Nature of thegnship.

The task is difficult for we can see that this institution has undergone many changes in the course of a long history and yet can not tell how much has remained unchanged. We begin by thinking of thegnship as a relation between two men. The thegn is somebody’s thegn. The household of the great man, but more especially the king’s household, is the cradle of thegnship. The king’s thegns are his free servants—servants but also companions. In peace they have duties to perform about his court and about his person; they are his body-guard in war. Then the king—and other great lords follow his example—begins to give lands to his thegns, and thus the nature of the thegnship is modified. The thegn no longer lives in his lord’s court; he is a warrior endowed with land. Then the thegnship becomes more than a relationship, it becomes a status. The thegn is a ‘twelve hundred man’; his wergild and his oath countervail those of six ceorls. This status seems to be hereditary; the thegn’s sons are ‘dearer born’ than are the sons of the ceorl[673]. But we can not tell how far this principle is carried. We can not easily reconcile this hereditary transmission of thegn-right with the original principle that thegnship is a relation between two men. We may have thegns who are nobody’s thegns, or else we may have persons entitled to the thegnly wergild who yet are not thegns. What is more, since the law which regulates the inheritance of land does not favour the first-born, we may have poor thegns and landless thegns. Yet another principle comes into play. A duty of finding well armed warriors for the host is being territorialized; every five hides should find a soldier. The thegn from of old has to attend the host with adequate equipment; the men who under the new system have to attend the host with horse and heavy armour are usually thegns. Then the man who has five hides, and who therefore ought to put a warrior into the field, is a thegn or is entitled to be a thegn. The ceorl obtains the thegnly wergild if he has an estate rated for military purposes at five hides. Another version of this tradition requires of the ceorl who ‘thrives to thegn-right’ five hides of his own land, a church, a kitchen, a house in the burh, a special office in the king’s hall. To be ‘worthy of thegn-right’ may be one thing, to be a thegn, another. To be a thegn one must be some one’s thegn. The prosperous ceorl will be no thegn until he has put himself under some lord. But the bond between him and his lord may be dissoluble at will and may hardly affect his land. It is, we repeat, very difficult to discover how these various principles were working together, checking and controlling each other in the first half of the eleventh century. Several inconsistent elements seem to be blended. There is the element of hereditary caste:—the thegn transmits thegnly blood to his offspring. There is the element of personal relationship:—he is the thegn of some lord and owes fealty to that lord. There is the military element:—he is a warrior who has horse and heavy armour and is bound to fight the nation’s battles. Connected with this last there is the proprietary element:—each five hides must send a warrior to the host; the man with five hides is entitled to become, perhaps he may be compelled to become a thegn, a warrior[674].

The thegns of Domesday.

On the whole, we gather from Domesday Book that the military element is subduing the others. The thegn is the man who for one reason or another is a warrior. For one reason or another, we say; for the class of thegns is by no means homogeneous. On the one hand, we see the thegns of the churches, who have been endowed by the prelates in order that they may do the military service due from the ecclesiastical lands. Many of the prelates have thegns, and for the creation of thegnlands by the churches it would not be easy to find any explanation save that which we have already found in the territorialization of military service. The thegn might pay some annual ‘recognition’ to the church, he might send his labourers to help his lord for a day or two at harvest time; but we may be sure that he was not rack-rented and that, if military service be left out of account, the church was a loser by endowing him. Here the land proceeds from the lord to the thegn; the thegn can not give or sell it; the holder of that land can have no lord but the church; if he forfeits the land, he forfeits it to the church. But, on the other hand, we see numerous king’s thegns who are able ‘to go to what lord they please.’ We may see in them landed proprietors who by the play of ‘the five hide rule’ have become bound to serve as warriors. We may be fairly certain that they have not been endowed by the king, otherwise they would not enjoy the liberty, that marvellous liberty, of leaving him, of putting themselves under the protection and the banner of some earl or some prelate. Not that every thegn will (if we may borrow phrases from a later age) possess a full ‘thegn’s fee’ or owe the service of a whole warrior. Large groups of thegns we may see who obviously are brothers or cousins enjoying in undivided shares the inheritance of some dead ancestor. They may take it in turns to go to the war; the king may hold the eldest of them responsible for all the service; but each of them will be called a thegn, will be entitled to a thegnly wergild and swear a thegnly oath. Still, on the whole, the thegn of Domesday Book is a warrior, and he holds—though perhaps along with his coparceners—land that is bound to supply a warrior.

Greater and lesser thegns.

In the main all thegns seem to have the same legal status, though they may not be all of equal rank. All of them seem to have the wergild of twelve hundred shillings. A law of Cnut, after describing the heriot of the earl, distinguishes two classes of thegns; there is ‘the king’s thegn who is nighest to him’ and whose heriot includes four horses and 50 mancuses of gold, and ‘the middle thegn’ or ‘less thegn’ from whom he gets but one horse and one set of arms or £2.[675] This law should we think be read in connexion with the rule that is recorded by Domesday Book as prevailing in the shires of Derby and Nottingham:—the thegn who had fewer than seven manors paid a relief of 3 marks to the sheriff, while he who had seven and upwards paid £8 to the king[676]. A rude line is drawn between the richer and the poorer thegns of the king. The former deal immediately with the king and pay their reliefs directly to him; the latter are under the sheriff and their reliefs are comprised in his farm. Thus the wealthy thegns, like the barones maiores of later days, are ‘nigher to’ the king than are the ‘less-thegns’ or those barones minores who in a certain sense are their successors.

The great lords.

The kings, the earls and the churches have of course many demesne manors. Of the ecclesiastical estates we shall speak in our next essay, for they can be best examined in the light that is cast upon them by the Anglo-Saxon charters. Here we will merely observe that some of the churches have not only large, but well compacted territories. The abbey of S^t. Etheldreda, for example, besides having outlying manors, holds the two hundreds which make up the isle of Ely; her property in Cambridgeshire is valued at £318[677]. The earls also are rich in demesne manors and so is the king.

The king as landlord.

