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Domesday Book and Beyond

by Frederic William Maitland

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§ 2 Domesday Statistics

Domesday’s three statements.

As a general rule the account given by Domesday Book of any manor contains three different statements about it which seem to have some bearing upon the subject of our present inquiry. (A) It will tell us that the manor is rated to the geld at a certain number of units, which units will in Kent be solins or sulungs and yokes (iuga), in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Norfolk and Suffolk carucates and bovates (but bovates are, to say the least, rare in East Anglia), and in the rest of England hides and virgates; but acres also will from time to time appear in the statement. (B) It will tell us that the manor contains land for a certain number of teams, or for a certain number of oxen. (C) It will tell us that there are on the manor a certain number of teams, some whereof belong to the lord and some to the men.

Modern AcreageRecorded Population (Ellis)Danegeld
circ. ann 1150		Hides, Carucates, Sulungs
IIIIIIIV
£s.d.
Kent975,82012,20510516101,224
Sussex932,73310,410217063,474
Surrey461,2304,3831791601,830
Hampshire1,037,76410,3731841542,588
Berkshire461,7426,3242051142,473
Wiltshire880,24810,1503891304,050
Dorset632,2727,807248502,277
[7,512 E][2,321 E]
Somerset1,042,48813,7642771042,936
[13,307 E][2,951 E]
Devon1,667,09717,4341031981,119
Cornwall868,2085,43822150155
Middlesex180,480(?)2,30285120868
Hertford406,9324,927110141,050
Buckingham475,0945,4202041472,074
Oxford485,3226,7752491652,412
Gloucester796,7318,366194162,388
Worcester480,3424,625101601,189
Hereford537,3635,368931561,324
Cambridge549,5655,2041141501,233
Huntingdon233,9282,9147150747
Bedford298,4943,8751101201,193
Northampton639,5418,4411191091,356
Leicester528,9866,772100002,500(?)
Warwick578,5956,5741281261,338
Stafford749,7133,1784510505
[499 E]
Shropshire859,5165,0801171861,245
Chester[655,036]2,349000512
Derby
Nottingham		657,550
539,752		3,041
5,686		112111679
567
Rutland[97,273]8621112037
York[3,888,351]8,0551659510,095
Lincoln1,694,90725,305266004,188
Essex985,54516,060236802,650
Norfolk1,315,09227,08733022[2,422]
Suffolk947,74220,49123508

Continued

Hides Gelding T. R. W.TeamlandsTeamsValet (Pearson)
VVIVIIVIII
£s.d.
3,1025,140910Kent
2,2413,0913,25574Sussex
7061,1721,1421,52449Surrey
1,5722,8472,614Hampshire
1,3382,0871,7962,383161Berkshire
3,4572,997Wiltshire
2,3031,7622,65698Dorset
[2,332 E][3,359129E]
4,8583,804Somerset
[4,812 E][4,16147E]
7,9725,5423,220143Devon
3992,3771,18766214Cornwall
66454575478Middlesex
1,7161,4061,5411311Hertford
2,2441,9521,81379Buckingham
2,6392,4673,242211Oxford
3,7682,82768Gloucester
1,88999106Worcester
2,479Hereford
1,6761,443Cambridge
1,120967864154Huntingdon
1,5571,3671,096122Bedford
2,9312,4221,84307Northampton
1,81773630Leicester
2,2762,0031,359138Warwick
1,398951[516163E]Stafford
1,755Shropshire
Chester
76286246140Derby
1,2551,991Nottingham
Rutland
York
5,0434,712Lincoln
3,9204,784108Essex
4,8534,154117Norfolk
Suffolk

TABLE II. AVERAGES.

Acreage div. by populationAcreage div. by teamlandsAcreage div. by teamsPopulation div. by teamlands
IXXXIXII
Kent79314
Sussex89301
Surrey1053934033·7
Hampshire1003643973·6
Berkshire732212573·0
Wiltshire862542932·9
Dorset802743583·3
Somerset752142742·8
Devon952093002·1
Cornwall1593657312·2
Middlesex782713313·4
Hertford822372892·8
Buckingham872112432·4
Oxford711831962·5
Gloucester95211
Worcester103254
Hereford100216
Cambridge1053273803·1
Huntingdon802082412·6
Bedford771912182·4
Northampton752182642·8
Leicester78291
Warwick882542882·8
Stafford2355367882·2
Shropshire169489
Chester[278]
Derby2168627623·9
Nottingham944302714·4
Rutland[112]
York[482]
Lincoln663363595·0
Essex61251
Norfolk48270
Suffolk46
Population div. by teamsTeamlands div. by teamsTotal valet div. by teamland [or by teams]Experimental valet of teamland [or of land tilled by team]
XIIIXIVXVXVI
£s.d.£s.d.
3·9[1131]11411Kent
3·3[110]0183Sussex
3·81·02160108Surrey
3·91·08126Hampshire
3·51·161241210Berkshire
3·31·15144Wiltshire
4·41·30130168Dorset
3·61·270159Somerset
3·11·43080053Devon
4·52·00056038Cornwall
4·21·21128111Middlesex
3·51·220171101311Hertford
2·71·1401610136Buckingham
2·71·06146108Oxford
2·2[0150][0161]Gloucester
2·4[0105][0107]Worcester
2·1[0911]Hereford
3·61·16129Cambridge
3·01·1501550122Huntingdon
2·81·1301410154Bedford
3·41·21099Northampton
3·7098Leicester
3·21·130111101010Warwick
3·31·47074088Stafford
2·8[072]Shropshire
Chester
3·50·8801210117Derby
2·80·63036Nottingham
Rutland
York
5·31·070176Lincoln
4·0[144]Essex
5·5[0171]Norfolk
Suffolk

Northern formulas.

We may begin our investigation with a formula common in Derbyshire.

In M [place name] habuit K [man’s name] a car[ucatas] terrae ad geldum. Terra b car[ucarum or carucis]. Ibi nunc in dominio d car[ucae] et... villani et... bordarii habent e car[ucas].

The Lincolnshire formula is perhaps yet plainer. Instead of saying ‘Terra b car[ucarum],’ it says, ‘Terra ad b car[ucas].’ Still more instructive is a formula used in Yorkshire.

In M habuit K a car[ucatas] terrae ad geldum ubi possunt esse b car[ucae]. Nunc habet ibi K d car[ucas] et... villanos et... bordarios cum e car[ucis].

As a variant on the phrase ‘ubi possunt esse b car[ucae],’ we have, ‘quas potest arare 1 car[uca],’ or ‘has possunt arare b car[ucae]1340.’

The teams on the demesne (d) and the teams of the tenants (e) are enumerated separately. The total number of the teams (d + e) we will call c.

Now occasionally we may find an entry concerning which the following equation will hold good: a = b = c: in other words, the same number will stand for the carucates at which the manor is taxed, the ‘teamlands’ that there are in it (or to put it another way the number of teams that ‘can be there,’ or the number of teams that ‘can plough it’1341) and also for the teams that are actually to be found there. Thus:—

Terra Roberti de Todeni.... In Ulestanestorp habuit Leuricus 4 car[ucatas] terrae ad geldum. Terra totidem car[ucis]. Ibi habet Robertus in dominio 1 car[ucam] et 6 villanos et 3 bordarios et 8 sochemannos habentes 3 car[ucas]1342.

Here a = b = c. But entries so neat as this are not very common. In the first place, the number (c) of teams often exceeds or falls short of the number (b) of ‘teamlands,’ or, which is the same thing, the number of teams that there ‘can be.’ An excess of ‘teamlands’ over teams is common. In some parts of Yorkshire and elsewhere instead of reading that there are so many teams, we read ‘modo vasta est’:—there are no oxen there at all. But the reverse of this case is not very uncommon. Thus we may be told that there are 3 carucates for geld, that ‘there can be there 2 teams’ and that there are 4 teams1343; we may find a manor that contains land for but 3 teams equipped with as many as 71344. As to the relation between a and b, this is not fixed. On one and the same page we may find that a is equal to, greater and less than b. Thus in Lincolnshire1345:

In Colebi habuit Siuuard 7 car. terrae ad geldum. Terra ad totidem car.
In Cherchebi habuit Comes Morcar 5 car. terrae ad geldum. Terra ad 4 car.
In Bodebi habuit Comes Morcar 8 car. terrae ad geldum. Terra ad 9 car.

Southern formulas.

Leaving now for a while the carucated part of England and postponing our visit to Kent, we find similar formulas. They tell us (A) that the manor contains a certain number of units of assessment, (B) that there is land for a certain number of teams, (C) that there are so many teams upon it. But we have a new set of units of assessment; instead of carucates and bovates, we have hides and virgates. The Huntingdonshire formula is particularly clear. It runs thus:

In M habet K a hidas ad geldum. Terra b car[ucarum or carucis]. Ibi nunc in dominio d car[ucae] et... villani et... bordarii habentes e car[ucas].

The number of hides that is put before us is the number of hides ‘for geld.’ So in Cheshire and Shropshire the number of hides that is put before us is the number of ‘hidae geld[antes].’ From this we easily pass to the formula that prevails in Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Devon:

K tenet M. T[empore] R[egis] E[dwardi] geldabat pro a hidis. Terra est b car[ucarum]. In dominio sunt d car[ucae] et... villani et... bordarii cum e car[ucis].

A formula common in Sussex, Surrey and several other counties instead of telling us that this manor has a hides for geld, or has a gelding hides, or gelds for a hides, tells us—what seems exactly the same thing—that it ‘defends itself’ for a hides. Then we pass to counties such as Middlesex, Hertford, Buckingham and Oxford where the entry does not commonly use any words which explicitly refer to geld:—we are told that K holds M for so many hides (pro a hidis). Lastly, we may pass to counties, such as Warwickshire and Staffordshire where, at first sight, the entries may seem to us ambiguous. They run thus—‘K holds M. There are there a hides. There is land for b teams.’ Here for a moment it may seem to us that we have two different statements about the actual extent or capacity of the manor:—there are a hides there, but land for b teams. But comparing the formulas in use here with those in use in other counties, we can hardly doubt that they all come to one and the same thing:—a statement about b, the capacity of the manor, is preceded by a statement about its taxation, which statement may take the short form, ‘There are a hides there,’ instead of one of the longer forms, ‘It gelds, or defends itself, for a hides,’ or ‘He holds a gelding hides, or a hides for geld.’

Kentish formulas.

In Kent again, we have the three statements, though here the units of assessment are sulungs and yokes:—the land ‘defends itself’ for a sulungs; there is land there for b teams; there are d teams in demesne and the men have e teams.

Relation between the three statements.

In the hidated south, as in the carucated north, the relation between the three amounts is not invariable. We may find that a = b = c. It is common to find that c is less than b, but occasionally it is greater; on one and the same page we may find that c is equal to, is greater, is less than b. Then a is often equal to b, often it is less than b, but sometimes it is greater. We have therefore three statements about the manor, between which there is no necessary connexion of any very simple kind.

It may look pedantic, but will be convenient if, by means of the letters A, B and C, we try to keep distinctly before our minds ‘the A statement’ about the units of assessment, ‘the B statement’ about the ‘teamlands,’ or teams for which ‘there is land,’ and ‘the C statement’ about the existing teams. We shall find hereafter that there are certain counties in which we do not get all three statements, at least in any of their accustomed forms. In Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire we rarely get the B statement. As to Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, we seem at first sight to obtain A and not B, or B and not A, while Leicestershire will require separate treatment.

Introduction of statistics.

Now if we are ever to understand these matters, it is necessary that we should look at the whole of England. Far be it from us to say that microscopic labour spent upon one county or one hundred is wasted; often it is of the highest value; but such work is apt to engender theories which break down the moment they are carried outside the district in which they had their origin. Well would it be if the broad features of Domesday Book could be set out before us in a series of statistical tables. The task would be gigantic and could hardly be performed except by a body of men who had plenteous leisure and who would work together harmoniously. However, rather to suggest what might and some day must be done, than to parade what has been done rapidly and badly, some figures have been set forth above in two tables1346. That they are extremely inaccurate can not be doubtful, for he who compiled them had other things to do and lacks many of the qualities which should be required of a good counter of hides. For unmethodical habits and faulty arithmetic no excuse is possible; but it will be remembered that, as matters now stand, two men not unskilled in Domesday might add up the number of hides in a county and arrive at very different results, because they would hold different opinions as to the meaning of certain formulas which are not uncommon. What is here set before the reader is intended to be no more than a distant approach towards the truth. It will serve its end if it states the sort of figures that would be obtained by careful and leisurely computers, and therefore the sort of problems that have to be solved1347.

Explanation of statistics.

Sidenote: Acreage.

We must now explain our statistics. In Column I. we give the acreage of the modern counties1348. A warning bracket will remind the reader that in the cases of Yorkshire, Cheshire and Rutland the modern does not coincide even approximately with the ancient boundary. To Middlesex we give a figure larger than that given by our statisticians, for they know a county of London which has been formed at the expense of its neighbours1349. Many minor variations should be remembered by those who would use Domesday Book for delicate purposes; for example, they must call to mind the merger in circumambient shires of what were once detached pieces of other counties. But of such niceties we can here take no account1350.

Population.

In Column II. we state the ‘recorded population’ as computed by Ellis. In the cases of Dorset and Somerset we also state, and we sign with the letter E, the result of Eyton’s labours. We must not forget that these figures give us rather the number of tenants or occupiers than the number of human beings. Our readers must multiply them by four, five or six, according to knowledge or taste, before the population of England will be attained.

Danegeld.

In Column III., for a reason that will become evident hereafter, we place the amount of danegeld charged against the counties—charged against them, not actually paid by them1351—in the middle of the twelfth century. The sources of these figures are the Pipe Rolls of 31 Henry I. and 2 and 8 Henry II. In these accounts the amount charged against a county is approximately constant. Some of the variations are probably due to a contemptuous treatment of small sums1352; but there are cases in which a sheriff seems to have been allowed to deduct £10 or so, without any recorded explanation1353. We choose the highest figures when there is any discord between our three rolls. The danegeld was being levied at the rate of two shillings on the hide, and therefore, if we would find the number of geldant hides, we have to multiply by ten the number of pounds that are set against the county.

Hides, carucates, sulungs.

Column IV. contains our estimate of A: in other words, of the number of hides, carucates or sulungs. As we are arguing for a large hide, we have thought right in doubtful cases to lean in favour of inclusion rather than of exclusion. We count all hides, except those ascribed to the shire’s boroughs1354, even though we are told that they have ‘never’ gelded. Also, when a hide is mentioned, we count it, even though we have a strong suspicion that the same hide is mentioned again on some other page. Especially in Sussex, where the rapes have recently been rearranged, this may make our figures too high1355. Then, again, we have frankly begged important questions by assuming that in Domesday Book the following equations are correct.

1 Hide= 4 Virgates= 120 Acres
1 Carucate= 8 Bovates= 120 Acres
1 Sulung= 4 Yokes= 120 Acres.

In the counties with which we have dealt, except Norfolk and Essex (Suffolk we have left alone), acres are so rarely mentioned that the error, if any, introduced by our hypothesis as to their relation to hides and carucates will be almost infinitesimal, and, even if we are wrong in supposing that the virgate is the quarter of a hide and that the bovate is the eighth of a carucate, the vitiation of our results that will be due to this blunder will but rarely be considerable1356.

Reduced hidage.

Almost everywhere we may find some hides (carucates, sulungs) that do not geld and many cases in which a tract now gelds for a smaller number of hides (carucates, sulungs) than that for which it formerly paid. In four counties, however, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire, we see that since William’s advent there has, rightfully or wrongfully, been a large and generally distributed reduction in the tale of the gelding hides. In our Column V. we give a rough statement of the reduced number1357. In Cornwall we read of an assessment that prevailed in the Confessor’s day and of a heavier assessment. The figures which speak of this heavier assessment we place in our Column V1358.

The teamlands.

We now pass from A to B. In Column VI. we set the number of teamlands, thus answering the question Quot carucarum [carucis] ibi est terra. We have assumed, but this rarely has an appreciable effect on our calculations, that the land of one ox is the eighth, the land of two oxen the fourth part of the land of one team. There are certain counties where we receive no statement about the teamlands, while in certain others the statement, though it seems to be expected, is often omitted1359. For this reason some blanks will be found in this column. In most of the other counties instances occur with more or less frequency in which nothing is said of the teamlands. In these cases we have thought it fair to assume that there were teamlands equal in number to the teams (B = C). The effect of this assumption will be to bring the number of teamlands (B) somewhat closer to the number of teams (C) than it would otherwise have been, but no very great harm will have thus been done to our rude statistics1360.

The teams.

Column VII. gives the number of teams. Here we assume (we shall endeavour to prove hereafter) that the caruca of Domesday Book always means the same, namely, eight oxen1361.

The values.

Lastly in Column VIII. we place the results attained by Pearson1362 and Eyton in their endeavours to add together the various sums which the various estates in a shire are said to be worth (valet) or to render (reddit) in the Conqueror’s day, and to thus obtain a total valet for the shire. We need hardly say that these values are ‘annual values.’

The table of ratios.

