In Lincolnshire we may find an unbroken series of fourteen entries each of which gives us an instance of equal rating[1481]. In both Lincolnshire and Yorkshire such cases are common, but, while in Lincolnshire over-rating is rare, in Yorkshire under-rating is very rare. Fewer are the over-rated than the under-rated counties; but there are some for which the figures can not be given, and, as immense Yorkshire is set before us as much over-rated, the balance must be nearly redressed. But further, we may see that the relation between A and B is apt to change somewhat suddenly at the border of a county. The best illustration is given by the twin shires of Leicester and Northampton, the one over-rated, the other grossly under-rated. Another good illustration is given by the south-western counties. Wiltshire is heavily over-rated; Dorset, as a whole, very equally rated; Somerset decidedly under-rated, while when we come to Devon and Cornwall we enter a land so much underrated that, had we only the account of these two counties, the assumption that is implied in our terms ‘under-rated’ and ‘over-rated’ would never have entered our heads.

Unhidated estates.

Now for one cause of the aberration of A from B we have not far to seek; it is a cause which will make A less than B and which may reduce A to zero. It is privilege. Certain estates have been altogether exempt from geld. In particular many royal estates have been exempt. ‘Nescitur quot hidae sint ibi quia non reddidit geldum’—‘Nunquam geldavit nec scitur quot hidae sint ibi’—‘Rex Edwardus tenuit; tunc 20 hidae sed nunquam geldaverunt’:—such and such like are the formulas that describe this immunity. The number of actually geldant hides is here reduced to zero, and sometimes the very term ‘hides,’ so usually does it imply taxation, is deemed inappropriate. But these royal estates do not stand alone. Often enough some estate of a church has been utterly freed from taxation. The bishop of Salisbury, for example, has a great estate at Sherborne which has gelded for 43 hides; but ‘in this same Sherborne he has 16 carucates of land; this land was never divided into hides nor did it pay geld[1482].’

Beneficial hidation.

But then again, we have the phenomenon which has aptly been called ‘beneficial hidation.’ Without being entirely freed from the tax, a manor has been rated at a smaller number of hides than it really contains. ‘There are 5 hides’ says a Gloucestershire entry, ‘3 of them geld, but by grant of the Kings Edward and William 2 of them do not geld[1483].’ ‘There are 8 hides there’ says another entry ‘and the ninth hide belongs to the church of S^t. Edward; King Æthelred gave it quit [of geld][1484].’ ‘There are 20 hides; of these 4 were quit of geld in the time of King Cnut[1485].’ ‘The Bishop [of Winchester] holds Fernham [Fareham] in demesne; it always belonged to the bishopric; in King Edward’s day it defended itself for 20 hides, and it does so still; there are by tale 30 hides, but King Edward gave them thus [i.e. granted that they should be 20 hides] by reason of the vikings, for it [Fareham] is by the sea[1486].’ ‘Harold held it of King Edward; before Harold had it, it defended itself for 27 hides, afterwards for 16 hides because Harold so pleased. The men of the hundred never heard or saw any writ from the king which put it at that figure[1487].’ We have chosen these examples because they give us more information than we can often obtain; they take us back to the days of Cnut and of Æthelred; they tell us of the depredations of the vikings; they show us a magnate fixing the rateable value of his estate ad libitum suum. But our record is replete with other instances in which we are told that by special royal favour an estate has been lightly taxed[1488]. What is more, there are many other instances in which we can hardly doubt that this same cause has been at work, though we are not expressly told of it. When in a district which as a whole is over-rated, or but moderately under-rated, we come upon a few manors which are extravagantly under-rated, then we may fairly draw the inference that there has been ‘beneficial hidation.’

Effect of privilege.

Certainly this will account for much, and we have reason to believe that this disturbing force had been in operation for a long time past and on a grand scale. There is an undated writ of Æthelred[1489], which ordains that an immense estate of the church of Winchester having Chilcombe for its centre and containing 100 hides shall defend itself for one hide. In Domesday Book Chilcombe does defend itself for one hide though it has land for 88 teams[1490]. But further, Æthelred is decreeing nothing new; his ancestors, his ‘elders,’ have ‘set and freed’ all this land as one hide ‘be the same more or less.’ Behind this writ stand older charters which are not of good repute. Still we can see nothing improbable in the supposition that Æthelred issued the writ ascribed to him and that what he said in it was substantially true. Before his day there may have been no impost that was known as a ‘geld’; but there may have been, as we have endeavoured to show, other imposts to which land contributed at the rate of so much per hide. We suspect that ‘beneficial hidation’ had a long history before Domesday Book was made.

Divergence of hide from teamland.

