“This is the description of the inquiry concerning the lands, which the king’s barons made, according to the oath of the sheriff of the shire and of all the barons and their Frenchmen and of the whole hundred-court—the priests, reeves and six villeins from every vill. In the first place [they required] the name of the manor; who held it in the time of King Edward, and who holds it now, how many hides [hidæ] are there, how many ploughs in demesne and how many belonging to the men, how many villeins, cottars, slaves, freemen and sokemen; how much woodland, meadow and pasture, how many mills and fisheries; how much has been added to or taken from the estate, how much the whole used to be worth, and how much it is worth now; and how much each freeman or sokeman had or has there. All this thrice over; with reference to the time of King Edward, and to the time when King William gave the land and to the present time; and if more can be got out of it than is being drawn now.”[[321]]
Now, although the fact may not appear on a first reading of these passages, all these details were entirely subsidiary to one main object—the exact record of the local distribution of the king’s “geld” or Danegeld, the one great direct tax levied on the whole of England. Domesday is essentially a financial document; it is a noteworthy example of that insistence on their fiscal rights which was eminently characteristic of the Anglo-Norman kings, and was the chief reason why they were able to build up the strongest government in Western Europe. Every fact recorded in Domesday bears some reference, direct or indirect, to the payment of the Danegeld, for the king’s commissioners knew their business, and the actual scribes who arranged the results of the survey were remorseless in rejecting all details which did not fit into the general scheme of their undertaking. It should not escape observation that this fact prepares many subtle pitfalls for those who would draw a picture of English society based on the materials supplied by Domesday; but more of this will be said later, for there are certain questions of history and terminology which demand attention at the outset.
The most important of those points is the meaning of those “hides,” which are mentioned in both of the above extracts. This, indeed, is the essential clue to the interpretation of Domesday, and it is unfortunately very elusive, for the term can be traced back to a very early period of Anglo-Saxon history and more than one meaning came to be attached to it in the course of its long history. When we first meet the “hide,” the word seems to denote the amount of land which was sufficient for the support of a normal household; it is the average holding of the ordinary free man of Anglo-Saxon law. This much is reasonably certain, but difficulties crowd in upon us when we attempt to estimate the capacity of the hide in terms of acreage. Much discussion has arisen about this point, but we may say that at present there are two main theories on the subject, one assigning to the hide one hundred and twenty acres of arable land, the other some much smaller quantity, such as forty-eight or thirty acres, in either case with sufficient appurtenances in wood, water, and pasture for the maintenance of the plough and its oxen. Just now the prevailing view seems to be that the areal capacity of the hide may have varied from county to county—that, for instance, while we know that in the eleventh century the hide stood at one hundred and twenty acres in Cambridgeshire and Essex, it may not improbably have contained forty-eight acres in Wiltshire. Important, or rather vital, as is the question for students of Anglo-Saxon history, it does not concern us to quite the same extent, and we must pass on to a change which came over men’s conception of this tenement and intimately affects the study of Domesday.
Our normal free householder, the man who held a “hide” in the seventh century, was burdened with many duties towards the tribal state to which he belonged. He had to serve in the local army, the fyrd, to keep the roads and bridges in his neighbourhood in repair, to help to maintain the strong places of his district as a refuge in time of invasion, and to contribute towards the support of the local king or ealdorman. Out of these elements, and especially the last, was developed a rudimentary military and financial system which is recorded in certain ancient documents which have come down to us from the Anglo-Saxon period, and deserve our attention as the direct ancestors of Domesday Book. They may be described as a series of attempts to express, in terms of hides, the capacity of the several districts of England with which they deal, for purposes of tribute or defence. The eldest of these documents, which is now generally known as the Tribal Hidage,[[322]] is a record of which the date cannot be fixed within a century and a half, while very much of its text is quite unintelligible, but in form it is clear enough. It consists of a string of names with numbers of hides attached; thus, the dwellers in the Peak are assigned 1200 hides, the dwellers in Elmet 600, the Kentishmen 15,000, and the Hwiccas 7000. Now, it is obvious that all these are round numbers, as in fact are all the figures occurring in the document; and this is a point of considerable importance, for it implies that the distribution of hides recorded in this early list was a matter of rough estimate, rather than of computation, since we cannot suppose that there were just 1200 free householders in the Peak of Derbyshire, nor exactly 15,000 in Kent. These figures are intended to represent approximately the respective strength of such districts, and are expressed in even thousands or hundreds because numbers of this kind will be easy to handle, a practice which we can see to be inevitable, for a barbarian king of the time of Beda would be a very unlikely person to institute statistical inquiries as to the exact number of hides under his “supremacy.” But the point that concerns us is, as we shall see later, that the distribution of hides in Domesday, for all its appearance of statistical precision, is in reality just as much a matter of estimate and compromise as was the rough reckoning which is recorded in the Tribal Hidage.
