It is necessary to remember that there were three processes, in each one of which error might arise:
I. In the actual survey and its returns, 'by reason of the insignificance of some estates, or by reason of forgetfulness, or inaccuracy, or confusion, or doubt on the part of local jurors and witnesses, or of the clerks who indited their statements'.[83]
II. In the collection and transmission of the returns, by the loss of a 'leaflet or rotulet of the commissioners' work'.[84]
III. In the transcription of the returns into D.B., or into the I.C.C., plus, in the case of the former, the rearrangement and abridgment of the materials.
We may now quit this part of our subject, claiming to have settled, by the aid of the I.C.C., a problem which has puzzled generations of antiquaries, namely: 'What was the Domesday hide?'[85] We have shown that it denoted a measure of assessment composed of four (geld) virgates or a hundred and twenty (geld) acres. What relation, if any, it bore to area and to value is a question wholly distinct, on which the next portion of this essay may throw quite a new light.
VI. THE FIVE-HIDE UNIT
It is one of the distinctive and valuable features of the Inq. Com. Cant. that it gives us the total assessment for each Vill of which it treats before recording the several Manors of which that Vill is composed, the aggregate assessments of which Manors make up the total assessment for the Vill. In this feature we have something which Domesday does not contain, and which (independently of its checking value),[86] gives us at once those Vill assessments which we could only extract from the Domesday entries by great labour and with much uncertainty. Let us see then if these Vill assessments lead us to any new conclusions on the whole assessment system.
The first point that we notice is this. The five-hide unit is brought into startling prominence. No careful student, one would suppose, of Domesday, can have failed to be struck by the singular number of Manors in the hidated portion of the realm, which are assessed in terms of the five-hide unit, that is to say, which are entered as of five hides or some multiple of five hides. This is specially the case with towns, and some years ago, in one of my earliest essays, I called attention to the fact, and explained its bearing in connection with the unit of military service.[87] Yet no one, it would seem, has been struck by the fact, or has seen that there must be some significance in this singular preponderance of five-hide Manors. Now what the Inquisitio here does for us is to show us that this preponderance is infinitely greater than we should gather from the pages of Domesday, and that when the scattered Manors are pieced together in their Vills, the aggregate of their assessments generally amounts either to five hides or to a multiple of the five-hide unit. Thus the rural townships are brought into line with towns, and we learn that in both the assessment was based on the five-hide unit.
Let us now take a typical Hundred and test this theory in practice:
| Hundred of Staines | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (Inq. Com. Cant., pp. 11-17) | |||||
| Vill. | Hides | Ploughlands | Valets (T.R.E.) | ||
| Bottisham | 10 | 20 | £16 | 0 | 0 |
| Swaffham (1) | 10 | 16 | 11 | 10 | 0 |
| Swaffham (2) | 10 | 13¼ | 12 | 10 | 0 |
| Wilbraham | 10 | 17 | 20 | 0 | 0 |
| Stow-cum-Quy | 10 | 11 | 14 | 10 | 0 |
| — | —— | — | — | — | |
| 50 | 77¼ | £74 | 10 | 0 | |