XIII. THE WORDS 'SOLINUM' AND 'SOLANDA'[192]
Several years ago I arrived at the conclusion that the identity of these two words was an unsupported conjecture. So long as it remained a conjecture only, its correction was not urgent; but since then, as is so often the case, the result of leaving it unassailed has been that arguments are based upon it. There appeared in the English Historical Review for July 1892 a paper by Mr Seebohm, in which that distinguished scholar took the identity for granted, as his no less distinguished opponent, Professor Vinogradoff, has done in his masterly work on Villainage in England.
I believe the alleged identity was first asserted by Archdeacon Hale, who wrote in his Domesday of St. Paul's (1858), p. xiv:
The word solanda, or, as it is written at p. 142, scolanda, is so evidently a Latinized form of the Anglo-Saxon sulung, or ploughland, and approaches so near to the Kentish solinus, that we need scarcely hesitate to consider them identical.
Let us start from the facts. In the Domesday of Kent we find the form solin, or its Latin equivalent solinum, used for the unit of assessment, like the hide and the carucate in other counties. In the Kent monastic surveys it is found as sullung or suolinga. But when we turn to the Domesday of St. Paul's, we find—first, that instead of being universal, as in Kent, it occurs only in three cases; secondly, that the form is solande, solanda, scholanda, scolanda, or even (we shall see) Scotlande; thirdly, that it is not employed as a unit of assessment at all.
The three places where the term occurs in the Domesday of St. Paul's are Drayton and Sutton in Middlesex, and Tillingham in Essex. Hale would seem to have arrived at no clear idea of what the word meant. At p. xiv he wrote that 'a solanda consisted of two hides, but probably in this case the hide was not of the ordinary dimension'. At p. lxxviii he inferred, from a reference to 'la Scoland' in a survey of Drayton, that '"ploughed land" would seem to be opposed to "Scoland"'. At p. cx he was led by the important passage—'De hydis hiis decem, due fuerunt in dominio, una in scolanda, et vii. assisæ'—to suggest that it 'appears to denote some difference in the tenure'. This last conjecture seems the most probable. If we take the case of Sutton and Chiswick, we read in the survey of 1222:
Juratores dicunt quod manerium istud defendit se versus regem pro tribus hidis preter solandam de Chesewich que per se habet duas hidas, et sunt geldabiles cum hidis de Sutton.
Hale (p. 119) believed that this Solande de Chesewich was no other than the Scotlande thesaurarii of 1181, namely the prebend of Chiswick. The above passage should further be compared with the survey of Caddington (1222):
Dicunt juratores quod manerium istud defendit se versus regem pro x. hidis ... preter duas prebendas quæ sunt in eadem parochia.
The formula is the same in both cases, and a solanda was clearly land held on some special terms, and was not a measure or unit of assessment at all. Indeed Hale himself admitted that it could not be identified with one or with two hides.