 64 acres of land,' whence we may 
 draw the inference that such an acreage was unusually small 5 . 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 79. 
 
 - Some other fractions into which a hide would easily break by inheritance 
 and partition can be expressed in various ways. Thus two-thirds of a hide can 
 be expressed as 80 A. or as ' half a hide and 20 acres.' Three-quarters of a hide 
 appears sometimes as 'half a hide and 30 A.,' sometimes as 'a hide less 30 A.' 
 We might add to our other arguments derived from Essex that used by Morgan 
 (op. cit., p. 31). It seems fairly clear that the holding of Roger ' God Bless 
 the Dames' which is called 3 v. in one place is called n. + 30A. in another 
 place (D. B. iv. 21 b, 96 b). 
 
 3 D. B. i. 141 b, Wallingtone. * D. B. i. 141, Stuterehele. 
 
 6 D. B. i. 165. There is here a transition from geldable area to real area.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 483 
 
 We pass from Mercia into Wessex. In Somersetshire we read 
 of ' three virgates and a half and 5 acres 1 / in Dorset of ' three 
 virgates and a half and 7 acres 2 ,' in Somerset of ' one and a half 
 virgates and 8 acres 3 .' 
 
 To prove that the fiscal carucate was composed of 120 (fiscal) Acreage of 
 acres is by no means easy. If, however, we have sojourned for a carucate. 
 while in Essex and then cross the border, we can hardly doubt 
 that in East Anglia the carucate bears to the acres the relation 
 that is borne by those hides among which we have been living. 
 Norfolk and Suffolk are carucated counties, but while in the 
 other carucated counties it is usual to express the smaller 
 quantities of land in terms of the bovate (8 bovates making 
 one cavucate) and to say nothing of acres, in East Anglia, on 
 the other hand, it is uncommon to mention the bovate in 
 Suffolk we may even find the virgate 4 and men reckon by 
 carucates, half-carucates and acres. We allow the description 
 of Suffolk to fall open where it pleases and observe a hundred 
 consecutive cases in which a plot of land (as distinguished 
 from meadow) is spoken of as containing a certain number of 
 acres. In 22 cases out of the hundred that number is 60, in 8 
 it is 30, in 7 it is 20, in 5 it is 40, in 5 it is 15 ; no other 
 number occurs more than 4 times, and yet the numbers that 
 appear range froni 100 to 2. We have tried the same ex- 
 periment on two hundred cases in Norfolk; in 28 cases the 
 number of acres was 30, in 16 cases it was 60, in 13 it was 40, 
 in 13 it was 16, in 12 it was 20, in 10 it was 80, in 9 it was 15, 
 though the numbers ranged from 1 to 405. Surely the ex- 
 planation of this must be that 60 acres are half a carucate, that 
 30 acres are a quarter, that 40 acres are a third, 20 a sixth, 
 15 an eighth. We have made many similar experiments and 
 always with a similar result ; wherever we open the book we 
 find plots of 60 acres and of 30 acres in rich abundance. We 
 use another test. When land is described by the formula 
 
 This land is rated at a hide, but when you come to plough it, you will find only 
 G4 acres. 
 
 1 D. B. i. 93 b, Dudesham ; iv. 396. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 79 b. Eyton, Dorset, 16, says that this is a clumsy way of 
 describing 1 H. + 1 A. Bound, Domesday Studies, i. 213, makes some just 
 remarks on Eyton's treatment of this passage. 
 
 3 D. B. i. 95 b, Ecewiche ; iv. 333. 
 
 4 D. B. ii. 389 (Cratingas). In Northamptonshire also there is talk of 
 virgates ; je.g. D. B. 225 b, 226 b : 3 v. - 1 B. ; 2 v. + 1 B. 
 
 312
 
 484 The Hide. 
 
 ' x carucatae et z acrae/ what values are assigned to z ? We 
 find 40 very commonly, 42, 45, 50, 60 (but this is rare, for it is 
 easier to say ' x\ carucates' than 'as carucates and 60 acres') 
 68, 69, 80 (at least four times), 81, and 100 \ On the one hand, 
 then, we have a good deal of evidence that the carucate contains 
 more than 80 acres, some evidence that it contains more than 
 100 acres, and some that it does not contain many more, for no 
 case have we seen in which z exceeds 100. Perhaps in Norfolk 
 the figure 16 occurs rather more frequently than our theory 
 would expect, but 16 is two-fifteenths of 120, and the figures 32 
 and 64 occur but rarely. Also it must be confessed that in 
 Derbyshire we hear of ' eleven bovates and a half and eight 
 acres,' also of 'twelve bovates and a half and eight acres 2 .' 
 These entries, to use an argument which we have formerly used 
 in our own favour, seem to imply that half a bovate is more 
 than eight acres and would therefore give us a carucate of at 
 least 144. We can only answer that, though men do not 
 habitually use clumsy modes of reckoning, they do this occa- 
 sionally 3 . 
 
 Acreage of Of the Kentish sulung very little can be discovered from 
 suiting Domesday. Apparently it was divided into 4 yokes (iuga)* and 
 the" yoke was probably divided into 4 virgates. We have 
 indeed one statement connecting acres with sulungs which 
 some have thought of great importance. ' In the common land 
 of S 1 . Martin [i.e. the land which belongs to the communitas of 
 the canons of S*. Martin] are 400 acres and a half which make 
 two sulungs and a half 5 .' Thence, a small quantity being 
 neglected, the inference has been drawn that the Kentish 
 sulung was composed of 160 acres, while some would read 
 '400 acres and a half to mean 450 acres and would so get 
 180 acres for the sulung 6 . But the entry deals with one 
 particular case and it connects real acres with rateable units : 
 the canons have 400^ or more probably 450 acres, which 
 
 1 D. B. ii. 377 b. 2 D. B. i. 276 b, 278. 
 
 8 If I hold two and a half acres in one place and three roods in a neigh- 
 bouring place and you ask me how much land I have, I may tell you that I have 
 two and a half acres and three roods. If you ask me how much money I have 
 in my purse, I may tell you that I have half-a-crown and three shillings. But 
 returns to governmental inquiries would not be habitually made in this way. 
 
 4 D. B. i. 13 : ' pro uno solin se defendit ; tria iuga sunt infra divisionem 
 Hugonis et quartum iugum est extra;' 
 
 8 D. B. i. 2. Elton, Tenures of Kent, 133-4.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 485 
 
 are rated at 2^ sulungs. If we passed to another estate, we 
 might find a different relation between the fiscal and the real 
 units. Kent was egregiously undertaxed and as a general rule 
 its fiscal sulung will have many real acres. Turning to the 
 cases in which the geldability of land is expressed in terms of 
 sulungs and acres, or yokes and acres, we can gather no more 
 than that the sulung is greater than 60 acres, so much greater 
 that ' 3 sulungs less 60 acres 1 ' is a natural phrase, and that the 
 half-sulung is greater than 40 2 and than 42 acres 3 . We may 
 suspect that the Exchequer was reckoning 120 (fiscal) acres to 
 the sulung but can not say that this is proved. 
 
 And now we must glance at certain theories opposed to that Kembie's 
 which has been here stated. Kemble contends that the hide 
 contained 30 or 33 Saxon which were equal to 40 Norman acres, 
 and that the hide of Domesday Book contains 40 Norman 
 acres 4 . Now in so far as this doctrine deals with the time 
 before the Conquest, we will postpone our judgment upon it. 
 So far as it deals with the Domesday hide, it is supported by 
 two arguments. One of these is to the effect that England 
 has not room for all the hides that are attributed to it if the 
 hide had many more than 30 or 40 acres ; this argument also 
 we will for a while defer. The other 5 is based on a single 
 passage in the Exeter Domesday relating to the manor of 
 Poleham. That entry seems to involve an equation which 
 can only be solved if 1 virgate = 10 acres. William of Mohun 
 has a manor which in the time of King Edward paid geld for 
 10 hides ; he has in demesne 4 H., 1 v., 6 A. and the villeins 
 have 5^ H., 4 A. 6 Now three or four such entries would 
 certainly set the matter at rest ; but a single entry can not. 
 By way of answer it will be enough to say that the very next 
 entry seems to imply an equation of precisely the same form, but 
 one that is plainly absurd. This same William has a manor 
 called Ham ; it paid geld for 5 hides ; there were 3 H., 8 A. in 
 demesne and the villains had 2 H. less 12 A. Shall we draw 
 the conclusion that 5 H. = 5 H. 4 A. ? The truth we suspect 
 to be that here, as in Middlesex, geldable units and actual areal 
 units have already begun to perplex each other. Both Poleham 
 
 1 D. B. i. 12 b. 2 D. B. i. 9 b. D. B. i. 12. 
 
 4 Kemble, Saxons, ch. iv. and App. B. 
 
 6 Saxons, i. 490. 
 
 D. B. iv. 42. Cf. D. B. i. 81 b.
 
 486 The Hide. 
 
 and Ham are what we call ' over-rated ' manors. It is known 
 that Poleham contains 10 hides and Ham 5 hides, but, when we 
 come to look for the acres that will make up the due tale of 
 hides, we can not find them ; for let King William's officers have 
 never so clear a terminology of their own, the country folk will 
 not for ever be distinguishing between ' acres ad geldum ' and 
 ' acres ad arandum.' But be the explanation what it may, we 
 repeat that the one equation that Kemble could find to support 
 his argument is found in the closest company with an equation 
 which when similarly treated produces a nonsensical result. 
 This is all the direct evidence that he has produced from 
 Domesday Book in favour of the hide of 40 acres. Robertson, 
 while holding that the hide of Mercia contained 120 acres, 
 adopted Kemble's opinion that the hide of Wessex contained 40 
 without producing any witness from Domesday save only the 
 passage about Poleham 1 . Eyton reckons 48 ' gheld acres' to 
 the ' gheld hide/ but he leaves us utterly at a loss to tell how 
 he came by this computation 2 . 
 
 The Another theory we must examine. It is ingenious and, were 
 
 land and it true, would throw much light on a dark corner. It starts 
 1- from the facts disclosed by the survey of the East Riding of 
 Yorkshire 8 . In that district, it is said, the number of carucates 
 for geld that there are in any manor (this number we will call 
 a) is usually either equal to, or just twice the number (which 
 we call 6) of the ' lands for one plough,' or, as we say, team- 
 lands. Further, it can be shown from maps and other modern 
 evidences that the manors in which a = b were manors with two 
 common fields, in other words, were ' two-course manors/ while 
 those in which a = 26 were manors with three common fields, in 
 other words were 'three-course manors.' The suggested ex- 
 planation is that while the teamland or ' land for one plough ' 
 means the amount of land that one plough will till in the course 
 of a year, the ' carucate for geld ' is the amount of land which 
 one plough tills in one field in the course of a year. Manor X, 
 let us suppose, is a two-course manor; the whole amount of 
 
 1 Eobertson, Hist. Essays, 95, 96. He has entirely misunderstood the 
 entry touching the hundred of Ailestebba. The equation involved in it is 
 merely the following : 16 H. (i.e. 10 + 4 + 1) + 37 H. + 20 H. = 73 H. 
 
 2 Eyton, Dorset, 15 ; Bound in Domesday Studies, i. 213. 
 
 8 Dr Isaac Taylor, The Ploughland and the Plough, in Domesday Studies, 
 L 143. Of this paper there is an excellent review by W. H. Stevenson in Engl. 
 Hist. Eev. v. 142.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 487 
 
 land which a plough will till there in a year will lie in one 
 field ; therefore in this case a = 6. Manor F is a three-course 
 manor; in a given year a plough will there till a certain 
 quantity of land, but half its work will have been done in one 
 field, half in another ; therefore in this case a = 26. 
 
 Now we must own to doubting the possibility of deciding The York- 
 with any certainty from comparatively modern evidence which ca tes. 
 (if any) of the Yorkshire vills were under a system of three- 
 course culture in the eleventh century. In the year 1086 many 
 of them were lying and for long years had lain waste either in 
 whole or in part. Thus the first group of examples that is put 
 before us as the foundation for a theory consists of 15 manors 
 the sum of whose carucates for geld is 91 1 while the sum of the 
 teamlands is 9 If. What was the state of these manors in 1086? 
 Three of them were absolutely waste. The recorded population 
 on the others consisted of four priests, one sokemean, eighty- four 
 villeins and twenty-six bordiers ; the number of existing teams 
 was 35| ; the total valet of the whole fifteen estates was 7. Is., 
 though they had been worth 72 in King Edward's day 1 . It 
 is obvious enough that very little land is really being ploughed, 
 and surely it is a most perilous inference that, when culture 
 comes back to these deserted villages, the old state of things 
 will be reproduced, so that we shall be able to decide which of 
 them had three and which had two fields in the days before the 
 devastation. Further, we can not think that, even for the East 
 Riding of Yorkshire, the figures show as much regularity as has 
 been attributed to them. In the first place, there are admittedly 
 many cases in which neither of the two equations of which we 
 have spoken (a = 6 or a = 26) is precisely true. We can only 
 say that they are approximately true. Then there are other 
 cases too many, as we think, to be treated as exceptional in 
 which a bears to 6 some very simple ratio which is neither 1 : 1 
 nor yet 2:1; it is 3 : 2, or 4 : 3, or 5 : 3. 
 
 But at any rate, to extend the theory to the whole ofR lation 
 
 * . . . between 
 
 Yorkshire, to say nothing of all England, is out of the question, teamlands 
 No doubt as a whole Yorkshire was (in the terms that we have carucates. 
 used) an ' over-rated ' county : that is to say, as a general rule, 
 a, if not equal to, was greater than 6. But it can not be said 
 that when a was not equal to 6 it normally was, or even tended 
 to be equal to 26. We take by chance a page describing the 
 1 Domesday Studies, 150 ; D. B. i. 324.
 
 488 The Hide. 
 
 possessions of Count Alan 1 ; it contains 20 entries; in one of 
 these a = b, in one a = 26, in one 6 is greater than a ; in ten 
 cases the proportion which a bears to b is 3 : 2, in two it is 
 4 : 3, in two it is 5 : 3, in one 6 : 5, in one 7 : 5, in one it is 
 17 : 12. In the counties of Lincoln, Nottingham and Derby an 
 application of this doctrine would be ludicrous, for very commonly 
 b is greater than a. What is more, the method of taxation that it 
 presupposes is so unjust that we are loath to attribute it to any 
 one. To tax a man in proportion to the area of the land that 
 he treats as arable, that is a plausibly equitable method; to tax 
 him in proportion to the area that he has ploughed in a given 
 year, that also is a plausibly equitable method ; but the present 
 proposal could only be explained as a deliberate effort to tax 
 the three-field system out of existence 2 . To take the figures 
 that have been suggested to us by the author of this theory, we 
 suppose that X is using a team of oxen in 'a two-course manor'; 
 he has 160 acres of arable land and ploughs 80 of them in every 
 year. Then in another village F is using a team of oxen 
 according to the three-course system ; he has, we are told, 
 180 acres of arable and ploughs 120 acres in every year. This 
 unfortunate F is to pay double the amount of geld that is paid 
 by X. We could understand a demand that F should pay nine 
 shillings when X pays eight, for F has in all 180 acres of 
 arable and X has 160. We could understand a demand that 
 F should pay three shillings when X pays two, for F sows 120 
 acres a year and X sows 80. But nothing short of a settled 
 desire to extirpate the three-field system will prompt us to 
 exact two shillings from F for every one that is paid by X. 
 Lastly, we must repeat in passing our protest 3 against the 
 introduction into this context of those figures which express 
 the aspirations of that enthusiast of the plough, Walter of 
 Henley. That the 'land for one team' of Domesday Book 
 points normally or commonly to an area of arable land con- 
 taining 160 or 180 acres we can not believe. If we give it on 
 an average 120 acres we may perhaps find room for the recorded 
 team lands, though probably we shall often have to make our 
 acres small ; but county after county will refuse to make room 
 for teamlands with 160 or 180 acres 4 . No doubt the regularity 
 of the Yorkshire figures is remarkable. There are other districts 
 
 1 D. B. i. 311 b. 2 Round, Feudal England, GO. 
 
 * See above, p. 397. * See above, pp. 402, 435.
 