But it will not account for all the facts that are before us; indeed it will serve for few of them. Privilege can account for exceptional cases; it will not account for steady and consistent under-rating; still less will it account for steady and consistent over-rating. We must look elsewhere, and for a moment we may find some relief in the reflection that by the operation of natural and obvious causes an old rate-book will become antiquated. There will be more ‘teamlands’ than there are gelding hides because new land has been brought under cultivation; on the other hand, land will sometimes go out of cultivation and then there will be more gelding hides than there are teamlands. Now that there is truth here we do not doubt. As we have already said[1491], the stability of agrarian affairs in these early times may easily be overestimated. But we can not in this direction find the explanation of changes that take place suddenly at the boundaries of counties.

Partition of the geld.

A master hand has lately turned our thoughts to the right quarter. There can we think be no doubt that, as Mr Round has argued, the geld was imposed according to a method which we have called the method of subpartitioned provincial quotas[1492]. A sum cast upon a hundred has been divided among that hundred’s vills; a sum cast upon a vill has been divided among the lands that the vill contains. It is in substance the method which still governs our land-tax, and in this very year our attention has been pointedly called to its inequitable results. But, whereas in later centuries men distributed pounds, shillings and pence among the counties, our remoter ancestors distributed hides or carucates or acres. The effect was the same; and it is not unlikely that they could pass with rapidity from acres to pence, because the pound had 240 pence in it and the fiscal hide had 120 acres. So the complaint urged this year that Lancashire is under-taxed and Hertfordshire over-taxed[1493] would have been in their mouths the complaint that too many hides had been cast on the one county and too few on the other.

Distribution of hides.

We will not repeat Mr Round’s convincing arguments. Just to recall their character, we will notice the beautiful hundred of Armingford in Cambridgeshire[1494]. In Edward’s day it had 100 hides divided among fourteen vills, six of which had 10 hides apiece, while eight had 5 hides apiece. Before 1085 the number of hides in the hundred had been reduced from 100 to 80; the number of hides in each of the ‘ten-hide vills’ had been reduced to 8; and each ‘five-hide vill’ had got rid of one of its hides. Obviously such results as these are not obtained by a method which begins by investigating the content of each landholder’s tenement. The hides in the vill are imposed from above, not built up from below[1495].

The Worcestershire hidage.

We have no wish to traverse ground which must by this time be familiar to all students of Domesday. But, having in our eye certain ancient statements about the hidage of England, we will endeavour to carry the argument one step further. In Worcestershire we have strong evidence of a neat arrangement of a whole county. In the first place, we are told that ‘in this county there are twelve hundreds, whereof seven, so the shire says, are so free that the sheriff has nothing in them, and therefore, so he says, he is a great loser by his farm[1496].’ Then we are told that the church of Worcester has a hundred called Oswaldslaw in which lie 300 hides. Then we remember that notorious charter (Altitonantis) which tells how this triple hundred of Oswaldslaw was made up of three old hundreds, called Cuthbertslaw, Wulfhereslaw and Wimborntree[1497]. Then, turning to the particulars, we find that exactly 300 hides are ascribed to the various estates which S^t. Mary of Worcester holds in this triple hundred. Those particulars are the following:—

The Worcester estate.

We have here preserved the order in which Domesday Book names the estates, but have added some brackets which may serve to emphasize the artificiality of the system. Then, looking back once more at our Altitonantis, we see Edgar adding lands to the 50 hides at Cropthorn, so that ‘a perfect hundred’ may be compiled, and the lands that he adds seem to be just those which in our table are bracketed with the Cropthorn estate.

The Westminster estate.

Thus we have disposed of three out of those twelve ‘hundreds’ of which Worcestershire is composed and also of 300 hides of land. Next we perceive that the church of Westminster is said to hold 200 hides. Reckoning up the particulars, we find, not indeed 200, but 199.

The Pershore estate.

Then the church of Pershore has just 100 hides; they are distributed thus:—

It is easy to divide these manors into two groups, each of which has 50 hides. The county also tells us that the church of Pershore ought to have the church-scot from ‘the whole 300 hides,’ that is, as well from the 200 allotted to Westminster as from the 100 which Pershore holds[1498].

The Evesham estate.

Then Evesham Abbey has, we are told, 65 hides in the hundred of Fissesberge. ‘In that hundred,’ it is added, ‘lie 20 hides of Dodingtree and 15 hides in Worcester make up the hundred.’ The 65 hides which Evesham holds are allotted thus:—

The residue of Worcestershire.

We have dealt heretofore with 665 hides. Let us now reckon up all the hides in Worcestershire that we have not yet counted. The task is not perfectly straightforward, for we have to meet a few difficult questions. In order that our account may be checked by others, we will set forth its details. We will go through the survey noting all the hides which we have not already reckoned.

