Let us ask ourselves how the burden that is known as burh-bót, the duty that the Latin charters call constructio, munitio, restauratio, defensio, arcis (for arx is the common 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[742], 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.
Military geography.
The exceedingly neat and artificial scheme of political geography that we find in the midlands, in the country of 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[743]. There has come down to us in a sadly degenerate form a document which we shall hereafter call ‘The Burghal Hidage[744].’ It sets forth, so we believe, certain arrangements made early in the tenth century for the defence of Wessex against Danish 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, Porchester, 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, Buckingham, 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 wall-work.
Let us now look once more at the Oxford of Domesday Book. The king has twenty ‘mural houses[745]’ which belonged to Earl Ælfgar; they pay 13s. 2d. He has a house of 6d. which is constructively at Shipton; one of 4d. at Bloxham; one of 30d. at Risborough and two of 4d. 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 everything except army service and wall-work.’ Then of Chester we read this[746]:—‘To repair the wall and the bridge, the reeve 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[747]
Henry the Fowler and the German burgs.
We may doubt whether the duty of the county to its borough has gone no farther than mere ‘wall-work.’ A tale from the older Saxony may come in well at this point. When 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 Æthelflæd, 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[748]. 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.
The shire thegns and their town houses.
Turning to England we shall not forget how in the year 894 Alfred divided his forces into two halves; half were to take the field, half to remain at home, besides the men who were to hold the burgs[749]; 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[750]. We find that the baron of Domesday Book has a 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 Æthelweard an estate of seven hides at Tistead in Hampshire and therewith the haws within the burg of Winchester that belonged to those seven hides[751]. When the Bishop of Worcester loaned out lands to his thegns, the lands carried with them haws in the ‘port’ of Worcester[752]. 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[753]. 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 knights in the borough.