 Domesday Statistics. 489 
 
 in northern England where we may see some one relation be- 
 tween A and B steadily prevailing. We will call to mind, 
 by way of example, the symmetrical arrangement that we have 
 seen in one of the Rutland wapentakes, where A = 4<B. This 
 we can not explain, nor will it be explained until Domesday 
 Book has been rearranged by hundreds and vills; we have, 
 however, hazarded a guess as to the quarter in which the 
 explanation may be found 1 . As to the Yorkshire figures, we 
 think that of all the figures in the record they are the least 
 likely to be telling us the simple truth about the amount of 
 cultivated land. 
 
 We may now briefly recapitulate the evidence which leads The fiscal 
 
 us to the old-fashioned belief that King William's Exchequer a c r e s ? 
 reckons .120 acres to the hide. There are at the least twenty 
 sums set before us which involve the equation : IH. = 120A. 
 or Iv. = 30 A. We doubt whether there are two sums which 
 involve any one other equation. That there are sums which 
 involve or seem to involve other equations we fully admit ; but 
 when a fair allowance has been made for mistranscription, 
 miscalculation, tlje loss of acres due to partitionary arrange- 
 ments 2 , and, above all, to a transition from the rateable to the 
 real, from the hidage on the roll to the strips in the fields, we 
 can not think that these cases are sufficiently numerous to 
 shake our faith. We have further seen that in Essex and East 
 Auglia the acres of the fiscal system lie in batches of just those 
 sizes which would be produced if an unit of 120 acres was 
 being broken into halfs, thirds, quarters and fifths. Lastly, 
 'the rustics' of the twelfth century 'tell us that the hide 
 according to its original constitution consists of a hundred 
 acres 3 ' and probably these rustics reckon by the long hundred. 
 
 If now we are satisfied about this matter, we seem to be Antiquity 
 
 of the large 
 
 entitled to some inferences about remoter history. The fiscal hide. 
 practice of reckoning 120 acres to the hide can hardly be new. 
 Owing to many causes, among which we recall the partitionary 
 system of taxation, the influence of an equity which would 
 consider value as well as area, and the disturbing forces of 
 privilege and favouritism, the fiscal hide of the Confessor's day 
 has strayed far away from the fields and is no measure of land*. 
 
 1 See above, p. 471. a See above, p. 480. 
 
 3 Dial, de Scac. i. 17. 
 
 4 The appearance in D. B. of a few ' hides ' which apparently consist
 
 490 The Hide. 
 
 At its worst it is jobbery; at its best a lame compromise 
 between an unit of area and an unit of value. And yet, for all 
 this, it is composed of acres, of 120 acres. The theory that is 
 involved in this mode of calculation is so little in harmony with 
 the existing facts that we can not but believe that it is ancient. 
 It seems to point to a time long gone by when the typical 
 tenement which was to serve as an unit of taxation generally 
 had six score arable acres, little more or less. 
 
 3. Beyond Domesday. 
 
 The hide " We have now seen a good deal of evidence which tends to 
 Domesday. P rove that the hide has had for its model a tenement comprising 
 120 acres of arable land or thereabouts. Some slight evidence 
 of this we have seen on the face of the Anglo-Saxon land-books 1 . 
 A little more evidence pointing in the same direction we have 
 seen in the manorial extents of a later day 2 . And now we have 
 argued that the fiscal hide of the Conqueror's day is composed 
 of 120 (fiscal) acres. From all this we are inclined to infer that 
 the hide has, if we may so speak, started by being a tenement 
 which, if it attained its ideal, would comprise a long-hundred 
 of arable acre-strips, and thence to infer that in the very old 
 days of conquest and settlement the free family or the free 
 house-father commonly and normally possessed a tenement of 
 this large size. 
 
 We have now to confess that this theory is open to attack, 
 and must endeavour to defend it, or rather to explain why we 
 think that, when all objections have been weighed, the balance 
 of probability still inclines in its favour. 
 
 Arguments That all along from Bede's day downwards Englishmen have 
 the small had in their minds a typical tenement and have been making 
 this idea the framework of their scheme of government can not 
 be doubted. Nor can we doubt that this idea has had some 
 foundation in fact. It could not occur to any one except in a 
 country where a large and preponderant number of tenements 
 
 altogether of wood-land (e.g. ii. 55 b) is one of the many signs that the fiscal 
 hide has diverged from its original pattern. A block of wood-land would not be 
 ' the land of one family.' 
 
 1 See above, p. 389. a See above, p. 393.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 491 
 
 really, if roughly, conformed to a single type. Therefore the 
 contest must be, and indeed has been, between the champions 
 of different typical tenements, and in the main there are but 
 two theories in the field. The one would give the Anglo- 
 Saxon hide its long-hundred of acres, the other would concede 
 to it but some thirty or forty, and would in effect equate it 
 with the virgate rather than with the hide of later days 1 . 
 Perhaps we may briefly state the arguments which have been 
 urged in favour of this small hide by saying that small hides 
 are requisite (1) if we are to find room enough within the 
 appropriate areal boundaries for the hides that are distributed 
 by Domesday Book and the Anglo-Saxon charters, (2) if we 
 are to explain the large quantities of hides or family-lands 
 which are assigned to divers districts by Bede and by that 
 ancient document which we call The Tribal Hidage, (3) if we 
 are to bring our own typical tenement into line with the typical 
 tenement of Germany, (4) if we are not to overdo our family 
 or house-father with arable acres and bushels of corn. 
 
 A ' name-shifting ' must be postulated. Somehow or Continuity 
 another, what was the hide becomes the virgate, while the ^ the land 
 name ' hide ' is transferred to a much larger unit. Now in books - 
 such a name-shifting there is nothing that is very improbable, 
 if we approach the matter a priori. Thought has been poor 
 and language has been poor. The term ' yard of land ' may, as 
 we have seen 2 , stand for a quarter-acre or for a much larger 
 space. But this particular name-shifting seems to us im- 
 probable in a high degree. For when did it happen ? Surely 
 it did not happen after the Norman Conquest. We have from 
 Edward the Confessor quite enough documents to warrant our 
 saying with certainty that the hides and rnanses of his charters 
 are the hides of Domesday Book. Suppose for a moment that 
 all these parchments were forged after the Conquest, this would 
 only strengthen our case, for stupid indeed must the forger 
 
 1 Dr Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 79, has endeavoured to find a via media. To me 
 it seems that his suggestion is open to almost all the objections that can be 
 urged against our Big Hide, for he seems prepared to give the normal household 
 of the oldest day its 120 acres. Mr Seebohm's adhesion to the party of the Big 
 Hide is of importance, for I can not but think that a small hide (which after- 
 wards was called a virgate) would have assorted better with his general theory. 
 Conversely, it is curious that Kemble, the champion of the free ceorls, was also 
 the champion, if not the inventor, of the Little Hide. 
 
 3 See above, p. 385.
 
 492 The Hide. 
 
 have been who did not remember that if he was to make a 
 title-deed for the abbey's lands he must multiply the hides by 
 four or thereabouts. This argument will carry us far. We 
 trace the stream of land-books back from Edward to Cnut, to 
 ^Ethelred, to Edgar, to Offa, nay, to the very days of Bede ; 
 nowhere can we see any such breach of continuity as that which 
 would appear had the hypothetical name-shifting taken place. 
 The forgers know nothing of it. Boldly they make the first 
 Christian kings bestow upon the church just about the number 
 of manses that the church has in the eleventh century if the 
 manse be Domesday's hide. 
 
 Examples Both points might be illustrated by the Chertsey charters. 
 
 ters of In Domesday Book S*. Peter of Chertsey is credited with many 
 sey ' hides in divers parts of Surrey 1 . A charter is forthcoming 
 whereby Edward the Confessor confirms the abbey's possession 
 of these estates 2 , and in the main the number of ' manses ' that 
 this charter locates in any village is the number of ' hides ' that 
 the abbey will have there in the year 1086. The two lists are 
 not and ought not to be identical, for there have been rearrange- 
 ments ; but obviously the manse of the one is the hide of the 
 other. Then the monks have books which profess to come from 
 the seventh century 3 and to show how Frithwald the kingling 
 of Surrey endowed their monastery. These books may be 
 forgeries ; but the scale on which they are forged is the scale 
 of the Confessor's charter and of Domesday Book. It has 
 been thought that they are as old as Edgar's day 4 ; but at 
 any rate their makers did not suppose that in order to tell a 
 profitable story they must portray Frithwald bestowing four 
 manses for every hide that the abbey possessed. 
 
 Examples Or look we at the estates of S fc . Aldhelm. The monks of 
 
 ters of Mai- Malmesbury have a book from the Confessor 5 which agrees very 
 sbury. accura tely, perhaps too accurately, with the Domesday record 6 . 
 The latter ascribes to their house (among other lands) 10 hides 
 at Dauntsey, 5 at Somerford, 5 at Norton, 30 at Kemble, 35 at 
 Purton. The Confessor has confirmed to them (among other 
 lands) 10 ' hides ' at Dauntsey given by ^Ethelwulf, 5 at Somer- 
 ford and 5 at Norton given by ^Ethelstan, 30 at Kemble and 35 
 
 1 D. B. i. 32 b. 2 K. 812 (iv. 151). 
 
 3 K. 986-988 (v. 14-21) ; B. i. 55-9, 64. 
 
 4 Plummer, Bede, ii. 217. 8 K. 917 (iv. 165). 
 6 D. B. i. 66 b, 67.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 493 
 
 at Purton given by Ceadwealla. Then behind this book are 
 older books. Here is one dated in 931 by which ^Ethelstan 
 gives quinque mansas at Somerford and quinque mansas at 
 Norton 1 . Here is another dated in 850 by which ^Ethelwulf 
 gives decem mansiones at Dauntsey 2 . Here is a third by which 
 in 796 Egfrith restores that terrain xxxv manentium at Purton 3 . 
 Here from 682, from the days of Aldhelm himself, is a deed of 
 Ceadwealla bestowing xxxii cassatos at Kemble 4 . It is pretty ; 
 it is much too pretty ; but it is good proof that the Malmesbury 
 monks know nothing of any change in the conveyancer's unit 5 . 
 
 If we examine any reputable set of land-books, those ofPerma- 
 Worcester, for example, or those of Abingdon and try to trace "he M 
 the history of those very hides the existence of which is tlon ' 
 chronicled by Domesday Book, we shall often fail. This was to 
 be expected. Any one who has ' read with a conveyancer ' will 
 know that many difficulties are apt to arise when an attempt 
 is made to identify the piece of land described in one with that 
 described in another and much older document. In the days 
 before the Conquest many causes were perplexing our task. We 
 have spoken of them before, but will recall them to memory. 
 New assessments were sometimes made, and thenceforth an 
 estate which had formerly contained five hides might be spoken 
 of as having only four. New villages were formed, and the 
 hides which had been attributed to one place would thenceforth 
 be attributed to another. Great landlords enjoyed a large 
 power of rearranging their lands, not only for the purposes of 
 their own economy, but also for the purposes of public finance. 
 In some cases they had collected their estates into a few gigantic 
 maneria each of which would pay a single round sum to the 
 king 6 . Lastly, the kings gave and the kings took away. The 
 disendowment of churches and simple spoliation were not un- 
 known ; exchanges were frequent ; no series of land-books is 
 complete. But when some allowance has been made for the 
 effects of these causes, we shall see plainly that, if the charters 
 are to account for the facts displayed by Domesday Book, then 
 the manses of the charters, even of the earliest charters, can not 
 
 1 K. 355 (ii. 179). a K. 263 (ii. 35). Accepted by Kemble. 
 
 3 K. 174 (i. 209). * K. 24 (i. 28). 
 
 5 It is fair to say that the instances here given are picked instances and that 
 the Malmesbary title to some other lands is not so exceedingly neat. 
 
 6 See above, p. 112.
 
 494 The Hide. 
 
 have been of much less extent than the hides of the Norman 
 record. We know of no case in which a church, whatever its 
 wealth of genuine and spurious parchments, could make a title 
 to many more manses than the hides that it had in 10S6 1 . 
 Gifts of vil- Another test of continuity may be applied. In the Con- 
 queror's day a village in the south of England will very 
 commonly be rated at five or some low multiple of five hides, 
 ten, fifteen or twenty 2 . Now we have argued above that the 
 land-book of an Anglo-Saxon king generally, though not 
 always, disposes of an integral village or several integral 
 villages, and if we look at the land-books we shall commonly see 
 that the manses or hides which they describe as being at a 
 single place are in number five or some low multiple of five. 
 We open the second volume of the Codex Diplomaticus and 
 analyze the first hundred instances of royal gifts which do not 
 bear a condemnatory asterisk and which are not gifts of small 
 plots in or about the towns of Canterbury and Rochester. In 
 date these land-books range from A.D. 840 to A.D. 956. In 
 sixty out of a hundred cases the number of manses is 5 or a 
 multiple of 5. In eighteen it is 5 ; in sixteen 10; in six 15; 
 in thirteen 20 ; in three 25 ; in one 30 ; in one 80 ; in two 100. 
 There are a few small gifts ; one of a yokelet ; six of 1 manse ; 
 four of 2 manses ; five of 3. The great bulk of the gifts range 
 from 5 to 25 manses. Only four out of 100 exceed 25 ; of 
 these four, one is of 30, another of 80, while two are of 100. 
 At this rate of progress and if the manse had no more than 
 some 30 acres, we shall have extreme difficulty in accounting 
 for the large territories which on the eve of the Conquest were 
 held by the churches of Wessex, and by those very churches 
 which have left us cartularies that are only too ample. This 
 is not all. If these manses were but yard-lands, then, unless 
 
 1 This is so even in the case of the Kentish churches, see above, p. 466. The 
 Chronicle of Abingdon affords good materials for comparison with D. B. As a 
 general rule the charters will account for just about the right number of manses, 
 if the manses are to be the hides. There are exceptions ; but not more than 
 might be fairly explained by changes such as those recorded in the following 
 words (Chron. Abingd. i. 270) : ' Fuerunt autem Witham, Seouecurt, Henstesie, 
 Eatun membra de Cumenora temporibus Eadgari regis Angliae, habentes cas- 
 satos xxv ; nnnc vero Hensteseie membrum est de Bertona ; Witheham et 
 Seouecurt militibus datae ; Eatun omnimodo ablata.' See also an excellent 
 paper by Mr C. S. Taylor, The Pre-Domesday Hide of Gloucestershire, Trans. 
 Brist. and Glouc. Archaeol. Soc. vol. xviii. 
 
 2 Bound, Feudal England, 44 ff.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 495 
 
 we suppose that the average village was a tiny cluster, it is 
 plain enough that the kings did not usually give away integral 
 villages, and yet a church's lordship of integral villages and 
 even of divers contiguous villages is one of the surest and most 
 impressive traits that the Conqueror's record reveals. 
 
 Parenthetically we may admit that the king is not always Gifts of 
 giving away a whole village. Nasse has contended that when uages. U 
 a land-book professes to dispose of a certain number (x) of 
 manses at the place called X, and then sets forth the boundaries 
 of X, we must not infer that the whole of the land that lies 
 within those boundaries is comprised in the grant 1 . The proof 
 of this consists of a few instances in which, to all appearance, 
 two different tracts of land are conve} 7 ed by two different books 
 and yet the boundaries stated in those two books are the same. 
 We will allege one instance additional to those that have been 
 mentioned by others. In 969 Bishop Oswald of Worcester 
 gave to his man ^Ethelweard seven manses, whereof five lay in 
 the place called Tedington. The book which effected this 
 conveyance states the bounds of Tedington 2 . In 977 the same 
 bishop gave to his man Eadric three manses at Tedin'gton by a 
 book which describes the boundaries of that place in just the 
 same manner as that in which they were set forth by the 
 earlier charter 3 . Some care, however, should be taken before 
 we assume that the two deeds which deal with land at X 
 dispose of different tracts ; for book-land hada way of returning 
 to the king who gave it ; also the gift of one king was some- 
 times confirmed by another ; and even if the one book purports 
 to convey x and the other y manses, we must call to mind the 
 possibility that there has been a reassessment or a clerical 
 error. Still it seems to be fairly well proved that there are 
 cases in which the x manses which the donor gives are but 
 some of the manses that lie within the meres drawn by his 
 deed of gift. This certainly deserves remark. At first sight 
 nothing could look more foolish than that we should painfully 
 define the limits of the village territory and yet leave undefined 
 the limits of that part of the village territory which we are 
 giving away. But this practice is explicable if we remember 
 the nature of a manse in a village. It consists of many 
 
 1 Nasse, Agricultural Community, Engl. transl., 23-5. Seebohm, Village 
 Community, 111. 
 
 2 K. 552 (iii. 35). K. 617 (iii. 164).
 
 496 The Hide. 
 
 scattered strips of arable land and of rights over uncultivated 
 waste. To define the limits of the whole territory is important, 
 for the donee should know how far his cattle can wander 
 without trespass. To specify each acre- strip would, on the 
 other hand, be a tedious task and would serve no profitable 
 end. However, there can be little doubt that very generally 
 what a charter bestows is the whole of the land of which the 
 boundaries are described, and therefore the whole territory of a 
 village or of several neighbouring villages. 
 