King William is much richer than King Edward was. The Conqueror has been chary in appointing earls and consequently he has in his hand, not only the royal manors, but also a great many comital manors, to say nothing of some other estates which, for one reason or another, he has kept to himself. Edward had been rich, but when compared with his earls he had not been extravagantly rich. In Somersetshire, for example, there were twelve royal manors which may have brought in a revenue of £500 or thereabouts, while there were fifteen comital manors which were worth nearly £300[678]. The royal demesne had been a scattered territory; the king had something in most shires, but was far richer in some than in others. It was not so much in the number of his manors as in their size and value that he excelled the richest of his subjects. Somehow or another he had acquired many of those vills which were to be the smaller boroughs and the market towns of later days. We may well suppose that from of old the vills that a king would wish to get and to keep would be the flourishing vills, but again we can not doubt that many a vill has prospered because it was the king’s.

The ancient demesne.

Among the manors which William holds in the south-west a distinction is drawn by the Exeter Domesday. The manors which the Confessor held are ‘The King’s Demesne which belongs to the kingdom,’ while those which were held by the house of Godwin are the ‘Comital Manors[679].’ So in East Anglia certain manors are distinguished as pertaining or having pertained to the kingdom or kingship, the regnum or regio[680]. This does not seem to have implied that they were inalienably annexed to the crown, for King Edward had given some of them away. Neither when it speaks of the time of William, nor when it speaks of the time of Edward, does our record draw any clear line between those manors which the king holds as king and those which he holds in his private capacity, though it may just hint that certain ancient estates ought not to be alienated. The degree in which the various manors of the crown stood outside the national system of finance, justice and police we can not accurately ascertain. Some, but by no means all, pay no geld. Of some it is said that they have never paid geld. Perhaps in these ingeldable manors we may see those which constituted the royal demesne of the West Saxon kings at some remote date. Of the king’s vill of Gomshall in Surrey it is written: ‘the villeins of this vill were free from all the affairs of the sheriff[681],’ as though it were no general truth that with a royal manor the sheriff had nothing to do.

The comital manors.

As with the estates of the king, so with the estates of the earls, we find it impossible to distinguish between private property and official property. Certain manors are regarded as the ‘manors of the shire’ (mansiones de comitatu[682]); certain vills are ‘comital vills[683],’ they belong to ‘the consulate[684].’ Hereditary right tempered by outlawry was fast becoming the title by which the earldoms were holden. The position of the house of Leofric in Mercia was far from being as strong as the position of the house of Rolf in Normandy, and yet we may be sure that King Harold would not have been able to treat the sons of Ælfgar as removable officers. But one of the best marked features of Domesday Book, a feature displayed on page after page, the enormous wealth of the house of Godwin, seems only explicable by the supposition that the earlships and the older ealdormanships had carried with them a title to the enjoyment of wide lands. That enormous wealth had been acquired within a marvellously short time. Godwin was a new man: nothing certain is known of his ancestry. His daughter’s marriage with the king will account for something; Harold’s marriage with the daughter of Ælfgar will account for something, for instance, for manors which Harold held in the middle of Ælfgar’s country[685]; and a great deal of simple rapacity is laid to the charge of Harold by jurors whose testimony is not to be lightly rejected[686]; but the greater part of the land ascribed to Godwin, his widow and his sons, seems to consist of comitales villae.

Private rights and governmental revenues.

The wealth of the earls is a matter of great importance. If we subtract the estates of the king, the estates of the earls, and the estates of the churches—and, as we shall see hereafter, the churches had obtained the bulk of their wealth directly from the kings,—if we subtract again the lands which the king, the earls, the churches have granted to their thegns, the England of 1065 will not appear to us a land of very great landowners, and we may obtain a valuable hint as to one of the origins of feudalism. A vast amount of land is or has recently been held by office-holders, by the holders of the kingship, the earlships, or the ealdormanships. We seem to see their proprietary rights arising in the sphere of public law, growing out of governmental rights, which however themselves are conceived as being in some sort proprietary. Many a passage in Domesday Book will suggest to us that a right to take tribute and a right to take the profits of justice have helped to give the king and the earls their manors and their seignories. Even in his own demesne manors the king is apt to appear rather as a tribute taker than as a landowner. Manors of very unequal size and value have had to supply him with equal quantities of victuals; each has to give ‘a night’s farm’ once a year. Then from the counties at large he has taken a tribute; from Oxfordshire, for example, £10 for a hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, £23 for dogs and 6 sesters of honey[687]; from Worcestershire £10 or a Norway hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse[688]; from Warwickshire £23 for ‘the dog’s custom,’ 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, £10 for a hawk and 24 sesters of honey[689]. The farm of the county that the sheriff pays is made up out of obscure old items of this sort. Many men who are not the king’s tenants must assist him in his hunting, must help in the erection of his deer-hays[690]. Then there are the avera and the inwards that are exacted by the king or his sheriff from sokemen who are not the king’s men. The sheriff also is entitled to provender rents; out of ‘the revenues which belong to the shrievalty’ of Wiltshire, Edward of Salisbury gets pigs, wheat, barley, oats, honey, poultry, eggs, cheeses, lambs and fleeces; and besides this he seems to have ‘reveland’ which belongs to him as sheriff[691]. Then we see curious payments in money and renders in kind made to some royal or some comital manor by the holders of other manors. In Devonshire, Charlton which belongs to the Bishop of Coutances, Honiton which belongs to the Count of Mortain, Smaurige which belongs to Ralph de Pomerai, Membury which belongs to William Chevre, Roverige which belongs to S^t. Mary of Rouen, each of these manors used to pay twenty pence a year to the royal manor of Axminster[692]. In Somersetshire there are manors which have owed consuetudines, masses of iron and sheep and lambs to the royal manors of South Perrott and Cury, or the comital manors of Crewkerne and Dulverton[693]. Then again, we find that pasture rights are connected with justiciary rights:—Godwin had a manor in Hampshire to which belonged the third penny of six hundreds, and in all the woods of those six hundreds he had free pasture and pannage[694]; the third penny of three hundreds in Devonshire and the third animal of the moorland pastures were annexed to the manor of Molland[695]. Many things seem to indicate that the distinction between private rights and governmental powers has been but faintly perceived in the past.