These remarks apply equally to the next document in the series of fiscal records which leads up to Domesday. Probably in the reign of Edward the Elder, when Wessex was recovering from the strain of the great Danish invasion, some scribe drew up a list of strong places or “burhs,” mostly in that country, with the number of hides assigned to the maintenance of each, and here again we find round figures resembling those which we have noticed in the Tribal Hidage.[[323]] In this way 700 hides are said to belong to Shaftesbury, 600 to Langport, 100 to Lyng. Apparently the wise men of Wessex have decreed that an even number of hides, roughly proportional to the area to be defended, should be assigned to the upkeep of each of those “burhs,” and have left the men of each district to settle the incidence of burden among themselves. It will be seen that the system on which this document (which is conveniently called the “Burghal Hidage”) is based is much more artificial than that represented in the Tribal Hidage—in the latter we are dealing with “folks” or “tribes,” if the word be not expressed too strictly; here we have conventional districts, the extent of which is evidently determined by external authority. This being so, it becomes possible to make certain suggestive comparisons between the Burghal Hidage and Domesday Book. Thus the former assigns 2400 hides to Oxford and Wallingford, respectively, and 1200 to Worcester; and if we count up the number of hides which are entered in the Domesday surveys of Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Worcestershire, we shall find that in all three cases the total will come very near to the number of hides assigned to the towns which represent these shires in the Burghal Hidage; the correspondence being much too close to be the result of chance. Hence, if the distribution of hides in the Burghal Hidage is artificial, we should be prepared for the conclusion that the similar distribution in Domesday is artificial also.
A century passed, and England was again being invaded by the Danes. In the vain hope of buying off the importunate enemy the famous Danegeld was levied, originally as an emergency tax, but one which was destined to be raised, at first sporadically, and then at regular intervals until the end of the twelfth century. This new impost must, one would suppose, have called for a re-statement of the old Hidages, but no such record has come down to us. On the other hand we possess a list of counties with their respective Hidages annexed, which is generally known as the “County Hidage,” and assigned to the first half of the eleventh century. This document[[324]] forms a link between the Burghal Hidage and Domesday; for, while it agrees with the older record in the figures which it gives for Worcestershire, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire, its estimate approximates very closely to the Domesday assessment of Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, and Bedfordshire.
And so we come to the Norman Conquest. At the very beginning of his reign, William, undeterred by the legend of his saintly predecessor, who had seen the devil sitting on the money bags, and had therefore abolished the Danegeld, laid on the people a geld exceeding stiff. At intervals during his reign a “geld” was imposed: in particular, in 1083, he raised a tax of seventy-two pence on the hide, the normal rate being only two shillings. It is not improbable that the grievance caused by this heavy tax may have been one chief reason why Domesday Book was compiled. We have seen enough to know that the system of assessment which underlies Domesday was, in principle at least, very ancient. It must have become very inequitable, for mighty changes had passed over England even in the century preceding the Conquest. We know that William had tried to rectify matters by drastic reductions of hidage in the case of individual counties, and it is by no means improbable that the Domesday Inquest was intended to be the preliminary to a sweeping revision of the whole national system of assessment. William died before he could undertake this, and so far as we know it was never attempted afterwards, for it has been pointed out that in 1194 the ransom of Richard I. was raised in certain counties according to the Domesday assessment.[[325]] This rigidity of the artificial old system makes its details especially worthy of study, for it is strange to see a fiscal arrangement which can be traced back to the time of Alfred still capable of being utilised in the days of Richard I. and Hubert Walter.
PORTION OF A PAGE OF DOMESDAY BOOK
(THE BEGINNING OF THE BERKSHIRE SECTION)
What, then, are the main features of this system? Much of its vitality, cumbrous and unequal as it was, may doubtless be ascribed to the fact that it was based on the ancient local divisions of the country, the shires, wapentakes or hundreds, and vills. Put into other words, the distribution of the hides which we find in Domesday is the result of an elaborate series of subdivisions. At some indefinitely distant date, it has been decreed that each county shall be considered to contain a certain definite number of hides, that Bedfordshire, for example, shall be considered to contain—that is, shall be assessed at—1200 hides. The men of Bedfordshire, then, in their shire court, proceeded to distribute these 1200 hides among the twelve “hundreds” into which the county was divided, paying no detailed attention to the area or population of each hundred, nor even, so far as can be seen, obeying any rule which would make a hundred answer for exactly one hundred hides, but following their own rough ideas as to how much of their total assessment of their county each hundred should be called upon to bear. The assessment of the hundreds being thus determined, the next step was to divide out the number of hides cast upon each hundred among the various vills of which it was composed, the division continuing to be made without any reference to value or area. And then the artificiality of the whole system is borne in upon us by the most striking fact—the discovery of which revolutionised the study of Domesday Book—that in the south and west of England the overwhelming majority of vills are assessed in some fraction or multiple of five hides.[[326]] The ubiquity of this “five-hide unit” is utterly irreconcilable with any theory which would make the Domesday hide consist of any definite amount of land; a vill might contain six or twenty real, arable hides, scattered over its fields, but, if it agreed with the scheme of distribution followed by the men of the county in the shire and hundred courts, that vill would pay Danegeld on five hides all the same. The Domesday system of assessment, then, was not the product of local conditions but was arbitrarily imposed from above. The hide was not only a measure of land, but also a fiscal term, dissociated from all necessary correspondence with fact.