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

by Frederic William Maitland

We have thus to consider the burh (1) as a stronghold, a 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[770]. 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[771]. 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 imply a resident population of buyers and sellers; it does not imply the existence of retailers[772]

Military and commercial elements in the borough.

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[773]. 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.

The borough and agriculture.

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, 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 stronghold. 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.

Burgesses as cultivators.

As a rule, quite half of the burgesses in any of those county towns that are fully described in the survey are the king’s own 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[774]. This looks as if in this case the soil had been not royal but ‘comital’ land 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 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[775]’. 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[776]. 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 tenure.

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 introduction of ‘burgage tenure’ seems to be regarded as the very essence of the enfranchisement[777]. 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 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[778]. 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[779]

Eastern and western boroughs.