The English state.

If now we look at that English state which is the outcome of a purely English history, we see that it has already taken a pyramidal or conical shape. It is a society of lords and men. At its base are the cultivators of the soil, at its apex is the king. This cone is as yet but low. Even at the end of William’s reign the peasant seldom had more than two lords between him and the king, but already in the Confessor’s reign he might well have three[696]. Also the cone is obtuse: the angle at its apex will grow acuter under Norman rulers. We can indeed obtain no accurate statistics, but the number of landholders who were King Edward’s men must have been much larger than the tale of the Norman tenants in chief. In the geographical distribution of the large estates under William there is but little more regularity than there was under his predecessor. In Cheshire and in Shropshire the Conqueror formed two great fiefs for Hugh of Avranches and Roger of Montgomery, well compacted fiefs, the like of which England had not yet seen. But the units which William found in existence and which he distributed among his followers were for the more part discrete units, and seldom did the Norman baron acquire as his honour any wide stretch of continuous territory. Still a great change took place in the substance of the cone, or if that substance is made up of lords and men and acres, then in the nature of, or rather the relation between, the forces which held the atoms together. Every change makes for symmetry, simplicity, consolidation. Some of these changes will seem to us predestined. To speculate as to what would have happened had Harold repelled the invader would be vain, and certainly we have no reason for believing that in that case the formula of dependent tenure would ever have got hold of every acre of English land and every right in English land. The law of ‘land loans’ (Lehnrecht) would hardly have become our only land law, had not a conqueror enjoyed an unbounded power, or a power bounded only by some reverence for the churches, of deciding by what men and on what terms every rood of England should be holden. Had it not been for this, we should surely have had some franc alleu to oppose to the fief, some Eigen to oppose to the Lehn. But if England was not to be for ever a prey to rebellions and civil wars, the power of the lords over their men must have been—not indeed increased, but—territorialized; the liberty of ‘going with one’s land to whatever lord one chose’ must have been curtailed. As yet the central force embodied in the kingship was too feeble to deal directly with every one of its subjects, to govern them and protect them. The intermediation of the lords was necessary; the state could not but be pyramidal; and, while this was so, the freedom that men had of forsaking one lord for another, of forsaking even the king for the ambitious earl, was a freedom that was akin to anarchy. Such a liberty must have its wings clipt; free contract must be taught to know its place; the lord’s hold over the man’s land must become permanent. This change, if it makes at first for a more definite feudalism, or (to use words more strictly) if it substitutes feudalism for vassalism, makes also for the stability of the state, for the increase of the state’s power over the individual, and in the end for the disappearance of feudalism. The freeholder of the thirteenth century is much more like the subject of a modern state than was the free man of the Confessor’s day who could place himself and his land under the power and warranty of whatever lord he chose. Lordship in becoming landlordship begins to lose its most dangerous element; it is ceasing to be a religion, it is becoming a ‘real’ right, a matter for private law. Again, we may guess, if we please, that but for the Norman Conquest the mass of the English peasantry would never have fallen so low as fall it did. The ‘sokemen’ would hardly have been turned into ‘villeins,’ the ‘villeins’ would hardly have become ‘serfs.’ And yet the villeins of the Confessor’s time were in a perilous position. Already they were occupying lands which for two most important purposes were reckoned the lands of their lords, lands for which their lords gelded, lands for which their lords fought. Even in an English England the time might have come when the state, refusing to look behind their lords, would have left the protection of their rights to a Hofrecht, to ‘the custom of the manor.’

Last words.

It is, we repeat it, vain to speculate about such matters, for we know too little of the relative strength of the various forces that were at work, and an accident, a war, a famine, may at any moment decide the fate, even the legal fate, of a great class. And above all there is the unanswerable question whether Harold or any near successor of his would or could have done what William did so soon as the survey was accomplished, when he proved that, after all, the pyramid was no pyramid and that every particle of it was in immediate contact with him, and ‘there came to him all the land-sitting men who were worth aught from over all England, whosesoever men they were, and they bowed themselves to him, and became this man’s men[697].’

§ 9. The Boroughs.

Dark as the history of our villages may be, the history of the boroughs is darker yet; or rather, perhaps, the darkness seems blacker because we are compelled to suppose that it conceals from our view changes more rapid and intricate than those that have happened in the open country. The few paragraphs that follow will be devoted mainly to the development of one suggestion which has come to us from foreign books, but which may throw a little light where every feeble ray is useful. At completeness we must not aim, and in our first words we ought to protest that no general theory will tell the story of every or any particular town[698].

The borough in cent. xiii.

In the thirteenth century a legal, though a wavering, line is drawn between the borough and the mere vill or rural township[699]. It is a wavering line, for stress can be laid now upon one and now upon another attribute of the ancient and indubitable boroughs, and this selected attribute can then be employed as a test for the claims of other towns. When in Edward I.’s day the sheriffs are being told to bid every borough send two burgesses to the king’s parliaments, there are somewhat more than 150 places to which such summonses will at times be addressed, though before the end of the middle ages the number of ‘parliamentary boroughs’ will have shrunk to 100 or thereabouts[700]. Many towns seem to hover on the border line and in some cases the sheriff has been able to decide whether or no a town shall be represented in the councils of the realm. Yet if we go back to the early years of the tenth century, we shall still find this contrast between the borough and the mere township existing as a contrast whence legal consequences flow. Where lies the contrast? What is it that makes a borough to be a borough? That is the problem that we desire to solve. It is a legal problem. We are not to ask why some places are thickly populated or why trade has flowed in this or that channel. We are to ask why certain vills are severed from other vills and are called boroughs.

The number of the boroughs.

We may reasonably wish, however, since mental pictures must be painted, to know at the outset whereabouts the line will be drawn, and whether when we are speaking of the Conqueror’s reign and earlier times we shall have a large or a small number of boroughs on our hands. Will it be a hundred and fifty, or a hundred, or will it be only fifty? At once we will say that some fifty boroughs stand out prominently and will demand our best attention, though a second and far less important class was already being formed.