The relations between our divers sets of figures are more important than the figures themselves, therefore we have worked the division sums the results of which are printed in the second Table, the first seven columns whereof are filled by quotients1363. The last column calls for more remark. The valets obtained for the various counties by Pearson and Eyton are somewhat precarious. They involve theories as to the relation between the values of gold and silver, as to the relation between the value of a pound reckoned by tale and a pound reckoned by weight, as to ‘blanched’ money and the cost of ‘a night’s farm.’ Also a good deal is included that can hardly be called the value of land, since it comprehends, not only the value of mills and the like, but also in some cases the revenue derived from courts. In order therefore that we might compare the values given to land in the various counties, we have taken at hazard a number of small estates in order that we might by addition and division obtain the value of a typical teamland with typical appurtenances. In general we have chosen ten estates each of which has one teamland, ten estates each of which has two teamlands and ten estates each of which has five teamlands, and then we have divided the sum of their values by eighty, the number of teamlands that they comprise. On the whole, the figures that we thus obtain and place in Column XVI. are not widely removed from those in Column XV., which represent the quotients arising from a division of Pearson’s ‘county values’ by the number of teamlands that are contained in the counties1364.

An apology.

In order that not too much credence and yet just credence enough may be given to the figures that we have hastily put together, we will set beside those that we have stated for Gloucestershire the results of a minute analysis accomplished by Mr Charles Taylor1365. We have set down: Population, 8366 (from Ellis); Hides, 2388; Teams, 3768; Total Valet, £2827 6s. 8d. (from Pearson). Mr Taylor gives: Population, 82391366; Hides, 2611 (or 2596); Teams, 3909; Total Valet, £3130 7s. 10d. Now these variations are wide and may in some sort be discreditable to those who differ from Mr Taylor1367. But they are not very substantial if we come to averages and ratios and a comparison of counties. For the purposes for which we shall use our figures, it is no great matter whether in this county there are 2·1 or 2·2 ‘recorded men’ to the plough-team1368. The broad features of Gloucestershire are that its hides fall far short of its teams, that its recorded population is sparse, that the average value of the land tilled by a team falls well below twenty shillings, that this shire differs markedly and in certain assignable respects from Wiltshire, where the hides exceed the teams, from Lincoln, where, despite the fen, the population is thick, from Kent, where the average value of land tilled by a team rises above thirty shillings1369.

Constancy of ratios.

Our figures tell of wide variations; but we may be allowed to call attention to the stability of certain ratios, a stability which is gratifying to the diffident arithmetician. In twenty-one counties we can divide ‘the recorded population’ by the number of teamlands. The quotient never falls as low as 2 and only twice exceeds 41370. For the same twenty-one counties we can divide the number of teamlands by the number of teams. Only twice will the quotient fall below 1 and only once will it touch 2. We must not, however, be led away into a general discussion of these figures. That task would require a wary and learned economist. We must keep our minds bent on what may be called the A B C of our subject1371.

The team.

Now we may start with what seems to be the most objective of our three statements, that which gives us C, the number of teams. We know that in A there is an element of estimation, of assessment; we may fear that this is true of B also; but an ox or a team ought to be a fact and not a theory. At the outset, however, a troublesome question arises. We have assumed that whenever our record speaks of a caruca it means eight oxen. On the other hand, there are who maintain that whereas the carucae of the demesne consisted of eight, those ascribed to the villeins comprised but four oxen1372, and others have thought that the strength of Domesday’s caruca varied from place to place with the varying practice of divers agriculturists.

Variability of the caruca .

But, in the first place, it is abundantly clear that the clerk who compiled the account of Cambridgeshire from the original verdicts held himself at liberty to substitute ‘half a team’ for ‘four oxen’ and ‘four oxen’ for ‘half a team1373.’ In the second place, the theory of a variable caruca would in our eyes reduce to an absurdity the practice of stating the capacity of land in terms of the teams and the oxen that can plough it. We are carefully told about each estate that ‘there is land for b teams, or for b´ oxen, or for b teams and b´ oxen.’ Now if a ‘team’ has always the same meaning, we have here a valuable truth. If, on the other hand, a ‘team’ may mean eight or may mean four oxen, we are being told next to nothing. The apparently precise ‘there is land for 4 teams’ becomes the useless ‘there is land for 32 or 16 or for some number between 32 and 16 oxen.’ What could the statesmen, who were hoping to correct the assessment of the danegeld, make of so vague a statement? They propose to work sums in teams and teamlands. They spend immense pains in ascertaining that here there is ‘land for half a team’ or ‘land for half an ox.’ We are accusing them of laborious folly unless we suppose that they can at a moment’s notice convert teams into oxen.

The caruca a constant.

If it be allowed that in the statement (B) about the number of teamlands the term caruca has always the same meaning, we cannot stop there, but must believe that in the statement (C) about the number of teams this same meaning is retained. Often enough when there is equality between teamlands and teams (C = B), the entry takes the following form:—There is land for b teams and ‘they’ are there1374. What are there? The teams for which ‘there is land’: those teams which are serving as a measure for the capacity of land. Let us try the two modes of interpretation on the first lines that strike our eye. Here we have two successive entries, each of which tells us that ‘there is land for 6 teams1375.’ If the caruca is a constant, we have learnt that in one particular there is equality between these estates. If the caruca is a variable, we have learnt nothing of the kind. Let us see what we can gain by reading further. In the one case there were 3 teams on the demesne and the villeins had 61⁄2; in the other there were 2 teams on the demesne, the villeins had 2 and the sokemen 2. We want to know whether the second of these estates is under-teamed or over-teamed. There is land for 6 teams and there are 6 teams on it; but 2 of these teams belong to villeins and 2 to sokemen. If we give the villeins but 4 oxen to the team, how many shall we give the sokemen? Shall we say 6? If so, there are 36 oxen here. Is that too many or too few or just enough for the arable land that there is? That is an unanswerable question, for the king’s commissioners have been content with the statement that the number of oxen appropriate to this estate lies somewhere between 23 and 49

The villeins’ teams.

Surely when we are told that 8 sokemen have ‘2 teams and 6 oxen’ or that 9 sokemen and 5 bordiers have ‘3 teams and 7 oxen1376,’ we are being told that the teams in question have no less than eight oxen apiece. Surely when we are told that there are 23 villeins and 5 bordiers with 2 teams and 5 oxen1377, we are being told that the teams of these villeins are not teams of four. And what are we to say of cases in which a certain number of teams is ascribed to a number of persons who belong to various classes, as for example when 6 villeins and 7 bordiers and 2 sokemen are said to have 3 teams and 5 oxen1378, or where 3 villeins, 2 bordiers, a priest and a huntsman are said to have one team and 6 oxen1379, or where 19 radknights ‘with their men’ are said to have 48 teams1380? Even if we suppose that the officers of the exchequer have tables which tell them how many oxen a caruca implies when it is attributed to a Northamptonshire sokeman or a Gloucestershire radknight, we are still setting before them insoluble problems. The radknights of Berkeley ‘with their men’ have 48 teams:—this may cover less than 200 or more than 300 oxen. And yet the record that is guilty of this laxity will tell us how in Bedfordshire Terra est dimidio bovi, et ibi est semibos1381.

The villeins’ oxen.

The main argument that has been urged in favour of a variable caruca is that which, basing itself on later documents, protests that a villein ought not to have more than two oxen1382. Now true it seems to be that if by the number of the teams belonging to the villani and bordarii of Domesday Book we divide the number of villani plus half the number of bordarii (and this would be a fair procedure), we shall obtain as our quotient a figure that will be much nearer to 2 than to 4. But it must be common ground to all who read our record that some villeins are much better supplied with oxen than are their neighbours, and that some villeins have whole teams, whatever a ‘team’ may mean. There is so much difference in this respect between manor and manor that we are not justified in talking of any particular number of oxen as the normal outfit of the villanus, and outside of Domesday Book we have far too little evidence to sanction the dogma that the average number must stand close to 21383. Even the villein virgater on the monastic manors of the thirteenth century is often expected to have four oxen, and his having eight is a possibility that must be contemplated1384.

Light and heavy ploughs.

That light as well as heavy ploughs were in use we have not denied. At a little later time we see teams of six beasts and teams of ten engaged in ploughing. But the compilers of Domesday Book are not concerned with the methods of husbandry; they are registering the number of oxen. If a man has one ox which is employed as a beast of the plough, they say of him: Arat cum uno bove1385. If he and another man have such an ox between them, they say: Ibi est semibos. If he has four oxen, they set this down as dimidia caruca. Instead of telling us that there are thirty-eight oxen, they speak of five teams less two oxen1386. Twelve pence make a shilling; and, at all events at the Exchequer, eight oxen make a team.

The team of Domesday and other documents.

Very lately an argument has been advanced in favour of a caruca, the strength of which varies from place to place. In many instances the Black Book of Peterborough in its description of the abbatial estates will give to the demesne of a particular manor exactly the same number of teams that are ascribed to it by Domesday Book, and, while in some cases the later of these documents will tell us that there are eight oxen to the team, in others it will speak of teams of six1387. That there is force in this argument we must admit; but many changes will take place in forty years, and we can not think that the correspondence between the two documents is sufficiently close to warrant the inference that the caruca of Domesday can have fewer beasts than eight. An exactly parallel argument would serve to prove that the hide of Domesday contains a variable number of fiscal ‘acres.’ Were it possible (but we shall see that it is not) for us to regard the teamland of Domesday as a fixed area, then we might afford to allow the strength of the team to vary; but if the teamland is no fixed area and the team has no fixed strength, then King William’s inquest ends in a collection of unknown quantities.

The teamland.

We turn from the team (C) to the teamland (B), and must face some perplexing questions. Reluctantly we have come to the opinion that this term ‘the land of (or for) one team’ does not in the first instance denote a fixed areal quantity of arable land. We have adopted this opinion reluctantly because we are differing from some of the best expositors of our record, and because it compels us to say that many of the statistical data with which that record provides us are not so useful as we hoped that they would be.

Fractional parts of the teamland.

In the first place, we must notice that if this term stands for a fixed quantity, a very rude use is being made of it. We see indeed that fractional parts of a teamland can be conceived. We often meet the land of (or for) half a team; we may come upon the land of or for two oxen, one ox, half an ox. But, except in a few counties, any mention of fractions smaller than the half of a team is rare, and even halves seldom occur. Now certainly the teamland was a large unit for such treatment as this. If, for instance, we suppose that it contained 120 acres, then we must infer that in some shires the jurors who had to describe a mass of 420 acres would have called it land for 3 or else land for 4 teams, and that in most shires an odd 80 acres would have been neglected or would have done duty as half a teamland. The hides or the carucates (A) have often been split into small fractions where the jurors distribute integral teamlands. One example of this common phenomenon shall be given. In Grantchester lie six estates1388:

the first rated at 3 v. has land for 1 team,
the first rated at 3 v. has land for 1 team,
the second rated at 2 h. 3 v. has land for 6 teams,
the third rated at 2 h. 3 v. has land for 4 teams,
the fourth rated at 11⁄2 v. has land for 1 team,
the fifth rated at 1 v. has land for 4 oxen,
the sixth rated at 1⁄2 v. has land for 3 oxen.

The teamland does not break up easily. As a general rule, we only hear of fractional parts of it when the jurors are compelled to deal with a tenement so small that it can not be said to possess even one teamland1389.

Land for oxen and wood for swine.

In passing we observe that this phrase, ‘There is land for x teams’ finds exact parallels in two other phrases that are not very uncommon, namely, ‘There is pasture for y sheep’ and ‘There is wood for z pigs’: also that the values given to y and z are often large and round. It may be that the jurors have in their minds equations which connect the area of a wood or pasture with its power of feeding swine or sheep, but an extremely lax use must be made of these equations when the number of sheep is fixed at a neat hundred or the number of pigs at a neat thousand, nor dare we say that the quality of the grass and trees has no influence upon the computation.

Teamland no areal unit.

Secondly, we observe that the teamland when it does break into fractional parts does not break into virgates, bovates, acres, roods, or any other units which we can regard as units in a scheme of areal measurement1390. The eighth of a teamland is the land of (or for) an ox. If we wish to speak of the sixteenth of a teamland, we must introduce the half-ox. Now had the jurors been told to state the quantity of the arable land comprised in a tenement, they had at their command plenty of words which would have served this purpose. No sooner will they have told us that there is land for two teams, than they will add that there are five acres of meadow and a wood which is three furlongs in length by two in breadth. We infer that they have not been asked to state the area of the arable. They have been asked to say something about it, but not to state its area.

The commissioners and the teamlands.

What had they been asked to say? Here we naturally turn to that well-known introduction to the Inquisitio Eliensis which professes to describe the procedure of the commissioners and which at many points corresponds with the contents of Domesday Book1391. We read that the barons made inquiry about the number of the hides (A) and the number of the teams (C); we do not read any word about the teamlands (B). Quot hidae they must ask; Quot carucae1392 in dominio et quot hominum they must ask; Quot carucis ibi est terra—there is no such question. On the other hand, the jurors are told to give all the particulars thrice over (hoc totum tripliciter), once with reference to King Edward’s day, once with reference to the date when the Conqueror bestowed the manor, and once with reference to the present time.

The teamlands of Great Domesday.

Now, if these be the interrogatories that the justiciars administered to the jurors, then the answering verdicts as they are recorded in Great Domesday err both by defect and by excess. On the one hand, save when they are dealing with the geld or the value of a tenement, they rarely give any figures from King Edward’s day, and still seldomer do they speak about the date of the Conqueror’s feoffments. Our record does not systematically report that whereas there are now four teams on this manor, there were five in the Confessor’s reign and three when its new lord received it. On the other hand, we obtain the apparently unasked for information that ‘there is land for five teams.’

The teams of Little Domesday.

We turn to Little Domesday and all is altered. Here the words of the writ seem to be punctually obeyed. The particulars are stated three times over, the words tunc, post and modo pointing to the three periods. Thus we learn how many teams there were when Edward was living and when the Conqueror gave the land away. On the other hand, we are not told how many teams ‘could till’ that land, though if the existing teams are fewer than those that were ploughing in time past, it will sometimes be remarked that the old state of things could be ‘restored1393.’

The Leicestershire formulas.

Next we visit Leicestershire. We may open our book at a page which will make us think that the account of this shire will be very similar to those reports that are typical of Great Domesday. We read that Ralph holds four carucates; that there is land for four teams; that there are two teams on the demesne while the villeins have two1394. But then, alternating with entries which run in this accustomed form, we find others which, instead of telling us that there is land for so many teams, will tell us that there were so many upon it in the time of King Edward1395. Perhaps, were this part of the survey explored by one having the requisite knowledge, he would teach us that the jurors of some wapentakes use the one formula while the other is peculiar to other wapentakes; but, as the record stands, the variation seems due to the compiling clerk. Be that as it may, we can hardly read through these Leicestershire entries without being driven to believe that substantially the same piece of information is being conveyed to us now in one and now in the other of two shapes that in our eyes are dissimilar. To say, ‘There were four teams here in King Edward’s day’ is much the same as to say, ‘There is land here for four teams.’ Conversely, to say, ‘There is land here for four teams’ is much the same as to say,‘There were four teams here in King Edward’s day.’ For an exact equivalence we must not contend; but if the commissioners get the one piece of information they do not want the other. On no single occasion, unless we are mistaken, are both put on record1396.

Origin of the inquiry about the teamlands.

When we have thought over these things, we shall perhaps fashion for ourselves some such guess as that which follows. The original scheme of the Inquest was unnecessarily cumbrous. The design of collecting the statistics of the past broke down. Let us imagine a similar attempt made in our own day. Local juries are summoned to swear communal verdicts about the number of horses and oxen that the farmers were keeping twenty years ago. Roughly, very roughly true would such verdicts be, although no foreign invasion, no influx of alien men and words and manners divides us from the fortieth year of Queen Victoria. In Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk some sort of answer about these matters was extracted from the jurors; but frequently they report that the arrangements which exist now have always existed, and by this they mean that they cannot remember any change. Now, when we fail to find in Great Domesday any similar figures, we may ascribe this to one of two causes. Either the commissioners did not collect statistics, or the compilers did not think them worthy of preservation. In some cases the one supposition may be true, in other cases the other. We may be fairly certain that in many or all counties the horses and the pigs and the ‘otiose animals’ that were extant in 1086 were enumerated in the verdicts1397. Also we know that Domesday Book is no mere transcript, but is an abstract or digest, and we have cause for believing that those who made it held themselves free to vary the phrases used by the jurors, provided that no material change was thus introduced1398. Howbeit, to come to the question that is immediately before us, our evidence seems to tell us that the commissioners and their master discovered that the original programme of the inquest was unnecessarily cumbrous. Once and again in more recent days has a similar discovery been made by royal commissioners. So some interrogatories were dropped.

Modification of the inquiry.

Then we suspect that the inquiry about the number of oxen that were ploughing in Edward’s day became a more practicable, if looser, inquiry about the number of oxen capable of tilling the land. The transition would not be difficult. What King William really wants to know is the agricultural capacity of the tenement. He learns that there are now upon it so many beasts of the plough. But this number may be accidentally large or accidentally small. With an eye to future taxation, he wishes for figures expressive of the normal condition of things. But, according to the dominant idea of his reign, the normal condition of things is their Edwardian condition, that in which they stood before the usurper deforced the rightful heir. And so these two formulas which we see alternating in the account of Leicestershire really do mean much the same thing: ‘There is land for x teams’: ‘There were x teams in the time of King Edward.’

Inquiry as to potential teams.