We have here therefore 539 hides to be added to the 665 of which we rendered an account above. We thus bring out a grand total of 1204 hides. Perhaps the true total should be exactly 1200; but at any rate it stands close to that beautiful figure. And now we remember how we were told that there were ‘twelve hundreds’ in Worcestershire from seven of which the sheriff got nothing. Of these twelve the church of Worcester had three in its ‘hundred’ of Oswaldslaw, the church of Westminster two, the church of Pershore one, and the church of Evesham one. But the Evesham or Fissesberge hundred was not perfect; it required ‘making up’ by means of 15 hides in the city of Worcester and 20 in the hundred of Dodingtree. Thus five hundreds remain to be accounted for, and in its rubrics Domesday Book names just five, namely, Came, Clent, Cresselaw, Dodingtree and Esch. We can not allot to each of these its constituent hides, for we never can rely on Domesday Book giving all the ‘hundredal rubrics’ that it ought to give, and the Worcestershire hundreds were subjected to rearrangement before the day of maps had dawned[1502]. An intimate knowledge of the county might achieve the reconstruction of the old hundreds. But, as it is, we seem to see enough. We seem to see pretty plainly that Worcestershire has been divided into twelve districts known as hundreds each of which has contained 100 hides. It is an anomaly to be specially noted that one of the jurisdictional hundreds, one which has been granted to the church of Evesham, has only 65 hides and can only be made up into a ‘hundred’ for financial purposes by adding to it 20 hides lying in another jurisdictional hundred and the 15 hides at which the city of Worcester is rated.

The County Hidage.

The moment has now come when we may tender in evidence an ancient document which professes to state the hidage of certain districts. There are three such documents which should not be confused. We propose to call them respectively (1) The Tribal Hidage, (2) The Burghal Hidage, and (3) The County Hidage; and this is their order of date. For the two oldest we are not yet ready. The youngest professes to give us a statement about the hidage of thirteen counties. We have it both in Latin and in Old English. It has come down to us in divers manuscripts, which do not agree very perfectly. We will here give its upshot, placing in a last column the figures at which we have arrived when counting the hides in Domesday.

The County Hidage.

Date of the document.

Dr Liebermann has said that the text whence these figures are derived was probably compiled in English and in the eleventh century[1504]. If we put faith in it, we shall be inclined to set its date at some distance before that of Domesday Book. But our first question should be whether it merits credence; whether it was written by some one who knew what he was about or whether it is wild guesswork. Now when we see that the scrupulous Eyton brought out the hides of Staffordshire at 499, or rather at 499 H 2¹³⁄₃₀ V, and that this document makes them 500, we shall begin to take it very seriously, without relying on our own 505, the result of hasty addition. We have also seen enough to say that 1200 for Worcestershire is very near the mark. As regards other counties, we set so little reliance upon our own computation, that we are not very willing to institute a comparison; but we have given Bedfordshire 1193 hides[1505] and this document gives it 1200; we have given Oxfordshire 2412 and this document gives it 2400; we have given Gloucestershire 2388[1506] and two versions of this document give it 2400. Having seen so much agreement, we must note some cases of violent discord. For Wiltshire 4800 seems decidedly too high, though we have brought the number of its hides above 4000. The figure given to Cambridgeshire is almost twice that which Domesday would justify, and the figures given to Cheshire, Shropshire and Northamptonshire are absurdly large when compared with the numbers recorded in 1086. These cases are enough to show that, though no doubt some or all of the transcribers of The County Hidage must be charged with blunders, the divergence of the copies from Domesday can not be safely laid to this account. About certain counties there is just that agreement which we might expect, when we remember how precarious our own figures are. About certain other counties there is utter disagreement. We infer therefore that the original document did not truly state the hidage as it stood in 1086; but may it not have represented an older state of things.

The Northampton Geld Roll.

Let us take one case of flagrant aberration. Three copies tell us that Northamptonshire has 3200 hides; one that it has 4200. The balance of authority inclines therefore to 3200. Domesday will not give us half that number. But let us turn to the Northamptonshire Geld Roll[1507], the date of which Mr Round places between the Conquest and 1075[1508]. It gives the county 2663¹⁄₂ hides. So here we have a case in which between 1075 and 1086 a county was relieved of about half of its hides[1509]. Also at 2664 we are within a moderate distance of 3200. But the Geld Roll does more than this. It represents Northamptonshire as composed of 28 districts; 22 of these are called ‘hundreds’; two are ‘two-hundreds’; four are ‘other-half hundreds,’ or, as we might say, ‘hundred-and-a-halfs.’ We work a sum:—

(22+4+6) × 100 = 3200.