The aid-paying boroughs of cent. xii.

In the middle of the twelfth century the Exchequer was treating certain places in an exceptional fashion. It was subjecting them to a special tax in the form of an auxilium or donum. This fact we may take as the starting point for our researches. Now if we read the unique Pipe Roll of Henry I.’s reign and the earliest Pipe Rolls of Henry II.’s we observe that an ‘aid’ or a ‘gift’ is from time to time collected from the ‘cities and boroughs,’ and if we put down the names of the towns which are charged with this impost, we obtain a remarkable result[701]. Speaking broadly we may say that the only towns which pay are ‘county towns.’ For a large part of England this is strictly true. We will follow the order of Domesday Book, beginning however with its second zone. If London is in Middlesex[702], it is Middlesex’s one borough. In Hertfordshire is Hertford. In Buckinghamshire is Buckingham, but no aid can be expected from it. In Oxfordshire is Oxford. In Gloucestershire is Gloucester, but Winchcombe also asserts its burghal rank. In Worcestershire is Worcester, while Droitwich appears occasionally with a small gift. Hereford is the one borough of Herefordshire. Turning to the third zone, we pass rapidly through Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire; each has its borough. This will be true of Leicestershire also; but Leicester is by this time so completely in the hands of its earl that the king gets nothing from it. Nor, it would seem, does he get anything from Warwick. Half in Warwickshire, half in Staffordshire lies Tamworth; Stafford also pays. At times Bridgenorth appears beside Shrewsbury. Nothing is received from Chester, for it is the head of a palatinate. Derby, Nottingham and York are the only representatives of their shires. Lincolnshire has Stamford on its border as well as Lincoln in its centre. Norfolk has Thetford as well as Norwich; but Suffolk has only Ipswich and Essex only Colchester.

Aid-paying boroughs in the south.

In the southern zone matters are not so simple. Kent contains Canterbury and Rochester; Surrey contains Guildford and Southwark; Sussex only Chichester. Hampshire has Winchester; Southampton is receiving special treatment. Wallingford represents Berkshire. When we get to Wiltshire and Dorset we are in the classical land of small boroughs. There are various little towns whose fate is in the balance; Marlborough and Calne seem for the moment to be the most prominent. In Somersetshire, whatever may have been true in the past, Ilchester is standing out as the one borough that pays an aid. Exeter has now no second in Devonshire. If there is a borough in Cornwall, it makes no gift to the king.

List of aids.

We may obtain some notion of the relative rank of these towns if we set forth the amounts with which they are charged in 1130 and in 1156, though the materials for this comparison are unfortunately incomplete.

Value of the list.

Now we are not putting this forward as a list of those English towns that were the most prosperous in the middle of the twelfth century. We have made no mention of flourishing seaports, of Dover, Hastings, Bristol, Yarmouth. Nor is this a list of all the places that are casually called burgi on rolls of Henry II.’s reign. That name is given to Scarborough, Knaresborough, Tickhill, Cirencester and various other towns. New tests of ‘burgality’ (if we may make that word) are emerging and old tests are becoming obsolete. We see too that some towns are dropping out of the list of aid-paying boroughs. In 1130 Wallingford has thrice failed to pay its aid of £15 and the whole debt of £45 must be forgiven to the burgesses pro paupertate eorum[706]. So Wallingford drops out of this list. Probably Buckingham has dropped out at an earlier time for a similar reason. But still this list, especially in the form that it takes in Henry I.’s time, is of great importance to those who are going to study the boroughs of Domesday Book. It looks like a traditional list. It deals out nice round sums. It is endeavouring to keep Wallingford on a par with Gloucester and above Northampton. It is retaining Winchcombe.

The boroughs in Domesday.

If we make the experiment, we shall discover that this catalogue really is a good prologue to Domesday Book. We will once more visit the counties which form the second zone. The account that our record gives of Hertfordshire has a preface. That preface deals with the borough of Hertford and precedes even the list of the Hertfordshire tenants in chief. Buckingham in Buckinghamshire and Oxford in Oxfordshire are similarly treated. In Gloucestershire the city of Gloucester and the borough of Winchcombe are described before the body of the county is touched. In Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire[707], Shropshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire[708] and Yorkshire the same procedure is adopted: the account of the shire’s city or borough precedes the account of the shire. In Lincolnshire the description of the county is introduced by the description of Lincoln and Stamford; also of Torksey, which had been a place of military importance and seems to have been closely united with the city of Lincoln by some governmental bond[709]. Convenient arrangement is not the strong point of ‘Little Domesday’; but what is said therein of Colchester is said at the very end of the survey of Essex, while Norwich, Yarmouth and Thetford stand at the end of the royal estates in Norfolk, and Ipswich stands at the end of the royal estates in Suffolk.

Southern boroughs in Domesday.

If now we enter the southern zone and keep in our minds the scheme that we have seen prevailing in the greater part of England, we shall observe that the account of Kent has a prologue touching Dover, Canterbury and Rochester. In Berkshire an excellent account of Wallingford precedes the rubric Terra Regis. Four places in Dorset are singled out for prefatory treatment, namely, Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham and Shaftesbury. In Devon Exeter stands, if we may so speak, above the line, and stands alone, though Barnstaple, Lidford and Totness are reckoned as boroughs. Of the other counties there is more to be said. If we compare the first page of the survey of Somerset with the first pages that are devoted to its two neighbours, Dorset and Devon, we shall probably come to the conclusion that the compilers of the book scrupled to put any Somerset vill on a par with Exeter, Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham and Shaftesbury. In each of the three cases the page is mapped out in precisely the same fashion. The second column is headed by Terra Regis. A long way down in the first column begins the list of tenants in chief. The upper part of the first column contains in one case the account of Exeter, in another the account of the four Dorset boroughs, but in the third case, that of Somerset, it is left blank. In Wiltshire Malmesbury and Marlborough stand above the line; but, if we look to the foot of the page, we shall suspect that the compilers can not easily force their general scheme upon this part of the country. In Surrey no place stands above the line. Guildford is the first place mentioned on the Terra Regis; Southwark seems to be inadequately treated on a later page. The case of Sussex is like that of Somerset; the list of the tenants in chief is preceded by a blank space. In Hampshire a whole column is left blank. On a later page the borough of Southampton has a column to itself; in the next column stands the Terra Regis of the Isle of Wight. And now let us turn back to the Middlesex that we have as yet ignored. Nearly two columns, to say nothing of some precedent pages, are void[710].