 The largest But at the moment the charters which will be the most 
 instructive will be those which attribute to a single place some 
 large number of hides. In these the champions of a small hide 
 have found their stronghold. They see perhaps 100 hides 
 ascribed to the place called X ; they look for that place in 
 modern maps and gazetteers and then tell us that in order to 
 pack our 100 hides within the parochial boundary we must 
 reduce the size of the hide to 30 acres at the most. 
 The Win- The dangers that beset this process may be well illustrated 
 tateatChii- by the documents relating to one of the most interesting 
 combe. estates in all England, the great Chilcombe estate of the 
 church of Winchester, which stretched for many a mile from 
 the gates of the royal city of the West Saxon kings. Let 
 us follow the story as the monks told it in a series of charters, 
 few of which have escaped Kemble's asterisk. In the first days 
 of English Christianity, Cynegils, king of the West Saxons, 
 gave the Chilcombe valley to S k . Birinus. King after king 
 confirmed the gift, but it was never put into writing until the 
 days of ^Ethelwulf. He declared by charter that this land 
 should defend itself for one hide. This was part of that great 
 tithing operation which puzzles the modern historian 1 . In 908 
 Edward the Elder confirmed this act by a charter in which he 
 declared that the land at Chilcombe (including that at Nursling 
 and Chilbolton) contained 100 manses, but that the whole was 
 to be reckoned as a single manse. He also remarked that the 
 land included many villae 2 . The next book conies from 
 ^Ethelstau ; the whole valley (vallis illuster CUtecumb appellata) 
 with all its appendages was to owe the service of a single 
 
 1 Charter of JBthelwulf, K. 1057 (v. 113) ; T. p. 115 ; H. & S. 646. We 
 should not be surprised if at least one part of the mysterious ' decimation ' 
 turned out to be an early act of 'beneficial hidation.' 
 
 2 Charter of Edward, K. 342 (ii. 153).
 
 Beyond Domesday. 497 
 
 manse 1 . Two charters were obtained from Edgar. However 
 much land there might be at Chilcombe, it was to defend itself 
 for one hide 8 . A writ of similar import, which Kemble has 
 accepted, was issued by ^Ethelred the Unready 3 . It said that 
 there were a hundred hides at Chilcombe and proceeded to 
 allot them thus: 
 
 .<Estun 4 Easton 
 
 Afintun and Ufintun 5 Avington and Ovington 
 
 Ticceburn 25 Titchbourne 
 
 Cymestun 5 Kilmiston 
 
 Stoke 5 Bishopstoke 
 
 Brombrygce and Oterburn 5 Brambridge and Otterbourne 
 
 Twyfyrde 20 Twyford 
 
 Ceolbandingtun 20 Chilbolton 
 
 Hnutscilling 5 Nursling 
 
 This territory extends along the left-hand bank of the 
 Itchen from Kilmiston to Titchbourne, thence past Ovington, 
 Avington, Easton, Chilcombe, and Winchester itself, Twyford, 
 Brambridge, Otterbourne to Bishopstoke. If we journeyed by 
 straight lines from village to village we should find that our 
 course was a long twenty miles. Then, to complete the 100 
 hides, Nursling which is near Southampton and Chilbolton 
 which is near Andover are thrown in. But all these lands lie 
 ' into Ciltecumbe.' 
 
 It is to be feared that these charters tell lies invented by The many 
 those who wished to evade their share of national burdens. Chilcombe. 
 And they seem to have failed in their object, for in the 
 Confessor's day, though a very large estate at ' Chilcombe ' with 
 nine churches upon it was rated at but one hide, several of the 
 other villages that we have mentioned were separately assessed 4 . 
 But to lie themselves into an immunity from taxes, this the 
 monks might hope to do ; to lie themselves into the possession 
 of square leagues of land, this would have been an impossible 
 feat, and the solid fact remains that their church was the lord 
 of a spacious and continuous block of territory in the very 
 heart of the old West Saxon realm, just outside the gates of the 
 royal burg, along the Itchen river, the land that would be 
 
 1 Charter of ^thelstan, K. 1113 (v. 224). 
 
 2 Charters of Edgar, K. 512 (ii. 401) ; K. 583 (iii. 111). 
 Writ of ^Ethelred, K. 642 (iii. 203). 
 
 * D. B. i. 40-41. 
 
 M. 32
 
 498 The Hide. 
 
 seized and settled at the earliest moment. The best explanation 
 that they could give of this fact was that the first Christian 
 kings had bestowed mile after mile of land upon the minster. 
 What better theory have we 1 ? 
 
 The Win- The truth seems to be that some of the very earliest gifts 
 tatesat of laud that were made to the churches might, if we have 
 
 regard to the size of the existing kingdoms, be fairly called the 
 ton - cession of provinces, the cession of large governmental and 
 
 jurisdictional districts. The bishops want a revenue, and in 
 the earliest days a large district must be ceded if even a modest 
 revenue is to be produced, for all that the king has to give 
 away is the chieftain's right" to live at the expense of the folk 
 and to receive the proceeds of justice. Therefore not only 
 whole villages but whole hundreds were given. Chilcombe 
 was by no means the only vast estate that the bishop of the 
 West Saxons acquired in very early days. Domesday Book 
 shows us how at Downton in Wiltshire the church of Win- 
 chester has had a round 100 hides 2 . For these 100 hides we 
 have a series of charters which professes to begin in the days 
 when the men of Wessex were accepting the new faith. They 
 bear the names of Cenwealla 3 , Egbert 4 , Edward 5 , ^Ethelstan 6 , 
 Edred 7 , Edgar 8 , and ^Ethelred 9 . Kemble has accepted the last 
 four of them. They tell a consistent story. There were 
 100 manses at Downton, or, to speak more accurately," 55 at 
 Downton itself and 45 at Ebbesborne (the modern Bishopston) 
 on the other side of the Avon 10 . We might speak of other 
 
 1 Kitchin, Winchester, 7 : ' Cenwalh built the church, the parent of Win- 
 chester cathedral... The monks at once set themselves to ennoble toil, to wed 
 tillage with culture ; and it is interesting to note that the first endowment of 
 the Church in Wessex fell to them in the form of a great grant of all the 
 land for some leagues around the city, given for the building of the church.' 
 Did the monks till the land for some leagues around the city ? I think not. 
 Was it all occupied by their serfs? I think not. What was given was a 
 superiority. -One last question : Did the monks really ennoble toil by ap- 
 propriating its proceeds? 
 
 2 D. B. i. 65 b: ' Episcopus Wintoniensis tenet Duntone. T. B. E. geldavit 
 pro 100 hidis tribus minus. Duae ex Ms non sunt episcopi, quia ablatae 
 fuerunt cum aliis tribus de aecclesia et de manu episcopi tempore Cnut 
 Begis.' 
 
 3 K. 985 (v. 12). 4 K. 1036 (v. 80). 5 K. 342 (ii. 153). 
 6 K. 1108 (v. 211). i K. 421 (ii. 287). 8 K. 599 (iii. 139). 
 8 K. 698 (iii. 299). 
 
 10 As to the limits of Downton, see W. H. Jones, Domesday for Wiltshire, 
 213.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 499 
 
 extensive tracts, of Farnham where there have been 60 hides 1 , 
 of Alresford where there have been 51 2 , of Mitcheldever where 
 there have been 106 3 , of Taunton where there have been 54 
 and more 4 . Whenever the West Saxons conquer new lands 
 they cede a wide province to their bishop. But perhaps we 
 have already said more than enough of these cessions, though 
 in our eyes they are very important ; they are among the first 
 manifestations of incipient feudalism and feudalism brings 
 manorialism in its train. We have recurred to them here 
 because the Winchester charters which describe them testify 
 strongly to the continuity of the hide and also indicate the 
 weak point in the arguments that are urged by the advocates 
 of little hides 5 . 
 
 Kemble has argued that it is impossible for us to allow the Kemble 
 hide of Domesday Book or the hide or manse of the charters Taunton 
 as many as 120 acres. Take a village, discover how many estate - 
 hides are ascribed to it, discover how many acres it has at the 
 present day, you will often find that- the whole territory of the 
 village will not suffice to supply the requisite number of hides 
 if the hide is to have 120 or even 60 acres. Kemble illustrates 
 this method by taking nine vills in Somerset and Devon. One 
 of them is Taunton. Modern Taunton, he says, has 2730 acres, 
 the Tantone of 1086 had 65 hides 8 ; multiply 65 even by so 
 low a figure as 40 and you will nearly exhaust all Tauuton's 
 soil 6 . This argument involves the assumption that the limits 
 of modern Taunton include the whole land that is ascribed to 
 'Tantone' in the Conqueror's geld-book. Strangely different 
 was the result to which Eyton came after a minute examination 
 of the whole survey of Somersetshire. The 'Tantone' of 
 
 1 D. B. i. 31 ; K. 1058 (v. 114) ; 1093 (v. 176) ; 605 (iii. 149). 
 
 2 D. B. i. 40. Forty hides said tp have been given by Cenwealla. K. 997 (v. 
 39) ; 1039 (v. 85) ; 1086 (v. 162) ; 1090 (v. 162) ; 601 (iii. 144). 
 
 8 D. B. i. 42 b. This belongs to the New Minster. In K. 336 (ii. 144) 
 Edward the Elder is made to give ' quendam fundum quern indigenae Myceldefer 
 appellant cum suo hundredo et appendicibus, habens centum cassatos et 
 aecclesiam.' The territory has 100 hides and is a 'hundred.' 
 
 * D. B. i. 87 b. K. 1002 (v. 44) ; "1051-2 (v. 99, 101) ; 1084 (v. 157) ; 374 (ii. 
 209) ; 598 (iii. 136). 
 
 5 They are hardly the worse witnesses about this matter for having been 
 much ' improved.' They do not look like late forgeries. Those which bear the 
 earliest dates seem to be treated as genuine in charters of the tenth century 
 which are not (if anything that comes from Winchester is not) suspected. 
 
 8 Kemble, Saxons, i. 487 ; D. B. i. 87 b. 
 
 322
 
 500 The Hide. 
 
 Domesday covers some thirteen or fourteen villages and is now 
 represented not by 2780 but by 24,000 acres 1 . The editor of 
 the Anglo-Saxon charters should have guessed that many hides 
 ' lay in ' Taunton which as a matter of physical geography were 
 far off from the walls of the bishop's burg 2 . There are counties 
 in which the lisb of the places that are mentioned in Domesday 
 is so nearly identical with the list of our modern parishes, that 
 no very great risk would be run if we circumspectly pursued 
 Kemble's method; but just in those counties to which he 
 applied it the risk is immeasurably great, for it is the land 
 where many villages are often collected into one great manerium 
 and all their hides are spoken of as lying in one place. Not 
 until we have compared the whole survey of the county with 
 the whole of its modern map, are we entitled to make even a 
 guess as to the amount of land that a place-name covers. 
 Often enough in those shires where there are large and ancient 
 ecclesiastical estates, those shires in which the feudal and 
 manorial development began earliest and has gone furthest, 
 hides ' are ' in law where they are not in fact. They ' lie into ' 
 the hall at which they geld or the moot-stow to which they 
 render soke, and this may be far distant from their natural 
 bed 3 . 
 
 Difficulty As we go backwards this danger is complicated by another, 
 namely, by the growth of new villages. The village of Hamton 
 has been a large village with 20 hides. Some of its arable 
 
 1 Eyton, Somerset, ii. 34. 
 
 2 See above, p. 499, note 4. 
 
 3 Compare, for instance, the account of the estates of the Bishop of Wells, 
 D. B. i. 89, with the charter ascribed to the Confessor, K. 816 (iv. 163). In the 
 former we read of 50 hides at Wells ; in the latter we see that these hides cover 
 24 villages or hamlets, each of which has its name. According to Eyton 
 (Somerset, 24) this estate extends over nearly 22,000 acres. The Malmesbury 
 charter, K. 817 (iv. 165) is another good illustration. Kemble's identifications 
 were hasty and have fared ill at the hands of those who have made local 
 researches. A few examples follow: Keynsham, 50n. = 3330A. (Kemble), 
 11,138 A. and more (Eyton). Dowlish, 9n. = 680A. (Kemble), 1282 (Eyton). 
 Koad, 9n. = 1010A. (Kemble), 1664 (Eyton). Portishead, lln. = 1610 (Kemble), 
 2093 (Eyton). The instances that Kemble gives (vol. i. p. 106) from the A.-S. 
 land-books are equally unfortunate. Thus he reads of 50 H. at Brokenborough, 
 Wilts, and seeks for them all in a modern parish which has 2950 A. ; but the 
 Domesday manor of this name covered ' at least 6000 or perhaps 7000 acres ' 
 (W. H. Jones, Domesday for Wilts, p. xxvii.). In several instances Kemble 
 tries to force into a single parish all the hides of a hundred which takes its 
 name from tnat parish.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 501 
 
 land has lain two or three miles from the clustered steads. A 
 partition of its fields is made and a new cluster of steads is 
 formed; for housebuilding is not a lengthy or costly process. 
 And so Little Hamton or 'Other' Ham ton with 5 hides 
 splits off from the old Hamton which has 15. We must not 
 now try to force 20 hides into the territory of either village 1 . 
 And as this danger increases, the other hardly diminishes, for 
 we come to the time when a king will sometimes give a large 
 jurisdictional district and call it all by one name. If the once 
 heathen Osric of the Hwiccas gave to a church ' 100 manentes 
 adjoining the city that is called the Hot Baths,' he in all 
 probability gave away the ' hundred ' of Bath ; he gave Bath 
 itself and a territory which in the eleventh century was the 
 site of a dozen villages 2 . We have the best reason for believing 
 that when a king of the eighth century says that he is giving 
 20 manses in the place called Cridie he is giving his rights 
 over a tract which comprises ten or twelve of our modern 
 parishes and more than the whole of the modern hundred of 
 Crediton 3 . 
 
 We have given above some figures which will enable our The name- 
 readers to 'compare the hides and the teamlands of a county m aucient 
 with its modern acreage. Also we have confessed to thinking documents - 
 that we can hardly concede to every teamland that Domesday 
 mentions 120 statute acres of arable land 4 . On the other 
 hand, we do not think that there would in general be much 
 difficulty in finding 120 arable acres for every fiscal hide, 
 though perhaps in the south the average size of the acre would 
 be small 5 . However, we have admitted, or rather contended, 
 that before the middle of the eleventh century the hides of the 
 fiscal system had strayed far away from the original type, and 
 the sight of an over-hided vill would not disconcert us. But 
 
 1 Hanssen, Abhandlungen, i. 499. 
 
 2 See above, p. 229, and Mr Taylor's paper there mentioned. 
 
 3 Napier and Stevenson, Crawford Charters, 43. Compare D. B. i. 101 b. In 
 the Confessor's time ' Crediton ' gelded for 15 hides. There was land for 185 
 teams, and teams to that number existed. There were 264 villeins, 73 bordiers 
 and 40 serfs. 2Ethelheard's charter suggests either that in his day this part of 
 Devon was very sparsely peopled, or that already, under a system of parti- 
 tionary taxation, a small number of fiscal units had been cast upon a poor 
 district. When at a later time Eadnoth bishop of Crediton mortgages a 
 yardland for 30 maucuses of gold (Ibid. p. 5), this yardland will be a fiscal 
 virgate of wide extent. See above, p. 467, note 2. 
 