The result will increase our respect for The County Hidage. Now, when the Geld Roll was made, some of the ‘hundreds’ of Northamptonshire contained their 100 hides apiece, but others were charged with a smaller number, which generally was round, such as 80, 60, 40 hides; and this arrangement is set before us as that which existed ‘in the days of Edward the king.’ If therefore we put faith in The County Hidage and its 3200 hides, we must hold that it speaks to us from the earlier part of the Confessor’s reign or from some yet older time.

Value of The County Hidage.

Is it too good, too neat to be true? Before we pass a condemnatory judgment we must recall the case of Worcestershire, its twelve ‘hundreds’ and 1200 hides. Also we must recall the case of the Armingford hundred in Cambridgeshire, where we have seen how in William’s reign an abatement of 20 per cent, was equitably apportioned among the fourteen villages, and the 100 hides were reduced to 80[1510]. Moreover, if in Domesday Book we pass from Northamptonshire to the neighbouring county of Leicester, we see a startling contrast. The former is decidedly ‘under-rated’; the latter is ‘over-rated.’ Leicestershire has about 2500 carucates, while Northamptonshire has hardly more than half that number of hides. The explanation is that Northamptonshire has obtained, while Leicestershire is going to obtain a reduction. The Pipe Rolls of the twelfth century show us that either under Rufus or under Henry I. this sadly over-taxed county was set down for exactly 1000 carucates.

Reductions of hidage.

As to the other cases in which there is a strident discord between Domesday and The County Hidage, the case of Chester, where the contrast is between some 500 hides and a round 1200 will not perhaps detain us long, for we may imagine, if we please, that the Chestershire of Cnut’s day was much larger than the territory described under that name in 1086[1511]. The 2500 hides attributed to Cambridgeshire and the 2400 attributed to Shropshire may shock us, for, if they are correctly stated, they point to reductions of 50 per cent. or thereabouts. But we have seen some and are going to see some other large abatements.

The county quotas.

On the whole, we believe that this County Hidage, though it has come to us in transcripts some or all of which are careless, is an old and trustworthy document, that it is right in attributing to the counties neat sums of hides, such as 1200 and 2400, and that it is right in representing the current of change that was flowing in the eleventh century as setting towards a rapid reduction in the number of hides. Only in one case, that of Warwickshire, have we any cause to believe that it gives fewer hides to a county than are given by Domesday; here the defect is not very large, and, besides the possibility of mistranscription, we must also remember the possibility of changed boundaries[1512].

The hundred and the hundred hides.

There is one other feature of this document that we ought to notice. Let us compare the number of hides which it gives to a county with the number of ‘hundreds’ which that county contains according to Domesday Book. The latter number we will place in brackets[1513].

Bedfordshire 1200 hides [12 hundreds]: Northamptonshire 3200 [28 hundreds which, however, have been reckoned to be 32[1514]]: Worcestershire 1200 [12]: Warwickshire 1200 [12]: Cheshire 1200 [12]: Staffordshire 500 [5]: Wiltshire 4800 [40]: Cambridgeshire 2500 [17]: Huntingdonshire 850 [4]: Gloucestershire 2400 [39[1515]]: Herefordshire 1500 [19]: Oxfordshire 2400 [uncertain, but at least 19]: Shropshire 2400 [13].

In six out of thirteen cases we seem to see a connexion of the simplest kind between the hides and the hundreds. Now in the eyes of some this trait may be discreditable to The County Hidage, for they will infer that its author was possessed by a theory and deduced the hides from the hundreds. But, after all that we have seen[1516] of symmetrical districts and reductions of hidage, we ought not to take fright at this point. Other people besides the writer of this list may have been possessed by a theory which connected hides with hundreds, and they may have been people who were able to give effect to their theories by decreeing how many hides a district must be deemed to contain. Is it not even possible that we have here, albeit in faded characters, one of their decrees? But the history of the hundreds can not be discussed in a parenthesis. Some further corroboration this County Hidage will receive when hereafter we set it beside The Burghal Hidage, and we may then be able to carry Worcester’s 1200 and Oxford’s 2400 hides far back into the tenth century.

Comparison of Domesday hidage with Pipe Rolls.