The boroughs and the plan of Domesday Book.

Now we must not be led away into speculations which would be vain. We must not, for example, inquire whether the information that had been obtained touching London and Winchester was too bulky to fill a room that had been left for it. We must not inquire whether something was to be said of Chichester or Hastings, of Ilchester or of Bristol that has not been said. But apparently we may attribute to King William’s officials a certain general idea. It is an idea which suits the greater part of England very well, though they find difficulties in their way when they endeavour to impose it on some of the counties that lie south of the Thames. The broad fact stands clear that throughout the larger part of England the commissioners found a town in each county, and in general one town only, which required special treatment. They do not locate it on the Terra Regis; they do not locate it on any man’s land. It stands outside the general system of land tenure.

The borough on no man’s land.

For a while, then, let us confine our attention to these county towns, and we shall soon see why it is that they are rarely brought under any rubric which would describe them as pieces of the king’s soil or pieces of some one else’s soil. The trait to which we allude we shall call (for want of a better term) the tenurial heterogeneity of the burgesses. In those boroughs that are fully described we seldom, if ever, find that all the burgesses have the same landlord. Of course there is a sense in which, according to the view of the Domesday surveyors and of all later lawyers, every inch of borough land is held of one landlord, namely, the king; but in that sense every inch of England has the same landlord. The fact that we would bring into relief is this, that normally the burgesses of the borough do not hold their burgages immediately of one and the same lord; they are not ‘peers of a tenure’; the group that they constitute is not a tenurial group. Far rather we shall find that, though there will be some burgesses holding immediately of the king, there will be others whose titles can be traced to the king only through the medium of other lords. And the mesne lord will often be a very great man, some prelate or baron with a widespread honour. Within the borough he will, to use the language of Domesday Book, ‘have’ or ‘hold’ a small group of burgesses, and sometimes they will be reckoned as annexed to or as ‘lying in’ some manor distant from the town. It seems generally expected that the barons of the county should have a few burgages apiece in the county town. This arrangement does not look new. Seemingly the great men of an earlier day, the antecessores of the Frenchmen, have owned town-houses: not so much houses for their own use, as houses or ‘haws’ (hagae) in which they could keep a few ‘burgesses.’

Heterogeneous tenures in the boroughs.

Some examples of this remarkable arrangement should be given. First we will look at Oxford. The king has many houses; the Archbishop of Canterbury has 7; the Bishop of Winchester 9; the Bishop of Bayeux 18; the Bishop of Lincoln 30; the Bishop of Coutances 2; the Bishop of Hereford 3; the Abbot of St Edmund’s 1; the Abbot of Abingdon 14; the Abbot of Eynsham 13. And so with the worldly great:—the Count of Mortain has 10; Count Hugh has 7; the Count of Evreux 1; Robert of Ouilly 12; Roger of Ivry 15; Walter Giffard 17:—but we need not repeat the whole long list[711]. It is so at Wallingford; King Edward had 8 virgates on which were 276 houses, and they paid him £11 rent; Bishop Walkelin of Winchester has 27, which pay 25 shillings; the Abbot of Abingdon has two acres, on which are 7 houses paying 4 shillings; Milo Crispin has 20 houses, which pay 12 shillings and 10 pence; and so forth[712]. Further, it is said that the Bishop’s 27 houses are valued in Brightwell; and, turning to the account of Brightwell, there, sure enough, we find mention of the 25 shillings which these houses pay[713]. Milo’s 20 houses are said to ‘lie in’ Newnham; he has also in Wallingford 6 houses which are in Hazeley, 1 which is in Stoke, 1 which is in Chalgrove, one acre with 6 houses which is in Sutton, one acre with 11 houses which is in Bray; ‘all this land’ we are told ‘belongs to Oxfordshire, but nevertheless it is in Wallingford.’ Yes, Milo’s manor of Chalgrove lies five, his manor of Hazeley lies seven miles from Wallingford; nevertheless, houses which are physically in Wallingford are constructively in Chalgrove and Hazeley. That we are not dealing with a Norman novelty is in this case extremely plain. Wallingford is a border town. We read first of the Berkshire landowners who have burgesses within it. There follows a list of the Oxfordshire ‘thegns’ who hold houses in Wallingford. Archbishop Lanfranc and Count Hugh appear in this context as ‘thegns’ of Oxfordshire.

Examples of heterogeneity.

When we have obtained this clue, we soon begin to see that what is true of Oxford and Wallingford is true even of those towns of which no substantive description is given us. Thus there are ‘haws’ or town-houses in Winchester which are attached to manors in all corners of Hampshire, at Wallop, Clatford, Basingstoke, Eversley, Candover, Strathfield, Minstead and elsewhere. Some of the manors to which the burghers of London were attached are not, even in our own day, within our monstrous town; there are some at Banstead and Bletchingley in Surrey, at Waltham and Thurrock in Essex. But in every quarter we see this curious scheme. At Warwick the king has in his demesne 113 houses, and his barons have 112[714]. Of the barons’ houses it is written: ‘These houses belong to the lands which the barons hold outside the borough and are valued there.’ Or turn we to a small town:—at Buckingham the barons have 26 burgesses; no one of them has more than 5.[715] The page that tells us this presents to us an admirable contrast between Buckingham and its future rival. Aylesbury is just an ordinary royal manor and stands under the rubric Terra Regis. Buckingham is a very petty townlet; but it is a borough, and Count Hugh and the Bishop of Coutances, Robert of Ouilly, Roger of Ivry, Arnulf of Hesdin and other mighty men have burgesses there. As a climax we may mention the case of Winchcombe. The burgages in this little town were held by many great people. About the year 1100 the king had 60; the Abbot of Winchcombe 40; the Abbot of Evesham 2; the Bishop of Hereford 2; Robert of Bellême 3; Robert Fitzhamon 5, and divers other persons of note had some 29 houses among them[716]. However poor, however small Winchcombe may have been, it radically differed from the common manor and the common village.