 4 See above, p. 445. B See above, p. 400.
 
 502 The Hide. 
 
 unfortunately we can not be content with such results as we 
 have as yet attained. We have already seen that the hides 
 attributed to a district show a tendency to increase their 
 number as we trace them backwards 1 , and there are certain 
 old documents which deal out hides so lavishly that we must 
 seriously face the question whether, notwithstanding the con- 
 tinuity of the land-books, we must not suppose that some 
 large change has taken place in the character of the typical 
 tenement. 
 
 The We have said above that we have inherited three ancient 
 
 Hidage. documents which distribute hides among districts. We call 
 them in order of date (1) The Tribal Hidage, (2) The Burghal 
 Hidage, (3) The County Hidage. Of the youngest we have 
 spoken. We must now attend to that which holds the middle 
 place. It states that large round numbers of hides belong to 
 certain places, which seem to be strongholds. The sense in 
 which a large number of hides might belong to a burh will 
 be clear to those who have read the foregoing pages 2 . This 
 document has only come down to us in a corrupt form, but 
 it has come from a remote time and seems to represent a 
 scheme of West-Saxon defence which was antiquated long 
 years before the coming of the Normans. We will give its 
 effect, preserving the most important variants and adding 
 within brackets some guesses of our own. 
 
 THE BURGHAL HID AGE* 
 
 Hides. 
 
 to Heorepeburan, Heorewburau 4 324 
 
 to Hastingecestre [Hastings] 15 or 500 
 
 to Lathe, Lawe [Lewes] 6 1300- 
 
 to Burhham [Burpham near Arundel] 726 
 
 to Cisseceastre [Chichester] 1500 
 
 to Portecheastre [Porchester] 650 
 
 1 See above, p. 458. 2 See above, p. 188. 
 
 3 Birch, Cart. Sax. iii. 671 ; Munimenta Gildhallae, ii. 627 ; Gale, Scrip- 
 tores xv., i. 748; Liebermann, Leges Anglorum, 9. 10. 
 
 4 This we can not find. If Kent were included in the scheme, we should 
 read of Canterbury, Rochester etc. Therefore we probably start in Sussex, but 
 at some point east of Hastings. In any case, unless a name has dropped out, 
 we can not make the five Sussex burgs correspond to the six rapes of a later 
 day, which, going from east to west, are Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, 
 Arundel, Chichester. 
 
 6 See the Laawe, Lwes of K. 499, 1237.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 503 
 
 Hides. 
 
 to Hamtona and to Wincestre [Southampton and Win- 
 chester] 2400 
 to Piltone, Pistone 1 , Wiltone [Wilton] 1400 
 to Tysanbyring [Tisbury] 2 700 
 to Soraflesbyriug, Soraflesburieg, Sceaftesbyrig [Shaftes- 
 
 bury] 700 
 
 to Thoriham, Tweonham, Twenham [Twyneham] 3 470 
 
 to Weareham [Wareham] 1600 
 
 to Brydian [Bridport or more probably Bredy] 4 1760 
 
 to Excencestre [Exeter] 734 
 
 to Halganwille, Hallgan Wylla [Halwell]* 300 
 
 to Hlidan, Hlida [Lidford] 140 
 to Wiltone Wisbearstaple, Piltone wrS Bearstaple [Pil- 
 
 ton 6 with Barnstaple] 360 
 
 to Weted, Weced [Watchet]^ 513 
 
 to Orenbrege, Oxenebrege, Axanbrige [Axbridge] 400 
 
 to Lenge, Lengen [Lyng] 8 100 
 
 to Langiord, Langport [Langport] 600 
 
 to Bathan, Badecan, Baderan [Bath] 3200 (?) 
 
 to Malmesberinge [Malmesbury] 1500 
 to Croccegelate, Croccagelada [Cricklade] 1003 or 1300 
 to Oxeforde and to Wallingeforde [Oxford and Walling- 
 
 ford] 2400 
 to Buckingham and to Sceaftelege, Sceafteslege, Steaf- 
 
 tesege [Buckingham and ?] 9 600 or 1500 
 
 to Eschingum and to Suthringa geweorc [Southwark 
 
 and Bashing] 10 1800 
 
 1 A confusion of P and W is common. 
 
 2 Tisbury lies between Wilton and Shaftesbury. See K. 104, 641. Mr 
 Stevenson suggests that the word may be Oysanbyrig, thereby being meant 
 Cbiselbury Camp. This also lies in the right quarter. 
 
 3 Tweoxneam, A.-S. Chron. ann. 901. 
 
 4 See Bridian in K. 656. Bredy lies about eight miles west of Dorchester. 
 It seems to contain a ' Kingston.' 
 
 6 There is a Halwell a little to the south of Totness. Already in 1018 
 (Crawford Charters, pp. 9, 79) the Devonshire burgs are Exeter, Lidford, Totness 
 and Barnstaple. 
 
 6 Pilton lies close to Barnstaple. 
 
 7 A.-S. Chron. ann. 915 : 'be eastan Weced.' 
 
 8 A little to the west of Langport; close to Athelney. A.-S. Chron. ann. 
 878: 'And J>ees on Eastron worhte jElfred cyning lytle werede geweorc set 
 jEJ>elinga eigge.' Green, Conquest of England, 110. Observe that a very small 
 district is assigned to Lyng. 
 
 9 After seeing Oxford and Wallingford together, we should naturally expect 
 Bedford with Buckingham. See A.-S. Chron. ann. 918-9. Or we might look 
 for Hertford. Ibid. aim. 913. 
 
 10 Bashing is a tithing in the parish of Godalming. See King Alfred's will 
 (K. 314) : set 2Escengum.' Bashing may have been supplanted by Guildford.
 
 504 The Hide. 
 
 These figures having been stated, we are told that they 
 make a total of 27,070 hides 1 . And then we read ' et triginta 2 
 to Astsexum [al. Westsexum], and to Wygraceastrum mcc. 
 hydas. to Wseringewice [al. Parlingewice] feower and xxiiii. 
 hund hyda.' 
 
 Meaning of Apparently we start at some burg in the extreme east 
 ge' f Sussex, go through Hastings, Lewes, Burpham, Chichester, 
 Porchester, and then pass through Hampshire, through the south 
 of Wiltshire, through Dorset to Devon, keeping always well to 
 the south. Then in Devon we turn to the north and retrace 
 our steps by moving to the east along a more northerly route 
 than that which we followed in the first instance. In short, 
 we make a round of Wessex and end at Southwark. This 
 done, we cast up the number of hides and find them to be 
 somewhat more than 27,000. Then in what may be a post- 
 script the remark is made that to Essex and Worcester belong 
 1200 hides (probably 1200 apiece) and to Warwick 2404. The 
 writer seems to know Wessex pretty thoroughly ; of the rest 
 of England he (if he added the postscript) has little to tell 
 us. We might perhaps imagine him drawing up this state- 
 ment under Edward the Elder 3 . He hears reports of what 
 has been done to make Essex defensible and of two famous 
 burgs built in Mercia ; but the military system of Wessex he 
 knows 4 . Of a military system it is that he is telling us. He 
 does not take the counties of Wessex one by one ; he visits 
 the burgs, and his tour through them takes him twice through 
 Wiltshire : westwards along a southerly and eastwards along 
 a northerly line. 
 
 It is an artificial system that he discloses to us. The 324 
 hides allotted to ' Heorepeburan ' (a place that eludes us) 
 
 1 Taking in the particulars the figures which seem the more probable, we 
 make a larger total. 
 
 2 If Essex is meant this figure seems impossibly small. Gale gives ' Ast 
 Saxhum et Wygeaceastrum 1200 hidas.' This may give Essex and Worcester 
 1200 hides apiece. 
 
 3 Mr Stevenson tells me that, though the document is very corrupt, some of 
 the verbal forms seem to speak of this date. 
 
 4 Such a document is apt to be tampered with. Some bits of it may be 
 older than other bits, but the reign of Edward the Elder seems the latest to 
 which we could ascribe its core. If we compare it with the list of Domesday 
 boroughs we shall be struck by the absence of Dorchester, Bridport, Ilchester, 
 Totness, Hertford, Bedford and Guildford, as well as by the appearance of 
 Burpham, Tisbury, Bredy, Halwell, Watcbet, Lyng and Eashing.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 
 
 505 
 
 may seem insufficiently round until we add it to the 726 given 
 to ' Burhham.' The Wiltshire burgs seem to be grouped 
 thus : 
 
 Wilton 1400 1 
 
 Tisbury 700 
 
 Shaftesbury 700 
 Malmesbury 1500 
 Cricklade 1300 
 
 - 2800 1 
 
 2800 
 
 5600 
 
 To compare these figures with those given in Domesday 
 Book and in The County Hidage is not a straightforward task, and later 
 for the military districts of 900 may not have been coincident documents - 
 with the counties of 1086, and, for example, Bath may have 
 been supported partly by Gloucestershire and partly by 
 Somerset 1 . The best comparison that we can make is the 
 following : 
 
 Burghal Hidage County Hidage Domesday Book 
 Sussex 2 4350 3474 
 
 Surrey 3 
 Hampshire 4 
 Berkshire 5 
 
 1800 (or 3600) 
 3520 
 2400 
 
 1830 
 
 2588 
 2473 
 
 Wiltshire 6 
 
 5600 
 
 4800 4050 
 
 Dorset 7 
 
 3360 
 
 2321 
 
 Somerset 8 
 
 4813 
 
 2951 
 
 Devon 9 
 
 1534 
 
 1119 
 
 Oxford 
 
 2400 
 
 2400 2412 
 
 Buckingham 
 Essex (?) 
 Worcester 
 
 1500 
 1200 
 1200 
 
 2074 
 2650 
 1200 1189 
 
 Warwick 
 
 2404 
 
 1200 1338 
 
 There is discord here, but also there is concord. According 
 to our reckoning, the Oxfordshire and Berkshire of Domesday 
 Book have just about 2400 hides apiece; then The County 
 Hidage gives Oxfordshire 2400 ; and The Burghal Hidage gives 
 2400 to Oxford and 2400 to Wallingford. Both documents give 
 
 1 See above, p. 189, note 1. 
 
 2 ' Heorepeburan,' Hastings, Lewes, Burpham, Chiohester. 
 
 3 Eashing, Southwark. 
 
 4 Porchester, Southampton, Winchester, Twyneham. 
 
 5 Wallingford. 
 
 6 Wilton, Tisbury, Shaftesbury, Malmesbury, Cricklade. 
 
 7 Wareham, Bredy. 
 
 8 Watchet, Axbridge, Lyng, Langport, Bath. 
 
 9 Exeter, Halwell, Lidford, Barnstaple.
 
 506 The Hide. 
 
 1200 to Worcester, and this is very close to the number that 
 Domesday Book assigns. Next we see that, with hardly an 
 exception 1 , all the aberrations of our Burghal Hidage from 
 Domesday Book lie in one direction. They all point to great 
 reductions of hidage, which seem to have been distributed with 
 a fairly even hand. Further, in the case of Wiltshire we see a 
 progressive abatement. The hidage is lowered from 5600 to 
 4800 and then to a little over 4000, and the first reduction 
 seems to have relieved the shire of just one-seventh of its 
 hides. 
 
 Criticism Now it seems to us that, on the one hand, we must reckon 
 Burghal with this document as with one which, however much it may 
 flre ' have been distorted by copyists, is or once was a truthful, and 
 possibly an official record, and that, on the other hand, we can 
 reckon with it and yet retain that notion of the hide which we 
 have been elaborating. In a general way it both gives support 
 to and receives support from the evidence that has already come 
 before us. We have seen reductions of hidage or carucatage 
 made in Yorkshire and Leicestershire after the Domesday 
 survey ; we have seen reductions in Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, 
 Berkshire, Cambridge, Northamptonshire. Here we come upon 
 earlier reductions. They are large; but still they are not of 
 such a kind as to make us think that any great change has 
 taken place in men's idea of a normal and typical hide. For 
 one thing, we might be rash if we denied that during that 
 miserable tenth century both the population and the wealth of 
 Wessex were declining, for, despite its ^Ethelstan and Edgar, a 
 miserable time it was. A real extinction of many a ' real hide ' 
 there may have been. But our main explanation will be that, 
 by a process which is gradual and yet catastrophic, the ancient 
 exaggerated estimates of population and wealth are being 
 brought into correspondence with the humbler facts. 
 The Tribal We must now turn to a more famous and yet older document, 
 namely that which we call The Tribal Hidage 2 . It assigns 
 large round quantities of hides to various districts, or rather to 
 various peoples, whose very names would otherwise have been 
 unknown to us. We are not about to add to the commentaries 
 
 1 A good deal of doubt hangs over the entries touching Buckingham, Essex 
 and Warwick. 
 
 2 Birch, Cartularium, i. 414; Birch, Journal Brit. Archaeol. Assoc. xl. 29 
 (1884) ; Earle, Land Charters, 458; Liebermann, Leges Anglorum, 8; Stevenson, 
 Engl. Hist. Rev., 1889, 354.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 507 
 
 that have been written upon it ; but its general scheme seems to 
 be fairly plain. It begins by allotting to Myrcna land 30,000 
 hides. On this follow eighteen more or less obscure names to 
 each of which a sum of hides is assigned ; 36,100 hides are 
 distributed between -them. Then a grand total of 66,100 is 
 stated. Ten other more or less obscure names follow, and 
 19,000 hides are thus disposed of. Then we have more intel- 
 ligible entries :' East Eiigle 30,000. East Sexena 7,000. 
 Cantwarena 15,000. South Sexena 7,000. West Sexena 
 100,000.' Then we are told that the complete sum is 242,700, 
 a statement which is not true as the figures stand, for they 
 amount to 244,100. The broad features, therefore, of this 
 system seem to be these : It ascribes to Wessex 100,000 hides, 
 to Sussex 7,000, to Kent 15,000, to Essex 7,000, to East Anglia 
 30,000, to Mercia 30,000, to the rest of England 55,100. 
 -Apparently we must look for this rest of England outside 
 Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Essex and East Anglia and outside the 
 Mercians' land, though- this last term is probably used in an 
 old and therefore narrow sense. The least obscure of the 
 obscure names that are put before us, those of the dwellers in 
 the Peak, the dwellers in Elmet and the men of Lindsey, seem 
 to point to the same conclusion 1 . 
 
 Now our first remark about this document will perhaps be Criticism 
 either that it is wild nonsense, or that its ' hide ' has for its Tribal 
 type something very different from the model that has served H 
 for those hides of which we have hitherto been reading. Domes- 
 day will not allow the whole of England 70,000 hides (caru- 
 cates, sulungs) and now we are asked to accommodate more 
 than 240,000. Kent is to have 15,000 hides instead of 1200 
 sulungs. Even the gulf between The Burghal Hidage and 
 this Tribal Hidage is enormous. The one would attribute 
 less than 4500 hides to the Sussex burgs, the other would 
 burden the South Saxons with 7000. In the older document 
 Wessex has 100,000 hides, while in the younger the burgs of 
 Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset 
 and Devon have as their contributories less than a quarter 
 of that number. The suspicion can not but cross our mind 
 
 1 Unless the mention of Wessex is interpolated (and if it be interpolated 
 then the grand total has been tampered with) it is difficult to suppose that 
 ' Wiht gara 600 ' points to the Isle of Wight, ' Gifla 300 ' to the district round 
 Ilchester, or the like. I owe this observation to Mr W. J. Corbett.
 
 508 The Hide. 
 
 that the 'hides' of The Tribal Hidage are yard-lands, or, in 
 other words have for their moulding idea rather a tenement 
 of 30 than a tenement of 120 arable acres 1 . 
 
 Bede's Before we decide this important question we must give 
 
 indage. au di e nce to Bede, whose testimony seems to point in the same 
 direction. As already said, he uses one and the same unit, 
 namely, the land of a family, whenever he speaks of a tract 
 of soil, whether that tract be the territory of a large tribe or 
 an estate that is granted to a monastery. He gives 7000 of 
 these units to the South Saxons, 5000 to the South Mercians, 
 7000 to the North Mercians, 960 to Anglesey, 300 and more 
 to Man, 600 to Thanet, 1200 to Wight, 600 to the Isle of 
 Ely, 87 to the promontory of Selsey, 5 to lona. Then he tells 
 how Alchfrid bestowed on Wilfrid the land of 10 families at 
 Stanford and a monastery of 30 families at Ripon, and in 
 various other cases we hear of a prelate acquiring the land of 
 20, 12, 10, 8 families or of one family 2 . 
 