Meanwhile, making use of our terms ‘equally rated’ (A = B), ‘over-rated’ (A > B), and ‘under-rated’ (A < B), let us briefly survey the counties as they stand in Domesday. Some help towards an estimation of their hidage is given to us by those few Pipe Rolls of the twelfth century which contain accounts of a danegeld. But we must not at once condemn as false the results of our own arithmetic merely because they do not square with the figures on these rolls. One instance will be enough to prove this. The Henries have to be content with £166 or thereabouts from Yorkshire, or, in other words, to treat it as having 1660 ‘carucates for geld.’ We give it a little more than 10,000 and shall not admit that we have given it 8000 too many. This poor, wasted giant has been relieved and has been set below little Surrey. So again, though Leicestershire will account to Henry I. and his grandson for but £100, it most certainly had more than 1000 and more than 2000 carucates when William’s commissioners visited it. On the other hand, there seem to be cases in a small group of counties in which his sons were able to recover a certain amount of geld which had been, rightfully or wrongfully, withheld or forborne during his own reign. But, taking the counties in mass, we hope that our figures are sufficiently consonant with those upon the Pipe Rolls. Absolutely consonant they ought not to be, for we have endeavoured to include the hides that are privileged from gelding, and in some shires (Hereford, for example) their number is by no means small. Also some leakage in an old tax may always be suspected, and the Pipe Rolls themselves show some unexplained variations in the amount for which a sheriff accounts, and some arithmetical errors[1517].

But now we will make our tour and write brief notes as we go.

Under-rated and over-rated counties.

Kent is scandalously under-rated. Of this there can be no doubt, though, since in many cases blanks are left where the number of the teamlands should stand, the figures can not be fully given. There has in a few instances been a reduction in the number of geldable sulungs since the Conquest, but this does not very greatly affect the result. The under-rating seems to be generally distributed throughout the county. It had not been redressed in Henry I.’s day. Indeed on the Pipe Rolls Kent appears as paying but £105, while Sussex pays twice as much. Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire appear to have all been over-rated. In the Conqueror’s day, however, they shuffled off large numbers of their geldant hides and were paying for considerably fewer hides than they had teamlands. Some part of this reduction was perhaps unauthorized. At any rate the sums that appear on the Pipe Rolls seem to show that in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire more hides were gelding under Henry I. than had been recently gelding when the survey was made; but the recovery was not sufficient to restore the state of things that existed under the Confessor. Wiltshire, so far as we can see, has always been a sorely over-rated county. It obtains no reduction under William. In the Pipe Rolls it stands at the very head of the counties. Dorset, taken as a whole, is exceedingly fairly rated. Eyton seems to have made 2321 hides and 2332 teamlands; but if the royal demesne (much of which is unhidated) be left out on both sides of the account, there will be slight over-rating. Somerset is very much under-rated, even if no notice be taken of the royal demesne. Devon is grossly under-rated. Cornwall is enormously under-rated. To all appearance considerably more than 1000 teamlands have stood as 400 hides, and even this light assessment seems to be the work of the Conqueror, for in the Confessor’s day the whole county seems to have paid for hardly more than 150 hides[1518]. Middlesex is decidedly over-rated; but Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford are under-rated. The ratio borne by hides to teamlands varies from county to county. We believe that it becomes small in Gloucester and Worcester and falls much below 1:2 in Hereford[1519]. This ratio is very small again in Warwick, Stafford, Shropshire and Cheshire. The two sister counties of Northampton and Leicester have, as already said, been very differently treated. Northampton is escaping easily, while Leicester, if we are not much mistaken, is over-rated[1520]. Then however the Pipe Rolls show that before the end of Henry I.’s reign Leicester has succeeded in largely reducing its geldability. We have seen reason to believe that a similar reduction had been made in Northamptonshire shortly before the compilation of Domesday Book. Derby is under-rated; Nottingham is much under-rated. Lincoln, though under-rated, is an instance of a county in which we long doubt whether the under-rating of some will not be compensated by the over-rating of other estates. So far as we can tell, Yorkshire had been heavily over-rated; but then, the teamland of Yorkshire is very often a merely potential teamland, and we can not be certain that the jurors will give to the waste vills as many teamlands as they had before the devastation. In the end a very small sum of geld is exacted.

Hidage and value.