But if we suppose the justices abandoning the question ‘How many teams twenty years ago?’ in favour of ‘How many teams can there be?’ we see that, though they are easing their task and enabling themselves to obtain answers in the place of silence, they are also substituting for a matter of pure fact what may easily become a matter of opinion. They have left the actual behind and are inquiring about potentialities. They will now get answers more speedily; but who eight centuries afterwards will be able to analyze the mental processes of which these answers are the upshot? It is possible that a jury sets to work with an equation which connects oxen with area, for example, one which tells that a team can plough 120 acres. It is but too possible that this equation varies from place to place and that the commissioners do not try to prevent variations. They are not asking about area; they are asking about the number of teams requisite for the tillage of the tenement. With this and its value as data, William’s ministers hope to correct the antiquated assessments. Some of the commissioners may allow the jurors to take the custom of the district as a guide, while others would like to force one equation on the whole country. Our admiration for Domesday Book will be increased, not diminished, if we remember that it is the work not of machines but of men. Some of the justices seem to have thought that the inquiry about potential teams (B) was not of the first importance, not nearly so important as the inquiries about actual teams (C) and gelding units (A). In various counties we see many entries in which Terra est is followed by a blank space. In Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford we find no systematic mention of teamlands, but only occasional reports which show that at certain places there might be more teams than there are. At the end of the account of the Bishop of Worcester’s triple hundred of Oswaldslaw (an account so favourable to St. Mary that it might have been dictated by her representative) we find the remark that in none of these manors could there be any more teams than now are there1399. The bishop, who fully understands the object of the inquest, does not mean to have his assessment raised, and the justices are compelled to take the word of jurors every one of whom is the vassal of St. Mary.

Normal relation between teams and teamlands.

We know so little as to the commissioners’ intentions, in particular so little as to any design on their part to force upon the whole country some one equation connecting oxen with area, that the task which is set before us if we would explain the relation between the number of the teams (C) and the number of the teamlands (B) that we find in a given county is sometimes an intricate and perhaps insoluble problem. If England be taken as a whole, the two numbers will stand very close to each other. In some counties, for example in Lincolnshire, if at the foot of each page we add up the particulars, we shall long remain in doubt whether B or C will be the greater when our final sum is made. In county after county we shall find a large number of entries in which B = C, and, though there will always be some cases in which, the tenement being waste, C descends to zero, and others in which C is less than B, still the deficiency will be partially redressed by instances in which B falls short of C. On the whole, the relation between the two is that which we might expect. Often there is equality; often the variation is small; but an excess on the part of B is commoner than an excess on the part of C, and when the waste teamlands have been brought into the account, then in most counties B will usually exceed C by 10 per cent, or little more. There are, however, some marked and perplexing exceptions to this rule1400.

Deficiency of teams in the south-west.

As we pass through the southern counties from east to west, the ratio borne by the teamlands to the teams steadily increases, until ascending by leaps it reaches 1.43:1 (or thereabouts) in Devon and 2:1 in Cornwall. Now to all seeming we are not in a country which has recently been devastated; it is not like Yorkshire; we find no large number of ‘waste’ or unpopulated or unvalued estates. Here and there we may see a tenement which has as many teams as it has teamlands; but in the great majority of cases the preponderance of teamlands is steadily maintained. What does this mean? One conceivable explanation we may decidedly reject. It does not mean a relatively scientific agriculture which makes the most of the ox. Nor does it mean a fertile soil1401. Our figures seem to show that men are sparse and poor; also they are servile. We suspect their tillage to be of that backward kind which ploughs enormous tracts for a poor return. Arva per annos mutant et superest ager. Of the whole of the land that is sometimes ploughed, they sow less than two-thirds or a half in any one year: perhaps they sow one-third only, so that of the space which the royal commissioners reckon as three teamlands two-thirds are always idle. We must remember that in modern times the husbandry that prevailed in Cornwall was radically different from that which governed the English open fields. It was what the agrarian historians of Germany call a Feldgrasswirtschaft1402. That perhaps is the best explanation which we can give of this general and normal excess of teamlands over teams. But to this we may add that systems of mensuration and assessment which fitted the greater part of England very well, may have fitted Devon, Cornwall and some other western counties very badly1403. Those systems are the outcome of villages and spacious common fields where, without measurement, you count the ‘acres’ and the plough-lands or house-lands, and they refuse to register with any accuracy the arrangements of the Celtic hamlets, or rather trevs of the west.

Actual and potential teamlands.

It is by no means impossible that when the commissioners came to a county which was very sparsely peopled (and in Cornwall each ‘recorded man’ might have had near 160 acres of some sort or another all to himself) their question about the number of teamlands or about the number of teams ‘that could plough there’ became a question about remote possibilities, rather than about existing or probable arrangements, and that the answer to it became mere guesswork. On one occasion in Cornwall they are content with the statement that there is land for ‘fifteen or thirty teams1404.’ In the description of a wasted tract of Staffordshire we see six cases close together in which two different guesses as to the number of the potential teamlands are recorded1405:—‘There is land for two teams’, but ‘or three’ is interlined. Five times ‘or two’ is written above ‘one,’ Now this is of importance, for perhaps we may see in it the key to the treatment that wasted Yorkshire receives. How much arable land is there in this village? Well, if by ‘arable land’ you mean land that is ploughed, there is none. If you do not mean this, if you are speaking of a ‘waste’ vill where no land has been ploughed these fifteen years, then you must be content with a speculative answer1406. If the ruined cottages were rebuilt and inhabited, if oxen and men were imported, then employment might be found for four or five teams. Called to speculate about these matters, the Yorkshire jurors very naturally catch hold of any solid fact which may serve as a base for computations. This fact they seem to find in the geld assessment. This estate is rated to the geld at two carucates; the assessment seems tolerably fair; so they say that two teams would plough the land. Or again, this estate is rated to the geld at four carucates; but its assessment is certainly too high, so let it be set down for two teamlands1407. Even in other parts of the country the jurors may sometimes avail themselves of this device. In particular there are tracts in which they are fond of reporting that the number of teamlands is just equal to (B=A) or just twice as great (B=2A) as the number of gelding carucates. We very much fear, though the ground for this fear can not be explained at this stage of our inquiry, that the figure which the jurors state when questioned about potential teams is sometimes dictated by a traditional estimate which has been playing a part in the geld assessment, and that the number of teamlands is but remotely connected with the agrarian arrangements of 1086. All our other guesses therefore must be regarded as being subject to this horrible suspicion, of which we shall have more to say hereafter1408.

The land of excessive teams.

This makes it difficult for us to construe the second great aberration from the general rule that the number of the teamlands in a county will slightly exceed the number of teams. In Derby and Nottingham apparent ‘understocking’ becomes the exception and ‘overstocking’ the rule. In Derby there is a good deal of ‘waste’ where we have to reckon teamlands but no teams, and yet on many pages the number of teams is the greater (C>B). In Nottingham there seem to be on the average near 200 teams where there are but 125 teamlands. In many columns of the Lincolnshire survey, and therefore perhaps in some districts of that large and variegated county, the teams have a majority, though, if we have not blundered, they are beaten by the teamlands when the whole shire has been surveyed. It is very possible that a similar phenomenon would have been recorded in Essex and East Anglia if the inquiry in those counties had taken the form that was usual elsewhere, for the teams seem to be thick on the land. Now to interpret the steady excess of teams that we see in Derby and Nottingham is not easy. We can hardly suppose that the jurors are confessing that they habitually employ a superfluity of oxen. Perhaps, however, we may infer that in this district a given area of land will be ploughed by an unusually large number of teams, whereas in Devon and Cornwall a given area will be ploughed, though intermittently, by an unusually small number. In every way the contrast between Devon and Cornwall on the one hand, Lincoln, Nottingham and Derby on the other, is strongly marked. Of the quality of soils something should, no doubt, be said which we are too ignorant to say. An acre would yield more corn in Nottingham and Derby, to say nothing of Lincoln, than in Devon and Cornwall, though the valets that we find in the three Danish shires are by no means so high as those that are displayed by some of the southern counties. But if we ask how many households our average teamland is supporting, then among all the counties that we have examined Lincoln, Nottingham and Derby stand at the very top, while Devon and Cornwall stand with the depopulated Stafford at the very bottom of the list1409. Then, again, we see the contrasts between village and trev, between Dane and Celt, between sokeman and slave. Possibly Northampton, Derby and parts of Lincoln really are ‘over-teamed’: that is to say, were the land of these counties to come to the hands of lords who held large and compact estates, the number of plough-teams would be reduced. Where there is freedom there will be some waste. The tenements split into fractions, and the owner of a small piece must keep oxen enough to draw a plough or trust to the friendliness and reciprocal needs of his neighbours. Manorialism has this advantage: it can make the most of the ox. Another possible guess is that the real carucates and bovates of this district (by which we mean the units which locally bear these names and which are the units in the proprietary or tenurial scheme) have few acres, fewer than would be allowed by some equation which the royal commissioners for these counties carry in their minds. Being assured (for example) that the bovates in a certain village or hundred have few acres, they may be allowing the jurors to count as three team-lands (‘of imperial measure’) a space of arable that has been locally treated as four. So, after all, the rule that normally each teamland should have its team and that each team should till its teamland may be holding good in these counties, though the proprietary and agrarian units have differed from those that the commissioners treat as orthodox.

Attempts to explain the excess of teams.

One last guess is lawful after what we have seen in Leicestershire. These Nottinghamshire folk may be telling how many teams there were in King Edward’s time and recording a large increase in the number of oxen and therefore perhaps in the cultivated area. In this case, however, we should expect to find the valet greater than the valuit, while really we find that a fall in value is normal throughout the shire.

Digression to East Anglia.

We must here say one parenthetical word about the account of East Anglia. In one respect it differs from the account of any other district1410. We are told of the various landholders that they hold so many carucates or so many acres. Analogy would lead us to suppose that this is a statement touching the amount of geld with which they are charged. Though there is no statement parallel to the Terra est b carucis which we find in most parts of England, still there are some other counties remote from East Anglia—Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford—where no such statement is given to us. In other words, a natural first guess would be that in Norfolk and Suffolk we are informed about A and not about B. But then, it is apparent that some information about A is being given to us by a quite different formula such as we shall not meet outside East Anglia. We are told about a vill that when the hundred pays 20s. for the geld this vill pays so many pence—seven pence halfpenny, it may be, or eight pence three farthings. This is the formula which prescribes how much geld the landholders of the vill must pay and it says nothing of carucates or of acres. Now this might make us think that the carucates and acres which are attributed to the landholders are ‘real’ and not ‘rateable’ areas, and are to be put on a level with the teamlands (B) rather than with the hides or gelding carucates (A) of other counties. Nevertheless, on second thoughts we may return to our first opinion. If these carucates are equivalent to the teamlands of other counties, Norfolk and Suffolk not only differ but differ very widely from the rest of England1411. In Norfolk we make about 2,422 carucates and about 4,853 teams, and, however wide of the mark these figures may be1412, the fact that there are upon an average about two teams to every carucate is apparent on page after page of the record; often the ratio is yet higher. We have seen a phenomenon of the same kind, though less pronounced, in Nottingham; but then, if in Norfolk we proceed to divide the ‘recorded population’ by the number of carucates, we shall get 11 as our quotient. This is so very much higher than anything that we have seen elsewhere that we are daunted by it; for, even though we recall the possibility that a good many tenants in this free county are counted twice because they hold under two lords, still this reflection will hardly enable us to make the requisite allowance. To this it may be added that if we divide the acreage of Norfolk by its carucates and treat the carucates as teamlands, the quotient will place Norfolk among the counties in which the smallest part of the total area was under the plough. Further, it will be observed that the statement about the geldability of the vills does not enable us to bring home any particular sum to any given man. Be it granted that the sum due from a vill is fixed by the proposition that it contributes thirteen pence to every pound levied from the hundred, we have still to decide how much Ralph and how much Roger, two landholders of the vill, must contribute; and our decision will, we take it, be dictated by the statement that Ralph has one carucate and Roger 60 acres. We fear therefore that here again we can not penetrate through the rateable to the real1413.

The teamland no areal measure.

About the ‘land for one team’ we can hardly get beyond vague guesswork, and may seriously doubt whether the inquiry as to the number of possible ploughs was interpreted in the same manner in all parts of the country. Here it may have been regarded as a reference to the good old time of King Edward, here to the local custom; there an attempt may have been made to enforce some royal ‘standard measure,’ and there again men were driven to speculate as to what might happen if a wilderness were once more inhabited. But unless we are mistaken, the first step towards a solution of the many problems that beset us is taken when we perceive that the jurors have not been asked to state the areal extent of the tilled or the tillable land.

Eyton’s theory.

Far other, as is well known, was the doctrine of one whom all students of Domesday revere. For Mr Eyton the teamland was precisely 120 of our statute acres1414. The proof offered of this lies in a comparison of the figures given by Domesday with the superficial content of modern parishes. What seems to us to have been proved is that, if we start with the proposed equation, we shall rarely be brought into violent collision with ascertained facts, and that, when such a collision seems imminent, it can almost always be prevented by the intervention of some plausible hypothesis about shifted boundaries or neglected wastes. More than this has not been done. Always at the end of his toil the candid investigator admits that when he has added up all the figures that Domesday gives for arable, meadow, wood and pasture, the land of the county is by no means exhausted. Then the residue must be set down as ‘unsurveyed’ or ‘unregistered’ and guesses made as to its whereabouts1415. Then further, this method involves theories about lineal and superficial measurements which are, in our eyes, precarious.

Domesday’s lineal measure.

One word about this point must be said, though we can not devote much room to it. The content of various spaces, such as woods and pastures, is often indicated by a reference to linear standards, leagues, furlongs, perches, feet, and there seems to be little doubt that the main equations which govern the system are these:

1 league= 12 furlongs or quarentines or acre-lengths
= 480 perches.

Now we read numerous statements which take the following form:—‘It is x leagues (furlongs, perches) long and y wide,’ or, to take a concrete example, ‘The wood is 1 league long and 4 furlongs wide.’ The question arises whether we are justified in making this mean that here is a wood whose superficial content is equal to that of a rectangular parallelogram 480 statute perches long by 160 statute perches wide. We are rash in imposing our perch of 16·5 feet on the whole England of the eleventh century, even though we are to measure arable land. We are rasher in using that perch for the measurement of woodland. But perhaps we are rasher still in supposing that the Domesday jurors have true superficial measurement in their minds1416. We strongly suspect that they are thinking of shape as well as of size, and may be giving us the extreme diameters of the wood or some diameters that they guess to be near the mean. If a clergyman told us that his parish was 3 miles long by 2 wide, we should not accuse him of falsehood or blunder if we subsequently discovered that in shape it was approximately a right-angled triangle and contained only some 3 superficial miles. And now let us observe how rude these statements are. The Norfolk jurors are in the habit of recording the length and the breadth of the vills. Occasionally they profess to do this with extreme accuracy1417. However, we reckon that in about 100 out of 550 cases they say that the vill is one league long by a half-league wide. This delightfully symmetrical county therefore should have quite a hundred parishes, each of which contains close upon 720 acres. Among the 800 parishes of modern Norfolk there are not 70 whose size lies between 600 and 800 acres. We are not saying that time spent over these lineal measurements is wasted, but an argument which gets to the size of the teamland by postulating in the first place that our statute perch was commonly used for all purposes throughout England, and in the second that these lineal can be converted into superficial measurements by simple arithmetic, is not very cogent and is apt to become circular, for the teamland contains its 120 acres because that is the space left for it by parochial boundaries when we have measured off the woods and pastures, and our measurement of the woods and pastures is correct because it will leave 120 acres for every teamland.

Measured teamlands.

One more word about these lineal measurements. In Norfolk and Suffolk the total area of the vills is indicated by them, and so it is in Yorkshire also. Now, unless we err, it sometimes happens that if we arithmetically deduce the total area from its recorded length and breadth, and then subtract from that area the content of any measured woods and pastures that there may be, we shall be left with too little space to give each East Anglian carucate or each Yorkshire teamland 120 acres and with far too little to allow a similar area to each East Anglian team. Try one experiment. At Shereford in Norfolk we have to force at least one carucate on which there are two teams into a space that is 3 furlongs in length by 3 in breadth1418. That means, if our method be sound, that each team has at the utmost 45 acres to till. Try we Yorkshire. There also we shall find entries which to all appearance will not suffer us to give 120 acres to the teamland.

In Andrebi... 9 carucates for geld; there may be 6 teams.... The whole half a league long and half [a league] wide1419.

In Hotone and Bileham... a manor of 10 carucates for geld; there may be 10 teams.... The whole 10 quarantines long and 8 wide1420.

In Warlavesbi 6 carucates for geld; there may be 4 teams.... The whole half a league long and half [a league] wide1421.