 1 It is a little curious that if we multiply the 244,100 hides by 120 we obtain 
 29,292,000, a figure which is not very far off from the 32,543,890 which gives 
 the total acreage (tidal water excepted) of modern England. However, it is in 
 the highest degree improbable that the computer of hides was aiming at pure 
 areal measurement. Nor could his credit be saved in that way, for the area of 
 Kent is to that of Sussex as 975 : 932, not as 15 : 7. The total of ' cultivated 
 land' in England is less than 25 million acres, that of arable is less than 
 12 million. 
 
 2 Bede, Hist. Eccl. ii. 9 (ed. Plummer, i. 97): '...Meuanias insulas... 
 quarum prior... nongentarum Ix. familiarum mensuram iuxta aestimationem 
 Anglorum, secunda trecentarum et ultra spatium tenet.' Ibid. iii. 24 (p. 180) : 
 ' ...regnum Australium Merciorum, qui sunt, ut dicunt, familiarum quinque 
 millium...Aquilonaribus Merciis quorum terra est familiarum vii. milium.' Ibid, 
 i. 25 (p. 45) : ' Est autem ad orientalem Cantiae plagam Tanatos insula non 
 modica, id est, magnitudinis iuxta consuetudinem aestimationis Anglorum 
 familiarum sexcentarum (J>set is syx hund hida micel asfter Angel cynnes sehta).' 
 Ibid. iv. 13 (p. 230) : 'ad provinciam Australium Saxonum, quae post Cantuarios 
 ad austrum et ad occidentem usque ad Occidentales Saxones pertingit, habens 
 terram familiarum septem millium (is J>aes landes seofen >usendo [hida]).' Ibid. 
 iv. 14 (p. 237) : ' Est autem mensura eiusdem insulae [Vectae] iuxta aestima- 
 tionem Anglorum mille ducentarum familiarum: unde data est episcopo 
 possessio terrae trecentarum familiarum (Defter Angel cynnes sehta twelf hund 
 hida, and he }>a J>am biscop gesealde on seht J>reo hund hida).' Ibid. iv. 17 
 (p. 246) : ' Est autem Elge in provincia Orientalium Anglorum regio familiarum 
 circiter sexcentarum (six .hund hida) in similitudinem insulae.' Ibid. iii. 25 
 (pp. 182-3) : ' donaverat monasterium quadraginta familiarum in loco qui 
 dicitur Inrhypum.' Ibid. v. 19 : 'mox donavit terram decem familiarum in loco 
 qui dicitur Stanford, et non multo post monasterium triginta familiarum in 
 loco qui vocatur Inrhypum (tyn hiwisca landes on J>aere stowe )>e is cweiSon 
 Stanford. ..minster xxx. hiwisca).' Ibid. iv. 13 (p. 232): ' donavit... Uilfrido
 
 Beyond Domesday. 509 
 
 Now we must notice that in their estimates of one large Criticism 
 province there is a certain agreement between the Eccle- hidage. 
 siastical History and The Tribal Hidage. Both give the South 
 Saxons 7000 hides or families 1 . What are we then to say? 
 If we suppose that Bede is speaking to us of tenements which 
 tend to conform to the hide of 120 arable acres his statements 
 must fly far beyond their mark. For example, the Isle of 
 Wight is to have 1200 hides, and yet, according to Domesday 
 Book, the whole of Hampshire including that island will not 
 have 3000 hides, nor 3000 ' teamlands,' nor 3000 teams. Bede's 
 Wight contains as many hides as the Worcestershire or the 
 Herefordshire of Domesday. He allots 600 of his units to 
 the Isle of Ely, which in 1086 had about 80 hides and 126 
 teamlands. He allots another 600 of his units to the Isle 
 of Thanet, which in 1086 had about 66 sulungs and 93 
 teamlands 8 . 
 
 We have now reached the critical point in our essay. Be- Bede and 
 
 . . the large 
 
 fore us lie two paths and it is hardly too much to say that our hide, 
 whole conception of early English history depends on the 
 choice that we make. Either as we pursue our retrogressive 
 course through the centuries there comes a time when the 
 hide of 120 acres gives place to some other and much smaller 
 typical tenement, or the men of Bede's day grossly exaggerated 
 the number of the hides that there were in England and the 
 various parts thereof. 
 
 We make our choice. We refuse to abandon the large Continuity 
 hide. In the first place, we call to mind the continuity of m the land- 
 the charters. They have begun to flow in Bede's day ; they ( 
 
 terrain Ixxxvii. famiiiarum (seofan and hund eahtig hida landes)...vocabulo 
 Selasseu.' Historia Abbatum (p. 380) : ' terram octo famiiiarum iuxta fluvium 
 
 Fresca ab Aldfrido rege...oomparavit terram xx. famiiiarum in loco qui 
 
 incolarum lingua Ad villam Sambuce vocatur...accepit Terram decem 
 
 famiiiarum quam ab Aldfrido rege in possessionem acceperat in loco villae quae 
 Daltun nuncupatur...' Hist. Eccl. iv. 21 ^(p. 253): 'accepit locum unius 
 familiae ad septentrionalem plagam Uiuri fluminis (onfeng heo anes hiwscipes 
 stowe to noriJ daele Wire "Saere ea).' Ibid. iii. 4 (p. 133) : 'Neque enim magna 
 est [lona] sed quasi famiiiarum quinque, iuxta aestimationem Anglorum.' Ibid, 
 iii. 24 (p. 178) : ' Singulae vero possessiones x. erant famiiiarum, id est simul 
 omues cxx. ' 
 
 1 If the 'Wiht gara 600 ' of The Tribal Hidage refers to Wight, we have here 
 a discord, for Bede gives the Island 1200. The North and South Mercians have 
 together but 1200 according to Bede; the Mercians have 30,000 according to The 
 Tribal Hidage : but the territory of ' the Mercians ' is a variable. 
 
 2 B. i. 4 b, 12; Elton, Tenures of Kent, 135.
 
 510 The Hide. 
 
 never cease to flow until they debouch in Domesday Book. 
 They know but one tenemental unit. To describe it they 
 use Bede's phrase, and his translator's phrases. It is the 
 hiwisc, the terra unius familiae, the terra unius manentis, 
 the manse, the hide 1 . Between this and the acre they know 
 nothing except the yard of land. Of it they speak but seldom, 
 and it can only be explained as being a yard in every acre of 
 a hide. No moment can we fix when an old mode of reckoning 
 by reference to small tenements is superseded by references 
 to a fourfold larger model. 
 Gradual J n the second place, we have been prepared for exaggeration. 
 
 reduction , , -i ,-, 
 
 ofhidage. We have seen the hides steadily increasing in number as we 
 passed from Domesday Book to The County Hidage and thence 
 to The Burghal Hidage, and what may we not expect in the 
 remote age that we have now reached ? Even in the days 
 of The Burghal Hidage there was a kingdom of England. There 
 was a king of the English who was trying to coordinate his^ 
 various dominions in one common scheme of national defence. 
 But now we have penetrated to an age when there is no 
 English nation. The gens Anglorum whose ecclesiastical his- 
 tory is being written is but a loose congeries of kindred folks. 
 Rude indeed will be the guesses made at such a time about 
 the strength of tribes and the wealth of countries. The South 
 Mercians are a folk of 5000 families, ' so they say ' : that is 
 all that Bede can tel-l us about them. It is not likely that they 
 have underestimated their numbers. When there is a kingdom 
 of England, when there is a crushing tax called ' danegeld,' then 
 the day will have come when a county will, if it can, 'conceal' 
 its hides. At an earlier time the various fojks will brag of 
 their strength and there will be none to mitigate their boasts. 
 
 Moreover we can not put our finger on the spot where the 
 breach of continuity occurs. In 1086 Sussex has about 3100 
 teamlands; it has about .3500 hides. The Burghal Hidage 
 would burden it with nearly 4500, and now we are required 
 to give it 7000. There is no place where we can see its hides 
 suddenly multiplied or divided by four. 
 
 Over-eati- Dare we set any limit to the power of exaggeration ? In 
 
 hidage. much later days when England had long been strongly governed 
 
 and accurate fiscal rolls were being carefully stored in the 
 
 treasury, men believed in 60,000 knight's fees ; royal ministers 
 
 1 See above, p. 359.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 511 
 
 believed in 32,000 ; and yet we now see good reason for doubt- 
 ing whether there were more than 5000 1 . In the reign of 
 Edward IIP. the collective wisdom of the nation supposed, 
 and acted upon the supposition, that there were more than 
 40,000 parishes in England, and then made the humiliating 
 discovery that there were less than 9000 2 . We hear that the 
 same error was current in the days of Wolsey. Men still be- 
 lieved in those 40,000 parishes 3 . Such numbers as these stood 
 written in ancient manuscripts, some of which seem to have 
 taken our Tribal Hidage as a base for calculations*. These 
 traditional numbers will not be lightly abandoned, though 
 their falsehood might be proved by a few days' labour spent 
 among the official archives. Counting hides is repulsive work. 
 If then these things happen in an age which is much closer to 
 our own than to Bede's, ought we not to be surprised at the 
 moderation of those current estimates of tribal strength that 
 he reports ? 
 
 Thirdly, when Bede speaks not of a large province, but Size of 
 of an estate acquired by a prelate, then his story seems to j^de. 
 require that ' the land of one family ' should be that big 
 tenemental unit, the manse or hide of the land-books. Let 
 us take by way of example the largest act of liberality that 
 he records. King Oswy, going to battle, promises that if he 
 be victorious he will devote to God his daughter with twelve 
 estates for the endowment of monasteries. He is victorious; 
 he fulfils his vow. He gives twelve estates, six in Deira, six 
 in Bernicia ; each consists of ' the possessions of ten families.' 
 His daughter enters Hild's monastery at Hartlepool. Two 
 years afterwards she acquires an estate of ten families at 
 Streanaeshalch and founds a monastery there. According to 
 our reading of the story, Oswy bestows twelve ' ten-hide 
 vills ' ; he gives, that is, his rights, his superiority, over twelve 
 villages of about the average size, some of which are in Deira, 
 
 i Bound, Feudal England, 289. 
 
 a Stubbs, Const. Hist. ii. 4223 ; Rot. Parl. ii. 302. 
 
 3 Bright, Hist. EngL ii. 386 ; Hall's Chronicle, ed. 1809, p. 656. 
 
 4 Some of them seem to start from The Tribal Hidage and take the number 
 of hides to be 303,201 (Liebermann, Leges Anglorum, 10). Divide this by 5 
 to find the knight's fees. You have 60,640. In MS. Camb. Univ. Ii. vi. 25, f. 108 
 we find 60,215 knight's fees, 45,011 parish churches, 52,080 vills. Another note, 
 printed by Hearne, Bob. of Avesbury, 264, gives 53,215 knight's fees, 46,822 
 parish churches, 52,285 vills.
 
 512 The Hide. 
 
 some in Bernicia. It is a handsome gift made on a grand 
 occasion and in return for a magnificent victory ; but it is on 
 the scale of those gifts whereof we read in the West Saxon and 
 Mercian land-books, where the hides are given away by fives 
 and tens, fifteens and twenties. We feel no temptation to 
 make thirty-acre yard-lands of the units that Oswy distributed. 
 Were we to do this, we should see him bestowing not entire 
 villages (for a village of two-and-a-half hides would, at all 
 events in later days, be abnormally small) but a few of the 
 tenements that lie in one village and a few of those that 
 lie in another, and such a gift would not be like those gifts 
 that the oldest land-books record. And so we think that the 
 unit which Bede employs is our large hide. When he speaks 
 of the estates given to those churches with whose affairs he 
 is conversant, he will state the hidage correctly ; but when it 
 comes to the hidage of Sussex or Kent, he will report current 
 beliefs which are far from the truth. This is what we see in 
 later days. The officers at the Exchequer know perfectly 
 well that this man has fifty knight's fees and that man five, 
 but opine that there are 32,000, or, may be, 60,000 fees in 
 England 1 . 
 
 Evidence Observe how moderate Bede's estimate of hidage is when 
 he speaks of a small parcel of land of which he had heard 
 much, when he speaks of the holy island of Hii or lona. A 
 Pictish king gave it to Columba, who received it as a site 
 for a monastery. ' Neque enim magna est, sed quasi familiarum 
 quinque, iuxta aestimationem AnglorumV 'It is not a large 
 island; we might compare its size with that of one of our 
 English five-hide tuns.' The comparison would be apt. lona 
 
 1 Bede, Hist. Eccl. iii. 24 (p. 178) : ' donatis insuper xii. possessiunculis 
 terrarum, in quibus ablato studio militiae terrestris, ad exercendam militiam 
 caelestem, supplicandumque pro pace gentis eius aeterna, devotioni sedulae 
 monachorum locus facultasque suppeteret....Singulae vero possessiones x. erant 
 familiarum, id est simul omnes cxx.' In these villages there have been men who 
 owed military service ; they are not being ousted from their homes ; they are 
 being turned over as tenants to the church ; henceforth they will no longer be 
 bound to fight, and in consideration of this precious immunity, they will have 
 to supply the monks with provender. That is how I read this passage. Others 
 can and will read it to mean something very different. But if Bede were speaking 
 of decuriae of slaves, how could there be talk of military service ? The slaves 
 would not fight, and if the slaves belonged to eorls who fought, then how comes 
 it that Oswy can expropriate his nobles ? 
 
 8 Hist. Eccl. iii. 4 (p. 133).
 
 Beyond Domesday. 513 
 
 has 1300 Scotch acres or thereabouts 1 . Plough 600 acres; there 
 will be ample pasture left 3 . If, however, we interpreted his 
 statement about the 7000 hides of Sussex in a similar fashion, 
 the result would be ridiculous. The South Saxons had not 
 840,000 acres of arable ; our Sussex has not 940,000 acres of 
 any kind; their Sussex was thickly wooded. The contrast, 
 however, is not between two measures ; it is between knowledge 
 and ignorance. Bede's name is and ought to be venerated, 
 and to accuse him of talking nonsense may seem to some an 
 act of sacrilege. But about these matters he could only 
 tell what was told him, and we may be sure that his informants, 
 were, to say the least, no better provided with statistics than 
 were the statesmen of the fourteenth century 3 . 
 
 Also there is one case in which we have what may be called Evidence 
 
 . . ^ from 
 
 a very ancient, though not a contemporary, exposition of Bede s Seisey. 
 words. He tells us that Jthelwealh king of the South Saxons 
 gave to Wilfrid the land of 87 families called Seisey 4 . Then 
 there conies to us from Chichester the copy of a land-book 
 which professes to tell us more touching the whereabouts of 
 these 87 hides 5 . Ceadwealla with the approval of Archbishop 
 Wilfrid gives to a Bishop Wilfrid a little land for the construc- 
 tion of a monastery in the place called Seisey : ' that is to say 
 55 tributarii in the places that are called Seolesige, Medeminige, 
 Wihttringes, Iccannore, Bridham and Egesauude and also 
 Besseiiheie, Brimfastun and Sidelesham with the other villae 
 thereto belonging and their appurtenances ; also the land named 
 
 1 Keith Johnston, Gazetteer. 
 
 2 I do not suggest, nor does Bede suggest, that Hii was laid out in hides. He 
 is speaking only of size. 
 
 3 Bede gives to Anglesey the size of 960 families, to Man that of 300 'or 
 more.' Anglesey has 175,836 acres ; Man 145,011. Anglesey in 1895 had 
 ' under all kinds of crops, bare fallow and grass (mountain and heath land 
 excluded) ' 152,004 acres. Man 96,098. Anglesey had 24,798 acres growing 
 corn crops and 9,305 growing green crops, while the corresponding figures for 
 Man were 22,666 and 11,580. Bationalistic explanation of Bede's statements 
 would be useless. He is reporting vague guesses. 
 
 4 Hist. Eccl. iv. 13 (p. 232) : ' Quo tempore Bex JSdilualch donavit reverent- 
 issimo antistiti Vilfrido terram Ixxxvii familiarum, ubi suos homines, qui 
 exules vagabantur, recipere posset, vocabulo Selsesu, quod dicitur Latine Insula 
 Vituli Marini.' Bede goes on to describe the Seisey peninsula and Wilfrid's 
 foundation of a monastery. Wilfrid proceeded to convert the men who were 
 given him. They included two hundred and fifty male and female slaves whom 
 he set at liberty. 
 
