THE ENGLISH BOROUGH 
 
 IN THE 
 TWELFTH CENTURY
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 C. F. CLAY, MANAGER 
 Hfltttfon: FETTER LANE, B.C. 
 
 roo PRINCES STREET 
 
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 All rights reserved
 
 THE ENGLISH BOROUGH 
 
 IN THE 
 
 TWELFTH CENTURY 
 
 BEING TWO LECTURES DELIVERED IN 
 
 THE EXAMINATION SCHOOLS OXFORD 
 
 ON 22 AND 29 OCTOBER 1913 
 
 BY 
 ADOLPHUS BALLARD^ 
 
 HON. M.A. (OXON.), B.A., LL.B. (LOND.) 
 
 TOWN CLERK OF WOODSTOCK 
 
 Author of The Domesday Boroughs, The Domesday Inquest, 
 British Borough Charters lo^-z izi6, &c. 
 
 Cambridge : 
 
 at the University Press 
 
 1914
 
 JS 
 
 63 
 
 vTambr tfcgr : 
 
 PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. BURGESS AND LORD t 
 
 2. BOROUGH AND HUNDRED . . . .31 
 APPENDIXES 
 
 1. The Garrison Theory .... 66 
 
 2. The Roman Boroughs .... 70 
 
 3. The "Liber Burgus" .... 76 
 
 4. London ....... go 
 
 5. Table showing the characteristics of certain 
 
 Domesday Boroughs ... 83 
 
 INDEX .....
 
 ABBREVIATIONS 
 
 B.B.C. British Borough Charters 1042 1216. 
 E. H. R. English Historical Review. 
 D. B. Domesday Book.
 
 THE ENGLISH BOROUGH IN THE 
 TWELFTH CENTURY 
 
 i. BURGESS AND LORD 
 
 THERE is no need for me to begin this lecture 
 with a definition : the lawyers of the twelfth century 
 applied the name of borough to certain places and 
 gave the name of burgesses to their inhabitants ; 
 this they did to distinguish these places from their 
 neighbours which were called manors ; and in order 
 to ascertain what were the characteristics of an 
 English borough of the twelfth century, I propose 
 to select the salient features of the 300 odd charters 
 of a date prior to the death of King John which relate 
 to the privileges and duties of the burgesses of the 
 various boroughs. M. Petit Dutaillis objects to the use 
 of the term borough, and thinks that "its misleading 
 technical appearance has perhaps greatly contributed 
 to plunge certain English scholars into blind alleys 1 " : 
 but our examination will show that there were certain 
 features in the boroughs which distinguish them 
 
 1 Studies Supplemental to Stubbs 71.
 
 2 Burgess and Lord 
 
 from the unprivileged villages ; and I may be per- 
 mitted to say that I have found myself hampered in 
 dealing with French municipal charters by the lack 
 of a technical term which would distinguish the 
 privileged from the unprivileged towns : for it was 
 not every privileged town that was a commune. In 
 the first of these two lectures I propose to deal with 
 the borough from the point of view of the burgess 
 and of the lord : and in the second to consider the 
 place of the borough in the national organisation. 
 
 In the first place, the borough was a home of 
 freedom : but freedom is a matter of comparison, 
 and the position of the burgess must be compared 
 with that of the villager. Of the two classes of 
 villagers, the villeins were more or less servile in 
 status ; their rents were mainly labour rents and a 
 distinguishing mark of villenage was the liability to 
 work on the lord's demesne for a certain number of 
 days every week, and also at specially busy times 
 such as ploughtime, haytime and harvest ; the vil- 
 leins could not give their womenfolk in marriage 
 without the payment of a fine for the license of the 
 lord ; they could not send their son to school without 
 a similar payment ; a fine was due from them if they 
 sold their cattle : if they sold their land such sale 
 could be effected only by surrender of the land to 
 the lord and the subsequent admission of the pur- 
 chaser who often had to pay another fine on his
 
 Burgess and Lord 3 
 
 admission : he was liable in many cases to be tallaged 
 at the will of his lord ; when he died his lord took 
 his best beast by way of heriot, and his heir paid a 
 heavy relief on succeeding to his father's land : if 
 his heiress were unmarried, the lord had the right 
 of giving her in marriage to whomsoever he chose, 
 and he usually chose the highest bidder : all these 
 restrictions reduced the villein to a state of economic 
 slavery. The tenant in socage was better off: his 
 rent was a money rent though he often had to work 
 on his lord's demesne at specially busy seasons : he 
 could sell his cattle and even his land without the 
 payment of a fine to his lord : usually no heriot was 
 payable on the death of a socager, and the relief, 
 if any, was but nominal : his kinsmen were the 
 guardians of his infant children and the lord had no 
 control over the marriage of his heiress. 
 
 On the other hand the burgess held his lands by 
 burgage tenure which was a peculiar form of socage 
 tenure : his rent was a money rent, and except in 
 a very few cases he was exempt from all liability 
 to work on the lord's demesne. The burgesses of 
 Leicester and Lancaster had redeemed their agri- 
 cultural services before the end of the twelfth 
 century but the burgess of Egremont was still 
 liable to provide a man to plough and another to 
 reap on his lord's demesne 1 . The distinguishing 
 1 B, B. C. 945. 
 
 I 2
 
 4 Burgess and Lord 
 
 feature of burgage tenure was that the burgess was 
 at liberty to sell his land and to go where he would 1 , 
 without in general the intervention of the lord or 
 his steward ; but this freedom was limited in three 
 directions : there were some towns where a burgess 
 might not sell his house which he had inherited, 
 without first giving his kinsmen an opportunity to 
 buy it at the same price as that which had been 
 offered 2 : and this custom is also found in France 
 and Germany 3 . At Whitby, the Abbot, who was 
 lord of the town, had a similar right of pre-emption, 
 and at Walsall the lord could purchase for 1 2ct. less 
 than any other person had offered 4 : but I cannot 
 find any similar provision in any French or German 
 charter. And the charters of many towns forbad 
 the burgess to sell his burgage to men of religion or 
 religious houses 5 , and thus anticipated the statute of 
 Mortmain. Coupled with this liberty to sell, was 
 the privilege that the burgess could devise his bur- 
 gage by will 6 and give his daughter in marriage 
 without the consent of his lord 7 , and occasionally he 
 was allowed to appoint guardians of his infant 
 children by his will 8 . 
 
 Normally no heriot was payable on the death of 
 
 1 B. B. C. 648. * B. . C, 6970. 
 
 3 B. B. C. ex, cxxiii. * B, B. C. 69. 
 
 D B. B. C. 69. B. B. C. 73. 
 
 7 B. B. C. 76. Pembroke B. B. C. 78.
 
 Biirgess and Lord 5 
 
 a burgess and at Pembroke, Lostwithiel, Bideford, 
 and Bradninch, the heir's relief was fixed at i2d. 1 
 Common to Great Britain and the greater part of 
 North-western Europe was a clause which gave 
 undisputed title to a burgess who had been in pos- 
 session of his tenement for a year and a day 2 . There 
 were, however, some towns where the burgess was 
 bound to grind his corn at the lord's mill and bake 
 his bread in the lord's oven 3 , and no inconsiderable 
 part of the lord's income was derived from these 
 sources. The burgesses of the boroughs which were 
 situate on the King's demesne, were, like the villeins, 
 liable to be tallaged at will, and during the reign of 
 Henry II such tallages or aids were levied every 
 three or four years 4 ; but at Egremont, the burgesses 
 were liable for the three feudal aids, those for knight- 
 ing the lord's eldest son, for marrying his eldest 
 daughter and for ransoming his person ; they were 
 also liable to pay aids when his military tenants 
 paid aids but all aids were to be assessed by the 
 burgesses 5 . But what especially marked out the 
 borough as the home of freedom was the privilege 
 that a serf who resided there for a year and a day 
 became a free man 6 : Dunwich, and the boroughs 
 that had charters founded on that of Dunwich, 
 
 1 B.B. C. 76. 2 B. B. C. 71, ex, cxxiii. 
 
 3 B. B. C. 96. * B. B. C. Ixxx. 
 
 5 B. B. C. 91. 6 B. B. C. 1035.
 
 6 Burgess and Lord 
 
 required his admission to the guild as well as his 
 residence in the town, and the Egremont charter, 
 which had been granted by Richard de Lacy, re- 
 fused this privilege to villeins from the King's 
 demesne : at Chesterfield, the lord had a veto on 
 the admission of a new burgess 1 , but we never find 
 in Great Britain a clause which is very frequent in 
 French charters, forbidding the admission to the 
 franchise of the men of certain lords 2 . 
 
 In the second place, the borough was a juris- 
 dictional unit, that is to say, it had a court of its 
 own with jurisdiction over all its inhabitants, except 
 that in some of the larger towns, there were sokens 
 belonging to certain magnates or churches where 
 the burgesses were, in the first instance, justiciable 
 in the courts of the sokens. Domesday book shows 
 that many boroughs were hundreds of themselves 
 and the borough court was frequently called the hun- 
 dred. Of course in the thirteenth century, the manor 
 was a jurisdictional unit, for the manor court had 
 jurisdiction over all the inhabitants of the manor, 
 but the position of the burgess in this respect was 
 superior to that of the inhabitant of a manor in 
 that, while the villagers could be summoned to the 
 hundred and shire courts, most borough charters 
 contained clauses exempting the burgesses from suits 
 of hundreds and shires 3 , or from pleading or being 
 1 B. B. C. 1 10. 2 B. B. C. cxii. 3 B. B. C. 123.
 
 impleaded elsewhere than at the courts of the 
 borough 1 ; but to this general exemption there were 
 occasional exceptions, and eventually the rule came 
 to be that pleas relating to lands situated or to debts 
 contracted within the borough could be tried only 
 in the borough court, while pleas relating to lands 
 situate elsewhere and to those burgesses who were 
 servants of the King could be tried elsewhere-. 
 
 Edgar's law provided that the borough court 
 should be held thrice a year, and the Whitby charter 
 shows that there were three general pleas at which 
 every burgess had to present himself under penalty 
 of a fine 3 , and that, when required, minor pleas were 
 held to which any particular burgess could be sum- 
 moned. 
 
 Naturally the law administered in the courts of 
 the various boroughs cannot be reduced to a code, 
 but it may be laid down as a general rule that 
 borough law was usually archaic both in its pro- 
 cedure and its rules ; the old pre-conquest rules of 
 compurgation were preserved in the boroughs long 
 after they had given way to inquests by witnesses 
 and jury in other courts : and our charters show 
 that the number of compurgators varied from borough 
 to borough, and that sometimes a borough required 
 more or fewer compurgators according to the nature 
 
 1 B.B.C. 115 121. - London 1155. B.B.C. 116. 
 
 3 B.B. C. 142.
 
 8 Burgess and Lord 
 
 of the offence 1 . The formal pleading of pre-con- 
 quest times was still required in the boroughs, except 
 where there were provisions against miskenning, 
 that is, against the rule which caused a party to lose 
 his cause if he failed in the correct repetition of his 
 formulae 2 . Two of the legal innovations of the 
 Norman conquest were absent from the jurispru- 
 dence of the boroughs : they were quit of the 
 murder fine, the fine imposed on a hundred or dis- 
 trict in which a murder had been committed 3 , and 
 except at Pontefract and Leeds, they were exempt 
 from trial by battle 4 ; in this latter particular, the 
 English burgesses differed from those in France, 
 Germany, Spain and Palestine, where trial by battle 
 was the general rule, and most elaborate provisions 
 were laid down for the conduct of duels 5 : I have 
 found only one French and three German charters 
 exempting the burgesses from trial by battle, and at 
 Beauvais the commune retained a hired champion 
 at a fee of ,20 sous a year 6 . 
 
 One of the most highly valued privileges of the 
 burgesses was their exemption from arbitrary fines 7 ; 
 
 1 B.B. C. 137 9. For compurgation in the County Court 
 see Maitland, Const. Hist. 205. 
 
 * B.B. C. 146. s B.B.C. 150. 
 
 4 B.B. C. 1324. 
 
 5 B. B. C. cxiii, cxxiv, cxxx, cxxxiii. 
 
 6 B. B. C. cxiii. 7 B. B. C. 1517.
 
 Bitrgess arid Lord 9 
 
 the charter of Henry I to London directs that no 
 one shall be amerced at more than his wergild, iocs. : 
 and there were many boroughs in which the limit 
 was fixed at 1 2d. y the same as in the Norman bourg 
 of Breteuil ; in the Devonshire boroughs the limit 
 was usually 6^., while in his new borough at 
 Eynsham the Abbot fixed the maximum at 105-. In 
 some of the Irish boroughs we find a distinction 
 between greater and lesser pleas ; in the greater 
 the fine could not exceed 55. and in the lesser the 
 limit was 15-. ; the Egremont charter alone provided 
 a nicely regulated scale of fines, in which the lord 
 tried to make the punishment fit the crime, and in so 
 doing punished a burgess who insulted his male 
 neighbour by a fine of 3^., but reduced the fine to ^d. 
 if one woman insulted another, and in the latter case 
 the complainant, was also fined ^d. if she failed in 
 her cause. In a few cases the amount of the fine was 
 fixed by the culprit's fellow burgesses. It is in this 
 connection that we see one of the greatest differences 
 between English and French municipal charters, for 
 in France most charters contain a nicely regulated 
 scale of fines, far more elaborate than that of 
 Egremont : it is very rare to find a French charter 
 fixing a maximum limit for all offences with but one 
 or two exceptions, as is found so frequently on this 
 side of the channel 1 . 
 
 1 B. B. C. cxiii.
 
 io Burgess and Lord 
 
 Three charters allowed private compositions for 
 offences ; the Norham charter says that free bur- 
 gesses were wont to settle their offences privately, 
 and implied that this rule prevailed in other towns 
 also ; at Whitby the prejudice in favour of these 
 private compositions was such that it was not till 
 after a man had made three attempts at a private 
 settlement that he could summon the offender in the 
 borough court 1 . It should be noticed that whereas 
 that offenders convicted of any offence had to make 
 payments both to the offended party and to the 
 lord of the court, the Wells charter exempted the 
 burgesses from any payment to the Bishop, the lord 
 of the town, when they made these private settle- 
 ments. Similarly, the men of Hythe and Dover 
 were declared to be witefree, that is free from the 
 wites payable to the lord of the borough court on 
 conviction for offences 2 . 
 
 Finally, from the point of view of the student of 
 jurisprudence, the most remarkable of the juris- 
 dictional privileges of the burgesses was the privi- 
 lege that they had of distraining on the goods of 
 their debtors from other towns, or on the goods of 
 the neighbours of those debtors, in order to secure 
 their appearance in the court of the borough 3 ; but 
 this privilege could not be exercised at certain times, 
 
 1 B. B. C. 1123. 2 B. B. C. 1823. 
 
 3 B.B.C. 1614.
 
 1 1 
 
 especially on market days, and by the end of the 
 twelfth century many charters forbad distraint on any 
 person who was not the principal debtor or his 
 surety, a prohibition which was made general by the 
 Statute of Westminster in 1275. It is to be borne 
 in mind that this privilege of distraint to secure 
 appearance in the court of the borough is confined to 
 the British Isles, and is unknown in contemporary 
 French charters except at Rouen, which was part of 
 the English dominions till 1204'. 
 
 So far we have been discussing characteristics 
 which are common both to the boroughs of the 
 British Isles and to the privileged towns of the 
 north-west of Europe : especially do the French 
 charters appear to be directed towards securing 
 the freedom of the burgesses their exemption from 
 feudal or seignorial exactions and the privileges of 
 their own law courts ; but when we come to the 
 next characteristic of the British Borough, we come 
 to a characteristic which is more emphasised here 
 than on the Continent. For thirdly, the English 
 borough was a place of trade ; our pre-conquest 
 kings had again and again forbidden traffic outside 
 of boroughs ; Maitland suggests that there were two 
 reasons for this prohibition, the prevention of trade 
 in stolen cattle and the facilitation of the collection 
 of tolls 2 ; after the Conquest these rules were not 
 1 P>. B. C. cxiv. 2 B. B. C. l.xvi.
 