We have seen enough in the case of Northampton to make us hesitate before we decide that the arrangement of hides set forth by Domesday Book is in all cases very ancient. That book shows us two different assessments of Cornwall; it shows us Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire relieving themselves or obtaining relief in the Conqueror’s time; it shows us some Cambridgeshire hundreds disburdened of their hides. But of the great reduction in Northamptonshire we should have learnt nothing from its pages. Therefore in other cases we must be cautious, even in the scandalous case of Kent, for we can not tell that there has not been a large reduction of its sulungs in quite recent years. However, behind all the caprice and presumable jobbery, we can not help fancying that we see a certain equitable principle. We have talked of under-rating and over-rating as if we held that every teamland in the kingdom should pay a like amount. But such equality would certainly not be equity. The average teamland of Kent is worth full thirty shillings a year; the average teamland of Cornwall is barely worth five; to put an equal tax on the two would be an extreme of injustice. Now we have formed no very high estimate of the justice or the statesmanship of the English witan, and what we are going to say is wrung from us by figures which have dissipated some preconceived ideas; but they hardly allow us to doubt that the number of hides cast upon a county had been affected not only by the amount, but also by the value of its teamlands. If, starting at the east of Sussex, we journey through the southern counties, we see that over-rating prevails in Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset. We see also that the valet of the average teamland stands rather above than below one pound. We pursue our journey. The ratio that A bears to B begins to decline rapidly and at the same time the valets descend by leaps and bounds. When we have reached Devon we are in a land which could not with any show of justice be taxed at the same rate per acre as that which Wiltshire might bear without complaint. Every test that we can apply shows the extreme poverty of the country that once was ‘West Wales.’ That poverty continues through the middle ages. We look, for example, at the contributions to the tax of 1341 and compare them with the acreage of the contributing counties. Equal sums are paid by 1020 acres in Wiltshire, 1310 in Dorset, 1740 in Somerset, 3215 in Devon, 3550 in Cornwall[1521]. We look at the subsidy of 1294[1522], and, in order that Devon and Cornwall may not be put at a disadvantage by moor and sea-shore, we take as our dividend the number of acres in a county that are now-a-days under cultivation[1523], and for our divisor the number of pence that the county pays. The quotients are, for Wiltshire 2·7, for Dorset 2·8, for Somerset 2·5, for Devon 6·4, for Cornwall 5·2. Retaining the same dividend, we try as a divisor the ‘polls’ for which a county will answer in 1377[1524]. Cornwall here makes a better show; but Devonshire still displays its misery. The quotients are, for Wiltshire 16, for Dorset 14, for Somerset 15, for Devon 27, for Cornwall 17. These figures we have introduced because they support the inferences that we should draw from the valets and valuits of Domesday Book, a study of which has convinced us that the distribution of fiscal hides has not been altogether independent of the varying value of land.

Connexion between hidage and value.

But in order that we may not trust to vague impressions, let us set down in one column the number of hides (carucates or sulungs) that we have given to twenty counties and in another column the annual value of those counties in the time of King Edward as calculated by Mr Pearson[1525].

One pound one hide.

No one can look along these lines of figures without fancying that some force, conscious or unconscious, has made for ‘One pound, one hide.’ But we will use another test, which is in some respects fairer, if in others it is rude. The total of the valets or valuits of a county sometimes includes and sometimes excludes the profit that the king derives from boroughs and from county courts; also the rents of his demesne manors are sometimes stated in disputable terms. Therefore from every county we will take eighty simple entries, some from the lands of the churches, some from the fiefs of the barons, and in a large county we will select our cases from many different pages. In each case we set down the number of gelding hides (carucates, sulungs) and the valuit given for the T. R. E.[1526]. Our method will not be delicate enough to detect slight differences; it will only suffice to display any general tendency that is at work throughout England and to stamp as exceptional any shires which widely depart from the common rule, if common rule there be. Using this method we find the values of the hide (carucate, sulung) to have been as follows, our figures standing for pounds and decimal fractions of a pound. We begin with the lowest and end with the highest valuit.

Leicester 0·26, York 0·34, Surrey 0·68, Northampton 0·75, Wiltshire 0·77, Sussex 0·81, Chester 0·82, Warwick 0·84, Somerset 0·85, Buckingham 0·86, Oxford 0·87, Dorset 0·88, Berkshire 0·89, Hereford 0·91, Gloucester 0·99, Lincoln 0·99, Derby 1·00, Huntingdon 1·02, Shropshire 1·02, Bedford 1·09, Hampshire 1·10, Worcester 1·10, Middlesex 1·15, Essex 1·41, Devon 1·52, Hertford 1·69, Cambridge 1·73, Nottingham 1·76, Kent 3·25, Cornwall 3·92.

Equivalence of pound and hide.

Now ‘One pound, one hide’ seems to be the central point of this series, the point of rest through which the pendulum swings. Our experiment has been much too partial to tell us whether a shire is slightly over-taxed or slightly undertaxed; but, unless we have shamefully blundered, it tells us that in some twenty out of thirty counties the aberration from the equivalence of pound and hide will not exceed twenty five per cent.: in other words, the value of the normal hide will not be less than 15 nor more than 25 shillings. Also we have brought our counties into an admirable disorder. We have snapped all bonds of race and of neighbourhood. For example, we see the under-taxed Hampshire in the midst of over-taxed counties; we have divorced Nottingham from Derby and Leicester from Northampton. The one general remark that we can make about the geographical distribution of taxation is that, if East Anglia is under-taxed (and this is likely), then Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge and Hertford would form a continuous block of territory that is escaping easily.

Cases of under-taxation.