 5 K. 992 (v. 32) ; B. i. 98. 
 
 M. 33
 
 514 The Hide. 
 
 Aldingburne and Lydesige 6 cassati, and in Geinstedisgate 6, 
 and in Mundham 8, and in Amberla and Hohtun 8, and in 
 Uualdham 4: that is 32 tributarii.' This instrument bears 
 date 683. Another purporting to come from 957 describes the 
 land in much the same fashion 1 . Where, let us ask, did the 
 makers of these charters propose to locate the 87 hides ? Some, 
 though not all, of the places that they mentioned can be easily 
 found on the map. We see Selsey itself ; hard by are Medmeny 
 or Medmerry, Wittering, Itchenor, Bird ham and Siddlesham. 
 At these and some other places that are not now to be found 
 were 55 hides. Then we go further afield and discover Alding- 
 bourn, Lidsey, Mundham, Amberley, Houghton and perhaps 
 Upper Waltham. But we have travelled far. At Amberley and 
 Houghton we are fifteen miles as the crow flies from Selsey 2 . 
 Apparently then, the 87 hides consist of a solid block of villages 
 at and around Selsey itself and of more distant villages that are 
 dotted about in the neighbourhood. Be it granted that these 
 land-books are forgeries ; still in all probability they are a good 
 deal older than Domesday Book 3 . Be it granted that the 
 number of 87 hides was suggested to the forgers by the words 
 of Bede 4 . Siill we must ask what meaning they gave to those 
 words. They distributed the 87 hides over a territory which is 
 at least eighteen miles in diameter 5 . Now it is by no means 
 unlikely that ^Ethelwealh's gift really included some villages 
 that were remote from Selsey. We have seen before now that 
 lands in one village may ' lie into ' another and a distant village 
 which is the moot-stow of a 'hundred.' But at any rate the 
 
 1 K. 464 (ii. 341). The 55 hides are reduced to 42, no mention is made of 
 Medemenige, Egesauude or Bessanheie, and the 32 hides are somewhat differently 
 distributed. 
 
 2 D. B. i. 17. The Bp of Chichester has 24 hides at Amberley. 
 
 8 I infer this from the thorough discrepancy that there is between these 
 charters and D. B. A forger at work after or soon before the Conquest would 
 have arranged the church's estates in a manner similar to that which we see in 
 King William's record. 
 
 4 As a matter of fact, however, it is not very easy to reconcile the earlier 
 charter with Bede's story. The charter makes the land proceed from the West- 
 Saxon Ceadwealla and says nothing of JSthelwealh, who, according to Bede, was 
 the donor. Mr Plummer, Bedae Opera, ii. 226, says that the forger betrays 
 his hand by calling Wilfrid archbishop. Really he seems to cut Wilfrid into two, 
 making of him (1) an archbishop, and (2) a bishop of the South Saxons. 
 See the attestations. 
 
 8 In D. B. i. 17 the bishop's manor at Selsey has but 10 hides and but 7 
 teamlands.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 515 
 
 forgers were not going to attempt the impossible task of cram- 
 ming ' the land of 87 families ' into the Selsey peninsula. 
 
 Therefore, in spite of Bede and The Tribal Hidage, we still Conclusion 
 remain faithful to the big hide. We have seen reason for the large 
 believing that in the oldest days the real number of the ' real ' 
 hides was largely over-estimated. It would be an interesting, 
 though perhaps an unanswerable, question whether any govern- 
 mental or fiscal arrangements were ever based upon these 
 inflated figures. A negative answer would seem the more 
 probable. In Bede's day there was no one to tax all England 
 or to force upon all England a scheme of national defence. So 
 soon as anything that we could dare to call a government of 
 England came into being, the truth, the unpleasant truth, 
 would become apparent bit by bit. All along bits of the truth 
 were well enough known. The number of hides in a village 
 was known to the villagers ; the kingling knew the number of 
 hides that contributed to his maintenance. As the folks were 
 fused together, these dispersed bits of truth would be slowly 
 pieced into a whole, though for a long while the work o'f co- 
 ordination would be hampered by old mythical estimates. 
 Perhaps The Burghal Hidage may represent one of the first 
 attempts to arrange for political purposes the hides of a large 
 province. There is still exaggeration, and, unfortunately for us, 
 new causes of perplexity are introduced as the older disappear. 
 On the one hand, statesmen are beginning to know something 
 about the facts; on the other hand, they are beginning to 
 perceive that tenements of equal size are often of very unequal 
 value, and to give the name hide to whatever is taxed as such. 
 Also there is privilege to be reckoned with, and there is 
 jobbery. It is a tangled skein. And yet they are holding fast 
 the equation IH. = 120A. 
 
 There is, however, another point of view from which the Continen- 
 ^vidence should be examined, though a point to which we can gie s ana 
 not climb. How will our big hide assort with the evidence that 
 comes to us from abroad? Only a few words about this question 
 can we hazard. 
 
 If we look to the villages of Germany, or at any rate of some The Ger- 
 parts of Germany, we see that the typical fully endowed peasant m 
 holds a mass of dispersed acre-strips, a Hufe, hoba, mansus 
 which, while it falls far short of our hide, closely resembles our 
 virgate. The resemblance is close. As our virgate is com- 
 
 53 2
 
 516 
 
 The Hide. 
 
 The Kon- 
 igshufe. 
 
 The Eng- 
 lish hide 
 and the 
 Koniys- 
 hiife. 
 
 pounded of acres, so this Hufe is compounded of acres, or day's- 
 works, or mornings (Morgen). When the time for accurate 
 measurement comes, these day-work-units differ somewhat widely 
 in extent as we pass from one district to another. The English 
 statute acre is, as we have already said 1 , an unusually large 
 day-work-unit. It contains 40'46 ares, while in Germany, if 
 there is nothing exceptional in the case, the Morgen will have 
 no more than from 25 to 30 ares 2 . This notwithstanding, the 
 Hufe, is generally supposed to contain either 30 or else 60 
 Morgen, the former reckoning being the commoner. In the 
 one case it would resemble our virgate, in the other our half- 
 hide. 
 
 Then, however, we see and it has occurred to us that some 
 solution of our difficulty might lie in this quarter that in 
 Germany there appears sporadically a unit much larger than 
 the ordinary Hufe, which is known as a Konigshufe or mansus 
 regalis. This is sometimes reckoned to contain 160, but some- 
 times 120 Morgen. It seems to be an unit accurately measured 
 by a virga regalis of 4*70 meters and to contain 21,600 square 
 virgae. In size it would closely resemble an English hide of 
 120 statute acres; the one would contain 47'736, the other 
 48'56 hectares. To explain the appearance of these large 
 units by the side of the ordinary Hufen, it has been said that 
 as the Emperor or German king reigned over wide territories 
 and had much land to give away, he felt the need'of some 
 accurate standard for the measurement of his own gifts, so that 
 he might be able to dispose of ' five manses ' or ' ten manses ' in 
 some distant province and, yet know exactly what he was doing. 
 This theory, however, does not tell us why the unit that was 
 thus chosen and called a king's Hufe or 'royal manse' was 
 much larger than an ordinary manse or Hufe, and we seem 
 invited to suppose that at some time or another a notion had 
 prevailed that when an allotment of land in a village was made 
 to a king, he should have for his tenement twice or thrice- or 
 four times as many strips as would fall to the lot of the 
 common man 3 . 
 
 The suggestion then might be made that the manse, terra 
 unius familiae, terra unius manentis, of our English documents 
 
 1 See above, p. 378. 2 Meitzen, op. cit. ii. 563. 
 
 3 Meitzen, op. cit., ii. 553-69; iii. 557-61; Lamprecht, Deutsches Wirt- 
 scbaftsleben, i. 348.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 517 
 
 is not the typical manse of the common man, but the typical 
 king's-manse. We might construct the following story : When 
 England was being settled, the practice was to give the common 
 man about 30 acres to his manse, but to give the king 120. 
 Thus in the administration of the royal lands a ' manse ' would 
 stand for this large unit. Then this same unit was employed 
 in the computation of the feorm, victus or pastus that was due 
 to the king from other lands, and finally the royal reckoning 
 got so much the upper hand that when men spoke of a 'manse' 
 or a 'family land' they meant thereby, not the typical estate of 
 the common man, but a four times larger unit which was thrust 
 upon their notice by fiscal arrangements. 
 
 Some such suggestion as this mc-y deserve consideration if The large 
 all simpler theories break down. But it is not easily acceptable. Continent. 
 It supposes that in a very early and rude age a natural use of 
 words was utterly and tracelessly expelled by a highly technical 
 and artificial use. This might happen in a much governed 
 country which was full of royal officials ; we can hardly conceive 
 it happening in the England of the seventh and eighth centuries. 
 Moreover, the continental evidence does not lie all on one side. 
 There was, for instance, one district in Northern Germany 
 where the term Hufe was given to an area that was but a trifle 
 smaller than 120 acres of our statute measure 1 . Also there are 
 the large Scandinavian allotments to be considered. Even in 
 Gaul on the estates of S l . Germain the mansus ingenuilis some- 
 times contained, if Gue'rard's calculations are correct, fully 
 as much arable land as we are giving to the hide 2 . Nor, 
 though we may dispute about the degree of difference, can it 
 be doubted that the Germanic conquest of a Britain that the 
 legions had deserted was catastrophic when compared with 
 the slow process by which the Franks and other tribes gained 
 the mastery in Gaul. Just in the matter of agrarian 
 allotment this difference might show itself in a striking form. 
 The more barbarous a man is, the more land he must have to 
 feed himself withal, if corn is to be his staple food. There were 
 
 1 Meitzeu, op. cit. ii. 566. The Kalenberger Hufe was a measure prevalent 
 in the district of Braunschweig-Liineberg. It contained 180 Morgen or 47-147 
 hectares. A hide made of 120 statute acres would contain about 48-56 hectares. 
 Apparently Dr Meitzen (ii. 113) has found no difficulty in accepting a hide of 
 120 acres as the normal share of the English settler. See also Lamprecht, 
 Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben, i. 348. 
 
 3 Polyptyque de 1'abbaye de S. Germain des Pr6s, ed. Longnon, i. 102.
 
 518 The Hide. 
 
 no ecclesiastics in England to maintain the continuity of agri- 
 cultural tradition. 'Also the heathen Germans in England had 
 a far better chance of providing themselves with slaves than 
 had their cousins on the mainland. Also it seems very possible 
 that throughout the wide and always growing realm of the 
 Frankish king, the fiscal nomenclature would be fixed by the 
 usages which obtained in the richest and most civilized of those 
 lands over which he reigned, and that the 'manse' that was 
 taken as the unit for taxation was really a much smaller 
 tenement than supported a family in the wilder and ruder 
 east. Besides, when in Frankland a tax is imposed which 
 closely resembles and may have been the model for our 
 danegeld, the mansus ingenuilis pays twice as much as the 
 mansus servilis 1 . This suggests that the Frankish statesmen 
 have two different typical tenements in their minds, whereas in 
 England all the hides pay equally. 
 The large No doubt at first sight 120 arable acres seem a husre 
 
 hide not too . _ 
 
 large. tenement for the maintenance of one family. But, though 
 the last word on this matter can not be spoken by those 
 ignorant alike of agriculture and physiology, still they may be 
 able to forward the formation of a sound judgment by calling 
 attention to some points which might otherwise be neglected. 
 In the first place, our 'acre' is a variable whose history is not 
 yet written. Perhaps when written it will tell us that the 
 oldest English acres fell decidedly short of the measure that 
 now bears that name and even that a rod of 12 feet was not 
 very uncommon. Secondly, when our fancy is catering for 
 thriftless barbarians, we must remember that the good years 
 will not compensate for the bad. . Every harvest, however poor, 
 must support the race for a twelvemonth. Thirdly, we must 
 think away that atmosphere of secure expectation in which we 
 live. When wars and blood-feuds and marauding forays are 
 common, men must try to raise much food if they would eat a 
 little. Fourthly, we must not light-heartedly transport the 
 three-course or even the two-course programme of agriculture 
 into the days of conquest and settlement. It is not impossible 
 that no more than one-third of the arable was sown in any 
 year 2 . Fifthly, we may doubt whether Arthur Young was 
 
 1 Pertz, Leges, i. 536 ; Ann. Bertin. (ed. Waitz) 81, 135 ; Bichter, Annalen, 
 ii. 400, 443 ; Diimmler, Gesch. d. Ostfrank. Beichs, i. 585. 
 8 Meitzen, op. cit. ii. 592-3.
 
 Beyond Domesday. 519 
 
 farther in advance of Walter of Henley than Walter was of the 
 wild heathen among whom the hides were allotted ; and yet 
 Walter, with all his learned talk of marl and manure, of second- 
 fallowing and additional furrows, faced the possibility of gar- 
 nering but six bushels from an acre 1 . Sixthly, we have to 
 provide for men who love to drink themselves drunk with beer*. 
 Their fields of barley will be wide, for their thirst is unquench- 
 able. Seventhly, without speaking of ' house-communities,' we 
 may reasonably guess that the household was much -larger in 
 the seventh than it was in the eleventh century. We might 
 expect to find married brothers or even married cousins under 
 one roof. Eighthly, there seems no reason why we should not 
 allow the free family some slaves : perhaps a couple of huts 
 inhabited by slaves ; there had been war enough. Ninthly, the 
 villein of the thirteenth century will often possess a full virgate 
 of 30 acres, and yet will spend quite half his time in cultivating 
 his lord's demesne. Tenthly, in Domesday Book the case of 
 the villanus who holds an integral hide is by no means un- 
 known 3 , nor the case of the villanus who has a full team of 
 oxen. When all this has been thought over, let judgment be 
 given. Meanwhile we can not abandon that .belief to which the 
 evidence has brought us, namely, that the normal tenement of 
 the German settler was a hide, the type of which had 120 acres 
 of arable, little more or less. 
 
 If we are right about this matter, then, as already said 4 . The large 
 some important consequences follow. We may once and for all the manor, 
 dismiss as a dream any theory which would teach us that from 
 the first the main and normal constitutive cell in the social 
 structure of the English people has been the manor. To call 
 the ceorl's tenement of 120 acres a manor, though it may have 
 a few slaves to till it, would be a grotesque misuse of words, 
 nor, if there is to be clear thinking, shall we call it an embryo 
 manor, for by no gradual process can a manor be developed 
 from it. There must be a coagulation of some three or four 
 such tenements into a single proprietary unit before that name 
 
 1 See above, p. 438. 
 
 2 Tacitus, Germania, c. 15, 23. The very lenient treatment by Abp 
 Theodore of the monk who gets drunk upon a festival tells a curious tale : 
 Haddan and Stubbs, Couucils, iii. 177; Robertson, Hist. Essays, 68. 
 
 3 Thus, e.g., D. B. i. 127, Fuleham : ' ibi 5 villani, quisque 1 hidam.' 
 
 4 See above, p. 360.
 
 520 The Hide. 
 
 can be fairly earned. That from the first there were units 
 which by some stretch of language might be called manors is 
 possible. The noble man, the eorl, may have usually had at 
 least those five hides which in later days were regarded as the 
 proper endowment for a thegn, and these large estates may 
 have been cultivated somewhat after the manorial fashion by 
 the slaves and freed-men of their owners. But the language of 
 Bede and of the charters assures us that the arrangement which 
 has been prevalent enough to be typical has been that which 
 gave to each free family, to each house-father, to each tax-payer 
 (tributarius) one hide and no more ; but no less. Such a use of 
 words is not engendered by rarities and anomalies. 
 