 12 Burgess and Lord 
 
 repeated, but Henry I forbad all trading in Cam- 
 bridgeshire except at the borough of Cambridge 1 , 
 and his grandson issued an order to the sheriff of 
 Lincolnshire requiring him to compel all foreign 
 merchants to take their wares to the city of Lincoln, 
 so that the reeves of the city should not lose the 
 royal customs 2 . In Scotland the old rules prevailed 
 much later than south of the Tweed : for William 
 the Lion, who did not die till 1214, forbad all trad- 
 ing in the counties of Aberdeen, Perth and Inverness 
 except in the three burghs of the same names 3 ; but 
 there is no similar prohibition of trade in any Irish 
 charter nor in any Continental charter of which I 
 have any knowledge. Although the charters are 
 sadly deficient in evidence on the subject of markets, 
 yet it may be presumed that most of our boroughs 
 had weekly markets and periodical fairs ; there were, 
 however, markets and fairs in villages which were 
 not styled boroughs. In some of the boroughs 
 the burgesses had the right of forming a merchant 
 guild 4 , that is, of uniting all the traders of the 
 town into a society which passed bye-laws and 
 made regulations for the good behaviour of the 
 traders and the improvement of the trade of the 
 
 1 B.B. C. 1 68. 2 16. 
 
 3 B. B. C. 169 170. Eventually these rules would tend to 
 the protection of the burgess against the foreign trader. 
 
 4 B. B. C. 202 7.
 
 13 
 
 town : only members of these merchant guilds were 
 at liberty to open shops in the town, and where there 
 was no merchant guild the charters often forbad 
 others than burgesses to carry on certain specified 
 trades in the town 1 . One of the rules of these 
 merchant guilds insisted that every guildsman must 
 submit any dispute of his with a guild brother to the 
 judgment of the guild, a rule that caused no loss to 
 the lord in those boroughs where private composi- 
 tions were allowed ; hence we often find two tribunals 
 within a town, the court of the merchant guild 
 dealing with disputes between the members of the 
 guild and presided over by the head of the guild, 
 and the borough court dealing with other disputes 
 and presided over by the bailiffs of the King or the 
 lord : Mr Salter has clearly shown the two courts 
 sitting side by side at Oxford 2 . In a few towns we 
 find rules forbidding the keeping of taverns by 
 others than burgesses 3 ; and in Scotland a modifica- 
 tion of this rule was pushed to extremities, for no 
 tavern was allowed in the counties of Perth and 
 Aberdeen, except in the towns of Perth and Aber- 
 deen, and except in those villages where the lord 
 was a knight and was actually resident. 
 
 But the most common of the mercantile privi- 
 leges of the burgesses was their exemption from toll 
 
 1 B. B. C. 211 4. 2 Oxford Millenary Lectures, p. 24. 
 
 3 B. B. C. 2167.
 
 14 Burgess and Lord 
 
 at markets and fairs ; this privilege our kings 
 granted wholesale 1 , and in many cases extended it to 
 their continental dominions and to Ireland ; often 
 too it was granted by mesne lords over more 
 restricted areas 2 ; the Earls of Cornwall exempted 
 the burgesses of the boroughs which they founded 
 from payment of toll within Cornwall, and Roger 
 de Lacy exempted the burgesses of Pontefract 
 from payment of tolls within the castellaries of 
 Pontefract and Clitheroe. Some of the royal 
 charters provided that in cases where toll had been 
 illegally taken from any burgess the sheriff of the 
 shire in which that borough was situate or the reeve 
 of the borough was empowered to retaliate by 
 seizing the goods of a person from the place where 
 the toll had been taken and detaining them till 
 compensation had been made to the aggrieved 
 party 3 ; but this right must be carefully distinguished 
 from the right of the burgess to distrain on the 
 goods of his foreign debtor to secure his appearance 
 at court. Freedom from toll was not peculiar to 
 burgesses ; our kings frequently granted this privi- 
 lege to monasteries and churches and their tenants, 
 but no provision was ever made for retaliation in 
 case toll had been illegally taken from the churches 
 or their tenants. It is this exemption from toll which 
 
 1 B.B. C. 180190. 2 B.B. C. 1914. 
 
 3 B.B. C. 1956.
 
 Bitrgess and Lord 15 
 
 affords the greatest contrast between the French and 
 English municipal charters of the twelfth century ; 
 in this country there were at least 40 boroughs whose 
 burgesses during that century received from the king 
 the privilege of being exempted from tolls through- 
 out England ; of the 65 French towns whose twelfth 
 century charters I have examined not one received 
 a grant of exemption from tolls throughout the 
 dominions of the French king ; but, on the other 
 hand, a few favoured towns, such as Calais and 
 Rouen, received from our English kings exemption 
 from toll throughout their continental dominions. 
 The absence of this privilege from French charters 
 is possibly the result of the extreme subdivision of 
 authority in that country, but it is tempting to 
 suggest that its presence in English charters is 
 evidence that our English kings and their advisers, 
 even in those days, were supporters of an enlightened 
 commercial policy, and anticipated Adam Smith in 
 holding that the best way to encourage trade was to 
 remove all restrictions on it. 
 
 A fourth characteristic of some English boroughs 
 was that they were military strongholds, but the 
 military importance of the towns is more prominent 
 in France than in England during this century. We 
 all know the part that the garrison theory has 
 played in the discussions on the origin of the 
 English borough, but it must be confessed that the
 
 1 6 Burgess and Lord 
 
 charters of the twelfth century throw no light on this 
 question ; the knights and rural sokemen of the 
 Abbot were obliged to assist the burgesses in the 
 repair of the walls of St Edmund's Bury 1 , and thus 
 it is shown that even at the end of the century, 
 burhbot was being exacted from the landowners 
 of Suffolk, but the charters of Wallingford and 
 Maldon exempted the burgesses from castle work 2 . 
 The burgesses of Inverness covenanted with King 
 William that if he would make a rampart round the 
 town they would maintain a good palisade thereon 3 . 
 But apart from these four charters and a very vague 
 reference to the fortification of Hereford 4 , there is 
 no reference in any of the 330 documents that I 
 have collected to the walls of any city or borough or 
 the duty of the burgesses in repairing them : and it 
 is not till 1224 that we find any charters authorising 
 the levy of tolls for purposes of murage. Domesday 
 Book shows that in the eleventh century the 
 boroughs sent contingents to the fyrd at the rate 
 of one fully armed man for every five hides of their 
 assessment 5 ; even in the sixteenth century military 
 service at this rate was due from some of our 
 boroughs 6 ; these contingents were much smaller 
 
 1 B. B. C. 93. 2 B. B. C. 94. 3 B. B. C. 94. 
 
 4 B. B. C. 222. 5 Domesday Boroughs 80. 
 
 6 Cambridge 1333; Cooper's Annals. Oxford 1523; Oxford 
 City Records 43.
 
 Burgess and Lord 17 
 
 than those required from the French communes. 
 The charters of some of the frontier boroughs in 
 South Wales provided for expeditionary service 
 on the part of their burgesses ; at Pembroke and 
 Swansea the burgesses were bound to accompany 
 the lord on his raids provided that they could return 
 the same night 1 ; a similar provision is found in the 
 charter of Lorris, a small town to the east of Paris, 
 whose charter was the examplar of many others 2 . 
 
 To sum up, the advantages of a burgess over a 
 villager were, that he held his lands in the borough 
 by a money rent, and was free from all the servile 
 conditions of tenure, that he could sell his lands and 
 devise them by his will, that he was justiciable in a 
 court of which his fellow burgesses were the dooms- 
 men, and was usually exempt from attending the 
 hundred and shire courts ; and that in many cases 
 that he and his fellow burgesses possessed the 
 monopoly of trading within the borough, and could 
 prevent a stranger from opening a shop unless he 
 made a heavy payment to the guild. 
 
 These being the advantages of the burgess, 
 what, if any, were the corresponding advantages to 
 the lord of the borough ? For landlords have never 
 been in the habit of managing their estates on 
 philanthropic principles, and if the status of a 
 burgess was freer than that of the villager, this was 
 1 B, B. C. 89. 2 B. B. C. cxi. 
 
 B. 2
 
 1 8 Burgess and Lord 
 
 not for any sentimental preference in favour of 
 liberty on the part of the lord, but because he gained 
 from the freer area certain advantages in pounds, 
 shillings and pence. Very frequently he would 
 receive a good round sum in cash as consideration 
 for his charter ; the burgesses of Pontefract gave 
 300 marks of silver for their charter 1 , while Richard 
 de Grenville was content with a payment of four 
 marks as consideration for his grant of liberties to 
 the burgesses of Bideford 2 . Much larger sums were 
 paid for royal charters, and the citizens of London 
 promised King John 3000 marks for his charter of 
 1199; but John knew that promises were not pay- 
 ments, and therefore delivered the charter to the 
 Chief Justice " so that if they are willing to pay 
 these 3000 marks they shall have their charter, but 
 if not, they shall not have it 8 ." 
 
 Apart from the advantage of a cash payment on 
 the grant of the charter the lord's income was usually 
 increased by the establishment of a borough on his 
 land ; in the first place, as to-day, so in the twelfth 
 century the towns were more thickly populated than 
 the villages, and therefore, from corresponding 
 areas, the boroughs produced higher rents ; the 
 sites of some boroughs were marked out as building 
 estates, at Burton-on-Trent the area of each burgage 
 was fixed at 24 perches by 4, or a little over half an 
 
 1 . B. C. 239. * Ib. 3 B, B. C. Ixxxiv.
 
 Burgess and Lord 19 
 
 acre 1 ; at Stratford-on-Avon the plots were about 
 a quarter of an acre in extent, but in each case the 
 rent of \2d. a plot was obtained 2 , whereas the money 
 rent of agricultural land was only ^d. an acre, so 
 that, then as now, it was lucrative for a landlord to 
 grant land for building purposes. Other sources of 
 income would be the receipts from the mill and oven, 
 the profits of the court and the market tolls, all 
 of which would vary with the number of burgesses 
 in the borough. But in addition to these regular 
 sources of income, the lord derived occasional sums 
 by way of aid and tallage : the periodical sums 
 which the king received by way of tallage from his 
 boroughs were assessed on the individual burgesses 
 by the itinerant justices, and formed a substantial 
 part of his income ; the Dialogus de Scaccario tells 
 that occasionally the burgesses offered a certain sum 
 to the justices as the aid from their borough, and if 
 this was accepted, they assessed themselves in such 
 a manner as to raise the amount ; but such an offer 
 was a voluntary matter ; " the common liability of 
 the town is always the result of its own act and 
 not that of the government*." The income derived 
 from the regular sources, the rents, the mill and 
 oven, the law courts and the markets, was collected 
 
 1 B. B. C. 51. 2 B.B.C. 48, 49. 
 
 3 Hughes Crump and Johnson : Dialogus de Scaccario, 
 p. 231 qu. B. B. C. Ixxxii. 
 
 2 2
 
 2O Burgess and Lord 
 
 by the reeve, who was often a speculator who would 
 undertake to pay the lord a fixed sum and would 
 recoup himself and obtain a profit from the exactions 
 he levied from the burgesses. The charters show 
 that he often added to his receipts in other and less 
 legitimate ways ; Henry II ordered that the citizens 
 of London should be quit of Year's gift and Scotale 1 ; 
 the former appears to have been a gift levied by the 
 authorities on New Year's Day, a precedent for the 
 Christmas box levied by the modern postman, while 
 the Scotale was a drinking party to which the 
 burgesses were invited by the reeve, who afterwards 
 made them pay for the drink that they had con- 
 sumed. In the early days of the thirteenth century 
 the burgesses of Malmesbury promised to pay 30^. 
 a year to the Abbot for the release of three scotales 
 which they had been accustomed to attend 2 . 
 
 Domesday Book shows us that even in the 
 eleventh century speculators had begun to take 
 leases of cities and boroughs and to pay fines for 
 the privilege of taking these leases, and the bur- 
 gesses of Northampton appear to have taken a lease 
 of their town from the sheriff in that century 3 ; after 
 the conquest, the custom of leasing boroughs to 
 speculators was continued and extended, and the 
 burgesses especially objected to an outsider coming 
 
 1 B.B. C. 84. 2 B.B.C. 85. 
 
 3 B. B. C. Ixxv.
 
 Burgess and Lord 21 
 
 in and taking the borough over their heads : the 
 Pontefract charter contained a covenant on the part 
 of the lord that he would not let the town to an 
 outsider if a burgess would give as good a rent as he 
 was otherwise offered 1 , and in 1163 the burgesses of 
 Derby paid a fine of ^40 to the King that William 
 Asturcarius should not have a lease of their borough 2 . 
 But the best way of keeping out the stranger was for 
 the burgesses themselves to take the lease, and in 
 order to secure the lease, they were willing to pay 
 an increased rent or a large sum in cash by way of 
 premium. Thus, at the beginning of the reign of 
 Henry II the citizens of Lincoln took a lease of 
 their city at a rent of i 80, an increase of ^o on 
 the rent which had been formerly paid by the sheriff* : 
 and in 1189 the burgesses of Cambridge paid the 
 King 100 marks of silver and one of gold as a 
 premium for the lease of their borough at the accus- 
 tomed rent 4 . But as a general rule, the charters 
 granting the boroughs at farm merely put the body 
 of burgesses in the place of the reeve and did not 
 give them any rights over the soil of the borough ; 
 certain land at Newcastle had escheated, not to the 
 burgesses, who had obtained a lease of the borough, 
 but to the King who granted a lease of these escheats 
 to the burgesses at an additional rent of nos. 6d.* 
 
 1 B. B. C. 236. 2 B. B. C. Ixxvi. 
 
 3 B. B. C. Ixxvii. 4 Ib. 5 B. B. C. 237.
 
 22 Burgess and Lord 
 
 On the other hand, the burgesses of Bristol received 
 a special grant of the waste places within that 
 borough 1 , and Richard I gave to the burgesses of 
 Colchester the customs of the water and the shores 
 on each side, "ad perficiendam firmam nostram," to 
 enable them to pay their rent 2 . While speaking of 
 the rents paid from the boroughs, it is interesting to 
 note, that, while Magna Charta enacted that hun- 
 dreds, wapentakes and shires should be let to sheriffs 
 at the ancient rents 3 , no mention was made of the 
 rents of cities and boroughs, and the King was 
 therefore at liberty to increase them to the utmost 
 sum that the burgesses or a speculator would pay. 
 Along with the right to farm the borough the bur- 
 gesses became entitled to appoint their own official 
 to collect the rents and to preside in the borough 
 court, and the Dublin charter expressly mentions 
 the prepositura, the provostship, as one of the appur- 
 tenances which passed with the right to farm the 
 city 4 . It is interesting to compare the English 
 charters granting the boroughs at farm with some 
 of the French charters which had the same effect ; 
 for in France the grant to the burgesses professed 
 to be a grant of the Prevote, the provostship, with 
 all the rents and dues received by the Pre"vot s . 
 
 1 B. B. C. 237. 2 B. B. C. 236. 
 
 3 B. B. C. Ixxvii. * B. B. C. 231. 
 
 6 B. B. C. cxvii.
 
 Btirgess and Lord 23 
 
 There were other than merely pecuniary ad- 
 vantages which the lord derived from his borough. 
 In the first decade of the thirteenth century, William 
 the Lion built a new castle at Ayr and founded a 
 borough at the gates of the castle 1 , but in so doing, 
 his aim was not to establish an additional fortifi- 
 cation so much as to furnish the garrison with a 
 base of supply. Remember how Domesday tells us 
 that "in the town where rests the body of St Edmund 
 there are living fourscore men less five, who are 
 bakers brewers tailors washermen shoemakers em- 
 broiderers cooks and stewards, and all these daily 
 minister to the Saint and the Abbot and the 
 brethren 2 ." And the Scots King would try to 
 attract to his new borough men who would serve 
 the castellan and his soldiers with provisions and 
 clothes and other stores. For a castellan would 
 sometimes have rights of purveyance 3 , rights of 
 taking goods for the King's use at a low price, and 
 also an unlimited credit, except in those cases where 
 a few of our mesne charters specify a limit within 
 which the lord or his bailiff must pay for the goods 
 which he has obtained 4 : the limit in England and 
 Ireland was 40 days, but in France the limit varies 
 from i 5 days to three months ; I have not found a 
 40 day limit in any French charter 5 . A French 
 
 1 B. B. C. 3. 2 D. B. ii, 372. 3 B. B. C. 87. 
 
 4 B. B. C. 879. 5 B. B. C. cxi.
 
 24 Burgess and Lord 
 
 custom, not found on this side of the Channel, was 
 the ban, the right of the lord to forbid the sale 
 within the town of certain goods, usually wine, for 
 a specified time, during which time the lord had the 
 monopoly of that article 1 . Then again, in certain 
 towns, the lord had the right of prise, which in 
 John's Dublin charter is defined as the right to take 
 from every ship laden with wine that entered the 
 port, two casks, one from before the mast and the 
 other from aft the mast, at a fixed price of 40^. 2 
 I have already referred to the military services of 
 the burgesses, but one or two charters require a 
 little further notice ; the Egremont charter provides 
 that in time of war the burgesses should furnish 
 twelve armed men for the defence of the castle, in 
 time of peace they were to accompany their lord 
 or his steward when he took a distress or made a 
 seizure in Coupland 3 , and at all times they were to 
 set watches at the gates ; similar watching service 
 was required of the burgesses of St Edmund's Bury 
 and Corbridge 4 , and the burgesses of Haverfordwest 
 were to accompany their lord or his bailiff when he 
 went to Parliament or to the army 5 . 
 
