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

by Frederic William Maitland

This step seems to have been very generally taken before 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 consideration. 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[794]. 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 (firma 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[795]. 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 his farm[796].’ The sheriff of Northamptonshire is liable to the king for a round sum as the farm of the shire, but ‘the burgesses’ of Northampton 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.

The sheriff and the borough’s farm.

We must not be in haste to expel the sheriff from the boroughs of the shire, or to bring the burgesses into immediate contact with the king’s treasury. We must remember that 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 concerned, the royal treasury knows nothing of any boroughs[797]. 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 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 community and the geld.

We also see that the ‘geld’ that the borough has to pay 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[798]. 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[799]. 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 prevailed. 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 arrangements was being inappropriately applied to what had become 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 repartitionable.

Partition of taxes.

For all this, however, we must be careful not to see more 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[800]. 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 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[801]. We do not say that the complaint of the burgesses at Shrewsbury points to no more than an automatic readjustment 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[802]

No corporation implied by the farming of the borough.

Returning, however, to the case of Northampton, it certainly seems to tell us of a composition, not indeed between the burgesses and the king, but between the burgesses and the 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 purse; they may divide the surplus every year[803], or we may suspect them of drinking the profits as soon as they are made.

Borough and county organization.