It would seem then that in these cases the utmost limit for the teamland is 60, 80, 90 acres. Then again, there are a few precious instances in which lineal measures are used in order to indicate the size of a piece of land the whole of which is arable. This occurs so rarely that we may fairly expect something exceptional. The result is bewildering. At Thetford we hear of land that is half a league long and half a league wide: ‘the whole of this land is arable and 4 teams can plough it1422.’ Here then, but 90 acres are assigned to the teamland. We journey to Yorkshire and first we will take an entry which suits the Eytonian doctrine well enough. ‘There are 13 carucates of land less one bovate for geld; 8 teams can plough them.... Arable land 10 quarentines long and equally broad1423.’ In this case we have 1000 acres to divide among 8 teamlands, and this would make each teamland 125 acres:—we could hardly expect a pleasanter quotient. But on the same page we have an entry which tells of a manor with 60 carucates and 6 bovates for geld and 35 teamlands where the ‘arable land’ is described as being ‘2 leagues long and 2 [leagues] wide1424.’ This gives nearly 165 acres to the teamland. There are two Lincolnshire entries which, when treated in a similar way, give 1601425 and 2251426 acres to the teamland. Then there is a Staffordshire entry which gives no less than 360 acres to each teamland, though it gives only 160 to each existing team1427. The suspicion can not but cross our minds that as regards the amount of land that had 8 oxen for its culture there may have been as wide a difference between the various shires in the days of the Confessor as there was in the days of Arthur Young; only, whereas in the eighteenth century a little space ploughed by many oxen was a relic of barbarism, it was in the eleventh an index of prosperity, freedom, a thick population and a comparatively intense agriculture. But theories about the facts of husbandry will not dispel the whole of the fog which shrouds the Domesday teamland.

Amount of ploughed land in England.

That, if all England be taken as a whole, the average teamland of Domesday Book would contain about 120 acres seems possible, and since we ourselves are committed to the belief that the old traditional hide had arable acres to this number, it may be advisable that we should examine some districts of ancient England through the medium of the hypothesis that Domesday’s teamland has a long-hundred of our statute acres. In Column 1. of the following table we place the result obtained if we multiply a county’s teamlands (or in the case of Sussex and Gloucester the teams) by 120; and in the following columns we give the figures which show the state of the county in 1895. In order to make a rough comparison the easier, we give round figures and omit three noughts, so that, for example, 371 stands for 371,000 acres1428.

Arable in 1086Arable (1895)Permanent pastures (1895)Mountain and Heath Land used for grazing (1895)Woods and Plantation (1895)Total Acreage of Modern County (1895)
1000 Acres1000 Acres1000 Acres1000 Acres1000 Acres1000 Acres
Sussex3712983819124933
Surrey1411331521254461
Berkshire251204163136462
Dorset2801883001838632
Somerset57720765348461042
Devon957581633138861667
Buckingham269165236232476
Oxford317228188127485
Gloucester589269387758797
Bedford187155100113298
Northampton352215344028640
Lincoln60510175012431695

Decrease of arable.

These figures are startling enough. We are required to believe that in many counties, even in Sussex where the forest still filled a large space, there were more acres ploughed T. R. W. than are ploughed T. R. V., while in some cases the number has been reduced by one half during the intervening centuries. Were the old acres in Oxfordshire as large as our own, a good deal more than three-fifths of that county was ploughed. Much might be said of the extreme futility of ancient agriculture. Then we should have to remember the ‘inclosures’ of the sixteenth century; also the movement which in our own day threatens to carry us back to ‘the pastoral state1429.’ We should have to scrutinize those abundant marks of the plough which occur in our meadows and on our hillsides, even where we least expect them, and to distinguish those which were being made in the days of the Norman conqueror from those which tell of a much later age when ‘the Corsican tyrant’ threatened our shores.

The food problem.

And then there is the great food problem. At this point we might desire the aid of a jury of scientific experts. We are, indeed, but ill prepared to deliver a charge or to define a clear issue, but the main question may be roughly stated thus:—South of Yorkshire and Cheshire we have some 275,000 ‘recorded men,’ some 75,000 recorded teams and (if we allow 120 statute acres to every team) some 9,000,000 statute acres of arable land1430. Is this supply of arable adequate or excessive for the population? Unfortunately, however, the question involves more than one unknown quantity.

What was the population?

In the first place, by what figure are we to multiply the number of ‘recorded men’ before we shall obtain the total population? Here we have to remember that nothing is said by our record about some of the largest towns and that the figures which we obtain from Norwich1431 suggest that the inhabitants of London, Winchester and the like should not be neglected, even by those who are aiming at the rudest computation. Then what we read of Bury St Edmunds1432 suggests that around every great abbey were clustered many artificers, servants and bedesmen who as a general rule were not enumerated by the jurors. We must also remember the monks, nuns and canons and the large households of barons and prelates1433. Again, it is by no means unlikely that, despite a high rate of mortality among children, the household of the ordinary villein was upon an average larger than is the household of the modern cottager or artizan, for the blood-bond was stronger than it is now-a-days. Married brothers with their wives and children may not unfrequently have dwelt in one house and may be described in our record as a single villanus because they hold an undivided inheritance. On the other hand, we have seen reason to think that in the eastern villages many men may be counted more than once1434. Shall we, for the sake of argument, multiply the recorded men by 5? This would give us a population of 1,375,000 souls1435.

What was the field-system?

What portion of the arable land shall we suppose to be sown in any one year? Some grave doubts may occur to us before we put this portion higher than one half1436. Common opinion would perhaps strike a balance between two-field and three-field husbandry. So we will suppose that out of 9 million acres 5 million are sown.

What was the acre’s yield?

Then comes the insoluble question about the acre’s yield. Even could we state an average, this would not be very serviceable, for every district had to feed itself in every year, and the statistics of the later middle ages suggest that the difference between good and bad years was very large, while the valuations of the manors in Domesday Book seem to tell us that the difference between fertile and sterile, forward and backward counties was much wider in the eleventh century than it is in our own day. The scientific agriculturist of the thirteenth century proposed to sow an acre with two bushels of wheat and regarded ten bushels as the proper return1437. Walter of Henley proved by figures that a three-fold return would not be remunerative, unless prices were exceptionally good, but he evidently thought of this exiguous yield as a possibility1438, and yet, as we have seen, he represents the ‘high farming’ of his time and in his two-course husbandry would plough the land thrice over between every two crops. In the first half of the next century we can not put the average as high as 8 bushels1439. To eyes that look for 29 or 30, a yield of from 6 to 10 may seem pitiful; and the ‘miserable husbandry’ that Arthur Young saw in the west of England was producing from 15 to 201440. However, there are countries in which a crop of wheat which gave 10 of our bushels to one of our acres would not be very small1441. For our present purpose, the figure that we should wish to obtain would be, not that which expressed the yield of an average year, but that which was the outcome of a bad year, for we have to keep folk alive and they can not wait for the good times. Let us then take our hypothesis from Walter of Henley. We suppose a yield of 6 bushels, 2 of which must be retained for seed. This would give us 20 million bushels as food, or, we will say, 15 bushels for every person.

Of beer.

Now, had we to deal with modern wheat and modern mills, we might argue that the bushel of wheat would weigh 60 pounds, that the weight of flour would be 72 per cent. of the weight of grain1442, and that every human mouth could thus be provided with a little more than 28 ounces of flour every day, or, to put it another way, with bread amounting to nine-sixteenths of a four pound loaf1443. Some large, but indefinable, deduction should be made from this amount on the score of poor grain and wasteful processes. As the sum stands, we are at present proposing to give to each person a great deal more wheat-flour than would be obtained if the total amount consumed now-a-days in the United Kingdom were divided by the number of its inhabitants1444. But it need hardly be said that the problem is far more complex than are our figures. In the first place, we have to withdraw from the men of 1086 a large quantity, perhaps more than a half, of the wheat-flour that we have given them in order to supply its place with other cereals1445, in particular with barley and oats, much of which, together with some of the wheat1446, will be consumed in the form of beer. And who shall fathom that ocean? Multum biberunt de cerevisia Anglicana, as the pope said. Their choice lay for the more part between beer and water. In the twelfth century the corn-rents paid to the bishop of Durham often comprised malt, wheat and oats in equal quantities1447. In the next century the economy of the canons of St. Paul’s was so arranged that for every 30 quarters of wheat that went to make bread, 7 quarters of wheat, 7 of barley and 32 of oats went to make beer1448. The weekly allowance of every canon included 30 gallons1449. In one year their brewery seems to have produced 67,814 gallons from 175 quarters of wheat, a like quantity of barley and 708 quarters of oats1450. With such figures before us, it becomes a serious question whether we can devote less than a third of the sown land to the provision of drink. The monk, who would have growled if he got less than a gallon a day, would, we may suppose, consume in the course of a year 20 bushels of barley or an equivalent amount of other grain: in other words, the produce, when seed-corn is deducted, of from two to three acres of land; and perhaps to every mouth in England we must give half a gallon daily1451.

The Englishman’s diet.

But if we can not make teetotallers of our ancestors (and in very truth we can not) neither may we convert them to vegetarianism. What we can read of the provender-rents paid in the days before the Conquest suggests that those who were well-to-do, including the monks, consumed a great deal of mutton, pork, poultry, fish, eels, cheese and honey1452. This would relieve the arable of part of the pressure that it would otherwise have borne, for, though we already hear of two manors which between them supply 6000 dog-loaves for the king’s hounds1453, and also read of pigs that are fattened with corn1454, it is not very probable that any beasts, save those that laboured, got much from the arable, except the straw, and the stubble which we may suspect of having been abundantly mixed with grass and weeds. It is likely, however, that the oxen which were engaged in ploughing were fed at times with oats. Walter of Henley would keep his plough-beasts at the manger for five-and-twenty weeks in the year and would during that time give 70 bushels of oats to every eight of them1455. At this rate our 75,000 teams would require 5,250,000 bushels of oats, and on this score we might have to deduct some 4 million bushels of wheat1456 from our 20 millions and reduce by one-fifth each person’s allowance of grain. But then, it is by no means certain that we ought to transplant Walter’s practices into the eleventh century; we have seen that he expected much of his oxen1457.

Is the arable super-abundant?

At first sight it may seem incredible that the average human being annually required the produce of nearly seven acres. But observe how rapidly the area will disappear. We deduct a half for the idle shift; a third of the remainder we set apart as beer-land. We have not much more than two acres remaining, and may yet have to feed oxen and horses. But suppose that we concede to every human mouth the wheat of two full acres; we can not say for certain that we are giving it a quarter of grain, even though we suppose each acre to yield more than was to be had always and everywhere in the fourteenth century1458.

Amount of pasturage.

Our doubt about the food of the oxen makes it difficult for us to state even the outlines of another important problem. Are we leaving pasture enough for the beasts? Their number was by no means small. South of the southern frontier of Cheshire and Yorkshire we must accommodate in the first place some 600,000 beasts of the plough, and in the second place and for their maintenance a sufficiency of bulls, cows and calves. Now-a-days England keeps 4,723,000 head of cattle, but we have been excluding from view near a quarter of England. Then there are other animals to be provided for. Their number we can not guess, for apparently the statistics that we obtain from the south-western and eastern counties give us only the stock that is on the demesne of the manors1459. We have seen that the peasants in East Anglia had sheep enough to make their ‘fold-soke’ an important social institution1460. Also we have much evidence of large herds of pigs belonging to the villeins, though these we may send to the woods. But, attending only to the dominical stock, we will begin by looking at the manor which stands first in the Cambridgeshire Inquest. The lord has 5 teams, 8 head of not-ploughing cattle, 4 rounceys, 10 pigs and 480 sheep. Then, in the accompanying table we will give some figures from various counties which show the amount of stock that is kept where there are 200 teams or thereabouts.

Teams (Demesne and Tenants’Beasts not of the PloughHorsesGoatsPigsSheep
Essex207267341077771657
Suffolk200196302956761705
Norfolk202132442006725673
Dorset202159472814796160
Somerset2028216491981506
Devon205282161351731553
Cornwall200623552261445
Total141811802221119300119699

Even if we look only at the flocks which belong to the holders of manors, we may have to feed a million sheep south of the Humber, and, though all England now maintains more than 15 millions, it does this by devoting a large portion of its arable to the growth of turnips and the like. No doubt, the medieval sheep were wretched little animals; also large numbers of them were slaughtered and salted at the approach of winter; but from the arable they got only the stubble, and every extension of the ploughed area deteriorated the quality besides diminishing the quantity of the pasture that was left for their hungry mouths. As already said, our forefathers did not live on bread and beer; bacon must have been plentiful among them1461. Also many fleeces were needed for their clothing. As to meadow land (pratum), that is, land that was mown, it was sparse and precious1462; the supply of it was often insufficient even for the lord’s demesne oxen. At least in Cambridgeshire, we find traces of a theory which taught that every ox should have an acre of meadow; but commonly this was an unrealized ideal1463. In Dorset now-a-days there will be near 95,000 acres growing grass for hay, whereas there were not 7,000 acres of meadow in 10861464. Therefore we are throwing a heavy strain on the pasture1465.

Area of the villages.

Lastly, we must not neglect, as some modern calculators do, the sites of the villages, the straggling group of houses with their court-yards, gardens and crofts, for this deducts a sensible piece from the conceivably tillable area. An exceedingly minute account of Sawston in Cambridgeshire which comes from the year 1279 shows us a territory thus divided: Messuages, Gardens, Crofts, etc., 85 acres: Arable, 1243 acres: Meadow, 82 acres: Several Pasture, 30 acres. The neighbouring village of Whittlesford shows us: Messuages, Gardens, Crofts, etc., 35 acres: Arable, 1363 acres: Meadow, 44 acres: Several Pasture, 35 acres. In both cases we must add some unspecified quantity of Common Pasture1466. The core of the village was not large when compared with its fields; but it can not be ignored.

Produce and value.

Recurring for a moment to our food problem, we may observe that the values that are set on the manors in Domesday Book seem to point to a very feeble yield of corn. Without looking for extreme cases, we shall often find that the value of a teamland is no more than 10 shillings. Now let us make the hypothesis most favourable to fertility and suppose that this ‘value’ represents a pure, net rent1467. We will make another convenient but extravagant assumption; we will say that 24 bushels of wheat will make 365 four-pound loaves. If then a lord is to get one such loaf every day from each teamland that is valued at 10 shillings, the price of wheat will be a good deal less than 5 pence the bushel; if two daily loaves are to be had, the price of the bushel must be reduced below 21⁄2 pence, for the cost of grinding and baking is not negligible. Whether this last price could be assumed as normal must be very doubtful, for the little that Domesday tells us about the price of grain is told in obscure and disputable terms1468. However, the evidence that comes to us from the twelfth1469 and thirteenth centuries1470 suggests a rough equivalence between an ox and two quarters of wheat, and in the eleventh the traditional price of the ox was 30 pence. But at any rate, the lord who has a small village with five teamlands, and who lets it to a firmarius, will receive a rent which, when it is stated in loaves, is by no means splendid. He will not be much of a hláford, or have many ‘loaf-eaters’ if his whole revenue is £2. 10s. or, in other words, if he is lord of but one small village in the midlands.

Varying size of acres.

Here we must leave this question to those who are expert in the history of agriculture; but if some relief is required, it may be plausibly obtained by a reduction in the size of the ancient acre. A small piece off the village perches will mean a great piece off the 2,600 teamlands of Oxfordshire, and we seem to have the best warrant for a recourse to this device where it is most needed. The pressure upon our space appears to be at its utmost in Oxfordshire, and just for that county we have first-rate evidence of some very small acres1471. On the other hand, in Lincolnshire and generally in the north, where we read of abnormally large acres, we seem to have room enough for them. And here may be a partial explanation of the apparent fact that the teamland of Oxfordshire does not support three, while that of Lincolnshire supports five recorded men.

The teamland in Cambridgeshire.

In these last paragraphs we have been speaking of averages struck for large spaces; but if we come to some particular districts we shall have the greatest difficulty in allowing 120 acres to every teamland. This is the case in southern Cambridgeshire. In that county Domesday’s list of vills is so nearly the same as the modern list of parishes that we run no great risk in comparing the ancient teamlands with the modern acreage vill by vill, if we also compare them hundred by hundred. The general result will be to make us unwilling to bestow on every teamland a long-hundred of acres. One example shall be given. The Whittlesford Hundred1472 contains five vills and we can not easily concede to it more land than is now within its boundary. In the following table we give for each vill its modern acreage, then the number of its teamlands, then the result of multiplying that number by 120.

Whittlesford Hundred.

Sawston1884101200
Whittlesford1969111320
Duxford32322114732520
Hinxton15571614741920
Ickleton2695241⁄22940
The Hundred11337821⁄29900

In two cases out of five we have already come upon sheer physical impossibility. But let us suppose some rearrangement of parish boundaries and look at the whole hundred. We are giving it 9900 acres of arable and leaving 1437 for other purposes. Then we are told of ‘meadow for’ 37 teams and this at the rate usual in Cambridgeshire1475, means 296 acres, so that we have only 1141 left. On this we must place the sites of five villages, houses, farmyards, fourteen water-mills, cottages, gardens. Probably we want 250 acres at least to meet this demand. Not 900 acres remain for pasture. The dominical flocks and herds were not large, but the lords were receiving divers ploughshares in return for the pasture rights accorded to the tenants and in some of the vills there was not nearly enough meadow for the oxen of the villeins. It is difficult to believe that 87 per cent. of a Cambridgeshire hundred was under the plough, and that less than 8 per cent. was pasture. However, we know too little to say that even this was impossible. In the twelfth century we read of manors in which there is no pasture, except upon the arable field that is taking its turn of idleness1476. We must remember that this idle field was not fallowed until the summer1477; also we may suspect that much that was not corn grew on the medieval corn-land.

The hides of Domesday.