 To sum up, a lord would establish a borough on 
 his estate, because thereby he would increase his 
 
 1 B. B. C. cxvi. 2 B. B. C. 235. 
 
 3 B. B. C. 92. 4 B. B. C. 93. 
 
 A A C. 92.
 
 Burgess arid Lord 25 
 
 income from the rents and other profits of the 
 borough, and he would have at his door tradesmen 
 who would furnish supplies for his castle, and also 
 retainers who would be of service to him in times of 
 civil trouble. 
 
 Hitherto we have been dealing with the advant- 
 ages accruing from the establishment of a borough, 
 on . the one hand to the burgess, on the other to 
 the lord : but we have not exhausted the differences 
 between borough and village. Maitland begins his 
 second Ford lecture with these words : " The 
 borough community is corporate : the village com- 
 munity is not : this is a real and important difference 
 in the fifteenth century it shows out in clear light 1 ." 
 Granted, but although the difference between cor- 
 porate boroughs and unincorporate villages is clear 
 in the fifteenth century, it is scarcely visible in the 
 twelfth. 
 
 Now, when we speak of the borough community 
 as a corporate body, we mean that in the eyes of 
 the law the individual burgesses lose their identity 
 in a person that has rights and duties of its own, 
 different from the rights and duties of each indi- 
 vidual burgess. In the eyes of the law every person 
 has a name of his own, can use a seal of his own, 
 can possess property, can enter into contracts and 
 can sue and be sued. Domesday Book personifies 
 1 Township and Borough 18.
 
 26 Burgess and Lord 
 
 certain institutions but appears to deny personality 
 to others : it represents the shire, the wapentake, 
 and the hundred as having eyes and ears and voice, 
 and as capable of taking and giving evidence : but 
 the vill and the borough are never represented as 
 giving evidence 1 . The whole of the controversy 
 whether the burgesses of the eleventh century pos- 
 sessed corporate property would have been avoided 
 if the Domesday scribe had personified the borough. 
 But, as Maitland says, when we come to the fifteenth 
 century, the difference appears clearly. The little 
 borough of Woodstock received its first charter in 
 1453 and by it the burgesses were incorporated : 
 they were declared to be one body in name and 
 deed : and this body was empowered to use a com- 
 mon seal and was given the capacity to sue and be 
 sued : and it received property in the shape of a 
 certain meadow called Le Pool, and a grant of the 
 borough at fee farm and also two fairs with the 
 right to appropriate the tolls. But the burgesses of 
 many boroughs acted as corporate bodies and exer- 
 cised one or another of these functions long before 
 they received a charter of Incorporation. Although 
 the burgesses of Oxford were not formally incorpo- 
 rated till the charter of James I in i6c>5 2 , vet tne 7 
 made corporate contracts 3 , owned corporate property 
 
 1 B. B. C. xcv. 2 Royal Letters addressed to Oxford 228. 
 
 3 B. B. C. ci.
 
 Burgess and Lord 27 
 
 and used a common seal within the first quarter of 
 the thirteenth century. And when the text-books 
 speak of boroughs by prescription, they mean that 
 the burgesses have acted as a body corporate in one 
 or another of these ways without any formal incor- 
 poration. It must be remembered that many of the 
 boroughs which were established by seignorial grant 
 never attained the possession of corporate property 
 or a common seal, and never entered into corporate 
 contracts, although, as at Darlington, the borough 
 court made regulations concerning the trade of 
 the town, and authorised the formation of trade 
 companies. Hence we must distinguish between 
 corporate boroughs and boroughs which were un- 
 incorporated. 
 
 It is in connection with their property and 
 money that the burgesses first begin to perceive 
 the difference between that which belonged to the 
 individual and that which belonged to the body of 
 burgesses: in 1188 a charter was granted to the 
 burgesses of Preston granting them the toll of the 
 wapentake of Amounderness 1 , and the pasture of 
 the forest called Fillewood 2 , that is, pasture rights 
 in the forest : but while it was possible for the indi- 
 vidual burgess to send his cattle to enjoy the pasture, 
 it is impossible to imagine that the charter authorised 
 each individual burgess to go on a free-booting 
 1 B.B.C. 176. 2 B.B, C. 59.
 
 28 Burgess and Lord 
 
 expedition into the wapentake to collect his share 
 of the tolls : the burgesses must have appointed an 
 officer to collect the tolls and pay them into a com- 
 mon purse. Apparently, the earliest grant of this 
 kind is that contained in Archbishop Thurstan's 
 charter to the burgesses of Beverley about ii3O l , 
 when he granted them for eight marks a year the 
 toll of Beverley except at three fairs. It is not 
 astonishing that the Archbishop should have made 
 a gift to a body of burgesses and should have 
 thought of that body as a person, for often a mo- 
 nastic or collegiate church was personified to such 
 an extent as to be represented as the owner of 
 property : this idea is very prominent in Domesday, 
 especially in the south-western counties ; it was the 
 Church of St Peter of Rome that owned Periton in 
 Somerset 2 . 
 
 But the most important gift that the burgesses 
 could receive was the grant of the borough at fee 
 farm, and before the death of King John 28 English 
 boroughs were held by their burgesses at fee farm : 
 but although the liability of the burgesses was joint 
 and several 3 , that is, although the King's officer 
 might distrain on any one of the burgesses for the 
 whole of the farm, yet no burgess considered himself 
 entitled to a share of the income ; the collection of 
 
 1 B.B. C. 176. 2 D. B. i, 91 a 2. 
 
 3 Township and Borough 77.
 
 Burgess and Lord 29 
 
 the dues and rents was the duty of one or more 
 officers. Let us see what happened at Ipswich on 
 the grant of a charter that the burgesses should 
 have the borough at farm : immediately the charter 
 arrived in the town, the burgesses met and elected 
 their bailiffs and coroners, the officials sanctioned 
 by the charter, a few days later they elected 12 
 capital portmen, and, after another interval, the 
 bailiffs, coroners and portmen decreed that all the 
 customs of the town should be collected by the 
 bailiffs and four good men of the town, who were to 
 pay the King's farm : and on the same day they 
 ordered a common seal to be made 1 . Here it is 
 evident that the grant of the borough to the bur- 
 gesses at farm did not put a single penny into the 
 pockets of a single burgess except the bailiffs, who 
 collected the income and paid the rent and, as 
 nothing is said on the matter, probably appropriated 
 any surplus for their own use. As Maitland has 
 pointed out, the charter authorised the burgesses to 
 elect a bailiff to "run the town." In the fifteenth 
 century it was held that the grant of a vill in fee 
 farm to the men of that vill, incorporated the latter 
 and authorised them to act as a body corporate 2 . 
 That being so we have to deal with many incorporated 
 
 1 Gild Merchant n, 119. 
 
 2 Y.B.i Edw. IV, No. 7, qu. Pike, Y. B. 16 Edw. Ill, pt i, 
 
 p. Ixviii.
 
 30 Burgess and Lord 
 
 villages ; for King John granted many vills, not 
 styled boroughs, at farm to the men of those vills to 
 whom he denied the style of burgesses. 
 
 I have been trying by this mass of details to 
 present some idea of the usual burgensic duties and 
 privileges in the twelfth century ; but it must not be 
 thought that this is a fair picture of medieval town 
 life ; Mrs Green has painted that picture once and 
 for all, and I fear that my long details about the 
 borough court and the law followed therein may 
 lead you to think that the medieval burgess spent 
 his time in nothing else but either suing his neigh- 
 bour or being sued by him : but the charters and 
 the custumals were drawn up by lawyers, and as the 
 shoemaker thinks there is nothing like leather, so 
 the lawyer thinks there is nothing like law, and 
 especially legal procedure : if shopkeepers had drawn 
 up the charters, we should probably have learnt more 
 of the trading privileges of the burgesses. But the 
 picture that I have tried to present is a composite 
 picture, and the details are drawn from all parts of 
 the British Isles. Two features, and two features 
 only, can with certainty be predicated of every 
 borough of the twelfth century, the application of 
 burgage tenure to all tenements within its borders, 
 and the possession of a law court with jurisdiction 
 over all the inhabitants of these tenements.
 
 2. BOROUGH AND HUNDRED 
 
 I finished my last lecture by stating that two 
 features, and two features only, could with certainty 
 be predicated of the English borough of the twelfth 
 century, that all its tenements were held by burgage 
 tenure, and that it had a court with jurisdiction over 
 all its inhabitants. But this statement, which is 
 apparently so simple, opens great difficulties when 
 we come to consider the place of the borough in the 
 national organisation. 
 
 For when we ask ourselves, what is the nature 
 of the borough court, we find ourselves involved in 
 a discussion as to the differences between feudal and 
 royal or national justice. Maitland defines feudal 
 justice as that justice which is exercised by one man 
 over another because they stand in the relation of 
 landlord and tenant 1 , and the records of the thirteenth 
 century show that then every lord was holding a 
 court for the tenants of his manor ; I do not know 
 of any direct evidence for the existence of manorial 
 courts in the twelfth century, but Domesday Book 
 shows that there were then many men who were 
 exercising over their tenants the rights known as 
 sake and soke, a term which was used by the lawyers 
 of the thirteenth century to imply the ordinary feudal 
 
 1 Domesday Book and Beyond 80.
 
 32 Boroiigh and Hundred 
 
 jurisdiction exercised by the lord of a manor over 
 his tenants : it is therefore not unreasonable to 
 believe that these owners of sake and soke held 
 manorial courts in the eleventh century and a fortiori 
 that there were manorial courts in the twelfth cen- 
 tury 1 . 
 
 Now the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were 
 especially the age of the establishment of boroughs : 
 we can compile a list of 26 English boroughs which 
 were founded on their own estates by others than 
 the King before the death of King John : some- 
 times the founders obtained the King's licence for 
 so doing 2 , but usually there is no evidence of such 
 licence. One of the most pregnant examples of 
 such borough-founding is to be seen in a little village 
 about six miles from Oxford : for in 1215 the Abbot 
 of Eynsham granted a charter by which he estab- 
 lished a new borough in his manor of Eynsham : he 
 cut out of the manor a piece of land about 20 acres 
 in extent, which he divided into building plots : these 
 
 1 Here I follow Prof. Vinogradoff, "As a rule the grants of 
 sake and soke led to the formation of separate manorial courts " 
 (English Society in the \\th Century 1 1 7 8), rather than Maitland, 
 " It seems clear that when Domesday Book was compiled, and 
 even at the beginning of the i2th century, sake and soke, what- 
 ever they meant, meant a jurisdiction that was not involved in 
 the mere possession of a manerium" (Sel. Pleas in Manorial 
 Courts i, xxiii.) 
 
 2 B. B. C. i.
 
 Borough and Himdred 33 
 
 he granted to various tenants at a money rent 1 , with 
 powers of sale 2 and devise 3 , i.e. on burgage tenure, 
 and for the piece of land thus cut out of his manor, 
 he established a court of which the burgesses were 
 the doomsmen 4 . Now it is obvious that, as lord of 
 the manor of Eynsham, the Abbot could ordain 
 that the court of that manor should sit in two 
 sessions, one for the inhabitants of the borough and 
 the other for the inhabitants of the rest of the 
 manor ; and that being so, the court of the borough 
 of Eynsham was a feudal court, a court wherein the 
 Abbot exercised over the burgesses the rights de- 
 fined by the term sake and soke. Long before the 
 establishment of the borough, the Abbey had re- 
 ceived a charter exempting its tenants from suit of 
 shires and hundred moots, but even so, his justice 
 was feudal in being restricted to his tenants in his 
 manors and boroughs. There are many instances 
 in which it can be shown that boroughs were formed 
 by the separation of certain areas from the juris- 
 diction of the manors in which they were geograph- 
 ically situate, and establishing for them separate 
 courts 5 , and if, as frequently happened during the 
 thirteenth century, a whole vill was raised to the 
 status of a borough by a seignorial grant that it 
 
 1 B. B. C. 45. 2 B. B. C. 68. 
 
 3 B.B.C. 74. " B.B. C. 157. 
 
 5 B. B. C. xci. 
 
 B.
 
 34 Borough and Hundred 
 
 should be a free borough, the court for that vill 
 would change its name but not its nature : in spite 
 of its name being changed from Court of the Manor 
 to Portmote, it was still feudal and would exercise 
 no higher justice than it had previously exercised. 
 And the contrary is also true: if a seignorial borough 
 lost its burghal status, it reverted to the status of 
 a manor : the new borough at Eynsham lost its 
 burghal status long before the Reformation, and is 
 to-day known as the manor of Newland, and its 
 court to-day is the court of the manor of Newland. 
 In fact, the sole difference between a seignorial 
 borough and a manor was that the former was in- 
 habited by free men holding on burgage tenure, 
 while on an ordinary manor much land was held in 
 villenage by men of servile status. 
 
 But feudal justice must be contrasted with 
 national justice 1 : as soon as justice begins to be 
 organised in this country, we find national courts 
 for districts known as hundreds and shires ; and 
 Edgar's law relating to the holding of moots implies 
 that there were certain boroughs that had moots 
 which were units in the national system of moots, and 
 were co-ordinate with the hundred moots 2 . But in 
 very early years our kings began to grant hundreds 
 
 1 Much of what follows was inspired by Miss Bateson's 
 criticisms of my Domesday Boroughs (20 E. H. R. 146). 
 
 2 Select Charters 71.
 
 Borough and Hundred 35 
 
 to their favourite bishops and abbots 1 , and with 
 the grant of the hundreds, that is, the grant of 
 the right to receive the dues paid to the hundred, 
 the grantees received the right of holding the hun- 
 dred courts, and although these hundred courts were 
 in the hands of subjects, they did not become feudal 
 courts, for the relationship between the grantee of 
 the hundred and the landowners within the hundred 
 was not that of landlord and tenant : the effect of 
 the grant was to appoint the grantee as the King's 
 delegate for the holding of a national court with the 
 right to receive for himself the fees and perquisites 
 arising from that court. The thirteenth century 
 accounts of the Manor of Woodstock show that the 
 bailiff of the manor was in the habit of leasing the 
 hundred of Wootton to persons who paid a fixed 
 rent for it: in 1246 the rent was reduced from 12 
 to 11. IQS. "because it was diminished on account 
 of many liberties," and in 1271 he was unable to let 
 it, and therefore received the dues and accounted 
 for them to the King 2 : but neither the lessee nor 
 the bailififwas ever regarded as the landlord of the 
 suitors of the court. 
 