Burgesses attached to manors.

We have seen above how in the Conqueror’s day the Abbey of Westminster had a manor at Staines[717] and how that manor included 48 burgesses who paid 40s. a year. Were those burgesses really in Staines, and was Staines a borough? No, they were in the city of London. The Confessor had told his Middlesex thegns how he willed that St Peter and the brethren at Westminster should have the manor (cotlif) of Staines with the land called Staninghaw (mid ðam lande Stæningehaga) within London and all other things that had belonged to Staines[718]. Is not the guess permissible that Staining Lane in the City of London[719], wherein stood the church of St Mary, Staining, was so called, not ‘because stainers lived in it,’ but because it once contained the haws of the men of Staines? We must be careful before we find boroughs in Domesday Book, for its language is deceptive. Perhaps we may believe that really and physically there were forty-six burgesses in the vill of St Albans[720]; but, after what we have read of Staines, can we be quite sure that these burgesses were not in London? The burgesses who de iure ‘are in’ one place are often de facto in quite another place.

Tenure of the borough and tenure of land within the borough.

We may for a moment pass over two centuries and turn to the detailed account of Cambridge given to us by the Hundred Rolls, the most elaborate description that we have of any medieval borough. Now in one sense the ‘vill’ or borough of Cambridge belongs to the king, and, under him, to the burgesses, for they hold it of him in capite at a fee-farm rent. But this does not mean that each burgess holds his tenement of the corporation or communitas of burgesses, which in its turn holds every yard of land of the king in chief. It does not even mean that each burgess holds immediately of the king, the communitas intervening as farmer of the king’s rents[721]. No, the titles of the various burgesses go up to the king by many various routes. Some of them pay rents to the officers of the borough who are the king’s farmers; but many of them do not. The Chancellor and Masters of the University, for example, hold three messuages in the vill of Cambridge; ‘but’ say the sworn burgesses ‘what they pay for the same, we do not know and can not discover[722].’ How could it be otherwise? Domesday Book shows us that the Count of Britanny had ten burgesses in Cambridge[723]. Count Alan’s houses will never be held in chief of the crown by any burgess: they will form part of the honour of Richmond to the end of time. We may take another example which will show the permanence of proprietary arrangements in the boroughs. From an account of Gloucester which comes to us from the year 1100 or thereabouts we learn that there were 300 houses in the king’s demesne and 313 belonging to other lords. From the year 1455 we have another account which tells of 310 tenements paying landgavel to the king’s farmers and 346 which pay them nothing[724]

The king and other landlords.

Perhaps no further examples are needed. But this tenurial heterogeneity seems to be an attribute of all or nearly all the very ancient boroughs, the county towns. In some cases the king was the landlord of far the greater number of the burgesses. In other cases the bishop became in course of time the lord of some large quarter of a town in which his cathedral stood. At Canterbury and Rochester, at Winchester and Worcester, this process had been at work from remote days; the bishops had been acquiring land and ‘haws’ within the walls[725]. But we can see that in Henry I.’s day there were still four earls who were keeping up their interest in their burgesses at Winchester[726]. In the later middle ages we may, if we will, call these places royal boroughs and the king’s ‘demesne boroughs,’ for the burgesses derive their ‘liberties’ directly from the king. But we must keep these ancient boroughs well apart from any royal manors which the king has newly raised to burghal rank. In the latter he will be the immediate landlord of every burgess; in the former a good deal of rent will be paid, not to him, nor to the community as his farmers, but to those who are filling the shoes of the thegns of the shire.

The oldest burh.

This said, we will turn back our thoughts to the oldest days. The word that deserves our best attention is burh, the future borough, for little good would come of an attempt to found a theory upon the Latin words, such as civitas, oppidum and urbs which occur in some of those magniloquent land-books[727]. Now it seems fairly clear that for some long time after the Germanic invasions the word burh meant merely a fastness, a stronghold, and suggested no thick population nor any population at all. This we might learn from the map of England. The hill-top that has been fortified is a burh. Very often it has given its name to a neighbouring village[728]. But, to say nothing of hamlets, we have full two hundred and fifty parishes whose names end in burgh, borough or bury, and in many cases we see no sign in them of an ancient camp or of an exceptionally dense population. It seems a mere chance that they are not tons or hams, worths or thorpes. Then again, in Essex and neighbouring shires it is common to find that in the village called X there is a squire’s mansion or a cluster of houses called X-bury. Further, we can see plainly from our oldest laws that the palisade or entrenchment around a great man’s house is a burh. Thus Alfred: The king’s burh-bryce (the sum to be paid for breaking his burh) is 120 shillings, an archbishop’s 90 shillings, another bishop’s 60 shillings, a twelve-hundred man’s 30 shillings, a six-hundred-man’s 15 shillings, a ceorl’s edor-bryce (the sum to be paid for breaking his hedge) 5 shillings[729]. The ceorl, whose wer is 200 shillings, will not have a burh, he will only have a hedge round his house; but the man whose wer is 600 shillings will probably have some stockade, some rude rampart; he will have a burh

The king’s burh.

We observe the heavy bót of 120 shillings which protects the king’s burh. May we not see here the very first stage in the legal history of our boroughs? We pass over some centuries and we read in a statement of the Londoners’ customs that a man who is guilty of unlawful violence must pay the king’s burh-bryce of five pounds[730]. And then the Domesday surveyors tell us how at Canterbury every crime committed in those streets which run right through the city is a crime against the king, and so it is if committed upon the high-roads outside the city for the space of one league, three perches and three feet[731]. This curious accuracy over perches and feet sends us to another ancient document:—‘Thus far shall the king’s peace (grið) extend from his burhgeat where he is sitting towards all four quarters, namely, three miles, three furlongs, three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine hand-breadths, nine barley-corns[732].’ And then we remember how Fleta tells us that the verge of the king’s palace is twelve leagues in circumference, and how within that ambit the palace court, the king’s most private court, has jurisdiction[733]

The special peace of the burh.