Saddened by our encounter with the teamlands (B)—and our last word about them is not yet said—we turn to the hides, carucates and sulungs (A). With a fair allowance for errors we feel safe in believing that the total number mentioned by Domesday Book falls short of 70,000—and yet time was when we spoke of 60,000 knight’s fees of 5 hides apiece1478. Let us then recall once more those tales of taxation that are told by the chronicler1479. If Cnut raised a geld of £72,000, then, even if we allow him something from those remote northern lands which William’s commissioners did not enter, the rate of the impost can hardly have been less than a pound on the hide. We are not told that he raised this sum in the course of a single year; but, even if we suppose it spread over four years, it is a monstrous exaction, and we can hardly fancy that in earlier days the pirates had waited long for the £24,000 or £30,000 that were the price of their forbearance. And yet, as already said, our choice seems to lie between believing these stories and charging the annalist with reckless mendacity. Hereafter we shall argue that some ancient statements about hidage, even some made by Bede himself, deserve no credit; but it is one thing for a Northumbrian scholar of the eighth century to make very bad guesses about the area of Sussex, and another for a chronicler of the eleventh to keep on telling us that a king levies £21,099 or £11,048 or the like, if these sums are wildly in excess of those that were demanded. As to the value of money, the economists must be heard; but it is probable that the sea-rovers insisted on good weight1480, and when in the twelfth century we can begin to trace the movement of prices, in particular the price of oxen, they are not falling but rising. However, we have already said our say about the enormity of the danegeld.

Relation between hide and teamland.

We are now to investigate the ‘law’ of A and its relation to B. We shall soon be convinced that we are not dealing with two perfectly independent variables. There will often be wide variations between the two; A may descend to zero, while B is high, and in some counties we shall see a steady tendency which makes A decidedly higher or decidedly lower than B. And yet, if we look at England as a whole, we can not help feeling that in some sense or another A ought to be equal to B, and that, when this equation holds good, things are in a condition that we may call normal. Perhaps, as we shall see hereafter, the current notion has been that the teamland should be taxed as a hide if it lies in a district where a teamland will usually be worth about a pound a year. But for the time we will leave value out of account, and, to save words, we will appropriate three terms and use them technically. When A = B, there is ‘equal rating’; when A > B, there is ‘over-rating’; when A < B there is ‘under-rating.’ We shall find, then, that in many counties there are numerous cases of equal rating. Thus in Buckinghamshire we count

cases of under-rating136
cases of equal rating102
cases of over-rating115

In Lincolnshire we may find an unbroken series of fourteen entries each of which gives us an instance of equal rating1481. In both Lincolnshire and Yorkshire such cases are common, but, while in Lincolnshire over-rating is rare, in Yorkshire under-rating is very rare. Fewer are the over-rated than the under-rated counties; but there are some for which the figures can not be given, and, as immense Yorkshire is set before us as much over-rated, the balance must be nearly redressed. But further, we may see that the relation between A and B is apt to change somewhat suddenly at the border of a county. The best illustration is given by the twin shires of Leicester and Northampton, the one over-rated, the other grossly under-rated. Another good illustration is given by the south-western counties. Wiltshire is heavily over-rated; Dorset, as a whole, very equally rated; Somerset decidedly under-rated, while when we come to Devon and Cornwall we enter a land so much underrated that, had we only the account of these two counties, the assumption that is implied in our terms ‘under-rated’ and ‘over-rated’ would never have entered our heads.

Unhidated estates.

Now for one cause of the aberration of A from B we have not far to seek; it is a cause which will make A less than B and which may reduce A to zero. It is privilege. Certain estates have been altogether exempt from geld. In particular many royal estates have been exempt. ‘Nescitur quot hidae sint ibi quia non reddidit geldum’—‘Nunquam geldavit nec scitur quot hidae sint ibi’—‘Rex Edwardus tenuit; tunc 20 hidae sed nunquam geldaverunt’:—such and such like are the formulas that describe this immunity. The number of actually geldant hides is here reduced to zero, and sometimes the very term ‘hides,’ so usually does it imply taxation, is deemed inappropriate. But these royal estates do not stand alone. Often enough some estate of a church has been utterly freed from taxation. The bishop of Salisbury, for example, has a great estate at Sherborne which has gelded for 43 hides; but ‘in this same Sherborne he has 16 carucates of land; this land was never divided into hides nor did it pay geld1482.’

Beneficial hidation.

But then again, we have the phenomenon which has aptly been called ‘beneficial hidation.’ Without being entirely freed from the tax, a manor has been rated at a smaller number of hides than it really contains. ‘There are 5 hides’ says a Gloucestershire entry, ‘3 of them geld, but by grant of the Kings Edward and William 2 of them do not geld1483.’ ‘There are 8 hides there’ says another entry ‘and the ninth hide belongs to the church of St. Edward; King Æthelred gave it quit [of geld]1484.’ ‘There are 20 hides; of these 4 were quit of geld in the time of King Cnut1485.’ ‘The Bishop [of Winchester] holds Fernham [Fareham] in demesne; it always belonged to the bishopric; in King Edward’s day it defended itself for 20 hides, and it does so still; there are by tale 30 hides, but King Edward gave them thus [i.e. granted that they should be 20 hides] by reason of the vikings, for it [Fareham] is by the sea1486.’ ‘Harold held it of King Edward; before Harold had it, it defended itself for 27 hides, afterwards for 16 hides because Harold so pleased. The men of the hundred never heard or saw any writ from the king which put it at that figure1487.’ We have chosen these examples because they give us more information than we can often obtain; they take us back to the days of Cnut and of Æthelred; they tell us of the depredations of the vikings; they show us a magnate fixing the rateable value of his estate ad libitum suum. But our record is replete with other instances in which we are told that by special royal favour an estate has been lightly taxed1488. What is more, there are many other instances in which we can hardly doubt that this same cause has been at work, though we are not expressly told of it. When in a district which as a whole is over-rated, or but moderately under-rated, we come upon a few manors which are extravagantly under-rated, then we may fairly draw the inference that there has been ‘beneficial hidation.’

Effect of privilege.

Certainly this will account for much, and we have reason to believe that this disturbing force had been in operation for a long time past and on a grand scale. There is an undated writ of Æthelred1489, which ordains that an immense estate of the church of Winchester having Chilcombe for its centre and containing 100 hides shall defend itself for one hide. In Domesday Book Chilcombe does defend itself for one hide though it has land for 88 teams1490. But further, Æthelred is decreeing nothing new; his ancestors, his ‘elders,’ have ‘set and freed’ all this land as one hide ‘be the same more or less.’ Behind this writ stand older charters which are not of good repute. Still we can see nothing improbable in the supposition that Æthelred issued the writ ascribed to him and that what he said in it was substantially true. Before his day there may have been no impost that was known as a ‘geld’; but there may have been, as we have endeavoured to show, other imposts to which land contributed at the rate of so much per hide. We suspect that ‘beneficial hidation’ had a long history before Domesday Book was made.

Divergence of hide from teamland.

But it will not account for all the facts that are before us; indeed it will serve for few of them. Privilege can account for exceptional cases; it will not account for steady and consistent under-rating; still less will it account for steady and consistent over-rating. We must look elsewhere, and for a moment we may find some relief in the reflection that by the operation of natural and obvious causes an old rate-book will become antiquated. There will be more ‘teamlands’ than there are gelding hides because new land has been brought under cultivation; on the other hand, land will sometimes go out of cultivation and then there will be more gelding hides than there are teamlands. Now that there is truth here we do not doubt. As we have already said1491, the stability of agrarian affairs in these early times may easily be overestimated. But we can not in this direction find the explanation of changes that take place suddenly at the boundaries of counties.

Partition of the geld.

A master hand has lately turned our thoughts to the right quarter. There can we think be no doubt that, as Mr Round has argued, the geld was imposed according to a method which we have called the method of subpartitioned provincial quotas1492. A sum cast upon a hundred has been divided among that hundred’s vills; a sum cast upon a vill has been divided among the lands that the vill contains. It is in substance the method which still governs our land-tax, and in this very year our attention has been pointedly called to its inequitable results. But, whereas in later centuries men distributed pounds, shillings and pence among the counties, our remoter ancestors distributed hides or carucates or acres. The effect was the same; and it is not unlikely that they could pass with rapidity from acres to pence, because the pound had 240 pence in it and the fiscal hide had 120 acres. So the complaint urged this year that Lancashire is under-taxed and Hertfordshire over-taxed1493 would have been in their mouths the complaint that too many hides had been cast on the one county and too few on the other.

Distribution of hides.

We will not repeat Mr Round’s convincing arguments. Just to recall their character, we will notice the beautiful hundred of Armingford in Cambridgeshire1494. In Edward’s day it had 100 hides divided among fourteen vills, six of which had 10 hides apiece, while eight had 5 hides apiece. Before 1085 the number of hides in the hundred had been reduced from 100 to 80; the number of hides in each of the ‘ten-hide vills’ had been reduced to 8; and each ‘five-hide vill’ had got rid of one of its hides. Obviously such results as these are not obtained by a method which begins by investigating the content of each landholder’s tenement. The hides in the vill are imposed from above, not built up from below1495.

The Worcestershire hidage.

We have no wish to traverse ground which must by this time be familiar to all students of Domesday. But, having in our eye certain ancient statements about the hidage of England, we will endeavour to carry the argument one step further. In Worcestershire we have strong evidence of a neat arrangement of a whole county. In the first place, we are told that ‘in this county there are twelve hundreds, whereof seven, so the shire says, are so free that the sheriff has nothing in them, and therefore, so he says, he is a great loser by his farm1496.’ Then we are told that the church of Worcester has a hundred called Oswaldslaw in which lie 300 hides. Then we remember that notorious charter (Altitonantis) which tells how this triple hundred of Oswaldslaw was made up of three old hundreds, called Cuthbertslaw, Wulfhereslaw and Wimborntree1497. Then, turning to the particulars, we find that exactly 300 hides are ascribed to the various estates which St. Mary of Worcester holds in this triple hundred. Those particulars are the following:—

The Worcester estate.

Chemesege
Wiche
Fledebirie
Breodun
Rippel
Blochelei
Tredinctun 24
15
40
35
25
38
23 200 Norwiche
Overberie
Segesbarue
Scepwestun
Herferthun
Grimanleh
Halhegan
Cropetorn
6
4
2
3
3
7
25


25



50 100

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

The Westminster estate.

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

H. V.H. V.
Persore2Pidelet5
Wiche6Newentune10
Pendesham2Garstune1.3
Berlingeham3.1Pidelet4
Bricstelmestune10Peritune6
Depeforde10Garstune7
Aichintune16Piplintune4.2
Beford10Piplintune6.2
Longedune30Cumbrintune9
Poiwic3Cumbrintune10
Snodesbyrie11Broctune3
Husentre6Stoche15
Wich1Cumbrintune2
Dormestun5199.0

The Pershore estate.

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

Persore26
Beolege21
Sture20
Bradeweia30
Lege3
100

It is easy to divide these manors into two groups, each of which has 50 hides. The county also tells us that the church of Pershore ought to have the church-scot from ‘the whole 300 hides,’ that is, as well from the 200 allotted to Westminster as from the 100 which Pershore holds1498.

The Evesham estate.

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

Evesham
Lenchewic
Nortune
Offenham
Liteltune
Bratfortune
Aldintone		3.0
1.0
7.0
1.0
6.0
6.0
1.0		25
Wiqwene
Bratfortune
Badesei
Liteltune
Huniburne
Ambreslege		3.0
6.0
6.2
7.0
2.2
15.0		25
65.0

The residue of Worcestershire.

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

Worcester city15.0More1.0Glese1.0
Bremesgrave30.0Betune3.2Merlie0.1
1499Suchelei5.0More0.1Wich1.0
Grastone3.2Edboldelege2.2Escelie4.0
Cochesei2.2Eslei6.0Nordfeld6.0
Willingewic2.3Eslei1.0Franchelie1.0
Celdvic3.0Ridmerlege1.2Welingewiche0.3
Chideminstre20.0Celdeslai1.0Escelie1.0
Terdeberie9.0Estham3.0Werwelie0.2
Clent9.0Ælmeleia11.0Cercehalle2.0
Wich0.2Wich10.0Bellem3.0
Clive10.2Sudtune1.0Hageleia5.2
Fepsetanatum6.0Mamele0.2Dudelei1.0
Crohlea5.0Broc0.2Suineforde3.0
Hambyrie14.0Colingvic1.0Pevemore3.0
Stoche10.0Mortune4.0Cradeleie1.0
Huerteberie20.0Stotune3.0Belintones5.0
Ulwardelei5.0Stanford2.2Witone2.0
Alvievecherche13.0Scelves1.0Celvestune1.0
Ardolvestone15.0Chintune5.0Cochehi2.2
Boclintun8.0Beretune2.0Osmerlie1.0
Cuer2.0Tamedeberie3.0Costone3.0
Inteberga15.2Wich0.2Beneslei1.0
Wich1.0Clistune3.0Udecote1.2
Salewarpe1.0Chure3.0Russococ5.0
Tametdeberie0.2Stanford1.2Stanes6.0
Wich0.2Caldeslei1.0Lundredele2.0
Matma5.0Cuer1.0Hatete1.0
1500Mortune5.0Hamme1.0Hamtune4.0
Achelenz4.2Sapie3.0Hortune2.0
Buintun1.0Carletune1.1Cochesie2.0
Circelenz4.0Edevent1.0Brotune2.0
Actune6.0Wicelbold11.0Urso’s hide1.0
Lenche4.0Elmerige8.0Uptune3.0
Wich1.0Croelai5.0Witune0.2
Ludeleia2.0Dodeham1.0Hantune4.0
Hala10.0Redmerleie1.2Tichenapletreu3.0
Salewarpe5.0Hanlege1.2Cedeslai25.0
Wermeslai2.0Hanlege3.0Hilhamatone0.1
Linde2.0Alretune1.2Fecheham10.0
Halac1.0Hadesoro2.0Holewei3.0
Dunclent3.0Holim1.01501Mertelai13.0
Alvintune2.0Stilledune0.2539.0

We have here therefore 539 hides to be added to the 665 of which we rendered an account above. We thus bring out a grand total of 1204 hides. Perhaps the true total should be exactly 1200; but at any rate it stands close to that beautiful figure. And now we remember how we were told that there were ‘twelve hundreds’ in Worcestershire from seven of which the sheriff got nothing. Of these twelve the church of Worcester had three in its ‘hundred’ of Oswaldslaw, the church of Westminster two, the church of Pershore one, and the church of Evesham one. But the Evesham or Fissesberge hundred was not perfect; it required ‘making up’ by means of 15 hides in the city of Worcester and 20 in the hundred of Dodingtree. Thus five hundreds remain to be accounted for, and in its rubrics Domesday Book names just five, namely, Came, Clent, Cresselaw, Dodingtree and Esch. We can not allot to each of these its constituent hides, for we never can rely on Domesday Book giving all the ‘hundredal rubrics’ that it ought to give, and the Worcestershire hundreds were subjected to rearrangement before the day of maps had dawned1502. An intimate knowledge of the county might achieve the reconstruction of the old hundreds. But, as it is, we seem to see enough. We seem to see pretty plainly that Worcestershire has been divided into twelve districts known as hundreds each of which has contained 100 hides. It is an anomaly to be specially noted that one of the jurisdictional hundreds, one which has been granted to the church of Evesham, has only 65 hides and can only be made up into a ‘hundred’ for financial purposes by adding to it 20 hides lying in another jurisdictional hundred and the 15 hides at which the city of Worcester is rated.

The County Hidage.

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

The County Hidage.

Cotton, Claudius, B. vii. f.204 b; Kemble, Saxons
i. 493		Cotton, Vespasian, A. xviii. f. 112 b; Kemble, Saxons
i. 494		Gale, Scriptores xv. p. 748 Croyland MS.MS. Jes. Coll. Ox.; Morris, Old English Miscellany,
p. 145		Domesday Book (boroughs omitted)
Wiltshire48004800480048004050
Bedfordshire12001000120012001193
Cambridgeshire25002500200525001233
Huntingdonshire850150385015038001⁄2850747
Northamptonshire32004200320032001356
Gloucestershire24002000240034002388
Worcestershire12001500120012001189
Herefordshire15001500100512001324
Warwickshire12001200120012001338
Oxfordshire24002400240024002412
Shropshire23002400240024001245
Cheshire1300120012001200512
Staffordshire500500——500505

Date of the document.

Dr Liebermann has said that the text whence these figures are derived was probably compiled in English and in the eleventh century1504. If we put faith in it, we shall be inclined to set its date at some distance before that of Domesday Book. But our first question should be whether it merits credence; whether it was written by some one who knew what he was about or whether it is wild guesswork. Now when we see that the scrupulous Eyton brought out the hides of Staffordshire at 499, or rather at 499 H 213⁄30 V, and that this document makes them 500, we shall begin to take it very seriously, without relying on our own 505, the result of hasty addition. We have also seen enough to say that 1200 for Worcestershire is very near the mark. As regards other counties, we set so little reliance upon our own computation, that we are not very willing to institute a comparison; but we have given Bedfordshire 1193 hides1505 and this document gives it 1200; we have given Oxfordshire 2412 and this document gives it 2400; we have given Gloucestershire 23881506 and two versions of this document give it 2400. Having seen so much agreement, we must note some cases of violent discord. For Wiltshire 4800 seems decidedly too high, though we have brought the number of its hides above 4000. The figure given to Cambridgeshire is almost twice that which Domesday would justify, and the figures given to Cheshire, Shropshire and Northamptonshire are absurdly large when compared with the numbers recorded in 1086. These cases are enough to show that, though no doubt some or all of the transcribers of The County Hidage must be charged with blunders, the divergence of the copies from Domesday can not be safely laid to this account. About certain counties there is just that agreement which we might expect, when we remember how precarious our own figures are. About certain other counties there is utter disagreement. We infer therefore that the original document did not truly state the hidage as it stood in 1086; but may it not have represented an older state of things.