 We were speaking of the co-ordination of the 
 courts of certain boroughs with those of the hun- 
 dreds as being units in the national system of courts ; 
 
 1 Domesday Book and Beyond 267. 
 
 2 Woodstock Manor in the Thirteenth Century. 
 
 32
 
 36 Boroitgh and Hundred 
 
 and Domesday gives abundant evidence of such co- 
 ordination. Every student of Domesday knows that, 
 except in the south-western counties and Oxford- 
 shire, it was the custom of the Domesday scribes to 
 place at the top of the statistics relating to any 
 manor or vill, the name of the hundred in which it 
 was situate, except when the manor or vill under 
 discussion was in the same hundred as its pre- 
 decessor. Now when we examine the statistics of 
 the boroughs in Domesday Book in relation to these 
 hundredal rubrics, we find that they fall into three 
 classes : the first class have no hundredal rubrics 
 and therefore are outside the ordinary hundredal 
 organisation : a second class lay in hundreds bearing 
 their own names, while the third class, like Eynsham 
 in the thirteenth century, lay in manors which them- 
 selves lay in the ordinary rural hundreds. When we 
 remember the effect of Edgar's law, we see that the 
 reason why some boroughs had no hundredal rubrics 
 was that they had moots which were co-ordinate 
 with the moots of the rural hundreds, and were 
 therefore equivalent to urban hundreds : if we look 
 at the boroughs which lay in hundreds bearing the 
 same name as themselves, we find that in some 
 cases these hundreds contained no vills other than 
 the boroughs, or that, in two cases, there were rural 
 hundreds bearing the same name as the boroughs, 
 but excluding the boroughs ; so that these boroughs,
 
 Borough and Himdred 37 
 
 too, may be considered as urban hundreds : for the 
 sake of brevity, I propose to give the name of hun- 
 dredal boroughs to those which are shown by Domes- 
 day to lie outside the ordinary organisation of the 
 rural hundreds, and of them I count 46 1 . Their 
 existence cannot be over-emphasised : the rural 
 hundreds came up to the boundaries of the land 
 belonging to these towns and there stopped short : 
 five rural hundreds touched the boundaries of the 
 borough of Cambridge ; and the boundaries of Lei- 
 cester and Chichester were each touched by three 
 rural hundreds : and it would seem that from the 
 earliest days of the English settlement many of the 
 old Roman towns had lain outside the ordinary rural 
 organisation, but there is no evidence of the survival 
 of Roman municipal institutions 2 . The moots of 
 these hundredal boroughs were, according to Edgar's 
 law, to be held thrice a year 3 : but these three 
 sessions were thus particularised because to them 
 alone all the burgesses were bound to pay suit 
 without a special summons : other meetings of the 
 borough court were held from time to time to which 
 any burgess whose attendance was required was 
 specially summoned. 
 
 Maitland adopts another classification of the 
 boroughs of Domesday Book ; he notices that some 
 
 1 For lists of various kinds of boroughs see note on pp. 44 5. 
 1 See Appendix II. 3 Select Charters 71.
 
 38 Borough and Hundred 
 
 are entered on the Terra Regis, and others lie on 
 the land of some subject or another, while others, 
 and these the most important, are placed above the 
 line, that is, before the list of tenants in chief in any 
 county, and are not stated to lie on the land of 
 either the King or any other person 1 . I think that 
 the key to this classification is the destination of 
 the third penny 2 : Dr Round has pointed out that 
 Domesday Book shows that in the time of King 
 Edward the income of certain boroughs was divided 
 between the King and the Earl of the shire in 
 which that borough was situate in the proportion 
 of two to one, and that the Earl's share was known 
 as the third penny 3 . But, although this was the 
 rule T. R. E., it was altered by the Conqueror; in 
 some cases, where no earl was appointed, as in 
 Wilts and Somerset, the sheriff accounted to the 
 King for the Earl's third penny as well as for his 
 original share, and in these cases the borough was 
 entered in the Terra Regis : in other cases, such as 
 Fordwich and Sandwich, the Earl had granted his 
 third penny to the same person as had received a 
 grant of the King's share, and these boroughs were 
 entered among the lands of the grantees : while 
 those boroughs whose income was still divided 
 
 1 Domesday Book and Beyond 176 8. 
 a Domesday Boroughs 41 3. 
 8 Geoffrey de Mandeville 287.
 
 Borough and Hundred 39 
 
 between the King and the Earl, were entered above 
 the line, and above the line were also found a 
 number of those boroughs about whose third penny 
 we have no information, but which gave their name 
 to the shires in which they were situate. None of 
 the boroughs above the line have any hundredal 
 rubric. Domesday mentions the third penny of 37 
 boroughs 1 , to which can be added from other evi- 
 dence, the names of two more 2 , and of this total of 
 39, no less than 25 are included among the hun- 
 dredal boroughs. 
 
 Another classification adopted by Maitland was 
 the division of the boroughs of Domesday Book 
 into those of homogeneous tenure, in which all the 
 burgesses held of one and the same lord, and those 
 of heterogeneous tenure, where different burgesses 
 paid their rents to different lords 3 ; as three syllables 
 are shorter than nine, I suggest that we should 
 apply the term "composite" to the boroughs of 
 heterogeneous tenure ; I can count 64 of these com- 
 posite boroughs, and of them 43 are hundredal, and 
 five are definitely stated to lie within one rural 
 hundred or another : there are only three of our 
 hundredal boroughs which are not composite, and 
 
 1 See note on pp. 44 5. 
 
 2 Bedford, Monasticon iv, 414; Cambridge, Cooper's Annals 
 
 i, 38- 
 
 3 Domesday Book and Beyond 197 etc.
 
 40 Borough and Hundred 
 
 before the conquest the Earl received the third 
 penny of these three 1 . 
 
 These composite boroughs will repay a more 
 careful study, for examination shows that the 
 burgesses who held of others than the King or 
 the lord of the borough held their houses of the 
 rural landowners in the shire : except that where 
 a borough lay on the borders of two shires, land- 
 owners on both sides of the border held houses in 
 the borough ; moreover, these town houses were 
 appurtenant to, and paid rent to, and were often 
 conveyed along with the rural manors of these land- 
 owners 2 . The only evidence from which we can 
 deduce the duties of the burgesses who held these 
 appurtenant houses is the Domesday entry relating 
 to the city of Oxford 3 , where there were 223 mural 
 mansions, which were so called because " if need be 
 and the King command, they repair the wall " : 
 now, of these 223 mural mansions, six were stated to 
 be appurtenant to four manors in Oxon. and Bucks., 
 20 which then belonged to the King had previously 
 belonged to Earl Alfgar, who had been a rural 
 landowner, 189 belonged to 27 men who owned 
 land in Oxfordshire, leaving a balance of nine houses 
 belonging to six men who cannot be identified as 
 
 1 See note on pp. 44 5. 
 
 8 Domesday Boroughs 29, 107. 
 
 3 D.B. i, 154 i.
 
 rural landowners in the county : so that of the mural 
 mansions in Oxford, 96 per cent, were appurtenances 
 of rural manors. Surely we are justified in deducing 
 from these figures the rule that, in Oxford at all 
 events, many of the rural landowners performed 
 their burhbot by keeping houses in the city and 
 burgesses in these houses to repair the wall. And 
 as Domesday Book neither gives nor suggests any 
 other explanation of the duties of the town houses 
 which were appurtenant to rural manors, it is argued 
 that in other boroughs too the duty of repairing the 
 wall devolved on the town houses of the rural 
 landowners, or the occupiers of such houses. If 
 this be so, all our 64 composite boroughs were 
 fortified towns at some time or another of their 
 existence, for it is no part of the garrison theory, as 
 I understand it, to argue that, at the time of the 
 Conquest, these town houses were in all cases liable 
 for the repair of the walls 1 . 
 
 Possibly it will be interesting to compare this 
 list of 64 composite boroughs with two other lists of 
 fortified towns of an earlier date : from the Chronicle 
 a list can be compiled of about a score of boroughs 
 established by Edward the Elder to secure his 
 conquests in the Midlands : of these, only nine 
 retained their bursfhal status at the time of Domes- 
 
 o 
 
 day, but all nine are included among the composite 
 1 Sec App. I. For Malmt'sbury sec 21 E. //. R. 98, 722.
 
 42 Borough and Hundred 
 
 boroughs 1 . From about the same date comes a 
 document known as the Burghal Hidage 2 containing 
 a list of 3 1 boroughs, with the hidage of the districts 
 which owed burhbot to each of them : of these, two* 
 cannot be identified : eight had lost their burghal 
 status at the time of Domesday 4 , three are found 
 among the boroughs of homogeneous tenure 5 , and 
 1 8 are composite boroughs, one of which, Buck- 
 ingham, appears also in the list of Edwardian 
 boroughs 6 . So that, of some half-hundred towns 
 which are known to have been fortified in the first 
 quarter of the tenth century, 21 had fallen to the 
 status of villages 150 years later, and 26 were 
 composite boroughs ; but from their analogy with 
 Oxford we have argued that the composite boroughs 
 were originally fortified boroughs ; our enquiries 
 therefore corroborate this argument in 26 cases. 
 A fourth characteristic is emphasised by those 
 
 1 Buckingham, Chester, Hertford, Huntingdon, Maldon, 
 Stafford, Tamworth, Warwick, Worcester. 
 
 2 Domesday Book and Beyond 502 6. 
 
 3 Heorepeburan, Sceaftelege. 
 
 4 Burpham, Porchester, Tisbury, Bredy, Halwell ; Watchet, 
 Lyng, Eashing. 
 
 5 Twineham, Lidford, Axbridge. 
 
 6 Barnstaple, Bath, Buckingham, Chichester, Cricklade, Exeter, 
 Hastings, Langport, Lewes, Malmesbury, Oxford, Shaftesbury, 
 Southampton, Southwark, Wallingford, Wareham, Wilton, Win- 
 chester.
 
 Borough and Hundred 43 
 
 who attribute much importance to the existence of a 
 mint in a borough as evidence that the borough was 
 a place of trade ; but it is remarkable that the 
 situation of many of the early mint-stows affords 
 evidence in favour of the garrison theory ; and 
 shows that the towns were fortified before they were 
 places of trade. The mints of Alfred 1 and Edward 
 the Elder 2 , and the earlier royal mints, were all 
 situate in the old Roman towns which became 
 English boroughs : Athelstan was the first to go 
 outside this circle, and of the 19 new mints estab- 
 lished by him, five were placed in boroughs men- 
 tioned in the Burghal Hidage 3 and seven in places 
 fortified by Edward the Elder 4 , while six others 
 were established in boroughs that contained houses 
 paying rents to rural manors 5 : in other words, 12 
 out of Athelstan's 19 new mints were established 
 in places which to our certain knowledge were 
 
 1 Bath, Canterbury, Exeter, Gloucester, London, Lincoln, 
 Winchester (n E. H. R. 759). Mr Stainer does not consider 
 that the OHSNAFORDA coins came from an Oxford mint. 
 (Oxford Silver Pennies xxxiii.) 
 
 2 Bath, Canterbury, Lincoln, Winchester, (n E.H.R, 759.) 
 
 3 Wareham, Shaftesbury, Langport, Oxford, Wallingford. (7#.) 
 
 4 Weardburh (i.e. Warburton near Chester (Plummer, A. S. 
 Chron.\ not Warborough, Oxon.), Tamworth, Warwick, Chester, 
 Hertford, Stafford, Maldon. (Id.) 
 
 5 Shrewsbury, Derby, Nottingham, Norwich, Dover, Hereford.
 
 44 
 
 fortified during the previous reign. Later kings 
 multiplied mints with the result that of our 46 
 hundredal boroughs, no less than 40 contained pre- 
 Conquest mints, and of our 64 composite boroughs 
 52 were mint-stows. 
 
 All of these characteristics, hundredality, the 
 third penny, tenurial heterogeneity and the mint, 
 point to the same conclusion, the national character 
 of the boroughs possessing them ; the hundredal 
 boroughs formed units in the national organisation 
 co-ordinate with the rural hundreds and shires ; the 
 third penny proves that the income derived from 
 them formed part of the national income and was 
 divided between the King and the chief official of 
 the shire ; their tenurial heterogeneity shows that 
 they were the national fortresses, and that their 
 walls were repaired by residents who held their 
 houses of the rural landowners ; the mints show 
 that they were places of national trade. Any borough 
 possessing any one of these characteristics naturally 
 stands on a higher plane than its neighbour which 
 possesses none of them : and it must therefore be 
 noticed that all four characteristics are possessed by 
 22 boroughs, that three of them are possessed by 22, 
 that two are possessed by 22, and that there are only 
 seven which possess only one or another of them 1 . 
 
 1 i. Hundredal, Composite, Third Penny, pre-Conquest Mint. 
 Cambridge, Chester, Chichester, Derby, Dover, Exeter,
 
 Borough and Hundred 45 
 
 Hereford, Huntingdon, Ipswich, Leicester, Lewes, Lincoln, 
 Malmesbury, Norwich, Oxford, Sandwich, Shrewsbury, Stafford, 
 Southwark, Thetford, Winchcombe, Worcester. (22) 
 
 2. Hundredal, Composite, pre-Conquest Mint. 
 Buckingham, Canterbury, Colchester, Dorchester, Gloucester, 
 
 Hertford, Maldon, Nottingham, Rochester, Shaftesbury, South- 
 ampton, Stamford, Wallingford, Warwick, Wareham, York. (16) 
 
 3. Hundredal, Third Penny, pre-Conquest Mint. 
 Bedford, Torksey. (2) 
 
 4. Hundredal, Third Penny. 
 Fordwich. (i) 
 
 5. Hundredal, Composite. 
 
 Arundel, Bridport, Grantham, Northampton, Pevensey. (5) 
 
 6. Composite, Third Penny, pre-Conquest Mint. 
 Bruton, Bath, Ilchester, Langport. (4) 
 
 7. Composite, pre-Conquest Mint. 
 
 Bristol, Guildford, Hastings, Hythe, London, Romney, 
 Sudbury, Tam worth, Wilton, Winchester. (10) 
 
 8. Composite, Third Penny. 
 
 Barnstaple, Cricklade, Droitwich, Milborne Port. (4) 
 
 9. Third Penny, pre-Conquest Mint. 
 Totnes, Salisbury. (2) 
 
 10. Composite. 
 
 Calne, Dunwich, Wimbourne. (3) 
 
 1 1. Third Penny. 
 
 Axbridge, Frome, Marlborough, Yarmouth. (4) 
 
 The Hundredal Boroughs are found in lists i, 2, 3, 4, 5. 
 
 The Composite Boroughs are found in lists i, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, TO. 
 
 The Boroughs whose third penny is recorded are found in 
 lists i, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, n. 
 
 The Boroughs with pre-Conquest mints are found in lists i, 2, 
 3> 6, 7, 9-
 
 46 Borough and Hundred 
 
 Every student of Domesday knows the capricious 
 manner in which facts are inserted or omitted by the 
 Domesday scribes : we have already noticed that the 
 hundredal rubric is always omitted in the South- 
 western shires, and it is therefore possible that 
 certain boroughs in Devon, Somerset and Wilts, 
 whose third penny, tenurial heterogeneity and mints 
 are recorded, were also hundredal boroughs, and 
 should be added to our list of boroughs possessing 
 the four characteristics. In fact, I should be inclined 
 to suggest that all the boroughs possessing one or 
 another of these characteristics, 73 in number, should 
 be placed in the same category, were it not that five 
 of them, Yarmouth, Dunwich, Hythe, Romney, and 
 Guildford, were definitely stated to lie within certain 
 rural hundreds. But, although this conclusion is too 
 sweeping, the fact remains that there were at the 
 Norman Conquest and for at least a century and 
 a half previously, a considerable number of boroughs 
 that formed units in the scheme of national organisa- 
 tion : their courts were national courts, and their 
 income was collected by the sheriff in the same way 
 as he collected the rest of the national income, 
 except in those cases where a hundredal borough 
 had been granted to a subject. But in the same 
 way as, when a rural hundred had been granted to a 
 subject, that subject held the court of the hundred 
 not as landlord but as the King's delegate, so, in
 
 Borough and Hundred 47 
 
 passing to a subject, the court of the hundredal 
 borough did not cease to be a national court. Every 
 argument points to the conclusion that our oldest 
 boroughs were always royal or national boroughs, 
 units in the national organisation, like the rural 
 hundreds and shires. 
 
 This digression into the character of the boroughs 
 at and before the Norman Conquest may seem 
 a side issue : but it shows that at the beginning 
 of the twelfth century certain boroughs were more 
 highly organised than their neighbours : and this 
 distinction appears all through the century. The 
 Pipe Rolls show that there were certain boroughs 
 that paid a special tax, called indifferently an aid 
 or a gift or a tallage : thus, the aid of 1 1 30 was paid 
 by 22 boroughs, of which 20 were included among 
 the hundredal boroughs of Domesday : but additions 
 were continually being made to the list of aid-paying 
 boroughs, and the aid of 1176 was paid by 32 hun- 
 dredal boroughs and 32 non-hundredal boroughs, 
 but of the latter, six were composite in 1086, five 
 paid the third penny and four were of homogeneous 
 tenure. 
 