Has not legal fiction been at work since an early time? Has not the sanctity of the king’s house extended itself over a group of houses? The term burh seems to spread outwards from the defensible house of the king and with it the sphere of his burh-bryce is amplified. Within the borough there reigns a special peace. This has a double meaning:—not only do acts which would be illegal anywhere become more illegal when they are done within the borough, but acts which would be legal elsewhere, are illegal there. King Edmund legislating against the blood-feud makes his burh as sacred as a church; it is a sanctuary where the feud may not be prosecuted[734]. If in construing such a passage we doubt how to translate burh, whether by house or by borough, we are admitting that the language of the law does not distinguish between the two. The Englishman’s house is his castle, or, to use an older term, his burh; the king’s borough is the king’s house, for his house-peace prevails in its streets[735]

The town and the burh.

Our oldest laws seem to know no burh other than the strong house of a great (but he need not be a very great) man. Early in the tenth century, however, the word had already acquired a new meaning. In Æthelstan’s day it seems to be supposed by the legislator that a moot will usually be held in a burh. If a man neglects three summonses to a moot, the oldest men of the burh are to ride to his place and seize his goods[736]. Already a burh will have many men in it. Some of them will be elder-men, aldermen. A moot will be held in it. Very possibly this will be the shire-moot, for, since there is riding to be done, we see that the person who ought to have come to the moot may live at a distance[737]. A little later the burh certainly has a moot of its own. Edgar bids his subjects seek the burh-gemót as well as the scyr-gemót and the hundred-gemót. The borough-moot is to be held thrice a year[738]. At least from this time forward, the borough has a court. An important line is thus drawn between the borough and the mere tún. The borough has a court; the village has none, or, if the villages are getting courts, this is due to the action of lords who have sake and soke and is not commanded by national law. National law commands that there shall be a moot thrice a year in every burh

The building of boroughs.

The extension of the term burh from a fortified house to a fortified group of houses must be explained by those who are skilled in the history of military affairs. It is for them to tell us, for example, how much use the Angles and Saxons in the oldest days made of the entrenched hill-tops, and whether the walls of the Roman towns were continuously repaired[739]. Howbeit, a time seems to have come, at latest in the struggle between the Danish invaders and the West-Saxon kings, when the establishment and maintenance of what we might call fortified towns was seen to be a matter of importance. There was to be a cluster of inhabited dwellings which as a whole was to be made defensible by ditch and mound, by palisade or wall. Edward the Elder and the Lady of the Mercians were active in this work. Within the course of a few years burgs were ‘wrought’ or ‘timbered’ at Worcester, Chester, Hertford, Witham in Essex, Bridgnorth, Tamworth, Stafford, Warwick, Eddisbury, Warbury, Runcorn, Buckingham, Towcester, Maldon, Huntingdon[740]. Whatever may be meant by the duty of repairing burgs when it is mentioned in charters coming from a somewhat earlier time, it must for the future be that of upholding those walls and mounds that the king and the lady are rearing. The land was to be burdened with the maintenance of strongholds. The land, we say. That is the style of the land-books. Land, even though given to a church, is not to be free (unless by exceptional favour) of army-service, bridge-work and borough-bettering or borough-fastening. Wall-work[741] is coupled with bridge-work; to the duty of maintaining the county bridges is joined the duty of constructing and repairing the boroughs. Shall we say the ‘county boroughs’

The shire and its borough.

Let us ask ourselves how the burden that is known as burh-bót, the duty that the Latin charters call constructio, munitio, restauratio, defensio, arcis (for arx is the common term) will really be borne. Is it not highly probable, almost certain, that each particular tract of land will be ascript to some particular arx or castellum[742], and that if, for instance, there is but one burh in a shire, all the lands in that shire must help to better that burh. Apportionment will very likely go further. The man with five hides will know how much of the mound or the wall he must maintain, how much ‘wall-work’ he must do. We see how the old bridge-work becomes a burden on the estates of the county landowners. From century to century the Cambridgeshire landowners contribute according to their hidage to repair the most important bridge of their county, a bridge which lies in the middle of the borough of Cambridge. Newer arrangements, the rise of castles and of borough communities, have relieved them from the duty of ‘borough-fastening;’ but the bridge-work is apportioned on their lands.

Military geography.

The exceedingly neat and artificial scheme of political geography that we find in the midlands, in the country of the true ‘shires,’ forcibly suggests deliberate delimitation for military purposes. Each shire is to have its borough in its middle. Each shire takes its name from its borough. We must leave it for others to say in every particular case whether and in what sense the shire is older than the borough or the borough than the shire: whether an old Roman chester was taken as a centre or whether the struggles between Germanic tribes had fixed a circumference. But a policy, a plan, there has been, and the outcome of it is that the shire maintains the borough[743]. There has come down to us in a sadly degenerate form a document which we shall hereafter call ‘The Burghal Hidage[744].’ It sets forth, so we believe, certain arrangements made early in the tenth century for the defence of Wessex against Danish inroads. It names divers strongholds, and assigns to each a large number of hides. A few of the places that it mentions we have not yet found on the map. Beginning in the east of Sussex and following the order of the list, we seem to see Hastings, Lewes, Burpham (near Arundel), Chichester, Porchester, Southampton, Winchester, Wilton, Tisbury (or perhaps Chisenbury), Shaftesbury, Twyneham, Wareham, Bredy, Exeter, Halwell near Totness, Lidford, Barnstaple, Watchet, Axbridge; then Langport and Lyng (which defend the isle of Athelney), Bath, Malmesbury, Cricklade, Oxford, Wallingford, Buckingham, Eastling near Guildford, and Southwark. Corrupt and enigmatical though this catalogue may be, it is of the highest importance. It shows how in the great age of burg-building the strongholds had wide provinces which in some manner or another were appurtenant to them, and it may also give us some precious hints about places in Wessex which once were national burgs but which forfeited their burghal character in the tenth century. Guildford seems to have risen at the expense of Eastling and Totness at the expense of Halwell, while Tisbury, Bredy and Watchet (if we are right in fancying that they are mentioned) soon lost caste. Lyng is not a place which we should have named among the oldest of England’s burgs, and yet we have all read how Alfred wrought a ‘work’ at Athelney. In Wessex burgs rise and fall somewhat rapidly. North of the Thames the system is more stable. Also it is more artificial, for north of the Thames civil and military geography coincide.