The Northampton Geld Roll.

Let us take one case of flagrant aberration. Three copies tell us that Northamptonshire has 3200 hides; one that it has 4200. The balance of authority inclines therefore to 3200. Domesday will not give us half that number. But let us turn to the Northamptonshire Geld Roll1507, the date of which Mr Round places between the Conquest and 10751508. It gives the county 26631⁄2 hides. So here we have a case in which between 1075 and 1086 a county was relieved of about half of its hides1509. Also at 2664 we are within a moderate distance of 3200. But the Geld Roll does more than this. It represents Northamptonshire as composed of 28 districts; 22 of these are called ‘hundreds’; two are ‘two-hundreds’; four are ‘other-half hundreds,’ or, as we might say, ‘hundred-and-a-halfs.’ We work a sum:—

(22+4+6) × 100 = 3200.

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

Value of The County Hidage .

Is it too good, too neat to be true? Before we pass a condemnatory judgment we must recall the case of Worcestershire, its twelve ‘hundreds’ and 1200 hides. Also we must recall the case of the Armingford hundred in Cambridgeshire, where we have seen how in William’s reign an abatement of 20 per cent, was equitably apportioned among the fourteen villages, and the 100 hides were reduced to 801510. Moreover, if in Domesday Book we pass from Northamptonshire to the neighbouring county of Leicester, we see a startling contrast. The former is decidedly ‘under-rated’; the latter is ‘over-rated.’ Leicestershire has about 2500 carucates, while Northamptonshire has hardly more than half that number of hides. The explanation is that Northamptonshire has obtained, while Leicestershire is going to obtain a reduction. The Pipe Rolls of the twelfth century show us that either under Rufus or under Henry I. this sadly over-taxed county was set down for exactly 1000 carucates.

Reductions of hidage.

As to the other cases in which there is a strident discord between Domesday and The County Hidage, the case of Chester, where the contrast is between some 500 hides and a round 1200 will not perhaps detain us long, for we may imagine, if we please, that the Chestershire of Cnut’s day was much larger than the territory described under that name in 10861511. The 2500 hides attributed to Cambridgeshire and the 2400 attributed to Shropshire may shock us, for, if they are correctly stated, they point to reductions of 50 per cent. or thereabouts. But we have seen some and are going to see some other large abatements.

The county quotas.

On the whole, we believe that this County Hidage, though it has come to us in transcripts some or all of which are careless, is an old and trustworthy document, that it is right in attributing to the counties neat sums of hides, such as 1200 and 2400, and that it is right in representing the current of change that was flowing in the eleventh century as setting towards a rapid reduction in the number of hides. Only in one case, that of Warwickshire, have we any cause to believe that it gives fewer hides to a county than are given by Domesday; here the defect is not very large, and, besides the possibility of mistranscription, we must also remember the possibility of changed boundaries1512.

The hundred and the hundred hides.

There is one other feature of this document that we ought to notice. Let us compare the number of hides which it gives to a county with the number of ‘hundreds’ which that county contains according to Domesday Book. The latter number we will place in brackets1513.

Bedfordshire 1200 hides [12 hundreds]: Northamptonshire 3200 [28 hundreds which, however, have been reckoned to be 321514]: Worcestershire 1200 [12]: Warwickshire 1200 [12]: Cheshire 1200 [12]: Staffordshire 500 [5]: Wiltshire 4800 [40]: Cambridgeshire 2500 [17]: Huntingdonshire 850 [4]: Gloucestershire 2400 [391515]: Herefordshire 1500 [19]: Oxfordshire 2400 [uncertain, but at least 19]: Shropshire 2400 [13].

In six out of thirteen cases we seem to see a connexion of the simplest kind between the hides and the hundreds. Now in the eyes of some this trait may be discreditable to The County Hidage, for they will infer that its author was possessed by a theory and deduced the hides from the hundreds. But, after all that we have seen1516 of symmetrical districts and reductions of hidage, we ought not to take fright at this point. Other people besides the writer of this list may have been possessed by a theory which connected hides with hundreds, and they may have been people who were able to give effect to their theories by decreeing how many hides a district must be deemed to contain. Is it not even possible that we have here, albeit in faded characters, one of their decrees? But the history of the hundreds can not be discussed in a parenthesis. Some further corroboration this County Hidage will receive when hereafter we set it beside The Burghal Hidage, and we may then be able to carry Worcester’s 1200 and Oxford’s 2400 hides far back into the tenth century.

Comparison of Domesday hidage with Pipe Rolls.

Meanwhile, making use of our terms ‘equally rated’ (A = B), ‘over-rated’ (A > B), and ‘under-rated’ (A < B), let us briefly survey the counties as they stand in Domesday. Some help towards an estimation of their hidage is given to us by those few Pipe Rolls of the twelfth century which contain accounts of a danegeld. But we must not at once condemn as false the results of our own arithmetic merely because they do not square with the figures on these rolls. One instance will be enough to prove this. The Henries have to be content with £166 or thereabouts from Yorkshire, or, in other words, to treat it as having 1660 ‘carucates for geld.’ We give it a little more than 10,000 and shall not admit that we have given it 8000 too many. This poor, wasted giant has been relieved and has been set below little Surrey. So again, though Leicestershire will account to Henry I. and his grandson for but £100, it most certainly had more than 1000 and more than 2000 carucates when William’s commissioners visited it. On the other hand, there seem to be cases in a small group of counties in which his sons were able to recover a certain amount of geld which had been, rightfully or wrongfully, withheld or forborne during his own reign. But, taking the counties in mass, we hope that our figures are sufficiently consonant with those upon the Pipe Rolls. Absolutely consonant they ought not to be, for we have endeavoured to include the hides that are privileged from gelding, and in some shires (Hereford, for example) their number is by no means small. Also some leakage in an old tax may always be suspected, and the Pipe Rolls themselves show some unexplained variations in the amount for which a sheriff accounts, and some arithmetical errors1517.

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

Under-rated and over-rated counties.

Kent is scandalously under-rated. Of this there can be no doubt, though, since in many cases blanks are left where the number of the teamlands should stand, the figures can not be fully given. There has in a few instances been a reduction in the number of geldable sulungs since the Conquest, but this does not very greatly affect the result. The under-rating seems to be generally distributed throughout the county. It had not been redressed in Henry I.’s day. Indeed on the Pipe Rolls Kent appears as paying but £105, while Sussex pays twice as much. Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire appear to have all been over-rated. In the Conqueror’s day, however, they shuffled off large numbers of their geldant hides and were paying for considerably fewer hides than they had teamlands. Some part of this reduction was perhaps unauthorized. At any rate the sums that appear on the Pipe Rolls seem to show that in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire more hides were gelding under Henry I. than had been recently gelding when the survey was made; but the recovery was not sufficient to restore the state of things that existed under the Confessor. Wiltshire, so far as we can see, has always been a sorely over-rated county. It obtains no reduction under William. In the Pipe Rolls it stands at the very head of the counties. Dorset, taken as a whole, is exceedingly fairly rated. Eyton seems to have made 2321 hides and 2332 teamlands; but if the royal demesne (much of which is unhidated) be left out on both sides of the account, there will be slight over-rating. Somerset is very much under-rated, even if no notice be taken of the royal demesne. Devon is grossly under-rated. Cornwall is enormously under-rated. To all appearance considerably more than 1000 teamlands have stood as 400 hides, and even this light assessment seems to be the work of the Conqueror, for in the Confessor’s day the whole county seems to have paid for hardly more than 150 hides1518. Middlesex is decidedly over-rated; but Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford are under-rated. The ratio borne by hides to teamlands varies from county to county. We believe that it becomes small in Gloucester and Worcester and falls much below 1:2 in Hereford1519. This ratio is very small again in Warwick, Stafford, Shropshire and Cheshire. The two sister counties of Northampton and Leicester have, as already said, been very differently treated. Northampton is escaping easily, while Leicester, if we are not much mistaken, is over-rated1520. Then however the Pipe Rolls show that before the end of Henry I.’s reign Leicester has succeeded in largely reducing its geldability. We have seen reason to believe that a similar reduction had been made in Northamptonshire shortly before the compilation of Domesday Book. Derby is under-rated; Nottingham is much under-rated. Lincoln, though under-rated, is an instance of a county in which we long doubt whether the under-rating of some will not be compensated by the over-rating of other estates. So far as we can tell, Yorkshire had been heavily over-rated; but then, the teamland of Yorkshire is very often a merely potential teamland, and we can not be certain that the jurors will give to the waste vills as many teamlands as they had before the devastation. In the end a very small sum of geld is exacted.

Hidage and value.

We have seen enough in the case of Northampton to make us hesitate before we decide that the arrangement of hides set forth by Domesday Book is in all cases very ancient. That book shows us two different assessments of Cornwall; it shows us Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire relieving themselves or obtaining relief in the Conqueror’s time; it shows us some Cambridgeshire hundreds disburdened of their hides. But of the great reduction in Northamptonshire we should have learnt nothing from its pages. Therefore in other cases we must be cautious, even in the scandalous case of Kent, for we can not tell that there has not been a large reduction of its sulungs in quite recent years. However, behind all the caprice and presumable jobbery, we can not help fancying that we see a certain equitable principle. We have talked of under-rating and over-rating as if we held that every teamland in the kingdom should pay a like amount. But such equality would certainly not be equity. The average teamland of Kent is worth full thirty shillings a year; the average teamland of Cornwall is barely worth five; to put an equal tax on the two would be an extreme of injustice. Now we have formed no very high estimate of the justice or the statesmanship of the English witan, and what we are going to say is wrung from us by figures which have dissipated some preconceived ideas; but they hardly allow us to doubt that the number of hides cast upon a county had been affected not only by the amount, but also by the value of its teamlands. If, starting at the east of Sussex, we journey through the southern counties, we see that over-rating prevails in Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset. We see also that the valet of the average teamland stands rather above than below one pound. We pursue our journey. The ratio that A bears to B begins to decline rapidly and at the same time the valets descend by leaps and bounds. When we have reached Devon we are in a land which could not with any show of justice be taxed at the same rate per acre as that which Wiltshire might bear without complaint. Every test that we can apply shows the extreme poverty of the country that once was ‘West Wales.’ That poverty continues through the middle ages. We look, for example, at the contributions to the tax of 1341 and compare them with the acreage of the contributing counties. Equal sums are paid by 1020 acres in Wiltshire, 1310 in Dorset, 1740 in Somerset, 3215 in Devon, 3550 in Cornwall1521. We look at the subsidy of 12941522, and, in order that Devon and Cornwall may not be put at a disadvantage by moor and sea-shore, we take as our dividend the number of acres in a county that are now-a-days under cultivation1523, and for our divisor the number of pence that the county pays. The quotients are, for Wiltshire 2·7, for Dorset 2·8, for Somerset 2·5, for Devon 6·4, for Cornwall 5·2. Retaining the same dividend, we try as a divisor the ‘polls’ for which a county will answer in 13771524. Cornwall here makes a better show; but Devonshire still displays its misery. The quotients are, for Wiltshire 16, for Dorset 14, for Somerset 15, for Devon 27, for Cornwall 17. These figures we have introduced because they support the inferences that we should draw from the valets and valuits of Domesday Book, a study of which has convinced us that the distribution of fiscal hides has not been altogether independent of the varying value of land.

Connexion between hidage and value.

But in order that we may not trust to vague impressions, let us set down in one column the number of hides (carucates or sulungs) that we have given to twenty counties and in another column the annual value of those counties in the time of King Edward as calculated by Mr Pearson1525.

Hides, Carucates, SulungsValue in PoundsHides, Carucates, SulungsValue in Pounds
Kent12243954Oxford24122789
Sussex34743467Gloucester23882855
Surrey18301417Worcester11891060
Berkshire24732378Huntingdon747900
Dorset22772564Bedford11931475
Devon11192912Northampton13561407
Cornwall399729Leicester2500491
Middlesex868911Warwick1338954
Hertford10501894Derby679631
Buckingham20741785Essex26504079
3324038652

One pound one hide.

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

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

Equivalence of pound and hide.

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

Cases of under-taxation.

Kent.

The markedly exceptional cases are the most interesting. First let us look at the worst instances of immunity. In Kent we seem to see ‘beneficial hidation’ on a gigantic scale; but on the whole, though the evidence is not conclusive, we do not think that this is due to any modern privilege. We can not doubt that for a long time past the Kentish churches have been magnificently endowed, and yet the number of manses and sulungs that their land-books bestow upon them is not very large, and the number attributed to any one place is usually small, perceptibly smaller than the number of hides that will be comprised in a West Saxon charter. If a royal land-book condescends to mention acres (iugera, segetes)1527 it will almost certainly be a Kentish charter, and we may guess that its acres are already fiscal acres of wide extent. To say more would be perilous. The title-deeds of Christ Church can not be readily harmonized with Domesday Book1528; perhaps we ought to add that this is much to their credit; but the documents which come to us from St. Augustin’s and Rochester suggest that the arrangement of sulungs which exists in the eleventh century is ancient, or, at any rate, that the monks knew of no older computation which dealt out these units with a far more lavish hand1529. In Kent the churches were powerful and therefore may have been able to preserve a scheme of assessment which unduly favoured a rich and prosperous shire; but we can not be certain that the hide and the Kentish sulung have really had the same starting-point, nor even perhaps that Kent was settled village-wise by its Germanic invaders1530.

West Wales.

Devon and Cornwall ought to be ‘under-rated’ (A < B) for they are very poor. What we find is that they are so much under-rated that the hide is worth a good deal more than a pound. Here again we are inclined to think that this under-rating is old, perhaps as old as the subjection of West Wales. Such land-books as we obtain from this distressful country point in that direction, for they give but few hides and condescend to speak of virgates1531. Among them is a charter professing to come from Æthelstan which bestows ‘one manse’ upon the church of St. Buryan; but clearly this one manse is a wide tract. Also this would-be charter speaks to us of land that is measured by the arpent, and, whether or no it was forged by French clerks after the Norman Conquest, it may tell us that this old Celtic measure has been continuously used in the Celtic west1532. Be that as it may, when we are speculating about the under-taxation of Devon and Cornwall, we may remember that where the agrarian outlines were drawn by Welsh folk, the hide, though it might be imposed from above as a piece of fiscal machinery, would be an intruder among the Celtic trevs and out of harmony with its environment. The light taxation of Cambridgeshire is perhaps more wonderful, for our figures represent the hidage of the Confessor’s time, and we have seen1533 how some of the hundreds in this prosperous shire (our champion wheat-grower) obtained a large abatement from the Conqueror1534. If, in accordance with The County Hidage, we doubled the number of Cambridgeshire’s hides, though it would be over-taxed, it would not be so heavily taxed as are some other counties.

Cases of over-taxation.

Extreme over-taxation is far more interesting to us at the present moment than extreme under-taxation. The latter may be the result of privilege, and in the middle ages privileges will be accorded for value received in this world or promised in another. But what are we to say of Leicester? On the face of our record it seems to have been in Edward’s day the very poorest of all the counties and yet to have borne a crushing number of carucates. Under William it was beginning to prosper but still was miserably poor1535. We have bethought ourselves of various devices for explaining this difficult case—of saying, for instance, that the Leicestershire ‘carucate of land’ is not a carucate for geld1536. But this case does not stand quite alone. The Yorkshire carucates, and they are expressly called ‘carucates for geld,’ had been worth little. It is likely that the figure that we have given for Yorkshire is not very near the true average for that wide territory; but we examined an unusually large number of entries and avoided any which showed signs of devastation in the present or the past. Also we see that in Northamptonshire, if we take the Edwardian valuit and the number of hides existing in 1086, we have an over-taxed county; and yet we have reason to believe that since 1075 it had been relieved of about half its hides. Had this not been done, it would have stood along with Yorkshire, and, if it once had those 3200 of which The County Hidage speaks, it would have stood along with its sister, the wretched Leicestershire. We might find relief in the supposition that the Leicestershire of Edward’s time had been scourged by war or pestilence; but unfortunately the jurors often tell us how many teams were then upon the manors, and in so doing give a marvellously small value to the land that one team tilled. Such reports as the following are common1537.

CarucatesTeams
T. R. E.		Teams
T. R. W.		Valuit
sol.		Valet
sol.
Werditone453120
Castone910740140
Wortone66540100
Tuicros667340
Gopeshille333130
Scepa233230

What can these figures mean? They can not mean that a tract of land was being habitually tilled by three teams and yet was producing in the form of profit or rent no more than the worth of one or two shillings a year. An organized attempt to deceive King William into an abatement seems out of the question, for he is being told of a rapid increase of prosperity. Our best, though an unwarranted, guess is that the Leicestershire valuit speaks not of the Confessor’s day, but of some time of disorder that followed the Conquest, for in truth it seems to give us but ‘prairie values.’ However, if we take, not the valuit, but the valet, we still have carucates that are worth much less than a pound, and it seems clear that the carucate had been worth much less than a pound in the as yet unravaged Yorkshire. On the whole, these cases, together with what we can learn of Lancashire, will dispose us to receive with more favour than we might otherwise have shown certain statements about the hidage of England that have yet to be adduced. In Yorkshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire we may perhaps see the unreformed relics of an age when the distribution of fiscal units among the various provinces of England was the sport of wild guesswork1538.