 The judicial reforms of Henry II however greatly 
 affected the boroughs : the Assize of Clarendon 
 provided that inquiry should be made for notorious 
 criminals, who were to be presented to the Justices 
 in Eyre by four lawful men of each vill and
 
 4 8 
 
 12 lawful men from each hundred 1 . But the 
 Assize makes no mention of presentments from the 
 boroughs, and this omission is probably intentional 
 as so many boroughs were urban hundreds, and it is 
 implied that presentments from the boroughs would 
 be made by 12 lawful men.. Hence it is. not 
 surprising that when the shire was summoned to 
 meet the Justices in Eyre, the sheriff was directed to 
 summon 12 lawful men from every borough and 
 the reeve and four lawful men from every vill 2 . 
 
 From this time forth, a new criterion arises, a 
 place which did not send twelve men to the Eyre 
 was no borough, and this was probably the criterion 
 which was adopted by the sheriffs in 1316, when 
 they were ordered to make returns showing the 
 names of the hundreds boroughs and vills in their 
 respective shires, and the names of the owners of 
 each : and when this return, known as the Nomina 
 Villarum, is examined it is found that a number 
 of boroughs are returned as being outside the. rural 
 hundreds, that others are returned as being within 
 one hundred or another, and that the names are 
 omitted of many that had received charters recog- 
 nising their burghal status. Further examination 
 shows that, except in Devon and Cornwall, the 
 sheriffs omitted those boroughs which had received 
 
 1 Sel. Ch. 143. 
 
 * Holdsworth, Hist. Eng. Law i, 440.
 
 49 
 
 only seignorial charters, and usually returned the 
 hundredal boroughs of Domesday as being outside 
 the rural hundreds. Then, we learn that certain 
 places, which had been hundredal boroughs in the 
 eleventh century, such as Buckingham and Winch- 
 combe, had in the fourteenth century ceased to 
 be recognised as boroughs : that others, such as 
 Yarmouth and Dunwich, had been promoted from 
 intra-hundredal to hundredal rank : that others, 
 which had formerly been assessed with rural manors, 
 such as Reading and Steyning, had been granted 
 hundredal rank, which had also been conferred on a 
 few unchartered boroughs on the King's demesnes, 
 such as Woodstock and Henley. It is, however, 
 permissible to doubt whether there was any prac- 
 tical difference between those boroughs which were 
 recorded as being hundreds of themselves and 
 those which had separate representation within the 
 hundred : so long as a borough was separately 
 represented at the Eyre, there appears no reason, 
 other than tradition, why it should be put in one 
 class rather than the other. The twelfth century 
 charters suggest that there were two methods by 
 which a borough might be raised to hundredal rank: 
 the burgesses of Portsmouth had been exempted 
 from suits of hundreds, and Wells and Bridgewater 
 had received royal grants of the " liber burgus," 
 and all three towns were returned as boroughs 
 
 H. 4
 
 50 Borough and Hundred 
 
 in the Nomina Villarum, presumably because they 
 were reckoned as hundreds and therefore sent 
 12 lawful men to the Eyre. It therefore appears 
 that a royal grant of the liber burgus exempted its 
 recipients from suits of hundreds and imposed on 
 them the duty of sending 1 2 men to the Eyre : but 
 a seignorial grant of the liber burgus had not this 
 effect 1 . But these suggestions are tentative, and 
 when the charters of the thirteenth century have 
 been examined as carefully as those of the twelfth, it 
 may be possible to decide definitely the reasons 
 which led the sheriffs to call on certain boroughs 
 to send 12 burgesses to the Eyre and to allow others 
 to be unrepresented. 
 
 Two results of the Nomina Villarum may be 
 noted : it seems to have settled the list of Parlia- 
 mentary boroughs : previously these lists were so 
 variable as to suggest that the sheriffs granted or 
 refused Parliamentary representation at their own 
 will; but after 1316, with certain exceptions, of 
 which the most are in Devon, Wilts, and Yorks, 
 only those boroughs which were returned as such in 
 the Nomina Villarum, sent burgesses to Parliament. 
 It also appears to have settled the list of boroughs 
 that paid the special taxation : for in 1322, Parlia- 
 ment granted the King a subsidy of one-tenth from 
 the baronage and shires and one-sixth from the 
 1 See App. III.
 
 Borough and Hundred 51 
 
 boroughs : with but a few exceptions, only the 
 boroughs mentioned in the return paid the sixth : 
 thus the seignorial boroughs of Burton-on-Trent, 
 Leek and Walsall were omitted from the return 
 and paid the tenth ; but the hundredal borough of 
 Stafford paid the sixth : but in Devon a number 
 of seignorial boroughs, which are mentioned in the 
 Nomina Villarum, paid the sixth. 
 
 The co-ordination of borough and hundred 
 appears in later centuries ; when the sheriff of 
 Oxfordshire in 1635 received the writ for Ship- 
 money, he issued his precepts for the collection 
 of their respective quotas to the mayors of the 
 boroughs and high constables of the hundreds in the 
 county ; and it is remarkable that even in the 
 sanitary legislation of the nineteenth century, the 
 same co-ordination is observed. Under the Public 
 Health Act, 1875, the whole country was divided 
 between Urban and Rural Sanitary Authorities ; the 
 Local Government Act, 1894, has changed the names 
 of these authorities to Urban and Rural District 
 Councils, but the districts over which the Rural 
 District Councils exercise their authority are, in 
 general, the Poor Law Unions established in 1834, 
 and these Poor Law Unions are, generally, the 
 ancient hundreds that had existed from the tenth 
 century or earlier, or unions of those hundreds : 
 so that for purposes of Public Health the hundred 
 
 42
 
 52 Borough and Hundred 
 
 and the town are co-ordinate authorities. Of course, 
 there have been many changes of area since the 
 tenth century, but such changes are, comparatively 
 speaking, very slight, and for our purpose, may be 
 neglected. 
 
 To sum up, Domesday Book shows that in the 
 eleventh century there were certain boroughs which 
 were units in the scheme of national organisation 
 like the rural hundreds and shires : this number 
 was increased during the twelfth century by royal 
 charters, and on all boroughs thus constituted, both 
 new and old, the Assize of Clarendon imposed 
 the duty of sending twelve burgesses to the Eyre as 
 their representatives ; in the thirteenth century their 
 separate representation at the Eyre was as definite a 
 mark of the national importance of certain boroughs 
 as was their position outside the rural hundreds at 
 the time of the Conquest, and the co-ordination of 
 hundred and town is to be found even at the present 
 day. But one distinction must be borne in mind : 
 the burgesses of some seignorial boroughs, like 
 Eynsham, were likewise exempt from attending the 
 hundred courts, but this exemption was extended to 
 them, not because they were burgesses of a certain 
 borough, but because they were tenants of a certain 
 lord; and an exemption from the court of the 
 hundred granted to a lord for all his men had not 
 the effect of changing a seignorial borough into a
 
 Borough and Hundred 53 
 
 national borough with its 12 representatives at the 
 Eyre. 
 
 In many of the boroughs, however, which 
 possessed national courts, co-ordinate with those 
 of the rural hundreds, were to be found feudal 
 courts exercising jurisdiction over the sokens that 
 were situate within the boundaries of the borough ; 
 when a landowner, who had sake and soke over 
 his rural estates, owned houses within a borough, 
 Domesday shows that he had sake and soke over 
 his town houses also 1 ; and in most, if not all, 
 of our Cathedral cities, the bishop had sake and 
 soke over that quarter of the city in which were 
 situate the Cathedral Church and Close and the 
 houses of himself and the Cathedral dignitaries. 
 London is the special home of these sokens, of which 
 there were at least 19 in the reign of Edward IP, 
 and some of these can be identified with the London 
 houses which were appurtenant to certain rural 
 manors at the time of Domesday ; thus, while 
 Domesday speaks of 17 burgesses in London who 
 paid rent to the manor of Lambeth 3 , a conveyance 
 of 1198 purports to grant one moiety of the manor 
 of Lambeth and one moiety of the soken within 
 London appurtenant thereto 4 . Kemble prints a copy 
 of the writ by which the Confessor signified to the 
 
 1 Domesday Boroughs 48. 2 Hundred Rolls i, 401, 420. 
 
 3 D, B, I, 34 a 2. 4 Monasticon I, 177.
 
 54 
 
 portreeve and bishop and burgesses of London his 
 will that the Abbot of Chertsey should be worthy of 
 his sake and soke over his haws within London and 
 over his own men 1 , his haws being the town houses 
 which were appurtenant to his rural manors ; and 
 Stephen ordained that the men of the soken of 
 St Peter of Westminster should be exempt from 
 attending the folkmoot and husting of London 2 . It 
 would seem from the London custumals and from 
 the writ relating to the soken of St Paul at Col- 
 chester 3 that there was often an appeal from the court 
 of the soken to that of the borough. Most of the 
 sokens mentioned in the list of Edward II's reign 
 were of post-conquest origin, as they belonged to 
 certain monastic and collegiate churches which had 
 been founded after the Conquest, and had received 
 royal grants that they should exercise sake and soke 
 over their own men ; but notwithstanding these 
 royal grants, the courts of the sokens were feudal 
 courts and exercised merely the ordinary jurisdic- 
 tion that was exercised by the lord of an ordinary 
 manor over his tenants. 
 
 I would suggest that it is in this connection that 
 we can see the greatest difference between the older 
 towns of England and those of France ; as far back 
 as we can trace them there were towns in England 
 
 1 B.B.C. 126. 2 B.B.C. 130. 
 
 8 B.B. C. 129.
 
 Borough and Hundred 55 
 
 that had royal or national courts exercising jurisdic- 
 tion over all the burgesses, while the sokens were 
 encroachments on these royal courts. But, in the 
 oldest stages of many French towns, we find several 
 authorities each administering his own feudal justice 
 over a portion of the town : our argument, as it will be 
 seen, is not affected by the fact that French feudal 
 justice was often more extended and dealt with more 
 important business than English feudal justice. The 
 Bishop and the Count certainly had their portions of 
 a French town ; the King's portion had probably 
 been sub-infeudated to an official, and any monas- 
 teries that there may have been in the town exercised 
 justice over those portions that belonged to them ; 
 and possibly the adjoining landowners had some 
 town houses, over which they also exercised justice, 
 but these town houses differed from the English 
 town houses, in that they were not considered as 
 appurtenances of the rural estates, and were not 
 charged with the repair of the walls. In the second 
 half of the eleventh century Amboise was divided 
 between three lords : two of them quarrelled and 
 fought a savage war in the streets of the town, and 
 in the course of the warfare the whole town was 
 burnt to the ground 1 ; at the beginning of the 
 twelfth century Aries was divided into four quarters, 
 all divided by walls from one another and forming 
 1 Flach, Origines de rancienne France n, 352.
 
 56 Borough and Hundred 
 
 as it were four separate towns, and there were six 
 lords who exercised jurisdiction over these four 
 quarters 1 . At Amiens there were six authorities, 
 the count and the bishop, the vidame and the 
 vicomte, the chatelain and the avoue" 2 . And 
 examples could be multiplied. And when a com- 
 mune was formed it embraced all the inhabitants 
 irrespective of the jurisdiction to which they belonged, 
 and they elected their mayor and e"chevins who 
 administered justice to all the members of the 
 commune, and in some cases were empowered to 
 make bye-laws for the good government of the 
 town. This communal court was the only court at 
 which all the burgesses were justiciable in the same 
 way as the English burgesses were justiciable at the 
 court of the hundredal borough ; but the communal 
 court was formed by encroachments on the courts 
 of the grandees who owned portions of the town, 
 whereas in England the court of the hundredal 
 borough was a national court and the sokens were 
 the encroachments of the grandees on the national 
 courts. In many cases, where the King of France 
 had granted a charter sanctioning or ratifying the 
 commune, he tried to assume the seignory of that 
 commune, and to lay down the principle that such com- 
 munes were held of him 3 : the grandees protested 
 
 1 Flach, Origines de I'ancienne France n, 274 5. 
 
 2 Ib. 297. 3 Luchaire, Les Communes Franfaises 270.
 
 Borough and Hundred 57 
 
 against this doctrine and succeeded in their pro- 
 test 1 ; but if the king had succeeded, we should 
 have seen a royal court formed by encroachments 
 on the feudal courts, in distinction to the English 
 custom of forming feudal courts by encroachments 
 on the royal courts 2 . 
 
 Possibly this comparison between French and 
 English municipalities will throw light on another 
 problem : it is a commonplace that the sworn com- 
 mune never took root in England; if I am correct in 
 my explanation of the relationship between the court 
 of the commune and the seignorial courts, the reason 
 is clear. From the very earliest times the English 
 borough had a court at which all the burgesses were 
 justiciable, to obtain which was one of the objects of 
 the French commune. True, until the borough was 
 farmed by the burgesses, the presiding officer of this 
 
 1 Luchaire, Les Communes Francises 272. 
 
 3 In this interpretation of the French evidence, I am in great 
 part following Professor Ashley's summary of M. Flach's views on 
 the origin of towns in France (Sumeys Historic and Economic 
 178): but I am bound to say that M. Flach does not appear to 
 consider the case of a commune being formed in a town of 
 divided authority ; in the two examples that he quotes he suggests 
 that the commune was directed against a single lord, the Bishop 
 of Cambrai and the Count of Maine ; and in all fairness to 
 Messrs Ashley and Flach, I must add that neither of them is 
 responsible for my views on the relation between the court of the 
 commune and the seignorial courts.
 
 58 Borough and Httndred 
 
 court was the nominee of the sheriff or of the lord 
 of the borough, but the doomsmen were the offender's 
 fellow burgesses, and not the men of another lord, 
 as might possibly be the case in a French town, and 
 in those English towns where there was a merchant 
 guild, there was a second court which had jurisdic- 
 tion over all the members of the guild, and was 
 presided over by the elected head of the guild. But 
 Richard of Devises tells us that during the absence 
 of Richard I from England, Prince John, as regent, 
 took an oath to the commune of London on 
 October 8th, ngi 1 , and Dr Round has printed the 
 oath of fealty taken by the commune to King 
 Richard during his imprisonment in Germany 2 . 
 What was this commune and what were its func- 
 tions ? 
 
 Now, one result of our examination of the 
 English boroughs of the twelfth century and before 
 is the evidence that in the twelfth century the 
 institutions of London were absolutely normal and 
 differed from those of the other boroughs of the 
 kingdom, not in kind but merely in degree ; firstly, 
 like so many boroughs, London lay outside the rural 
 hundreds ; three rural hundreds of Sussex ran up 
 to the boundaries of the lands belonging to the City 
 of Chichester, and there stopped short ; the rural 
 
 1 Select Charters 252. 
 
 2 Commune of London 235 6.
 
 59 
 
 hundred of Ossulton in Middlesex ran up to the 
 boundaries of the lands belonging to the City of 
 London and there stopped short ; secondly, Domes- 
 day Book and the Pipe Rolls show that except 
 where a borough had been granted in farm to some 
 person or body of persons, the sheriff accounted at 
 the Exchequer for the income arising from the shire 
 and the boroughs within it ; Dr Round has shown 
 that the sheriff of Middlesex and the portreeve of 
 London was one and the same person, and that the 
 farm of London and Middlesex was always paid 
 to the Exchequer by one and the same person or 
 body of persons 1 ; thirdly, Edgar's law required the 
 burghimot to be held thrice a year ; the folkmoot of 
 London was held thrice a year at Michaelmas, 
 Christmas, and Midsummer, and at these three 
 sessions all the citizens attended without special 
 summons- : if the folkmoot had been a shiremoot, it 
 would, in accordance with Edgar's law, have been 
 held twice a year'; fourthly, in other boroughs, there 
 were more frequent sittings of the borough court 
 which were attended only by those who had received 
 special summons ; in London, by the side ot the 
 folkmoot, was the weekly husting which was 
 attended only by those who had been specially 
 summoned'; fifthly, Domesday Book shows that 
 
 1 Geoffrey de Mandevillc 353, 359. '- i 7 E. H. K. 502. 
 
 " Select Charters 71. " B. />'. C. 142.
 