 Lastwords. However, we would not end, this essay upon a discord. 
 Therefore a last and peaceful word. There is every reason why 
 the explorers of ancient English history should be hopeful. We 
 are beginning to learn that there are intricate problems to be 
 solved and yet that they are not insoluble. A century hence 
 the student's materials will not be in the shape in which he 
 finds them now. In the first place, the substance of Domesday 
 Book will have been rearranged. Those villages and hundreds 
 which the Norman clerks tore into shreds will have been 
 reconstituted and pictured in maps, for many men from over all 
 England will have come within King William's spell, will have 
 bowed themselves to him and become that man's men. Then 
 there will be a critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon charters in 
 which the philologist and the paleographer, the annalist and 
 the formulist will have winnowed the grain of truth from the 
 chaff of imposture. Instead of a few photographed village maps, 
 there will be many ; the history of land-measures and of field- 
 systems will have been elaborated. Above all, by slow degrees 
 the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about 
 common things, will have become thinkable once more. There 
 are discoveries to be made; but also there are habits to be 
 formed.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Abbots, Secular, 242 
 
 Abingdon, Church of, 254, 295, 494 
 
 Abington, Vill of, 11 
 
 Acre, 369, 373-386, 518 
 
 Acre, Fiscal, 475-490 
 
 Acreage, Medieval statements of, 392 
 
 Acreage of counties, 407 
 
 Adultery, 281 
 
 Advocatus of church, 303 
 
 Agrarian morphology, 15, 16, 222, 362 
 
 Aids of boroughs, 174-176 
 
 Aids of counties, 473 
 
 Alfred's army, 189 
 
 Alfred, Will of Ealdorman, 245 
 
 Alfred, Will of King, 254 
 
 Alienable superiority, The King's, 241, 
 
 357 
 
 Alienation, Lord's consent to, 296 
 Alien, Franc, 171 
 Almende, 348 
 Alodial ownership, 154 
 Alodium, 153, 256 
 Altitonantis, 268, 452 
 Amber (measure), 440 
 Amerciamenta hominum, 277 
 Anathema in land books, 230, 251 
 Ancient demesne, 65, 167, 255 
 Ancillae, 34 
 Angild, 274, 282, 290 
 Anglesey, 513 
 Anglo-Saxon history, Fundamental 
 
 questions of, 221 
 Arable and appurtenances, 388 
 Arable, Extent of, 435-441 
 Arable, Beallotment of, 346-8 
 Archiductor, 306 
 Arenga of A.-S. book, 243 
 Arepennis, 375, 467 
 Armingford Hundred, 11, 12, 451 
 Army, Constitution of the, 156-7, 308 
 Arpentum, 375, 467 
 Ascripticii, 51, 53 
 Aston and Cote, 354 
 Athelney, Fort at, 188, 503 
 Attestation and consent, 247-252 
 Augustin's, St, Canterbury, 466 
 Automatic adjustment of taxes, 207 
 Avera, 130, 138, 169, 240 
 Aylesbury, 180 
 
 Balk, 364 
 
 Barley, 439 
 
 Barley-corns, 369 
 
 Bath, 229, 501 
 
 Battle Abbey, 97, 281 
 
 Beasts, Number of, 441 
 
 Bede, 228, 233, 242, 251, 358, 509-515 
 
 Beds or selions, 379, 383 
 
 Beer, Consumption of, 439, 519 
 
 Benefice, Ecclesiastical, 152 
 
 Beneficial hidation, 264, 448 
 
 Beneficium, 152, 300-1 
 
 Beneftcium oblatum, 75 
 
 Berewicks, 114, 333 
 
 Bergholt, 90 
 
 Berkeley, 113 
 
 Berkshire, 79, 156, 505 
 
 Bishop, Soldiers of a, 306 
 
 Bishop's cross, 251 
 
 Bishops-land, 286 
 
 Blythburg, 96 
 
 Blything, Hundred of, 96 
 
 Bodenregal, 240 
 
 Book-land, 154, 242, 244-258, 293 
 
 Boon-days, 77 
 
 Bordarii, 23-25, 38-41, 107, 363 
 
 Borough, 172-219 
 
 Boundaries in charters, 495 
 
 Bourg, The French, 214 
 
 Bovate, 395 
 
 Bracton on villeinage, 61 , 
 
 Brewing, 440 
 
 Bridge-work, 187 
 
 Broughton, Court at, 99 
 
 Brungar's case, 104 
 
 Buckingham, 176, 180, 196 
 
 Burbium, 214 
 
 Burgage tenure, 198 
 
 Burgesses, 179, 190 
 
 Burghal Hidage, The, 187, 455, 502-6, 
 
 515 
 
 Burh, 183-6 
 Burh-b<$t, 186-8 
 Burh-bryce, 183-4 
 Burh-geat, 184, 190 
 Burh-gemdt, 185 
 Burh-gri, 88, 184 
 Burh-riht, 214 
 Burhwaras, 190
 
 522 
 
 Index. 
 
 Buri, 36, 329 
 
 Bury and barrow, 183 
 
 Cambridge, 181, 187, 191, 211 
 Cambridgeshire, 10, 12, 13, 62, 
 
 129-139, 445, 468, 476 
 Cambridgeshire Inquest, 1, 10 
 Campus, 380 
 
 Canterbury, 89, 184, 191, 201 
 Canterbury, Church of, 87, 97, 228, 
 
 466 
 
 Carucage of 1198, 127 
 Carucate, 395, 404, 483 
 Casati, 335, 359 
 Castle guard, 151 
 Causa of gifts, 293 
 Celtic rural economy, 338 
 Celtic villages, 15, 222, 467 
 Censarii, 57 
 Ceorl, The, 30, 44, 58 
 Cervisarii, 57 
 Charter and writ, 262-4 
 Chattels of the boor, 38 
 Chertsey, Church of, 492 
 Cheshire, 458 
 Chester, 188, 211 
 Chief, Tenants in, 170 
 Chilcombe, 449, 496 
 Church-right, 229, 242 
 Churches, Lands of the, 227-9, 253 
 Churches, Ownership of, 144 
 Church-scot, 290, 305, 321 
 Cwitas, 183 
 Classification of mankind, 23, 30, 
 
 122, 140 
 
 Cniht, 8, 191, 303, 309 
 Ciiihts, Gilds of, 191 
 Cnut, Laws of, 55, 87, 239, 261, 282 
 Cnut's geld, 3, 55, 446 
 Cnut's writs, 260 
 Co-aration, 142, 149 
 Cognizance, Claims of, 93, 97, 282-293 
 Colchester, 198, 201 
 Coleness, Hundred of, 355 
 Coliberti, 28, 33, 36, 329 
 Collective liability, 208 
 Coloni, 51 
 
 Colonization of villages, 365, 501 
 Colonization under Ine, 238, 367 
 Comes, 8 
 
 Comital manors, 167 
 Commendation, 67-75, 102, 104, 326 
 Common fields, 15, 379 
 Common property of burgesses, 200 
 Common, Rights of, 143, 202, 348, 
 
 352 
 
 Communalism, 149, 203, 341 
 Community, The borough, 198, 200 
 Community, The village, 142-150, 
 
 340-356 
 
 Compound householders, 125 
 Confessor, see Edward 
 Conqueror, Writs of the, 266 
 Conquest, Norman, Effects of, 60, 
 
 135, 172 
 
 Consent of Witan, 247-252 
 Consuetudines, 67-8, 76-9 
 Continuity of hidation, 491, 509 
 Contract, Free, 171 
 Convertible husbandry, 366, 425 
 Conveyance in court, 323 
 Co-ownership, 143-4, 341 
 Cornage, 147 
 
 Cornwall, 410, 425, 428, 463, 467 
 Corporation, 204-209, 253, 341. 349, 
 
 351 
 
 Corroboration of land-books, 251 
 Cotarii, 23-25, 38-41 
 Cotlif, 334 
 Cotseti, 39 
 Cotsetla, 328 
 
 Counties, Detached pieces of, 9 
 Counties, Farms of, 169 
 Counties, Geld of, in cent. xi. 
 
 448-475 
 Counties, Geld of, in cent. xii. 7, 
 
 474 
 
 Counties, Populousness of, 19, 20 
 County Hidage, The, 455 
 County .towns, 176 
 Court, Borough, 185, 210 
 Court, Seignorial, 91, 94, 275-8 
 Court, Suit of, 85, 95, 140, 322 
 Crediton, 113, 228, 501 
 Criminal and civil, 83 
 Criminal law and revenue, 79 
 Criminal law and serfage, 29, 32 
 Crosses on charters, 251, 262-5 
 Crown, Pleas of the, 82, 261, 282 
 Cultura, 380 
 Curia, 94, 110, 125 
 Cursing clause, 230, 262 
 Customary acres, 373-6 
 Customary land, 78 
 
 Dairy farming, 115 
 
 Danegeld, see Geld 
 
 Danelaw, The, 139 
 
 Danish influence, 139, 339, 395, 397 
 
 Day's labour, 377 
 
 Dearer birth, 163 
 
 Decuriae of slaves, 361, 512 
 
 Deer-hays, 169, 240, 307 
 
 Default of justice, 284 
 
 Default of service, 159 
 
 Defence, 123 
 
 Delegation of franchises, 84, 289 
 
 Demense, Ancient, 65, 167 
 
 Demesne and geld, 55 
 
 Demesne, Boroughs on royal, 218 
 
 Demesne land of manor, 119 
 
 Denmark, King's feorm in, 238 
 
 Derby, 200 
 
 Derbyshire, 90, 108, 166, 427 
 
 Devastation of villages, 363 
 
 Devonshire, 116, 215, 425, 428, 463, 
 
 467 
 Dialogus de Scaccario, on villeinage, 
 
 53, 61 
 Diet of Englishmen, 440
 
 Index. 
 
 523 
 
 Diplomatics, 247-252, 262-5 
 Dispositive and evidentiary, 263 
 Divine service, Tenure by, 151 
 Division of acres, 384 
 Dog-bread, 146, 440 
 Dominium, 224 
 
 Dominium and dominicum, 53-4 
 Dominium and imperium, 342 
 Dona of boroughs, 174-176 
 Dona of counties, 473 
 Doomsmen, 95, 97, 102, 211 
 Dorset, 175, 461 ' 
 Double hide, 393 
 Dover, 193, 209 
 Downton, 498 
 Drengage, 308 
 Dunwich, 96 
 Duxford, 136 
 
 Earl, 8, 168-170 
 
 Earl, Third penny of, 95 
 
 Bashing, 503 
 
 East and West, 22, 199, 339 
 
 Ecclesiastical jurisdiction, 279-282 
 
 Economic grades, 41 
 
 Edmund, Abbey of S'., 55, 88, 240 
 
 Edward the Confessor and the geld, 3 
 
 Edward the Confessor's charters, 259, 
 
 491 
 Edward the Elder builds burgs, 186, 
 
 504 
 
 Edwardi Lex, 52 
 Ell (measure), 372 
 
 Ely, Church of, 77, 89, 92, 162, 269 
 Ely, Isle of, 476, 509 
 Embryo manors, 139, 519 
 Emeudable crimes, 89 
 Eminent domain, 342 
 Enfranchisement, 31 
 English and French, 62 
 Epping Forest, 356 
 Escheat propter defectum, 295 
 Escheat propter delictum, 103, 295 
 Essex, 35, 64, 116, 363, 430, 480 
 E strays, 148 
 Ethel, 256 
 Euti, 467 
 
 Evesham, Church of, 235, 453 
 Exaggeration, Medieval, 510 
 Exchequer Domesday, 2 
 Exeter, 156, 201 
 Exon Domesday, 2 
 Extra-hundredal places, 9 
 
 Fallowing, 399 
 
 Familiae, Terra unius, 358 
 
 Family, Size of, 437, 519 
 
 Famine, 364, 518 
 
 Fareham, 449 
 
 Farm of manors, 62, 146 
 
 Farthingland, 479 
 
 Fealty, 59, 293 
 
 Fee farm, 152 
 
 Feet as measures, 369 
 
 Feldgrasswirtschaft, 425 
 
 Feorm, The king's, 234, 318, 324 
 
 Fertinus, 479 
 
 Festuca, 323 
 
 Feudalism, 223, 240, 307 
 
 Feudalism and clerical claims, 280 
 
 Feudalism and vassalism, 171 
 
 Feudum, 152-5, 301, 318 
 
 Field systems, 365, 425, 437, 486, 518 
 
 Fiht-wite, 88 
 
 Firma burgi, 204 
 
 Fission of vills, 14, 365, 367 
 
 Five hide unit, 121, 156-164 
 
 Fleta, 397 
 
 Flurzwang, 347 
 
 Fold-soke, 76, 91, 442 
 
 Foldworthiness, 77, 91 
 
 Folk-land, 244-258 
 
 Food of beasts, 441 
 
 Food of the nation, 436, 518 
 
 Foreign precedents, 230, 249, 321 
 
 Forensic service, 50 
 
 Forest measures, 372, 376 
 
 Forfeiture of land, 103, 295 
 
 Forfeitures, The six, 88 
 
 Franchise, 1, 43, 50, 82 
 
 Francigena, 46 
 
 Francus, 46 
 
 Frankalmoin, 151 
 
 Prankish danegeld, 518 
 
 Frankish gifts of land, 297 
 
 Prankish manors, 321 
 
 Prankish military service, 161 
 
 Freda, 278 
 
 Freedom, see Liberty 
 
 Free-holding, 46-50 
 
 Free men, see Liberi homines 
 
 Free villages, 129, 339, 352 
 
 Freiziigigkeit, 42, 51 
 
 French diplomatics, 265 
 
 French law of seignorial justice, 82, 
 
 94, 284 
 
 Fre(51s-b<5c, 270 
 Frigesoca, 93 
 Furlong, 372, 379 
 Fyrdwite, 159, 161 
 Fyrdworthiness, 160 
 
 Gablatores, 57 
 
 Gafol-land, 44 
 
 Gebiir, 28, 36, 59, 328 
 
 Geld, 3-8, 24, 54, 120-129, 206-8, 
 
 324, 391, 408, 446-490 
 Geld in cent. xii. 6, 460, 474 
 Geld Inquests, 478 
 Geneat, 59, 327 
 Genossenschaft, 342 
 Geography of D. B., 9, 407 
 Gerefa, The, 327, 392 
 German burgs, 189 
 Gersuma, 57, 147 
 Gift and loan, 299, 317 
 Gifts of land, 293 
 Gilds, 191, 201 
 Gloucester, 182, 205 
 Gloncestershire, 205, 395, 412
 
 524 
 
 Index. 
 
 Goad (measure), 372, 377 
 Goats, 442 
 
 Godwin, House of, 168 
 Grantham, 213 
 Grass-swine, 57 
 
 Halimot, 82, 86, 91 
 
 Hall, The, 109-110, 125 
 
 Ham, 332 
 
 Hamlets, 15-16 
 
 Hamton, The suit about, 85, 124, 
 
 158 
 
 Hampshire, 153, 155 
 Harold, Eapacity of, 168 
 Harrow (Middlesex), 112 
 Hawgavel, 204 
 Hawks, Prices of, 169 
 Haws in boroughs, 114, 182, 196 
 Head-penny, 33 
 Hearth-penny, 38 
 Heir-land, 257 
 Heming's Cartulary, 227 
 Henley, Walter of, 378, 397, 438, 
 
 441, 488, 519 
 Henry the Fowler, 189 
 Herdwicks, 333 
 Hereford, 199, 209 
 Heriot, 73, 155, 199, 298 
 Hertfordshire, 137-8 
 Heyford, Map of, 382 
 Hide, The, 336, 357-520 
 Hide, The, of Leicestershire, 468-470 
 Highways, Eoyal, 87 
 Hiwisc, 358 
 Hiwscipe, 358 
 Holtding, 355 
 Homage, 69 
 Homines dei, 275 
 Honour and manor, 81 
 Horses, 442 
 Hospites, 60 
 
 House communities, 349 
 House-peace and soke, 99 
 Hufe, German, 387, 515 
 Hundred, Elder of the, 147 
 Hundredal soke, 90, 94 
 Hundred-moot, 93, 97 
 Hundreds, 90, 148, 259, 267, 287, 
 
 451-5, 459 
 Huntingdon, 204 
 Husting, 211 
 HyldaS, 69 
 
 Idealism, Archaic, 389 
 Ideas, Legal, 9, 224 
 Identification of parcels, 493 
 Immunists, 277 
 
 Immunity, The English, 270, 292 
 Immunity, The Frankish, 278 
 Inclosure of common fields, 16, 436 
 Ine's foster, 237 
 Ine's laws, 237, 320, 332 
 Infangennethef, 82, 276 
 Ingeldable carucates, 409 
 Inheritance, 145 
 
 Inheritance, Precarious, 309 
 
 Inland, 55, 121, 331 
 
 Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, 1 
 
 Inquisitio Eliensis, 1 
 
 Intercommoning of vills, 355 
 
 Intermixed manors, 136 
 
 Intermixed strips, 337 
 
 Inward, 130, 169, 240 
 
 lona, 512 
 
 Ipswich, 211 
 
 Iron, Dues paid in, 45 
 
 Judices, 211 
 Jurisdiction, 101, 277 
 Justice, Feudal and Franchisal, 80 
 Justice, Seignorial, 52, 80-107, 258- 
 292, 310 
 
 Kalenberg Hufe, 517 
 
 Kent, 360, 466, 484 
 
 Kind, Payments in, 57 
 
 King and crown, 167, 253, 300 
 
 King as immunist, 276 
 
 King as landlord. 65, 166-7 
 
 King's land, 231-258, 351 
 
 King's thegns, 162 
 
 Kingship, Elective, 254 
 
 Kinship, 349 
 
 Knight, see Cniht 
 
 Knight's fees, Number of, 511 
 
 Knight's service, 151 
 
 Konigshufe, 516 
 
 Leen-land, 75, 160, 301-318 
 
 Last, The Kentish, 27 
 
 Laeti, 27, 37 
 
 Land, Kinds of, 257 
 
 Land-books, 226-258, 261, 286-8, 520 
 
 Land-c6p, 323 
 
 Land-loans, 75 
 
 Landrica, 59, 125 
 
 Language, Legal, 225, 267 
 
 Law Latin, 267 
 
 Lawmen, 88, 211 
 
 Leases, 301-318 
 
 Leges Edwardi on township, 148 
 
 Leges Henrici on serfage, 30 
 
 ,, on soke, 80 
 
 Lehn, The German, 301 
 Lehnrecht, 171, 311 
 Leicester, 156, 197, 218 
 Leicestershire, 409, 421, 468 
 Leis Williame on serfage, 51 
 Leominster, 56, 58 
 Letters patent, 263 
 Lewisham, 58 
 Lex equitandi, 305 
 Liberalis homo, 43, 59 
 Liber burgus, 217 
 Li beri } homines, 23, 66-7, 90, 101 
 Liberties within boroughs, 210 
 Liberty, 42-47 
 Lincoln, 211 
 
 Lincoln, Church of, 92, 103 
 Lincolnshire, 90, 106, 139, 147, 428, 445
 
 Index. 
 