Equity and hidage.

We have spoken of a tendency on the part of the hide to be worth a pound. Now we have no wish to represent this equitable element as all powerful or very powerful; the case of Kent is sufficient to show that it may be overruled by favouritism or privilege. There has been a ‘beneficial hidation’ of shires as there has been a ‘beneficial hidation’ of manors. Still that the kings and witan have considered the value as well as the number of teamlands seems fairly plain. Probably they have considered it in a rough, ‘typical’ fashion. Any one who peruses Domesday Book paying attention to the valets will be struck in the first place by their roundness. If a teamland is not worth 20, it is worth 10 or 30, 5 or 40 shillings. The jurors seem to keep in their minds as types the ‘one-pound-teamland,’ the ‘half-pound-teamland’ and so forth. But then, whereas in one county ‘twenty shillings’ will stand for ‘fair average’ and in another for ‘rather poor,’ in a third it will indicate unusual excellence. Similarly we imagine that when fiscal hides have been distributed or redistributed, there has been talk of typical qualities of land, of first-rate and fourth-rate land. Any tradition of Roman taxation which had perdured in Britain or crossed the sea from Frankland would have taught men that this was the right method of procedure. But it is by no means certain that we can carry back this equitable principle very far1539. Long ago the prevailing idea may have been that teamland, house-land, pound-land and fiscal hide were, or ought normally to be, all one; and then the discovery that there are wide tracts in which the worth of an average teamland is much less or somewhat greater than a pound may have come in as a disturbing and differentiating force and awakened debates in the council of the nation. We may, if we like such excursions, fancy the conservatives arguing for the good old rule ‘One teamland, one hide,’ while a party of financial reformers has raised the cry ‘One pound, one hide.’ Then ‘pressure was brought to bear in influential quarters,’ and in favour of their own districts the witan in the moots jobbed and jerrymandered and rolled the friendly log, for all the world as if they had been mere modern politicians.

Distribution of hides and of teamlands.

But, to be serious, it is in some conjecture such as this that we may perchance find aid when we are endeavouring to loosen one of Domesday’s worst knots. We have hinted before now1540 that there are districts in which the teamland (B) seems to be as artificial and as remote from real agrarian life as is the hide or the gelding carucate (A). To any one who thinks that when we touch Domesday’s teamland we have always freed ourselves from the geld system and penetrated through the rateable to the real, the following piece of the survey of Rutland may be commended. ‘In Martinesleie Wapentake there is a hundred in which there are 12 carucates for geld and there can be 48 teams.’ Now there is nothing curious in the fact that 48 ‘real’ teamlands are rated at 12 carucates. But let us look closer. Beside one smaller estate there are in this wapentake three manors. Their arrangement is this1541:—

Carucates
for geld		TeamlandsVilleins and
bordiers		Desmesne
teams		Men’s
teams
Ocheham416157237
Hameldune416153540
Redlinctune4161961542430
Subtenancy2445
1248530127

Now surely the three sixteens are just as artificial as the three fours, and in what possible sense can we affirm that there is land for only 48 teams when we see that 530 tenants are actually ploughing it with 127 teams? Behind this there must be some theory or some tradition that we have not yet fathomed1543.

Area and value as elements of geldability.

We strongly suspect that in the work of distributing and reducing the geld, ‘the land for one team’ has been playing a part for some time past. In order to decide, for example, whether a claim for abatement was just, the statesman had to consider two elements, the number of the teamlands and their value. He would be content with round figures, indeed no others would content him or be amenable to his rude manipulation. So it is decided that some province or district has, or must be deemed to have, y teamlands. Also it is decided at this or at some other time, or perhaps from time to time, that the land in this district (regard being had to its state of cultivation) is or must be deemed to be first-class, or, as the case may be, third-class land. Then a combination of these propositions induces the conclusion that the district has x hides or carucates for geld. Then inside the district, when the process of subpartitionment begins, a similar method is pursued. There are x hides or carucates for geld to be distributed. They ought to be distributed with reference to the number and value of real teamlands. The work is rudely done in the subpartitionary fashion. A certain sub-district has x/a hides thrown upon it; a sub-sub-district has x/ab; but this apportionment is obtained by combining a proposition about value with a partitionment of the y teamlands. The sub-sub-district has x/ab hides, because y/cd teamlands fall to its share and because its land is assigned to a certain class. Then, perhaps for the purpose of future rearrangements, the number of teamlands (y/cd) is remembered as well the number of hides or gelding carucates (x/ab). The result is that every manor in a certain district has four hides and sixteen teamlands. It is very pretty; it was never (except for technical purposes) very true, and every year makes it less true1544.

The equitable teamland.

That exactly this was done, we do not say and do not think; but something like it may have been done. As already remarked, we gravely doubt whether that question which the commissioners put about potential teams was understood in the same way in different counties, but we are sadly afraid that some of the answers that they obtained were references, not to existing agrarian facts, but to a fiscal history which already lay in the past and is now hopelessly obscure. A mystery of iniquity is bad, but the mysteries of archaic equity are worse. In many Anglo-Saxon arrangements we find a curious mixture of clumsiness and elaboration.

Artificial valets.

We can not quit this part of our subject without adding that there are cases in which the valuits and valets look as artificial and systematic as the hides and the teamlands. On a single page we find a description of five handsome Yorkshire manors1545. We wish to know their value in the past and the present, and what we learn is this: Brostewic valuit £56, valet £10; Chilnesse valuit £56, valet £10; Witfornes valuit £56, valet £6; Mapletone valuit £56, valet £6; Hornesse valuit £56, valet £6; and yet between these manors there are large variations in the number of the carucates and the number of the teamlands. Then we look about and see that it has been common for the first-class manor of Yorkshire, if it is the centre of an extensive soke, to be worth precisely £561546. We can not but fear that the value of these manors is a legal fiction, though a fiction that is founded upon fact. Their supposed worth seems fixed at a figure that will fit into some scheme, the clue to which we have not yet recovered. Everywhere we are baffled by the make-believe of ancient finance.

The new assessments of Henry II.

The obscure forces which conspired to determine the quotas of the various counties might be illustrated by an episode in the reign of Henry II. The old danegeld is still being occasionally levied, and in the main the old assessment prevails. But alongside of this we see a newer tax. From time to time the king takes a gift (donum, assisa, gersuma) from the counties. A certain round number of marks is demanded from every shire. For this purpose a new tariff is employed, and yet it is not wholly independent of the old, for we can hardly look at it without seeing that it is so constructed as to redress in a rude fashion the antiquated scheme of the danegeld. In the first column of the following table we give, omitting fractions, the pounds that the counties contribute when a danegeld is levied, in the second and third the half-marks (6s. 8d.) that they pay by way of gift on two different occasions early in the reign of Henry of Anjou1547.

DanegeldDonum of
2 Hen. II.		Donum of
4 Hen. II.
£half-markshalf-marks
Kent106320240
Sussex217202160
Surrey180160160
Hampshire185200
Berkshire206148120
Wiltshire390200160
Dorset248
Somerset278200300
Devon104368300
Cornwall23
Middlesex8617580
Hertford110120
Buckingham
Bedford		205
111		200240
Oxford250140200
Gloucester194218260
Worcester101100120
Hereford9480140
Cambridge115160
Huntingdon71100
Northampton120240280
Leicester100100160
Warwick129100240
Stafford4580100
Shropshire11880140
Derby
Nottingham		112160280
York165100015481000
Lincoln266540600
Essex236400400
Norfolk
Suffolk		330
235		400
240		400

The variable tariff of dona hits most heavily just those counties which have been too favourably treated; Kent and Devon must make large ‘gifts’ because they pay little geld. Yorkshire, which once more is becoming prosperous, heads the new list, though it pays less geld than Surrey; and, on the other hand, Wiltshire, which makes the largest of all contributions to the ancient tax, is leniently treated. When men have acquired a vested right in an iniquitous assessment, the fertile politician neither reforms nor abolishes the old, but invents a new impost.

Acreage of the fiscal hide.

And now, after all these inconclusive meanderings, we will state our cheerful belief that the hide of Domesday (A) is always1549 composed of 120 acres and that the carucate for geld of Domesday (A) is always composed of 120 acres. We are speaking only of a fiscal system. Let us forget for a time that the terms that we are using can be employed to describe masses of land. Let us treat them as red and white counters. In the game played at the Exchequer the red counter called a hide is the equivalent of 120 white counters called acres.

Equation between hide and acres.

If Domesday Book is to serve its primary purpose, if it is to tell the king’s officers how much geld is due, it is absolutely necessary that by some ready process they should be able to work sums in hides and acres and in carucates and acres. They must understand such statements as the following:—‘it defends itself for 2 hides and 5 acres1550’: ‘it gelded for 3 hides, 1 virgate and 11⁄2 acres1551’: ‘he has 5 bovates, 13 acres and 1 virgate for geld1552.’ Now it is conceivable that the treasury contains a book of tables which will teach the clerks that a hide has a acres in Surrey and b acres in Devon; but this seems highly improbable. As we have already said1553, the variations between the numbers of ‘real’ acres that go to make ‘real’ hides are not provincial, they are villar variations. That the financiers at Winchester should consider villar variations is out of the question. Therefore if we can prove that in one district they employed a given equation, there is a strong presumption that they used it in other districts. And unfortunately our proof has to be of this kind, for in many counties acres are rarely mentioned and we get no sums that are worked in acres and hides. But further, if we see one equation holding good in a considerable number of cases, we shall still believe that this is the one true equation, though other cases occur in which it breaks down. We have to remember the possibility of mistranscription, the possibility of bad arithmetic, the possibility of a haughty treatment of small numbers: the actual existence of all these dangers can be amply proved. Therefore if once we have inductively obtained an equation which serves in many instances, we shall hold by it, unless the instances in which it fails point either to some one other equation or to the conclusion that the equation varies from parish to parish.

Evidence from Cambridgeshire.

Now the Cambridgeshire Inquest professes to give us the total hidage of a vill and then proceeds to allot the hides among the various tenants in chief. Sometimes when it does this it speaks of virgates and acres and thus gives us an opportunity of seeing how many acres are reckoned to the hide or to the virgate. The equation 1 H. = 4 V. is implied in many entries. But further, there are at least ten cases which assume one or both of the following equations: namely, 1 H. = 120 A. and 1 V. = 30 A. On the other hand, there are some cases in which the sum that is put before us is not rightly worked if these equations be correct; but in some of these cases the Inquisitio and Domesday Book contradict each other and in some a small quantity is neglected. The very few remaining cases point to no one rival equation, and are not too numerous to be ascribed to carelessness1554.

Evidence from the Isle of Ely.

A similar test can be applied to a part of Cambridgeshire that is not included in the Cambridgeshire Inquest but is included in the Inquisitio Eliensis. We speak of the Isle of Ely. There are entries which, having told us how many hides a manor contained, proceed to allot these among their various occupants, and, as in some of these cases a calculation by acres is mixed up with a calculation by hides, they hold out a hope that we may be able to discover how many acres were reckoned to the hide. We will begin with Ely itself. ‘Ely defends itself for 10 hides.... In demesne there are 5 hides... and there are 40 villeins with 15 acres apiece... and 18 cottiers and 20 serfs1555.’ Now if from the total of 10 hides we subtract the 5 that are in demesne, this leaves 5 others, and if we divide these 5 among the 40 villeins this gives to each villein 1/8th of a hide; but we are told that each villein has 15 acres; therefore it follows that 120 acres make a hide. We reckon that in eight other cases1556 the same method of computation is followed, though in one of these a hide divided among 17 villeins is said to give them 7 acres apiece and this shows us how a single acre may be neglected in order to avoid a very ugly fraction1557. Against these cases must be set seven which give less pleasing results1558. In at least one of these no possible theory will justify the arithmetic of our record as it stands1559, and there is no accord between the remaining five.

Evidence from Middlesex.

At first sight the survey of Middlesex seems to offer materials similar to those that come to us from Cambridgeshire. Very curious and instructive they are. A Middlesex entry will usually give us the number of hides (A), the number of teamlands (B), the number of teams (C), and also certain particulars which state the quantity of land that there is in demesne and the quantities held by divers classes of tenants. The sum of these particulars we may call P. Now we begin by hoping that P will be equal to A, and, since the particulars often contain acres as well as hides and virgates, we hope also to discover the equation that is involved in the sum. As an example we will take a case in which all goes well. At Cowley a manor defends itself for two hides; in demesne are one and a half hides; two villeins have a half hide. Here A = 2 H. and P = 11⁄2 H. + 1⁄2 H.; so all is as it should be. But we soon come upon cases in which, though we make no assumption about the relation of the acre to the hide, our P refuses to be equal to our A. Then perhaps we begin to hope that P will be equal to B: in other words, that the sum of the quantities ascribed to lord and tenants will be equal to the number of teamlands. But this is more fallacious than the former hope. We will put a few specimens in a table1560.

HidesTeamlandsSum of particulars
Harrow (Abp. Canterbury)10070461⁄2 H. + 13 V. + 13 A.
Stepney (Bp. London)3225181⁄2 H. + 481⁄2 V.
Fulham (Bp. London)4040411⁄2 H. + 30 V.
Westminster (Abbot)131⁄21110 H. + 141⁄2 V. + 5 A.
Sunbury (Abb. Westminster)764 H. + 101⁄2 V.
Shepperton (Abb. Westminster)8731⁄2 H. + 17 V. + 24 A.
Feltham (C. Mortain)12106 H. + 161⁄2 V.
Chelsea (Edw. of Salisbury)251 H. + 4 V. + 5 A.

Meaning of the Middlesex entries.

We seem to have here three independent statements, and, though throughout the county P shows a tendency to keep near to A, still we must not make calculations which suppose that the ‘hide’ of A is the ‘hide’ of P. Take Chelsea for example. We must not say: 2 H. = 1 H. + 4 V. + 5 A., and therefore four virgates and five acres make a hide. No, it seems possible that in these Middlesex ‘particulars’ we do at last touch real agrarian arrangements. At Fulham the bishop has 13 hides in demesne; 5 villeins have 1 hide apiece; 13 villeins have 1 virgate apiece; 34 have a half-virgate apiece; 22 cottiers have in all a half-hide; Frenchmen and London burgesses have 23 hides; so there are 411⁄2 hides and 30 virgates. That we take to be the real arrangement of the manor, though we are far from saying that all its hides are equal. But it gelds for only 40 hides. A virgate can not be a negative quantity. Therefore we need say no more of these Middlesex entries, only in passing let us observe that the discrepancy between P and B is often considerable, and this seems to show that the teamland of these Middlesex jurors is not in very close touch with the agrarian and proprietary allotments.

Evidence in the Geld Inquests.

To yet one other quarter we have hopefully turned only to be disappointed, namely, to the so-called Geld Inquests, copies of which are placed at the beginning of the Exeter Domesday. They tell us of a geld that obviously is being levied at the rate of six shillings on the hide, and sometimes they seem to tell us expressly or implicitly the amount that an acre pays. For a moment we may think that we are obtaining valuable results. Thus at Domerham we find that 14 hides minus 4 acres pay £4. 3s. 8d. We conclude that each acre is taxed at one penny and that 72 A. = 1 H.1561. Then at Celeberge 20 H. minus 4 A. is taxed at £5. 19s. 6d. We conclude that each acre is taxed at three-half-pence and that 48 A. = 1 H.1562. But we soon come to sums which are absurd and discover that as regards small quantities these documents are for our present purpose quite useless. For the Wiltshire hundreds we have three different documents. They do not agree in their arithmetic. Probably they represent the efforts of three different computers. Indubitably one or more of them made blunders. To give one example:—one of our documents begins its account of Mere by saying that it contains 85 hides, 1⁄2 a hide and 1⁄2 a virgate; the other two documents say 86 hides, 1⁄2 a hide and 1 virgate1563. This is by no means the only instance of such discrepant results. But mere clerical or arithmetical errors are not the only obstacle to our use of these accounts. It soon becomes quite evident that small amounts are dealt with in an irregular fashion. Thrice over we are assured that 15 H. 1⁄2 V. paid the king £4. 11s. 0d.1564; but they should have paid £4. 10s. 9d., if four virgates make a hide. Thrice over we are assured that 641⁄2 H. paid £19. 6s. 10d.1565. All suppositions as to acres and virgates apart, 641⁄2 H. should have paid £19. 7s. 0d In Somersetshire the calculations do not speak of acres, but they introduce us to the fertinus or farthing, which is certainly meant to be the quarter of a virgate. Numerous entries show us that 4 fertini = 1 virgate, and yet when a mass of land expressed in terms of hides, virgates and farthings is said to pay a certain sum for geld, we find that the odd farthings are reckoned as paying, sometimes 3d., sometimes 4d., sometimes 42⁄3d., sometimes 5d., sometimes 6d. per farthing1566. So again, when additions are made, odd acres are ignored. We are told that in a certain hundred the barons have 20 hides in demesne, and then that this amount is made up by the following particulars, 8 H. + 1 V. + 3 H. + 3 V + 41⁄2 H. - 4 A. + 31⁄2 H. It is obvious that these particulars when added together do not make 20 hides, though they may well make 20 hides and 4 acres1567. A study of these Geld Inquests has brought us reluctantly to the conclusion that, though they amply prove that 4 V. = 1 H., they afford no proof as to the number of acres that are reckoned to the virgate1568.