 60 Borough and Hundred 
 
 York was divided into six wards and Cambridge 
 into 10 ; there were 20 wards in London in the 
 reign of Henry I 1 and 24 a century later 2 , and both 
 Miss Bateson and M. Petit Dutaillis were of opinion 
 that the aldermen of these wards were the skivini 
 mentioned in the oath of fealty 3 ; sixthly, like all 
 our old towns, London was divided ecclesiastically 
 into a number of parishes : there were 1 1 parishes 
 within the walls of the City of Oxford, and Fitz- 
 stephen says there were 136 parish churches in 
 London 4 ; seventhly, the charters show that the 
 Bishop of London had a soken at Colchester 5 , and 
 the Canons of Grimsby had a soken at Grimsby 8 ; 
 there were nine sokens in Stamford in io86 7 ; we can 
 compile a list of about a score of sokens in London 
 in the reign of Edward II 8 ; eighthly, the Pipe Roll 
 of 1 130 shows that there were then Weavers' Guilds 
 at Oxford, Lincoln and Huntingdon, as well as in 
 London, and there was also a Bakers' Guild in 
 London. The only difference that I can see between 
 London and the other boroughs was that in London 
 there were more wards, more parishes, more sokens, 
 
 1 Hist. Account of Guildhall, p. 16. 2 Ib. 167. 
 
 3 17 E. H. R. 508, Studies Supplemental to Stubbs, 99. 
 
 4 Stow, Survey of London (Everyman's Series), 501. 
 
 5 B.B.C. 129. 6 B.B.C. 125. 
 
 7 D. B. i, 336 b 2 ; Dom. Bor. 51. 
 
 8 Hundred Rolls I, 401, 420.
 
 Borough and Hundred 61 
 
 and more guilds than elsewhere. But we must not 
 attribute more governmental functions to the wards 
 and parishes than they actually possessed : one most 
 tempting analogy must be resisted : a rural hundred 
 was composed of many vills : an urban hundred 
 might be divided into many wards ; but the Pipe 
 Rolls show that the urban ward was not the equiva- 
 lent of the rural vill ; again and again the printed 
 Pipe Rolls record the payment of fines by rural vills 
 for some transgression or another, but they never 
 record the payment of a fine by an urban ward : 
 the wards of London appear to have had four func- 
 tions and four functions only ; they were entrusted 
 with the assessment and collection of the Royal aids 
 and the rates required for city purposes 1 ; each ward 
 had to find guards for one or another of the city 
 gates ; the ward jury acted as a leet jury and pre- 
 sented nuisances ; and the alderman of each ward 
 was responsible for the administration of the Assize 
 of Arms within his ward, and was the leader of the 
 armed forces of his ward, but such forces were 
 arrayed under the pennon of the parish to which 
 they belonged 2 . It is scarcely necessary to remind 
 you that till the sixteenth century the parish was an 
 ecclesiastical organ and had no civil functions, and 
 that the Tudor Poor and Highway laws first 
 entrusted civil functions to the ecclesiastical organ. 
 1 17 E. H.R. 728. a 17 E. H. R. 728.
 
 62 Borough and Hundred 
 
 From this digression into the functions of the wards 
 it is clear that any authority that they possessed, 
 they possessed in subordination to the folkmoot, 
 and we have seen that the courts of the sokens were 
 encroachments on the folkmoot, so that it is clear 
 that from the earliest times there was a strong 
 centralised body which could speak and act for the 
 whole city and for all the citizens, and that London 
 always possessed one of the objects which were 
 sought by the French communes. But the folkmoot 
 was under the presidency of the sheriff or sheriffs, 
 who throughout the twelfth century, except for a 
 few years at the end of the reign of Henry I, were 
 the nominees of the king : and what the Londoners 
 sought, and what they obtained, by the establish- 
 ment of their commune was the right to elect the 
 presiding officer in the person of the mayor: his 
 official position was recognised by Richard on his 
 return from captivity, and was definitely secured by 
 John's charter of 1215 authorising the Londoners 
 to elect a mayor. With this right secured to them, 
 the Londoners had obtained the second object 
 sought by the French communes, and it is not there- 
 fore surprising that nothing more is heard of the 
 commune of London. 
 
 There are many other towns in which the history 
 of the mayoralty is very similar to that of the mayor- 
 alty of London. In the first place we find that a
 
 Borough and Hundred 63 
 
 person calling himself mayor of the borough appears 
 as a witness to deeds : it is obvious that he would 
 not be thus styled mayor unless he was recognised 
 as such by his fellow burgesses ; secondly, writs are 
 addressed to him out of the royal chancery, implying 
 the royal recognition of his office ; and finally, some- 
 times centuries after his first recognition by the King, 
 there is a royal charter authorising the burgesses to 
 elect a mayor. This is the sequence of events at 
 Cambridge, Chester, Chichester, Leicester, Oxford 
 and Salisbury, to name only half a dozen towns, and 
 it is noteworthy that in all these six towns there 
 was a merchant guild before the mayor was first 
 mentioned. 
 
 But we have wandered far from our starting 
 point the difference between feudal and royal 
 justice, and in our discussion of the differences 
 between the court of the seignorial borough and 
 that of the hundredal borough, we have overlooked 
 the element that was common to both. The example 
 of Eynsham has shown us the manner in which a 
 mesne lord would create a borough, by granting all 
 the land within a certain area on burgage tenure, and 
 establishing a session of his manorial court for the 
 control of that area ; but the manorial court was 
 simply a modification of the primeval township 
 moot, a moot, which in its origin was administrative 
 rather than judicial. Now the court of a rural
 
 6 4 
 
 hundred was financial and judicial rather than 
 administrative, and when we find the court of a 
 hundredal borough, an urban hundred, exercising 
 administrative functions, we see that that court 
 contains an element which is wanting in the court 
 of the rural hundred: that element can be attributed 
 to nothing else but the primeval township moot. 
 This is corroborative evidence in support of Stubbs' 
 dictum "the burkoi the Anglo-Saxon period is simply 
 a more organised form of the township 1 " ; and our in- 
 vestigations have shown us that this higher organisa- 
 tion consisted in the super-position of the organisation 
 of the hundred on that of the township. 1 1 is, however, 
 permissible to doubt whether all the burhs of the 
 Anglo-Saxon period possessed higher organisations 
 than those of the neighbouring rural manors ; in 
 the thirteenth century most of the seignorial 
 boroughs had no higher organisation than that of 
 the manors from which they had been amputated ; 
 and such seignorial boroughs were valued for pur- 
 poses of taxation along with the vills of which they 
 had previously formed part. Now Domesday Book 
 shows us some 25 or 30 rural manors containing 
 within their boundaries boroughs which are not 
 valued separately from the manors, and analogy 
 with the seignorial boroughs of the thirteenth 
 century suggests that they were not separately 
 1 Const. Hist. I, 92.
 
 Borough and Hundred 65 
 
 valued because their organisation was no higher 
 than that of the manors in which they lay. 
 
 But although the primitive township is an element 
 in the borough, it must be noticed that the seignorial 
 borough is the result of a definite act of creation on 
 the part of the lord, and that the imposition of the 
 hundredal organisation is also the result of a definite 
 act on the part of the King. Hence, with the 
 possible exception of those Roman towns which 
 became English boroughs and always seem to have 
 lain outside the rural organisation, all our boroughs 
 acquired their distinctive organisation by definite 
 acts of creation. 
 
 B.
 
 APPENDIXES 
 
 I. THE GARRISON THEORY 
 
 THE " garrison theory " does not command general 
 acceptance and it is therefore necessary to discuss briefly 
 the various objections that have been urged against it, and 
 the answers thereto. 
 
 In her first criticisms 1 of my Domesday Boroughs 
 Miss Bateson maintained that the burgesses mentioned 
 in Domesday Book in connection with rural manors were 
 men who resided in those manors but had burgess rights 
 in the town : in my reply 2 , I pointed out that this 
 contention could not account for the houses that were 
 physically situate in the boroughs, and paid rent to 
 rural manors, and that there was evidence for believing 
 that the Domesday scribes spoke of the houses or the 
 burgesses as fancy moved them. She then 3 began her 
 rejoinder in these words : " In my review of Mr Ballard's 
 Domesday Boroughs it was not my intention to suggest 
 that every burgess who paid rent to a manor resided on 
 that manor and had no house in any town. My plea 
 
 1 20 E. H. R. 149. 2 21 E. H. R. 699. 
 
 3 21 E.H.R. 709.
 
 Appendixes 67 
 
 throughout was for variety in the explanations advanced 
 to account for the association between town houses and 
 rural properties, and while admitting the possibility that 
 some burgesses may have acquitted rural estates of burghal 
 service, my protest was made against that theory as in- 
 capable of explaining the whole of the evidence." But 
 if she admits the theory in some cases, who is to decide 
 the cases to which it is not applicable ? I must emphasise 
 this point for when M. Petit Dutaillis wrote his Appen- 
 dixes to Stubbs' Constitutional History, since translated 
 as Studies Supplemental to Stubbs, he had not seen my 
 reply to Miss Bateson nor her rejoinder. 
 
 Three other objections to the theory can best be put in 
 the shape of question and answer : How comes it that 
 Domesday records town houses which are appurtenant to 
 manors that are not situate in the same county as the 
 borough ? There are only a few boroughs to which this 
 question applies : London, Tamworth and Wallingford were 
 border towns and were not unnaturally fortified by their 
 adjoining counties : Oxford is also a border town, and con- 
 tained houses paying rents to Steventon in Berks and to 
 two manors in Bucks : and Mr Round has shown that 
 four of the manors recorded in the Hereford Domesday 
 as having houses in Worcester, were really situate in 
 Worcestershire, and that there was only one Herefordshire 
 manor which had houses in the city of Worcester. 
 
 Is it not possible, in view of the pre-conquest laws for- 
 bidding extra-urban traffic, and the burgesses' monopoly 
 of trade within their boroughs, that the resident burgesses 
 who paid rent to rural manors resided in the boroughs as 
 the accredited agents of their fellow villagers for trading 
 purposes ? But the gildsman's monopoly of sale was 
 
 52
 
 68 Appendixes 
 
 generally suspended during fairs and in some places on 
 market days 1 , and on these days the villagers could visit 
 the towns and do their trafficking on payment of the usual 
 tolls : so that there was no necessity for the residence of 
 permanent agents. Moreover, it is doubtful whether some 
 of the villages which had appurtenant town houses had 
 sufficient surplus produce for sale to require a resident 
 agent in a town : there were two houses in Leicester 
 pertaining to Desford, a vill of four carucates occupied 
 by only one villain with one team 2 . Can it be contended 
 that this one farmer required two salesmen in Leicester? 
 
 Why is it impossible to establish a proportion between 
 the number of burgesses or town houses possessed by a 
 manor and the extent or assessment of that manor ? The 
 statistics of Dunwich and Wallingford answer that question ; 
 in each town the rural landowners held "acres," and it would 
 naturally be to their advantage to crowd as many houses as 
 possible on these individual acres to secure larger rents : at 
 Wallingford Milo Crispin had one acre belonging to Sutton 
 on which were six houses and another belonging to Bray 
 on which were eleven houses. 
 
 Another objection is that of M. Petit Dutaillis who 
 points out that heterogeneity of tenure was known on the 
 continent : the French and German towns were " nothing 
 but juxtapositions of patchwork, of fragments of great 
 estates ; there is no reason for attributing an absolutely 
 original growth to English towns 3 " : it must be admitted 
 that there was much tenurial heterogeneity in continental 
 towns, but according to the evidence at our disposal the 
 
 1 Gild Merchant i, 47. 2 D. B, I, 230 a i, 232 a i. 
 
 3 Studies S^ipplemental to Stubbs 82.
 
 Appendixes 69 
 
 heterogeneity of continental towns differed from that of 
 England, inasmuch as on the continent the town houses 
 belonging to others than the lord of the town were not con- 
 sidered as being appurtenant to nor were they conveyed 
 along with the rural manors of the magnates. Nor again, 
 do I know any evidence that in France the duty of repairing 
 the walls of the towns was charged on the rural landowners : 
 in other words, burhbot was unknown in France. So that 
 continental conditions differed entirely from those of 
 England, and we cannot employ the argument from 
 analogy. 
 
 Professor Tait 1 suggests that the rents payable to rural 
 manors in respect of burgesses in towns may represent 
 payments for permission to live away from the manor, 
 like the chivagium of later days : but this suggestion fails 
 in that it does not explain how the payments came to be 
 attached to houses ; nor does it explain why the payments 
 were, with a few exceptions, from the houses or inhabitants 
 of a town to the manors of the county in which it was 
 situate or the adjoining counties : London contained houses 
 and burgesses paying rents to manors in Surrey and Essex : 
 does any one dare say that the only immigrants into 
 London came from Surrey and Essex ? 
 
 Finally, let me point out a remarkable analogy: the 
 supporters of the garrison theory contend that some of the 
 rural landowners performed their burhbot by keeping houses 
 in the boroughs and burgesses in those houses ; three years 
 ago I called attention to the fact that some of the grandees 
 who owed castle guard to the castles of Newcastle-on-Tyne, 
 Bamburgh and Dover were bound by their tenure to maintain 
 
 775.
 
 70 Appendixes 
 
 houses within those castles where their knights might 
 reside during their term of duty 1 . Since then I have found 
 that the same custom existed in connection with the castle 
 of Durham 2 ; and there is evidence which suggests that it 
 was also to be found at Alnwick 3 . These instances throw 
 light on the statements in Domesday Book that Roger had 
 two masures in the castle of Ewias 4 and Osbern had 23 men 
 in the castle of Auretone 5 ; and suggest that the King and 
 some barons, when they founded their castles and enfeoffed 
 knights to hold by the service of castle guard, followed the 
 example of Alfred, and gave to these knights, houses within 
 the walls of the castle where their men might reside when 
 they were required to perform their service. 
 
 II. THE ROMAN BOROUGHS 
 
 No one knows the exact number of towns that were 
 inhabited during the Roman occupation of England: we 
 are told of colonies at Colchester, London, Lincoln and 
 York, and it is believed that Verulamium was a muni- 
 cipium 6 : but although there were few Roman towns which 
 obtained municipal institutions, there were many settle^ 
 ments, larger than mere villages and surrounded with walls. 
 Till the Legions were withdrawn they all enjoyed a greater 
 or less degree of cultured life, and even after the withdrawal 
 of the Legions, whatever culture there was in the country 
 
 1 24 E.H.R. 712. 
 
 2 Feodarium Prioratus Dunelmensis 196 n. 
 * Percy Cartulary, cp. p. 371 with p. 456. 
 
 4 D, B. i, 185 a 2. 5 D. B. i, 186 b 2. 
 
 ' Studies Supplemental to Stubbs 72.
 
 Appendixes 7 1 
 
 was to be found in the towns. Calleva Atrebatorum was 
 inhabited till into the sixth century, but was evacuated at 
 the approach of the Germanic invaders and has never since 
 been inhabited 1 . According to the Chronicle, Anderida 
 was burnt, but although the houses within the walls were 
 burnt and the inhabitants massacred, the Roman walls 
 remain to this day. There is no evidence that the invaders 
 deliberately destroyed the Roman towns; they left them 
 severely alone as the work of giants and the home of 
 ghosts, and settled at their gates. Even to-day the walls 
 of Richborough, Pevensey and Burgh Castle impress the 
 most casual observer : what then must have been the im- 
 pression that they made on the ignorant and superstitious 
 savage from over the sea. One of their poets has preserved 
 his thoughts at the sight of the deserted city of Bath in the 
 poem called The Ruin. 
 
 One result of the superstition of the invaders and their 
 consequent avoidance of the old Roman towns and the 
 extramural territories on which their dead were buried, is 
 the fact that the rural hundreds come up to their boundaries 
 and there stop short. On the east and west of the Roman 
 walls of Anderida, the Saxons fixed their settlements of 
 East and West Ham, but the fortified area lay outside 
 both townships. The Domesday hundreds of Box, Stock- 
 bridge and Singleton embrace the city of Chichester, and 
 its extramural lands, and three rural hundreds come up to 
 the boundaries of the extramural lands of the Roman town 
 of Leicester, but both Chichester and Leicester lie outside 
 the rural hundreds. Sir Laurence Gomme attributes the 
 non-inclusion of London in the rural hundreds of Middlesex 
 
 1 Studies Supplemental to Stubbs 73.
 
 72 Appendixes 
 
 to the military strength of the surviving inhabitants : but, 
 whatever may be the reason, the exclusion of some of the 
 old Roman towns from the rural hundreds is a fact of the 
 highest importance ; and of the 20 Roman towns that were 
 styled boroughs in Domesday Book, 1 6 lay outside the rural 
 hundreds and only four, St Albaris, Bath, Dunwich and 
 Ilchester, appear to have been grouped with rural vills to 
 form hundreds of the ordinary type, and Bath, Dunwich 
 and Ilchester were all separately mentioned in the Nomina 
 Villarum, a fact which shows that they were hundredal 
 boroughs in the fourteenth century. 
 