The markedly exceptional cases are the most interesting. First let us look at the worst instances of immunity. Kent. In Kent we seem to see ‘beneficial hidation’ on a gigantic scale; but on the whole, though the evidence is not conclusive, we do not think that this is due to any modern privilege. We can not doubt that for a long time past the Kentish churches have been magnificently endowed, and yet the number of manses and sulungs that their land-books bestow upon them is not very large, and the number attributed to any one place is usually small, perceptibly smaller than the number of hides that will be comprised in a West Saxon charter. If a royal land-book condescends to mention acres (iugera, segetes)[1527] it will almost certainly be a Kentish charter, and we may guess that its acres are already fiscal acres of wide extent. To say more would be perilous. The title-deeds of Christ Church can not be readily harmonized with Domesday Book[1528]; perhaps we ought to add that this is much to their credit; but the documents which come to us from S^t. Augustin’s and Rochester suggest that the arrangement of sulungs which exists in the eleventh century is ancient, or, at any rate, that the monks knew of no older computation which dealt out these units with a far more lavish hand[1529]. In Kent the churches were powerful and therefore may have been able to preserve a scheme of assessment which unduly favoured a rich and prosperous shire; but we can not be certain that the hide and the Kentish sulung have really had the same starting-point, nor even perhaps that Kent was settled village-wise by its Germanic invaders[1530].

West Wales.

Devon and Cornwall ought to be ‘under-rated’ (A < B) for they are very poor. What we find is that they are so much under-rated that the hide is worth a good deal more than a pound. Here again we are inclined to think that this under-rating is old, perhaps as old as the subjection of West Wales. Such land-books as we obtain from this distressful country point in that direction, for they give but few hides and condescend to speak of virgates[1531]. Among them is a charter professing to come from Æthelstan which bestows ‘one manse’ upon the church of S^t. Buryan; but clearly this one manse is a wide tract. Also this would-be charter speaks to us of land that is measured by the arpent, and, whether or no it was forged by French clerks after the Norman Conquest, it may tell us that this old Celtic measure has been continuously used in the Celtic west[1532]. Be that as it may, when we are speculating about the under-taxation of Devon and Cornwall, we may remember that where the agrarian outlines were drawn by Welsh folk, the hide, though it might be imposed from above as a piece of fiscal machinery, would be an intruder among the Celtic trevs and out of harmony with its environment. The light taxation of Cambridgeshire is perhaps more wonderful, for our figures represent the hidage of the Confessor’s time, and we have seen[1533] how some of the hundreds in this prosperous shire (our champion wheat-grower) obtained a large abatement from the Conqueror[1534]. If, in accordance with The County Hidage, we doubled the number of Cambridgeshire’s hides, though it would be over-taxed, it would not be so heavily taxed as are some other counties.

Cases of over-taxation.

Extreme over-taxation is far more interesting to us at the present moment than extreme under-taxation. The latter may be the result of privilege, and in the middle ages privileges will be accorded for value received in this world or promised in another. But what are we to say of Leicester? On the face of our record it seems to have been in Edward’s day the very poorest of all the counties and yet to have borne a crushing number of carucates. Under William it was beginning to prosper but still was miserably poor[1535]. We have bethought ourselves of various devices for explaining this difficult case—of saying, for instance, that the Leicestershire ‘carucate of land’ is not a carucate for geld[1536]. But this case does not stand quite alone. The Yorkshire carucates, and they are expressly called ‘carucates for geld,’ had been worth little. It is likely that the figure that we have given for Yorkshire is not very near the true average for that wide territory; but we examined an unusually large number of entries and avoided any which showed signs of devastation in the present or the past. Also we see that in Northamptonshire, if we take the Edwardian valuit and the number of hides existing in 1086, we have an over-taxed county; and yet we have reason to believe that since 1075 it had been relieved of about half its hides. Had this not been done, it would have stood along with Yorkshire, and, if it once had those 3200 of which The County Hidage speaks, it would have stood along with its sister, the wretched Leicestershire. We might find relief in the supposition that the Leicestershire of Edward’s time had been scourged by war or pestilence; but unfortunately the jurors often tell us how many teams were then upon the manors, and in so doing give a marvellously small value to the land that one team tilled. Such reports as the following are common[1537].

What can these figures mean? They can not mean that a tract of land was being habitually tilled by three teams and yet was producing in the form of profit or rent no more than the worth of one or two shillings a year. An organized attempt to deceive King William into an abatement seems out of the question, for he is being told of a rapid increase of prosperity. Our best, though an unwarranted, guess is that the Leicestershire valuit speaks not of the Confessor’s day, but of some time of disorder that followed the Conquest, for in truth it seems to give us but ‘prairie values.’ However, if we take, not the valuit, but the valet, we still have carucates that are worth much less than a pound, and it seems clear that the carucate had been worth much less than a pound in the as yet unravaged Yorkshire. On the whole, these cases, together with what we can learn of Lancashire, will dispose us to receive with more favour than we might otherwise have shown certain statements about the hidage of England that have yet to be adduced. In Yorkshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire we may perhaps see the unreformed relics of an age when the distribution of fiscal units among the various provinces of England was the sport of wild guesswork[1538].