 525 
 
 Linear measurement, 432 
 
 Little Domesday, 1 
 
 Loaf -eaters, 29 
 
 Loan aud gift, 299, 317 
 
 Locus standi of villeins in court, 52 
 
 London, 174, 178, 180, 184, 191, 409 
 
 Lord and man, 67, 285-9 
 
 Lord, Duty of finding a, 70 
 
 Lord's responsibility for crime, 38 
 
 Lord's responsibility for taxes, 24, 
 
 54, 59, 122-128, 323 
 Lordless villages, 141, 149 
 Lordship and landlordship, 104j 172 
 Lug (measure), 372 
 Lyng (Somerset), 188, 503 
 Lysing, The Danish, 44 
 
 Mainpast, 29 
 
 Maintenance of quarrels, 71 
 
 Malmesbury, Church of, 72, 492 
 
 Man, Isle of, 513 
 
 Man-b6t, 31, 54, 70 
 
 Manentes, 335, 359 
 
 Manerium, 64, 107, 500 
 
 Manor, 107-128, 326-340, 519 
 
 Manor and vill, 129-150, 334 
 
 Manorial organization, 319, 360, 391, 
 
 519 
 
 Mansa, 108, 359 
 Mansio, 109 
 
 Mansus indominicatus, 320 
 Mansus ingenuilis, 517 
 Mantal, Swedish, 387 
 Manumission, 31 
 Manure, 76, 442 
 Manusfirma, 309 
 Maps, 15, 16, 362, 381-3 
 Mark, The German, 354, 368 
 Market, 192-6 
 
 Marriage and wardship, 310 
 Marshland Fen, 367 
 Meadows, 348, 443 
 Measures, 368 
 
 Mediatization of boroughs, 212-218 
 Mellitarii, 57 
 Merchant gilds, 191 
 Merchet, 199 
 
 Mercia, Hides of, 507, 510 
 Merovingian Gaul, 224 
 Middlesex, 477 
 
 Migrantibus, Lex Salica de, 350 
 Miles, 8, 163 
 Military service, 156-164, 235, 273, 
 
 294 
 
 Mills, 144 
 Mill-soke, 77 
 Mixed tribunals, 275 
 Modern conveyances, 232 
 Monasticism, 325 
 Money rents in D. B., 57 
 Moneyers, 195 
 Moot-worthiness, 260 
 Morgen, 377, 516 
 Movability of land, 10, 13 
 Mufflae, 31 
 
 Mund and soke, 100 
 Mural houses, 188 
 
 Nation, Lands of the, 252 
 
 Nativi, 51 
 
 New vills, 14, 365, 367 
 
 Night's farm, 146, 169, 236-8, 319 
 
 Nottinghamshire, 90, 108, 127, 166, 
 
 427 
 
 Norfolk, 106, 146, 429, 483 
 Norman perches, 376 
 Norman tenures, 154 
 Northampton, 204, 208 
 Northamptonshire, 204, 457, 468 
 Northamptonshire Geld Boll, 2, 457 
 Northumberland, 7 
 Norwich, 192, 199, 200 
 Nucleated villages, 15 
 
 Oaths of thegns, 163 
 
 Oatns of villeins, 53 
 
 Oats, 439, 441 
 
 Office and property, 168 
 
 Ordeal, 281 
 
 Orwell, 63, 95, 129, 133, 136, 352 
 
 Oswald, S'., 268, 289, 304-313 
 
 Oswald's law, 85, 227, 267-9, 308-310, 
 
 424 
 
 Oswy's gift, 511 
 
 Overrating and underrating, 447, 461 
 Ownership, Ancient and modern, 397 
 Ownership and superiority, 231, 342 
 Ownership, Limited, 299 
 Ox, Price of, 44, 444 
 Oxford, 156, 179, 188, 198, 202 
 Oxfordshire, 92, 169, 445, 505 
 Oxgang, 395 
 
 Pannage, 57, 307 
 Parage, 143 
 Pardons of geld, 8 
 Parishes, Modern, 12, 499 
 Parishes, Number of, 511 
 Parliamentary boroughs, 173 
 Partible inheritance, 145 
 Partitionary taxation, 120, 206, 391, 
 
 450, 480 
 
 Pasture, 143, 170, 203, 348, 442, 446 
 Pastus, The King's, 234, 272 
 Patria potestas, 349 . 
 
 Patronage of church, 303 
 Peace of borough, 184, 193 
 Peculium, 28 
 Penal stipulation, 230 
 Penenden, The suit at, 87 
 Perch (measure), 372-9, 518 
 Pershore, Church of, 290, 452 
 Persona ficta, 353, 356 
 Pertica, 274 
 
 Peter pence, 59, 125, 288 
 Petroc, Church of S*., 55 
 Pipe Bolls, Geld in, 400, 460 
 Placita et forisfacturae, 84, 94 
 Plan of D. B., 9 
 Plough, 142, 373
 
 526 
 
 Index. 
 
 Ploughgang, 395 
 
 Ploughing, A day's, 378 
 
 Ploughing, A year's, 398, 435 
 
 Poleham, 485 
 
 Police of villa, 147 
 
 Population, 17-22, 408, 437 
 
 Port and burh, 195 
 
 Portmen, 195, 212 
 
 Portreeve, 202 
 
 Pound and hide, 465 
 
 Precarium, 300 
 
 Prediality of serfage, 28 
 
 Prices, 44, 169, 365, 444 
 
 Priest of village, 148, 437 
 
 Protection and commendation, 70 
 
 Provender rents, 146, 236, 316, 440 
 
 Pursuit of fugitive serfs, 42, 51 
 
 Purveyance, 239 
 
 Quasi hides, 409 
 
 Radchenistres, 44, 56, 66, 305 
 
 Radmanni, 57, 305 
 
 Kamsey, Church of, 260, 319, 393 
 
 Kapes of Sussex, 409 
 
 Recedere, 47, 68, 152, 162 
 
 Rectitudines, 37, 327 
 
 Eeductions of hidage, 410, 506, 510 
 
 Eedemption of land, 60 
 
 Eeeve of borough, 209 
 
 Regio, 167 
 
 Belief, 153, 155, 310 
 
 Rents, Money, in D. B., 57 
 
 Restraint on alienation, 296 
 
 Reveland, 169 
 
 Ribble and Mersey, Land between, 
 
 458 
 
 Ridingmen, 305, 307 
 Rochester, Church of, 466 
 Rod or perch, 372-9 
 Rogatio testium, 250 
 Roman law, 224, 303 
 Roman taxation, 470 
 Roman villa, 327, 337 
 Romney, 89 
 
 Rood (measure), 372, 382 
 Rothley, 114 
 Rounceys, 442 
 Royal boroughs, 182 
 Rutland, 471 
 
 Sake, 84 
 
 Sale of chattels, 147, 194 
 
 Sale of land, 47, 100, 105, 144 
 
 Sale of slaves, 33 
 
 Salica, Ownership in Lex, 347, 350 
 
 Salisbury, The oath at, 172 
 
 Sanford, Hundred of, 90 
 
 Sawston, 136, 387, 443 
 
 Scattered steads (Einzelhofe), 15, 16, 
 
 140 
 
 Seal, 265 
 
 Secularizations, 301 
 Sedgebarrow, 227 
 Seignory over commended men, 74 
 
 Selions, 383 
 
 Selsey, 228, 234, 513 
 
 Semibos, 142 
 
 Senior and Vassus, 283, 300 
 
 Serfage, see Servi 
 
 Serfage, Transmission of, 31 
 
 Serjeanty, 151, 162 
 
 Servi, 23-25, 26-36, 325, 519 
 
 Servi, Price of, 44 
 
 Services due from book-land, 294 
 
 Services of geneat, 328-332 
 
 Services of Oswald's tenants, 306 
 
 Services of sokemen, 76 
 
 Services of villeins, 56 
 
 Sextarius, 365 
 
 Sheep, 442 
 
 Sheriff, 8, 205, 255 
 
 Sheriff, Revenues of, 169 
 
 Shots in fields, 380 
 
 Shrewsbury, 199, 207 
 
 Singulare pretium, 274 
 
 Sinuous furrows, 379 
 
 Slavery, see Servi 
 
 Socage, Tenure in, 66 
 
 Sochemanni, 23-25, 62, 66-79, 95, 
 
 104, 125-6, 134-5, 213 
 Soke, 67-69, 80-107, 115, 258-292 
 Solta et persolta, 290 
 Somerset, 116, 166, 177, 215, 367, 479 
 Southwark, 98 
 Square measure, 370, 432 
 Staffordshire, 426 
 Stages, Theory of normal, 345 
 Stamford, 199, 200, 211 
 Staines, 111, 181 
 Staninghaw, 181 
 Statistical Tables, 400-3 
 Statistics, Domesday, 399 
 Stipulation, 250 
 Stock on manors, 116, 422 
 Stoke by Hisseburn, 330 
 Strip-holding, 337, 346 
 Sub-commendation, 74 
 Subinfeudation, 155 
 Subsidiary liability, 126 
 Suburbium, 214 
 Suffolk, 62, 77, 106, 117, 125-6, 147, 
 
 429, 483 
 
 Suit of court, 85, 95, 140, 322 
 Suitors borrowed, 95, 102 
 Sulung, 360, 395, 466, 484 
 Sunbury, 111 
 
 Superficial measurement, 370, 432 
 Surnames of vills, 14, 365, 367 
 Sussex, 510, 513 
 Swine, 419, 442 
 
 Tacitus on land-tenure, 347 
 
 Tackley, Map of, 381 
 
 Tagwerk, 377 
 
 Tailla, 57, 147 
 
 Taunton, 87, 102, 113, 158, 214, 272, 
 
 276, 499 
 
 Team, Plough, 142, 372, 416 
 Teamland, 404, 418-446
 
 Index. 
 
 527 
 
 Tenure, Dependent, 46, 73, 151, 154, 
 
 171, 317 
 
 Tenure in boroughs, 178 
 Tenure, Kinds of, 151 
 Terminology of D. B., 8 
 Terra ad unam carucam, 404, 418-446 
 Testamentary power, 242, 297 
 Teste meipso, 264 
 Testimony of villeins, 53 
 Tewkesbury, 55 
 Thanet, Isle of, 509 
 Thegn, 64-5, 160-6 
 Thegnage, 308 
 Theow, 26-36 
 Thing and person, 27 
 Third penny, 95, 170 
 Three field system, 365, 486 
 Three life leases, 303 
 Thumbs as measures, 369 
 Tidenham, 330 
 Tithe, 322 
 Torksey, 177 
 Township, see Vill 
 Township moot, 21, 350 
 Townsmen, 59, 140, 288 
 Trevs, Celtic, 15, 340 
 Tribal Hidage, The, 455, 506-8 
 Tributarii, 335, 359 
 Tributum, 234, 239, 272 
 Trinoda necessitas, 240, 270-4 
 Tun, 59, 110 
 Twelfhindi, 44 
 
 Twelve-fold b6t, 290, 322 r 
 Two field system, 365, 486 
 
 Ulna, The king's, 370 
 Undersettles, 41 
 Unhidated estates, 448 
 Uniformity of villages, 390 
 Usufruct, 299 
 Utware, 158 
 
 Values, Domesday, 411, 444, 463-473 
 
 Vassallus, 293 
 
 Vavassores, 81 
 
 Vendible soke, 100 
 
 Verge of the palace, 184 
 
 Vicecomes, 8 
 
 Victus, The king's, 234 
 
 Vicus, 333 
 
 Vill and borough, 173, 185, 216 
 
 Vill and village, 11-21, 129-150, 346- 
 
 356 
 
 Villa and vicus, 333 
 Villa, The Roman, 221, 327, 337 
 Villages, Detached portions of, 367 
 Villani, 23, 36-66, 125-6, 172, 324 
 Villani, Teams of, 416 
 Villani and Servi, 26, 30, 172 
 Vineyards, 375 
 
 Virga regalis, 375, 516 
 Virgate, 384-7, 391 
 
 Wallingford, 98, 176, 179, 193 
 
 Wall-work, 188 
 
 Wara, 123 
 
 Wardship and marriage, 310 
 
 Warnode, 123 
 
 Warranty of man by lord, 71 
 
 Warwick, 98, 156, 209, 218 
 
 Warwickshire, 169, 459 
 
 Washingwell, The grant of, 245, 255 
 
 Week-work, 77 
 
 Well, Wapentake of, 103 
 
 Wergild of ceorl, 44 
 
 Wergild of serf, 31 
 
 Wergild of thegn, 163 
 
 Wessex, Hides of, 507 
 
 Westminster, Church of, 111, 290, 452 
 
 Westminster Hall, 192 
 
 Wettorley, Hundred of, 95, 131 
 
 Wheat, Yield of, 437 
 
 Whittlesford, 444-5 
 
 Wicks, 115, 333 
 
 Wight, Isle of, 233, 509 
 
 Wiggenhall, 367 
 
 Wihtrsed,. Privilege of, 271 
 
 Wikarii, 115 
 
 Wiltshire, 175, 215, 475, 479 
 
 Winchcombe, 174, 180 
 
 Winchester, 178, 180, 182, 190-1 
 
 Winchester, Church of, 272, 331, 
 
 496-9 
 
 Wintoniensis, Codex, 331, 499 
 Witan, 247-252 
 Wites, Ecclesiastical, 281 
 Wites, The right to, 87, 259, 274-9 
 Withdrawal from lord, 47, 48, 68, 100, 
 
 142, 153, 162 
 
 Witnesses of charters, 247-252, 262-4 
 Wong, 380 
 Woods, 348, 419 
 Worcester, 190, 194 
 Worcester, Church of, 88, 158-160, 
 
 194, 227, 424, 452 
 Worcestershire, 88, 159, 169, 267-8, 
 
 451, 506 
 
 Words of inheritance, 297 
 Works and rents, 57-8, 77 
 Writ and charter, 262-4 
 Wye, Hundred of, 97 
 
 Yard, 372, 385 
 
 Yardland, 385 
 
 Yield of corn, 437, 441, 444, 519 
 
 Yoke, 360 
 
 York, 211 
 
 York, Church of, 87 
 
 Yorkshire, 139, 397, 426, 4C8, 4S6 
 
 Young, Arthur, 378, 438
 
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