 The year 410 is generally accepted as the date of the 
 withdrawal of the Legions : in 597 St Augustine landed in 
 Kent, and, according to Bede 1 , his first gift from the King 
 was a piece of land in Canterbury. In 604 Augustine 
 consecrated Bishops to live in the old Roman towns of 
 Rochester and London 2 : in 627 Paulinus and Felix were 
 respectively consecrated Bishops of York and Dunwich 3 ; 
 and in the following year the reeve of Lincoln was con- 
 verted and a Bishop consecrated in that city 4 ; in 635 
 Birinus was consecrated Bishop of Dorchester, Oxon 5 , and 
 in 643 a new see was established at Winchester : the first 
 Bishop whose see was fixed at any but an old Roman town 
 was the Bishop of the Mercians whose see was fixed at 
 Repton in 65 3 6 and afterwards removed to Lichfield. So 
 that the first eight bishops in England were established in 
 old Roman towns, a fact which shows that during the 
 
 1 Bede, Ecc. Hist. Bk i, c. 26. 
 
 2 Ib. Bk n, c. 3. 3 Ib. c. 15. 
 
 4 Ib. c. 1 6. * Ib. Bk in, c. 7. 
 
 8 Ib. c. 21.
 
 Appendixes 73 
 
 troublous times of the English invasions, there was material 
 persistence of these old towns. Sir Laurence Gomme 
 maintains that, in addition to this material persistence, 
 Roman municipal institutions and Roman private law 
 persisted in London till its surrender to Edward the Elder 
 in 9I2 1 : but the evidence adduced in support of this 
 position is not very convincing. 
 
 Further evidence of the persistence of the old Roman 
 towns is to be found in the fact that our kings, prior to 
 Alfred, had mints only at Canterbury, London, Lincoln and 
 York, all four of Roman foundation : Alfred's coins come 
 from these four and from four other towns of Roman origin, 
 Bath, Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester ; Athelstan was 
 the first king to coin in any town not of Roman foundation 2 . 
 
 If the traditions embodied in the English Chronicle are 
 to be trusted, the old Roman towns played no part in the 
 battles of kites and crows as Milton styled the struggles 
 between the various kingdoms of the Heptarchy ; but with 
 the beginnings of the Danish raids, their use as fortified 
 refuges begins to be recognised: for in 8i_j. :! the King of 
 Mercia gave a house in Canterbury " ad refugium neces- 
 sitatis," for a refuge in case of necessity, to the Abbess ot 
 Lyminge, whose nunnery la}' on the seacoast near Hythe. 
 The walls of these refuges would be repaired by the rural 
 landowners under the trinoda necessitas, but although the 
 teaching of Christianity probably broke down much of the 
 superstition of the Anglo-Saxons, yet it is certain that the 
 intramural spaces were very sparsely inhabited. Xehemiah 
 was faced with the same problem when lie had rebuilt the 
 
 1 The Making of London 90. - Supra, [>. 43. 
 
 : Domesday Boroughs 107.
 
 74 Appendixes 
 
 walls of Jerusalem ; like the Anglo-Saxon, the Jew of that 
 day preferred village to town life : and while some volun- 
 teered to live in Jerusalem " the rest of the people cast lots 
 to bring one of ten to dwell in Jerusalem, the holy city, and 
 nine parts to dwell in the other cities 1 ." Alfred dealt with 
 this problem in another way, and to secure the restoration 
 of London granted two several acres of land within the 
 city to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of 
 Worcester respectively 2 , who were doubtless required to 
 build houses on these acres and to find burgesses to dwell 
 in these houses. The example, once set, would seem to 
 have been generally followed, with the result that of the 
 20 Roman towns styled boroughs in Domesday Book, 
 there is only one St Albans which did not then contain 
 houses or burgesses paying rent to rural manors : but a 
 deed of 996 shows that the manors of Byrston and Wincel- 
 field had nine appurtenant houses in St Albans 3 so that in 
 the tenth century all the Roman boroughs were of hetero- 
 geneous tenure. 
 
 We have already seen evidence that the composite 
 boroughs were fortified ; and it therefore appears that all 
 the Roman towns which became English boroughs were 
 fortified during the tenth century, and it has been noticed 
 that 1 6 out of the 20 lay outside the rural hundreds. 
 
 This evidence from the Roman boroughs supports our 
 previous argument that there was some connection between 
 tenurial heterogeneity and extra-hundredality : but this 
 connection first appears in the Roman boroughs, using 
 
 1 Nehemiah xi. i. 
 
 2 Domesday Book and Beyond 1 89 n. 
 
 3 Kemble, No. 696.
 
 Appendixes 75 
 
 this term to signify those Roman towns which became 
 English boroughs, and it would seem to follow that when 
 the new boroughs were fortified, Edward the Elder and his 
 successors followed the example which had been set in 
 connection with the old Roman towns, and gave them a 
 court of their own equivalent to the courts of the rural 
 hundreds. 
 
 The evidence from the Roman boroughs may be 
 summed up as follows : the old Roman towns were deserted 
 after the Saxon invasions and owed their re-settlement to 
 the work and influence of the Christian missionaries : from 
 very early times they were treated apart from the rural 
 organisation of the shire, with the result that they were 
 regarded as urban hundreds having courts of their own : 
 their walls were repaired by the rural landowners under 
 the trinoda necessitas, and served as defences against the 
 Danish raiders : but they were still sparsely populated and 
 to secure a population Alfred gave plots of land within 
 their walls to some of the rural land-owners who owed 
 burhbot, on which they built houses and kept burgesses : 
 then, when Edward the Elder fortified certain Midland 
 boroughs, he obtained a population for them in the same 
 way as Alfred had peopled the Roman boroughs of Wessex, 
 and the boroughs thus created were treated as urban hun- 
 dreds in the same way as the older Roman boroughs.
 
 76 Appendixes 
 
 III. THE "LIBER BURGUS" 
 
 In my British Borough Charters^ it was said that the 
 idea of the "liber burgus" seems to have been the only 
 idea added to municipal jurisprudence during the reign of 
 King John : the term was in constant use after that date 
 but no definition of its meaning is known to me : in a plea 
 of 1350 the burgesses of Macclesfield pleaded "that by the 
 words ' quod villa de Maclesfeld sit liber burgus ' they claim 
 that the same town shall be a liber burgus, and shall have 
 all the liberties and customs which a liber burgus ought to 
 have 2 ." But this is no definition ; and we must therefore 
 try to ascertain the effect of this grant. 
 
 I have been unable to find any difference between a 
 borough and a free borough : the two requisites for a 
 borough were burgage tenure for all its tenements and 
 a court with jurisdiction over all its inhabitants, except 
 the inhabitants of sokens, and I cannot find that there was 
 any additional requisite for the formation of a "free borough," 
 and would therefore suggest that the term was introduced 
 by the lawyers of John's reign to shorten the verbiage of 
 charters. 
 
 It must, however, be noticed that there were two kinds 
 of free boroughs varying according to the competence of 
 the grantor of the charter : if a mesne lord created a free 
 borough, the only court he would be able to establish would 
 be a manorial court, where he would exercise over his 
 tenants the rights defined by the term " sake and soke " : 
 if the King created a free borough he would create a 
 
 1 p. xv. 2 Gild Merchant n, 171.
 
 Appendixes 77 
 
 hundredal court for the borough, and by so doing would 
 exempt the burgesses from the jurisdiction of the rural 
 hundred in which the borough was geographically situate, 
 and would impose on them the duty of sending twelve 
 representatives to the Eyre, and also representatives to 
 Parliament. This distinction is clearly shown in Dorset ; 
 in 1284 the King granted a charter conferring on Lyme 
 the status of a free borough ; and Lyme appears in the 
 Nomina Villarum as a borough, and therefore presumably 
 was entitled to separate representation at the Eyre and in 
 Parliament. In 1254 the Prior of Winchester created a 
 free borough at VVeymouth, but Weymouth does not appear 
 in the Nomina Villarum. 
 
 With the grant of a separate court came the privileges 
 implied by the possession of that court, the right to com- 
 pound offences as at Norham 1 , and the right to elect twelve 
 capital portmen, as at Ipswich": but neither the " firma 
 burgi " nor the merchant guild were appurtenances of the 
 "liber burgus 3 ." 
 
 It is, however, from the litigation which resulted in the 
 cancellation of a charter granted to the burgesses of Wells 
 by Edward III in 1341, that incidentally we learn most 
 about the nature of the " liber burgus 4 ." Domesday Book 
 speaks of Wells as a rural manor only 5 but Richard, Bishop 
 of Wells (1135 66), cut out of his manor an area with 
 defined boundaries, which he created a borough, in the 
 same way as, in the next century, the Abbot of Eynsham 
 
 1 B.B. C. 112. 2 Gild Merchant \\, 119. 
 
 3 Ib. i, 89. 
 
 4 Year Book, 16 Edw. Ill, part i, Introd. pp. xxiv xciv 
 (Rolls Series). 5 D. B. i, 89 a 2.
 
 78 Appendixes 
 
 created a borough at Eynsham : his charter is lost but was 
 confirmed by his two successors, who gave the burgesses 
 the monopoly of sale of hides and leather and certain rights 
 at certain fairs ; but the court of this borough was merely 
 a manorial court. However, in 1201, King John conferred 
 the status of a " liber burgus " on this manorial borough of 
 Wells ; we have argued that by this grant he exempted the 
 burgesses from suit of the court of the rural hundred and 
 conferred on the court of the borough the status of a 
 hundredal court : and in corroboration of this position it 
 is to be noted that in an Inquisition connected with the 
 litigation, it is stated that the Bishop had a Hundred Court 
 in and for the vill of Wells 1 ; and, in the early part of the 
 fourteenth century we find that Wells is returned in the 
 Nomina Villarum as a borough, that it sent burgesses to 
 Parliament during the reigns of Edward I and II, and 
 paid the sixth of 1322, all points of evidence that it was 
 a hundredal borough. 
 
 In 1341, the burgesses obtained a new charter from 
 Edward III granting them (i) freedom from toll through- 
 out England, (2) the right to elect a Mayor, Bailiffs and 
 Constables, (3) the right to elect a Coroner to keep the 
 pleas of the Crown, (4) the right to keep a gaol, (5) the 
 return of all writs : (6) they were not to plead or be im- 
 pleaded without the borough, nor (7) to be placed on juries 
 with men from outside the borough, and (8) they were 
 allowed to fortify their town 2 . But the fatal point in con- 
 nection with this charter was that it had not been preceded 
 by an " Inquisitio ad quod damnum," an inquisition which, 
 by this time, was a condition precedent to any new charter. 
 
 1 Y. B. 16 Edw. Ill, pt. r, p. Ixii. 2 Ib. xlix.
 
 Appendixes 79 
 
 Consequently, steps were taken for the revocation of the 
 charter ; the litigation was very long and technical ; it was 
 alleged that many of these privileges would be to the 
 damage of the King, inasmuch as, being damage to the 
 Bishop, the King would lose profits which he would other- 
 wise receive during the vacancy of the see. 
 
 Eventually it was held that the omission of the " Inqui- 
 sitio ad quod damnum " vitiated the grant of the charter, 
 and the burgesses were ordered to deliver it to the Chancery 
 for cancellation. But, for our purpose, it is important to 
 note, that the burgesses did not use the grant of the " liber 
 burgus " as evidence that they were in possession of any of 
 these privileges before the grant of the new charter : if any 
 of them could have been claimed as being implied by the 
 " liber burgus," it is certain that the burgesses would have 
 relied on that grant, especially as John's charter had been 
 inspected and confirmed by Edward I in 1290. 
 
 The record of this litigation throws light on another 
 point : it will be remembered that the burgesses of Ipswich 
 elected 12 capital portmen "as there are in the other 
 ' liberi burgi ' in England 1 ": during the Wells litigation it 
 was certified to the King that " Twelve burgesses and the 
 rest of the community had the keeping (custodiam) of the 
 town for a certain number of years, in virtue of an indenture 
 made between them and the Bishop, for which, and for the 
 profits issuing out of the town, they paid the Bishop 100 
 marks sterling per annum 2 ." Were these 12 burgesses of 
 Wells the doomsmen of the hundred court of the borough 
 and possibly its permanent delegation to the Eyre ? 
 
 1 Gild Merchant n, 119. a Y.B. u. s. Ixviii.
 
 8o Appendixes 
 
 IV. LONDON 
 
 It might be contended that the institutions of London 
 were abnormal for the few years during the twelfth century 
 when the citizens elected a sheriff or sheriffs who collected 
 the joint farm of the city of London and the County of 
 Middlesex, and accounted for it at the Exchequer; but 
 this abnormality existed only at two periods ; first, from 
 the granting of the Charter of Henry I, in 1130 or 1131, 
 till Stephen's grant of the shrievalty of London and 
 Middlesex to Geoffrey de Mandeville at Christmas 1141*, 
 and secondly from the 5th day of July 1199, when John 
 granted the shrievalty of London and Middlesex to the 
 citizens of London for .300 a year 2 : so that for seven- 
 eighths of the century, the sheriffs of London and Middle- 
 sex were the nominees of the King 3 , in the same way as 
 the sheriffs of the other shires were likewise nominees of 
 the King. But the duties of the sheriffs were well defined ; 
 they collected the dues accruing to the King from the 
 county and accounted for them at the Exchequer; they 
 had the return of all writs within the shire (except where 
 the lord or the inhabitants of a district had this privilege), 
 and they executed all judicial process : but neither the 
 sheriffs nor the citizens of London exercised any govern- 
 mental functions over Middlesex, and certainly never treated 
 it as a " subject district." The Custumals of the City the 
 Liber Albus, the Liber Custumarum, the Liber de Anti- 
 quis legibus, and the Anonymous Collection printed by 
 Miss Bateson in the English Historical Review are full of 
 
 1 Geoffrey de Mandeville 141. 2 B. B. C. 220. 
 
 3 Geoffrey de Mandeville 372, especially lines 21, 22.
 
 Appendixes 8 1 
 
 regulations dealing with persons and property within the 
 walls, but they contain no regulations relating to any 
 persons or property in any of the villages of Middlesex. 
 
 But, even if it be granted that for ten or twelve years 
 during the twelfth century, the King's representatives within 
 the City of London were abnormal in that they exercised 
 certain restricted functions in the County of Middlesex, yet 
 that is the extent of the abnormality, and with that excep- 
 tion, as is contended in the lecture, "the institutions of 
 London differed from those of the other boroughs in the 
 Kingdom not in kind, but only in degree," and examination 
 of those institutions does not bear out Bishop Stubbs when 
 he speaks of " their (i.e. the Londoners') shire organisation 
 under the sheriff 1 ." If London had been organised as a 
 shire, its folkmoot would have been a shire-moot and, 
 according to Edgar's law, have been held twice a year, 
 whereas our earliest information shows us the folkmoot 
 meeting thrice a year 2 , as was ordered by Edgar of the 
 Burghimot, and was the rule at Whitby 3 . 
 
 Dr Round quotes, with approval, another dictum of 
 Stubbs that London was only "a bundle of communities 
 townships parishes and lordships of which each had its 
 own institutions 4 ," but he disagrees with Stubbs' suggestion 
 that this complicated organisation was displaced by a shire 
 organisation, and in his turn suggests that " the sheriff and 
 the folkmoot could no more bind these self-governing 
 bodies into one coherent whole, than they could or did 
 in the case of an ordinary shire But what the sheriff and 
 
 1 Sel Ch. 107, 5th Edit. 
 
 2 17 E.H.R. 502. 
 
 3 B.B. C. 142. 
 
 4 Const. Hist. I, 404, qu. Geoffrey de Mandeville 356. 
 
 B. 6
 
 82 Appendixes 
 
 folkmoot could not accomplish, the mayor and commune 
 could and did 1 ." 
 
 But Dr Round himself has produced evidence that more 
 than half a century before the appearance of the first Mayor 
 of London, the citizens acted as a " coherent whole " when 
 they claimed that they were entitled to elect the King, and 
 made a treaty with Stephen before they proceeded to elect 
 him as King 3 ; three or four years later they sent a deputa- 
 tion on behalf of their "communio" to the Council at 
 Winchester by which the Empress was elected to be lady 
 of England 3 . At this date the folkmoot was the only body 
 of which we have any knowledge, to which all the citizens 
 owed suit, and therefore it alone could speak on their 
 behalf. But Stephen was not the only King in whose 
 election the Londoners took part ; they elected Edmund 
 Ironsides in 1015*, and after the Battle of Hastings, they, 
 with the Archbishop of York and earls Edwin and Morcar, 
 elected Edgar Atheling as Harold's successor 8 . There is 
 no definite evidence of communal action at these last two 
 elections and it may have been that the citizens played 
 merely the part of the shouting crowd, the part that was 
 played by the boys of Westminster school at the last two 
 coronations. But there are other passages in which Dr 
 Round treats the Londoners as acting as a " coherent 
 whole," even before 1191, when he deals with the charter 
 of Henry I and their transactions in respect of the farm 
 of London and Middlesex 6 : analogy with other boroughs 
 suggests that it was the folkmoot that carried on these 
 negotiations 7 . 
 