The shire’s wall-work.

Let us now look once more at the Oxford of Domesday Book. The king has twenty ‘mural houses[745]’ which belonged to Earl Ælfgar; they pay 13s. 2d. He has a house of 6d. which is constructively at Shipton; one of 4d. at Bloxham; one of 30d. at Risborough and two of 4d. at Twyford in Buckinghamshire. ‘They are called mural houses because, if there be need and the king gives order, they shall repair the wall.’ There follows a list of the noble houseowners, an archbishop, six bishops, three earls and so forth. ‘All the above hold these houses free because of the reparation of the wall. All the houses that are called “mural” were in King Edward’s time free of everything except army service and wall-work.’ Then of Chester we read this[746]:—‘To repair the wall and the bridge, the reeve called out one man from every hide in the county, and the lord whose man did not come paid 40s. to the king and earl.’ The duty of maintaining the bulwark of the county’s borough is incumbent on the magnates of the county. They discharge it by keeping haws in the borough and burgesses in those haws[747]

Henry the Fowler and the German burgs.

We may doubt whether the duty of the county to its borough has gone no farther than mere ‘wall-work.’ A tale from the older Saxony may come in well at this point. When the German king Henry the Fowler was building burgs in Saxony and was playing the part that had lately been played in England by Edward and Æthelflæd, he chose, we are told, the ninth man from among the agrarii milites; these chosen men were to live in the burgs; they were to build dwellings there for their fellows (confamiliares) who were to remain in the country tilling the soil and carrying a third of the produce to the burgs, and in these burgs all concilia and conventus and convivia were to be held[748]. Modern historians have found in this story some difficulties which need not be noticed here. Only the core of it interests us. Certain men are clubbed together into groups of nine for the purpose of maintaining the burg as a garrisoned and victualled stronghold in which all will find room in case a hostile inroad be made.

The shire thegns and their town houses.

Turning to England we shall not forget how in the year 894 Alfred divided his forces into two halves; half were to take the field, half to remain at home, besides the men who were to hold the burgs[749]; but at all events we shall hardly go astray if we suggest that the thegns of the shire have been bound to keep houses and retainers in the borough of their shire and that this duty has been apportioned among the great estates[750]. We find that the baron of Domesday Book has a few burgesses in the borough and that these few burgesses ‘belong’ in some sense or another to his various rural manors. Why should he keep a few burgesses in the borough and in what sense can these men belong some to this manor and some to that? To all appearance this arrangement is not modern. King Edmund conveyed to his thegn Æthelweard an estate of seven hides at Tistead in Hampshire and therewith the haws within the burg of Winchester that belonged to those seven hides[751]. When the Bishop of Worcester loaned out lands to his thegns, the lands carried with them haws in the ‘port’ of Worcester[752]. We have all read of the ceorl who ‘throve to thegn-right.’ He had five hides of his own land, a church and a kitchen, a bell-tower and a burh-geat-setl, which, to our thinking, is just a house in the ‘gate,’ the street of the burh[753]. He did not acquire a town-house in order that he might enjoy the pleasures of the town. He acquired it because, if he was to be one of the great men of the county, he was bound to keep in the county’s burh retainers who would do the wall-work and hoard provisions sent in to meet the evil day when all men would wish to be behind the walls of a burh

The knights in the borough.

We have it in our modern heads that the medieval borough is a sanctuary of peace, an oasis of ‘industrialism’ in the wilderness of ‘militancy.’ Now a sanctuary of peace the borough is from the very first. An exceptional and exalted peace reigns over it. If you break that peace you incur the king’s burh-bryce. But we may strongly suspect that the first burg-men, the first burgenses, were not an exceptionally peaceful folk. Those burhwaras of London who thrashed Swegen[754] and chose kings were no sleek traders; nor must we speak contemptuously of ‘trained bands of apprentices’ or of ‘the civic militia.’ In all probability these burg-men were of all men in the realm the most professionally warlike. Were we to say that in the boroughs the knightly element was strong we might mislead, for the word knight has had chivalrous adventures. However, we may believe that the burgensis of the tenth century very often was a cniht, a great man’s cniht, and that if not exactly a professional soldier (professional militancy was but beginning) he was kept in the borough for a military purpose and was perhaps being fed by the manor to which he belonged. These knights formed gilds for religious and convivial purposes. At Cambridge there was a gild of thegns, who were united in blood-brotherhood. We can not be certain that all these thegns habitually lived in Cambridge. Perhaps we should rather say that already a Cambridgeshire club had its head-quarters in Cambridge and there held its ‘morning-speeches’ and its drinking bouts. These thegns had ‘knights’ who seem to have been in some sort inferior members of the gild and to have been bound by its rules[755]. Then we hear of ‘knight-gilds’ at London and Canterbury and Winchester[756]. Such gilds would be models for the merchant-gilds of after-days, and indeed when not long after the Conquest we catch at Canterbury our first glimpse of a merchant-gild, its members are calling themselves knights: knights of the chapman-gild[757]. Among the knights who dwelt in the burg such voluntary societies were the more needful, because these men had not grown up together as members of a community. They came from different districts and had different lords. In this heterogeneity we may also see one reason why a very stringent peace, the king’s own house-peace, should be maintained, and why the borough should have a moot of its own. When compared with a village there is something artificial about the borough.