Equity and hidage.

We have spoken of a tendency on the part of the hide to be worth a pound. Now we have no wish to represent this equitable element as all powerful or very powerful; the case of Kent is sufficient to show that it may be overruled by favouritism or privilege. There has been a ‘beneficial hidation’ of shires as there has been a ‘beneficial hidation’ of manors. Still that the kings and witan have considered the value as well as the number of teamlands seems fairly plain. Probably they have considered it in a rough, ‘typical’ fashion. Any one who peruses Domesday Book paying attention to the valets will be struck in the first place by their roundness. If a teamland is not worth 20, it is worth 10 or 30, 5 or 40 shillings. The jurors seem to keep in their minds as types the ‘one-pound-teamland,’ the ‘half-pound-teamland’ and so forth. But then, whereas in one county ‘twenty shillings’ will stand for ‘fair average’ and in another for ‘rather poor,’ in a third it will indicate unusual excellence. Similarly we imagine that when fiscal hides have been distributed or redistributed, there has been talk of typical qualities of land, of first-rate and fourth-rate land. Any tradition of Roman taxation which had perdured in Britain or crossed the sea from Frankland would have taught men that this was the right method of procedure. But it is by no means certain that we can carry back this equitable principle very far[1539]. Long ago the prevailing idea may have been that teamland, house-land, pound-land and fiscal hide were, or ought normally to be, all one; and then the discovery that there are wide tracts in which the worth of an average teamland is much less or somewhat greater than a pound may have come in as a disturbing and differentiating force and awakened debates in the council of the nation. We may, if we like such excursions, fancy the conservatives arguing for the good old rule ‘One teamland, one hide,’ while a party of financial reformers has raised the cry ‘One pound, one hide.’ Then ‘pressure was brought to bear in influential quarters,’ and in favour of their own districts the witan in the moots jobbed and jerrymandered and rolled the friendly log, for all the world as if they had been mere modern politicians.

Distribution of hides and of teamlands.

But, to be serious, it is in some conjecture such as this that we may perchance find aid when we are endeavouring to loosen one of Domesday’s worst knots. We have hinted before now[1540] that there are districts in which the teamland (B) seems to be as artificial and as remote from real agrarian life as is the hide or the gelding carucate (A). To any one who thinks that when we touch Domesday’s teamland we have always freed ourselves from the geld system and penetrated through the rateable to the real, the following piece of the survey of Rutland may be commended. ‘In Martinesleie Wapentake there is a hundred in which there are 12 carucates for geld and there can be 48 teams.’ Now there is nothing curious in the fact that 48 ‘real’ teamlands are rated at 12 carucates. But let us look closer. Beside one smaller estate there are in this wapentake three manors. Their arrangement is this[1541]:—

Now surely the three sixteens are just as artificial as the three fours, and in what possible sense can we affirm that there is land for only 48 teams when we see that 530 tenants are actually ploughing it with 127 teams? Behind this there must be some theory or some tradition that we have not yet fathomed[1543].

Area and value as elements of geldability.

We strongly suspect that in the work of distributing and reducing the geld, ‘the land for one team’ has been playing a part for some time past. In order to decide, for example, whether a claim for abatement was just, the statesman had to consider two elements, the number of the teamlands and their value. He would be content with round figures, indeed no others would content him or be amenable to his rude manipulation. So it is decided that some province or district has, or must be deemed to have, y teamlands. Also it is decided at this or at some other time, or perhaps from time to time, that the land in this district (regard being had to its state of cultivation) is or must be deemed to be first-class, or, as the case may be, third-class land. Then a combination of these propositions induces the conclusion that the district has x hides or carucates for geld. Then inside the district, when the process of subpartitionment begins, a similar method is pursued. There are x hides or carucates for geld to be distributed. They ought to be distributed with reference to the number and value of real teamlands. The work is rudely done in the subpartitionary fashion. A certain sub-district has x/a hides thrown upon it; a sub-sub-district has x/ab; but this apportionment is obtained by combining a proposition about value with a partitionment of the y teamlands. The sub-sub-district has x/ab hides, because y/cd teamlands fall to its share and because its land is assigned to a certain class. Then, perhaps for the purpose of future rearrangements, the number of teamlands (y/cd) is remembered as well the number of hides or gelding carucates (x/ab). The result is that every manor in a certain district has four hides and sixteen teamlands. It is very pretty; it was never (except for technical purposes) very true, and every year makes it less true[1544].