 1 Geoffrey de Mandeville 357. 2 Ib. 2, 247. 
 
 3 Stubbs, Const, Hist. I, 407. * Norm. Cong, i, 397. 
 
 6 Ib. in, 524. 6 Geoffrey de Mandeville 363. 7 B. B. C. cii.
 
 Table showing the characteristics of certain 
 Domesday Boroughs. 
 
 
 
 Roman 
 origin 
 
 Burghal 
 Hidage 
 
 Edward 
 the 
 Elder 
 
 Precon- 
 quest 
 Mint 
 
 DOMESDAY 
 
 Hundred 
 
 Composite 
 
 Third 
 Penny 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 7 
 
 I 
 
 Arundel 
 
 
 
 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 
 2 
 
 Axbridge 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 3 
 
 Barnstaple 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 4 
 
 Bath R 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 5 
 
 Bedford 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 
 (T.P.) 
 
 6 
 
 Bristol 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 H 
 
 ? 
 
 7 
 
 Bridport 
 
 
 ? 
 
 
 
 Extra 
 
 A 
 
 
 8 
 
 Bruton 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 9 
 
 Buckingham 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 E. E. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 B 
 
 
 10 
 
 Calne 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 H B 
 
 
 ii 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 (T.P.) 
 
 12 
 
 Canterbury 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 
 13 
 
 Chester 
 
 R 
 
 
 E. E. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 14 
 
 Chichester 
 
 R 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 15 
 
 Colchester 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 16 
 
 Cricklade 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 17 
 
 Derby 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 II 
 
 T.P. 
 
 18 
 
 Dorchester 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 
 19 
 
 Dover 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 T.P. 
 
 20 
 
 Droitwich 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 21 
 
 Dunvvich 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 
 Intra 
 
 A B 
 
 
 22 
 
 Exeter 
 
 R 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 T.P. 
 
 3 
 
 Fordwich 
 
 
 
 
 
 Own 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 24 
 
 Frome 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 *5 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 
 26 
 
 Grantham 
 
 
 
 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 27 
 
 Guildford 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Intra 
 
 H 
 
 
 28 
 
 Hastings 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 B 
 
 
 29 
 
 Hereford 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 3 
 
 Hertford 
 
 
 
 E. E. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 3i 
 
 Huntingdon 
 
 
 E. E. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 32 
 
 Hythe 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Intra 
 
 B 
 
 
 33 
 
 Ilchester R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 34 
 
 Ipswich 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Own 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 35 
 
 Langport 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 36 
 
 Leicester R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 37 
 
 Lewes 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 38 
 
 Lincoln R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 39 
 
 London R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 (Extra) 
 
 H B 
 
 
 40 
 
 Maldon 
 
 
 
 E.E. 
 
 M 
 
 Own 
 
 B 

 
 Table showing the characteristics of certain 
 Domesday Boroughs, continued. 
 
 
 
 Roman 
 origin 
 
 Burgbal 
 Hidage 
 
 Edward 
 the 
 Elder 
 
 Precon- 
 quest 
 Mint 
 
 DOMESDAY 
 
 Hundred 
 
 Composite 
 
 Third 
 Penny 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 7 
 
 41 
 
 Malmesbury 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H A B 
 
 T. P. 
 
 4 2 
 
 Marlborough 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 43 
 
 Milborne 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 44 
 
 Northampton 
 
 
 
 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 45 
 
 Norwich 
 
 
 
 
 If 
 
 Own 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 46 
 
 Nottingham 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 47 
 
 Oxford 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 48 
 
 Pevensey 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 
 Extra 
 
 B 
 
 
 49 
 
 Rochester R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Own 
 
 H 
 
 
 50 
 
 Romney 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Intra 
 
 B 
 
 
 5i 
 
 Sandwich 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Own 
 
 H 
 
 T.P. 1 
 
 52 
 
 Salisbury 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 53 
 
 Shaftesbury 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 B 
 
 
 54 
 
 Shrewsbury 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 55 
 
 Southampton 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 56 
 
 Southwark 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 T.P. 
 
 57 
 
 Stafford 
 
 
 
 E.E. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 58 
 
 Stamford 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 59 
 
 Sudbury 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Intra 
 
 B 
 
 
 60 
 
 Tarn worth 
 
 
 
 E.E. 
 
 M 
 
 
 B 
 
 
 61 
 
 Thetford 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Own 
 
 H 
 
 T.P. 
 
 62 
 
 Torksey 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 63 
 
 Totnes 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 64 
 
 Wallingford 
 
 
 B. H. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H A 
 
 
 65 
 
 Warwick 
 
 (App.) 
 
 E.E. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 
 66 
 
 Wareham 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 
 67 
 
 Wilton 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 H B 
 
 
 68 
 
 Wim bourne 
 
 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 
 69 
 
 Winchcombe 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 70 
 
 Winchester R 
 
 B. H. 
 
 
 M 
 
 (Extra) 
 
 H B 
 
 
 71 
 
 Worcester R 
 
 (A PP .) ; E.E. 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H B 
 
 T.P. 
 
 72 
 
 Yarmouth 
 
 
 
 
 Intra 
 
 
 T.P. 
 
 73 
 
 York 
 
 R 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 Extra 
 
 H 
 
 
 NOTES. In column 6, the letters H. A. B. respectively indicate whether 
 the appurtenances of the rural manors are styled Houses, Acres or Burgesses. 
 
 From this list are omitted Reading and Twineham (Christchurch) which 
 were included in the list of composite boroughs on pp. 39, 40, of my Domes- 
 day Boroughs : these two boroughs contained houses paying rent to the lord 
 of the borough and houses paying rent to the church of the town : but it is 
 obvious that the latter class stand in a different category from those paying 
 rent to the lords of rural manors in the neighbourhood 
 
 1 B.B.C. 232.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Aberdeen, 12. 13 
 Agricultural .Service-, 3 
 Aids, 5. 19, 47 
 Almvick, 70 
 Amboise. 55 
 Amiens, 56 
 Amounderness, 27 
 Anderida, 7 I 
 Arbitrary tine-, * 
 Aries, 55 
 Arundel,' 4;-, 83 
 A--ize of Ciarcndnn. 47 
 Auretone. 70 
 A\bri<ige, 4 :. 45. s.- 
 Ayr. 23 
 
 Hamburgh, ^9 
 Han of Wine, 24 
 Barons' houses, 69, 70 
 Barnstaple, 42, 45, 83 
 Bale-son. Miss quoted, 60, 
 Batli, 42. 43. 45. 71. 72, 
 Battle, trial by, 8 
 Beauvais. S 
 Bedford, 39. 4 = , 83 
 Beverley. 28 
 Bideford. s, 18 
 Bradnincli. 5 
 Bredy, 42 
 Breteuil, 9 
 Bridge-water. 49 
 Bridport. 45. *j 
 Bristol, 22, 4;, S3 
 Bruton, 45, 83 
 Buckingham, 42. 4 = . 4^. 
 Burgh Ca-lle. 71 
 Burgage Tenure. 3 
 Burghal Hidage, 42. 43, 
 
 Huriibot. 69 
 
 Burpham. 21 
 
 Br.r;on on Trent, iS. =i 
 
 Bury Si Pxiinuncls. 1 6, 23, 24 
 
 60, 
 
 Canterbury, 43. 45, 72.^73, 83 
 
 1 wiles, 23, 69 
 
 Chert-ey Abbey, 54 
 
 Chester, 42, 43, 44. 63. 83 
 
 Che>terueid, ''i 
 
 (.'hichester, 37. 42, 44. 5S, ('13, 71 
 
 Chivagium, ^-9 
 
 Clitheroe. 14 
 
 ColclK-ster, 22, 45, (>o, 70. S3 
 
 ('immune. 56-8 
 
 Composite boroughs, 39-43, f 44 , 
 
 Derby, 21. 43. 44, 83 
 Desfnrd, 6s 
 l)i>;iaiii - . 10 
 l)ome-day Book. i]uoted, 
 
 .^'-43/53, 59 
 1 '' irchester, 45. s_j 
 Dorche>ter (<.).\"n'.), 72 
 
 I)'ivi.-r. 10. 43. 44, f>tj. s 
 I)r<iit\vic!i. 45. 83
 
 86 
 
 Index 
 
 Dublin, 22, 24 
 
 Dunwich, 5, 45, 46, 49, 68, 72, 83 
 
 Durham, 70 
 
 Eashing, 42 
 
 Edgar, law as to holding courts, 7, 
 
 36, 37. 59. 81 
 Egremont, 3, 5, 6, 9, 24 
 Election of King by Londoners, 82 
 Escheats, 21 
 
 Essentials of Borough, 30, 31 
 Ewias, 70 
 
 Exeter, 42, 43, 44, 73, 83 
 Eynsham, 9, 32, 78 
 Eyre, 48 
 
 Fee farm rent, 28 
 
 Feudal justice, 31-4 
 
 Folkmoot of London, 54, 59, 81, 82 
 
 Fordwich, 38, 45, 83 
 
 French municipal laws, 4, 5,6, 8, 9, 
 
 ii, 15, 17, 22, 23, 54-8, 69 
 Frome, 45, 83 
 
 Garrison theory, 16, 40-2, 66-70 
 
 German charters, 4, 5, 8 
 
 Gloucester, 43, 45, 73, 83 
 
 Grantham, 45, 83 
 
 Grimsby, 60 
 
 Guardians of children, 3, 4 
 
 Guildford, 45, 46, 83 
 
 Hal well, 42 
 
 Hastings, 42, 45, 83 
 
 Haverfordwest, 24 
 
 Heorepeburan, 42 
 
 Henley on Thames, 49 
 
 Hereford, 16, 45, 83 
 
 Heriot, 3, 4 
 
 Hertford, 42, 43, 45, 83 
 
 Heterogeneous tenure, 39 
 
 Homogeneous tenure, 39 
 
 Hundredal Boroughs, 6, 36, 37, 44, 
 
 45. 48, 51. 52 
 Huntingdon, 42, 45, 60, 83 
 Husting of London, 54, 59 
 Hythe, 10, 45, 46, 83 
 
 Ilchester, 45, 72, 83 
 Inverness, 12, 16 
 Ipswich, 29, 45, 77, 83 
 
 Labour rents, 2 
 
 Lambeth, 53 
 
 Lancaster, 3 
 
 Langport, 42, 43, 45, 83 
 
 Leek, 51 
 
 Leicester, 3, 37, 45, 63, 68, 71, 83 
 
 Lewes, 42, 45, 83 
 
 Liber burgus, 49, 50, 76-9 
 
 Lichfield, 72 
 
 Lidford, 42 
 
 Lincoln, 12, 21, 43, 45, 60, 70, 72, 
 
 73, 83 
 London, 9, 18, 20, 43, 45, 53, 58-62, 
 
 67. 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80-2, 
 
 83 
 
 Lorris, 17 
 Lostwithiel, 5 
 Lyme, 77 
 
 Lyminge, Abbess of, 73 
 Lyng, 42 
 
 Macclesfield, 76 
 
 Magna Charta, 22 
 
 Maitland, Professor, quoted, n, 25, 
 
 28, 29, 31, 32, 37 
 Maldon, 16, 42, 43, 45, 83 
 Malmesbury, 20, 42, 45, 84 
 Manorial court, 6, 31, 33 
 Markets, 12 
 Marlborough, 45, 84 
 Marriage fines, 8 
 Mayor, 62, 63 
 Merchant guild, 12, 58, 63 
 Milborne, 45, 84 
 Military services, 15, 24 
 Mill, suit of, 5, 19 
 Mints, 43-5, 83-4 
 Miskenning, 8 
 Mural mansions, 41 
 Murder fine, 8 
 
 Newcastle on Tyne, 21, 69 
 Nomina Villartim, 48, 77 
 Norham, 10, 77 
 Northampton, 20, 45, 84 
 Norwich, 43, 45, 84 
 Nottingham, 43, 45, 84 
 
 Oven, suit of, 5 , 19 
 Oxford, 13, 26, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 60 
 63,84
 
 Index 
 
 Palestine, laws of burgesses, 8 
 
 Parishes, 60 
 
 Parliamentary boroughs, 50 
 
 Pembroke, 5, 17 
 
 Perth, 12. 13 
 
 Petit Dutaillis, M., quoted, i, 60, 
 
 67, 68 
 
 Pevensey, 45, 71, 84 (see Anderida) 
 Pipe Rolls, 47. 60 
 Pomefract, 14, 18 
 Poor Law Union. 51 
 Porchester. 42 
 Portmote, 34 
 Portreeve of London, sy 
 Portsmouth, 49 
 
 Pre-emption by kin, 4 ; by lord, 4 
 Prepositura, 22 
 Preston , 2 7 
 Prevote, 22 
 Prise, 24 
 
 Public Health Act 1875, ;i 
 Purveyance, 23 
 
 Reading, 49, 84 
 Reeve. 20 
 Relief, 3, = 
 Repton. 72 
 Richborough, 71 
 Rochester. 4;, 72, 84 
 Romney. 45. 46. 84 
 Roman boroughs 43, 70-5 
 Rouen, 1 1 
 
 Round. Dr. quoted. 38, = 8, ;y, 67, 
 81-2 
 
 St Albans, 72, 74 (see Verulamium) 
 
 Sake and soke, 31, 76 
 
 Sale, liberty of. 4 
 
 Salisbury, 45, 63, 84 
 
 Sandwich, 38, 45, 84 
 
 Scotale, 20 
 
 Shaftesbury, 42. 43, 45, 84 
 
 Sheriff, 20, 46. 50,, 62 
 
 Shipmoney, 51 
 
 Shrewsbury, 4^, 4 = , 84 
 
 Socage tenure, 3 
 
 Sokens, = 3, 60, 62 
 
 Southampton) 42, 45, 84 
 
 Southwark, 42, 4 = , 84 
 
 Spanish municipal charter-, s 
 
 Stafford. 42, 43, 45. ~i. 84 
 
 Stamford, 45, 60, 84 
 
 Statute of Westminster 1275, 11 
 
 Steventon, 67 
 
 Steyning, 49 
 
 Stratford on Avon, 19 
 
 Subsidy, 50 
 
 Sudbury, 41, 84 
 
 Swansea, 17 
 
 Tallage, =, 19, 47 
 
 Tanuvortb, 42. 4^, 4;, 67, 84 
 
 Thetford. 45, 84' 
 
 Third penny. 38-9, 44-1. 83-4 
 
 Tisbury, 42 
 
 Toll, freedom from, 13 
 
 Torksey, 4 = , 84 
 
 Totnes, 45, 84 
 
 Township Moot, 63, 64 
 
 Trade. I I 
 
 Twineham, 42, 84 
 
 Yeralainium, 70 
 V'illenage, tenure in. 2 
 Vinogradoff, Professor, quoted, 32 
 
 Waliingford. iC>, 42, 4 = , 67, 68, 84 
 Walsall, 4 . : i 
 Ward*. 60, 6 1 
 \Vareham, 42. 43. 4;, 84 
 
 War'.\ick. 4:. 4^. 4;. 84 
 
 Watchel, 42 
 
 Weardlmrli. 43 
 
 \Vea\ei>" < iuild, 60 
 
 Wells, 10. 49. 77-9 
 
 Wergild, 9 
 
 Westminster Abbey, 54 
 
 Wey mouth, 77 
 
 Whitby, 4 , 7, 10 
 
 Wilton, 42. 4; 
 
 Winchcombe. 45, 49, 84 
 
 Winchester, 42, 43, 45, 7:, 73. 84 
 
 Wimbourne, 4 = . 84 
 
 Woodcock borough, 26, 49; manor. 
 
 \ ear and day, Ireedom by. ;
 
 CamtmUge : 
 
 PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
 
 Date Due 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.A. CAT. NO. 24 161