Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England

by Frederic William Maitland

Some examples of this remarkable arrangement should be given. First we will look at Oxford. The king has many houses; the Archbishop of Canterbury has 7; the Bishop of 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[711]. 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[712]. 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[713]. 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 ‘belongs to Oxfordshire, but nevertheless it is in Wallingford.’ 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 of heterogeneity.

When we have obtained this clue, we soon begin to see that 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[714]. 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.[715] 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 Evesham 2; the Bishop of Hereford 2; Robert of Bellême 3; Robert Fitzhamon 5, and divers other persons of note had some 29 houses among them[716]. However poor, however small Winchcombe may have been, it radically differed from the common manor and the common village.

Burgesses attached to manors.

We have seen above how in the Conqueror’s day the Abbey of Westminster had a manor at Staines[717] and how that manor included 48 burgesses who paid 40s. a year. Were those burgesses 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 ðam lande Stæningehaga) within London and all other things that had belonged to Staines[718]. Is not the guess permissible that Staining Lane in the City of London[719], 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[720]; 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.

Tenure of the borough and tenure of land within the borough.

We may for a moment pass over two centuries and turn to the detailed account of Cambridge given to us by the Hundred Rolls, the most elaborate description that we have of any medieval borough. Now in one sense the ‘vill’ or borough of Cambridge belongs to the king, and, under him, 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[721]. 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 example, hold three messuages in the vill of Cambridge; ‘but’ say the sworn burgesses ‘what they pay for the same, we do not know and can not discover[722].’ How could it be otherwise? Domesday Book shows us that the Count of Britanny had ten burgesses in Cambridge[723]. 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 thereabouts 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[724]

The king and other landlords.

Perhaps no further examples are needed. But this tenurial 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[725]. 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 Winchester[726]. 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 burgess; in the former a good deal of rent will be paid, not to him, nor to the community as his farmers, but to those who are filling the shoes of the thegns of the shire.

The oldest burh.