Treatment of small quantities.

One word to explain that the apparent rudeness with which small figures are treated is not due to any persuasion that they may be safely disregarded, but is rather the natural outcome of a partitionary method of taxation. Little quantities are lost in the process. It is known that a certain hundred should have, for example, 80 hides and a certain vill 5 hides: but when you come to add up the particulars you can not bring out these round figures, perhaps because many years ago a small error was made by some one when an estate of 23⁄4 hides was being divided into 7 shares. If a mistake be made, it can never be corrected; the landowner who has once or twice paid for 47 acres will refuse to pay for 48 and will tell you that the deficient acre does not lie on his land.

Result of the evidence.

The ignes fatui which dance over the survey of Middlesex and the Geld Inquests of the south-western counties have for a while led us from our straight path. We have seen that in Cambridgeshire the equation 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A. is employed on at least twenty occasions. Now as to the rest of England it must at once be confessed that we have no such convincing evidence. In many counties acres of arable land are but rarely mentioned; parcels of land which geld for less than a hide are generally expressed in terms of hides and virgates; we read, for example, not of so many acres, but of the ninth part of a hide or of two third parts of a virgate. Thus we are compelled for the more part to fall back upon the presumption that the treasury has but one mode of reckoning for the whole of England.

Evidence from Essex.

But we would not rest our case altogether upon probability. In Essex we find one fairly clear case in which our equation is used1569. Sometimes, again, we read that a tract of land is, or gelds for, or defends itself for x hides and z acres, or for x hides, y virgates and z acres. Now in any entry which takes the first of these forms we have some evidence that z acres are less than one hide, and from any entry which takes the second of these forms we may infer that z acres are less than one virgate. Of course from such a statement as that ‘A holds 90 or 115 or 240 acres’ we draw no inference. It is common enough in our own day to speak of things costing thirty shillings or eighteen pence. But we never speak of things costing one pound and thirty shillings, or one shilling and eighteen pence, and we should require much proof before we thought so meanly of our ancestors as to suppose that they habitually spoke in this clumsy fashion.

Let us use this test. Happily in Essex we very frequently have a tract of land described as being x hides and z acres.

Now we read of

a half hide and 30 acres1570,
a hide and a half and 31 acres1571,
a half hide and 35 acres1572,
a half hide and 37 acres1573,
a hide and a half and 40 acres1574,
a hide and a half and 45 acres1575,
a half hide and 45 acres1576,
two hides and a half and 45 acres1577,
a half hide and 48 acres1578,
x hides and 80 acres1579,
nine hides and 82 acres1580.

We have here cited twenty instances in which, as we think, the hide exceeds 60 acres (we might have cited many others) and twelve in which it exceeds 80 acres. We might further adduce instances in which our record speaks of a virgate and 10 acres, a virgate and 15 acres, and even of a virgate and 20 acres1581, and when we read of two hides less 30 acres and two hides less 40 acres1582 we infer that a hide probably has not only more but considerably more than the 30, 40 or 48 acres that are allowed to it by Kemble and Eyton. Our argument is based on the belief that men do not habitually adopt extremely cumbrous forms of speech. From a single instance we should draw no inference, and therefore when we just once read of ‘three hides and a half and 80 acres’ we do not infer that 80 acres are less than half a hide1583.

Evidence from Essex continued.

But more can be made of these returns from Essex. We will take a large number of tracts of land described in the formula ‘x hides and z acres’; we will observe the various numbers for which z stands, and if we find some particular number frequently repeating itself we shall be entitled to argue that this number of acres is some very simple fraction of a hide. We will take at hazard 100 consecutive entries which contain this formula—‘x hides + z acres,’ where x is either an integral number or 1⁄2. The result is that in 37 cases z is 30, in 12 it is 15, in 8 it is 40; then 35 and 20 occur 5 times; 80, 50, 45, 37, 18, 10 occur thrice, and 38 and 151⁄2 twice; eleven other numbers occur once apiece. There can we think be but one explanation of this. The hide contains that number of acres of which 30 is the quarter, 40 the third, 15 the eighth1584.

Further evidence.

But Essex, it must be confessed, lies next to Cambridgeshire, and for the rest of England we have less evidence. Still there are entries which make against any theory which would give to the hide but 30, 40 or 48 acres. In Hertfordshire we read of ‘a hide and a half and 26 acres1585.’ In the same county we read of ‘a half virgate and 10 acres,’ and this seems to tell of a hide of at least 88 acres1586. In Gloucestershire we read of a manor of one hide and are told that ‘in this hide, when it is ploughed, there are but (non sunt nisi) 64 acres of land,’ whence we may draw the inference that such an acreage was unusually small1587. We pass from Mercia into Wessex. In Somersetshire we read of ‘three virgates and a half and 5 acres1588,’ in Dorset of ‘three virgates and a half and 7 acres1589,’ in Somerset of ‘one and a half virgates and 8 acres1590.’

Acreage of the fiscal carucate.

To prove that the fiscal carucate was composed of 120 (fiscal) acres is by no means easy. If, however, we have sojourned for a while in Essex and then cross the border, we can hardly doubt that in East Anglia the carucate bears to the acres the relation that is borne by those hides among which we have been living. Norfolk and Suffolk are carucated counties, but while in the other carucated counties it is usual to express the smaller quantities of land in terms of the bovate (8 bovates making one carucate) and to say nothing of acres, in East Anglia, on the other hand, it is uncommon to mention the bovate—in Suffolk we may even find the virgate1591—and men reckon by carucates, half-carucates and acres. We allow the description of Suffolk to fall open where it pleases and observe a hundred consecutive cases in which a plot of land (as distinguished from meadow) is spoken of as containing a certain number of acres. In 22 cases out of the hundred that number is 60, in 8 it, is 30, in 7 it is 20, in 5 it is 40, in 5 it is 15; no other number occurs more than 4 times, and yet the numbers that appear range from 100 to 2. We have tried the same experiment on two hundred cases in Norfolk; in 28 cases the number of acres was 30, in 16 cases it was 60, in 13 it was 40, in 13 it was 16, in 12 it was 20, in 10 it was 80, in 9 it was 15, though the numbers ranged from 1 to 405. Surely the explanation of this must be that 60 acres are half a carucate, that 30 acres are a quarter, that 40 acres are a third, 20 a sixth, 15 an eighth. We have made many similar experiments and always with a similar result; wherever we open the book we find plots of 60 acres and of 30 acres in rich abundance. We use another test. When land is described by the formula ‘x carucatae et z acrae,’ what values are assigned to z? We find 40 very commonly, 42, 45, 50, 60 (but this is rare, for it is easier to say ‘x1⁄2 carucates’ than ‘x carucates and 60 acres’) 68, 69, 80 (at least four times), 81, and 1001592. On the one hand, then, we have a good deal of evidence that the carucate contains more than 80 acres, some evidence that it contains more than 100 acres, and some that it does not contain many more, for no case have we seen in which z exceeds 100. Perhaps in Norfolk the figure 16 occurs rather more frequently than our theory would expect, but 16 is two-fifteenths of 120, and the figures 32 and 64 occur but rarely. Also it must be confessed that in Derbyshire we hear of ‘eleven bovates and a half and eight acres,’ also of ‘twelve bovates and a half and eight acres1593.’ These entries, to use an argument which we have formerly used in our own favour, seem to imply that half a bovate is more than eight acres and would therefore give us a carucate of at least 144. We can only answer that, though men do not habitually use clumsy modes of reckoning, they do this occasionally1594.

Acreage of the fiscal sulung.

Of the Kentish sulung very little can be discovered from Domesday. Apparently it was divided into 4 yokes (iuga)1595 and the yoke was probably divided into 4 virgates. We have indeed one statement connecting acres with sulungs which some have thought of great importance. ‘In the common land of St. Martin [i.e. the land which belongs to the communitas of the canons of St. Martin] are 400 acres and a half which make two sulungs and a half1596.’ Thence, a small quantity being neglected, the inference has been drawn that the Kentish sulung was composed of 160 acres, while some would read ‘400 acres and a half’ to mean 450 acres and would so get 180 acres for the sulung1597. But the entry deals with one particular case and it connects real acres with rateable units:—the canons have 4001⁄2 or more probably 450 acres, which are rated at 21⁄2 sulungs. If we passed to another estate, we might find a different relation between the fiscal and the real units. Kent was egregiously undertaxed and as a general rule its fiscal sulung will have many real acres. Turning to the cases in which the geldability of land is expressed in terms of sulungs and acres, or yokes and acres, we can gather no more than that the sulung is greater than 60 acres, so much greater that ‘3 sulungs less 60 acres1598’ is a natural phrase, and that the half-sulung is greater than 401599 and than 42 acres1600. We may suspect that the Exchequer was reckoning 120 (fiscal) acres to the sulung but can not say that this is proved.

Kemble’s theory.

And now we must glance at certain theories opposed to that which has been here stated. Kemble contends that the hide contained 30 or 33 Saxon which were equal to 40 Norman acres, and that the hide of Domesday Book contains 40 Norman acres1601. Now in so far as this doctrine deals with the time before the Conquest, we will postpone our judgment upon it. So far as it deals with the Domesday hide, it is supported by two arguments. One of these is to the effect that England has not room for all the hides that are attributed to it if the hide had many more than 30 or 40 acres; this argument also we will for a while defer. The other1602 is based on a single passage in the Exeter Domesday relating to the manor of Poleham. That entry seems to involve an equation which can only be solved if 1 virgate = 10 acres. William of Mohun has a manor which in the time of King Edward paid geld for 10 hides; he has in demesne 4 H., 1 V., 6 A. and the villeins have 51⁄2 H., 4 A.1603 Now three or four such entries would certainly set the matter at rest; but a single entry can not. By way of answer it will be enough to say that the very next entry seems to imply an equation of precisely the same form, but one that is plainly absurd. This same William has a manor called Ham; it paid geld for 5 hides; there were 3 H., 8 A. in demesne and the villains had 2 H. less 12 A. Shall we draw the conclusion that 5 H. = 5 H. - 4 A.? The truth we suspect to be that here, as in Middlesex, geldable units and actual areal units have already begun to perplex each other. Both Poleham and Ham are what we call ‘over-rated’ manors. It is known that Poleham contains 10 hides and Ham 5 hides, but, when we come to look for the acres that will make up the due tale of hides, we can not find them; for let King William’s officers have never so clear a terminology of their own, the country folk will not for ever be distinguishing between ‘acres ad geldum’ and ‘acres ad arandum’ But be the explanation what it may, we repeat that the one equation that Kemble could find to support his argument is found in the closest company with an equation which when similarly treated produces a nonsensical result. This is all the direct evidence that he has produced from Domesday Book in favour of the hide of 40 acres. Robertson, while holding that the hide of Mercia contained 120 acres, adopted Kemble’s opinion that the hide of Wessex contained 40 without producing any witness from Domesday save only the passage about Poleham1604. Eyton reckons 48 ‘gheld acres’ to the ‘gheld hide,’ but he leaves us utterly at a loss to tell how he came by this computation1605.

The ploughland and the plough.

Another theory we must examine. It is ingenious and, were it true, would throw much light on a dark corner. It starts from the facts disclosed by the survey of the East Riding of Yorkshire1606. In that district, it is said, the number of carucates for geld that there are in any manor (this number we will call a) is usually either equal to, or just twice the number (which we call b) of the ‘lands for one plough,’ or, as we say, teamlands. Further, it can be shown from maps and other modern evidences that the manors in which a = b were manors with two common fields, in other words, were ‘two-course manors,’ while those in which a = 2b were manors with three common fields, in other words were ‘three-course manors.’ The suggested explanation is that while the teamland or ‘land for one plough’ means the amount of land that one plough will till in the course of a year, the ‘carucate for geld’ is the amount of land which one plough tills in one field in the course of a year. Manor X, let us suppose, is a two-course manor; the whole amount of land which a plough will till there in a year will lie in one field; therefore in this case a = b. Manor Y is a three-course manor; in a given year a plough will there till a certain quantity of land, but half its work will have been done in one field, half in another; therefore in this case a = 2b

The Yorkshire carucates.

Now we must own to doubting the possibility of deciding with any certainty from comparatively modern evidence which (if any) of the Yorkshire vills were under a system of three-course culture in the eleventh century. In the year 1086 many of them were lying and for long years had lain waste either in whole or in part. Thus the first group of examples that is put before us as the foundation for a theory consists of 15 manors the sum of whose carucates for geld is 911⁄4 while the sum of the teamlands is 913⁄4. What was the state of these manors in 1086? Three of them were absolutely waste. The recorded population on the others consisted of four priests, one sokemean, eighty-four villeins and twenty-six bordiers; the number of existing teams was 351⁄2; the total valet of the whole fifteen estates was £7. 1s., though they had been worth £72 in King Edward’s day1607. It is obvious enough that very little land is really being ploughed, and surely it is a most perilous inference that, when culture comes back to these deserted villages, the old state of things will be reproduced, so that we shall be able to decide which of them had three and which had two fields in the days before the devastation. Further, we can not think that, even for the East Riding of Yorkshire, the figures show as much regularity as has been attributed to them. In the first place, there are admittedly many cases in which neither of the two equations of which we have spoken (a = b or a = 2b) is precisely true. We can only say that they are approximately true. Then there are other cases—too many, as we think, to be treated as exceptional—in which a bears to b some very simple ratio which is neither 1:1 nor yet 2:1; it is 3:2, or 4:3, or 5:3

Relation between teamlands and fiscal carucates.

But at any rate, to extend the theory to the whole of Yorkshire, to say nothing of all England, is out of the question. No doubt as a whole Yorkshire was (in the terms that we have used) an ‘over-rated’ county: that is to say, as a general rule, a, if not equal to, was greater than b. But it can not be said that when a was not equal to b it normally was, or even tended to be equal to 2b. We take by chance a page describing the possessions of Count Alan1608; it contains 20 entries; in one of these a = b, in one a = 2b, in one b is greater than a; in ten cases the proportion which a bears to b is 3:2, in two it is 4:3, in two it is 5:3, in one 6:5, in one 7:5, in one it is 17:12. In the counties of Lincoln, Nottingham and Derby an application of this doctrine would be ludicrous, for very commonly b is greater than a. What is more, the method of taxation that it presupposes is so unjust that we are loath to attribute it to any one. To tax a man in proportion to the area of the land that he treats as arable, that is a plausibly equitable method; to tax him in proportion to the area that he has ploughed in a given year, that also is a plausibly equitable method; but the present proposal could only be explained as a deliberate effort to tax the three-field system out of existence1609. To take the figures that have been suggested to us by the author of this theory, we suppose that X is using a team of oxen in ‘a two-course manor’; he has 160 acres of arable land and ploughs 80 of them in every year. Then in another village Y is using a team of oxen according to the three-course system; he has, we are told, 180 acres of arable and ploughs 120 acres in every year. This unfortunate Y is to pay double the amount of geld that is paid by X. We could understand a demand that Y should pay nine shillings when X pays eight, for Y has in all 180 acres of arable and X has 160. We could understand a demand that Y should pay three shillings when X pays two, for Y sows 120 acres a year and X sows 80. But nothing short of a settled desire to extirpate the three-field system will prompt us to exact two shillings from Y for every one that is paid by X. Lastly, we must repeat in passing our protest1610 against the introduction into this context of those figures which express the aspirations of that enthusiast of the plough, Walter of Henley. That the ‘land for one team’ of Domesday Book points normally or commonly to an area of arable land containing 160 or 180 acres we can not believe. If we give it on an average 120 acres we may perhaps find room for the recorded team lands, though probably we shall often have to make our acres small; but county after county will refuse to make room for teamlands with 160 or 180 acres1611. No doubt the regularity of the Yorkshire figures is remarkable. There are other districts in northern England where we may see some one relation between A and B steadily prevailing. We will call to mind, by way of example, the symmetrical arrangement that we have seen in one of the Rutland wapentakes, where A = 4B. This we can not explain, nor will it be explained until Domesday Book has been rearranged by hundreds and vills; we have, however, hazarded a guess as to the quarter in which the explanation may be found1612. As to the Yorkshire figures, we think that of all the figures in the record they are the least likely to be telling us the simple truth about the amount of cultivated land.

The fiscal hide of 120 acres.

We may now briefly recapitulate the evidence which leads us to the old-fashioned belief that King William’s Exchequer reckons 120 acres to the hide. There are at the least twenty sums set before us which involve the equation: 1H. = 120A. or 1V. = 30A. We doubt whether there are two sums which involve any one other equation. That there are sums which involve or seem to involve other equations we fully admit; but when a fair allowance has been made for mistranscription, miscalculation, the loss of acres due to partitionary arrangements1613, and, above all, to a transition from the rateable to the real, from the hidage on the roll to the strips in the fields, we can not think that these cases are sufficiently numerous to shake our faith. We have further seen that in Essex and East Anglia the acres of the fiscal system lie in batches of just those sizes which would be produced if an unit of 120 acres was being broken into halfs, thirds, quarters and fifths. Lastly, ‘the rustics’ of the twelfth century ‘tell us that the hide according to its original constitution consists of a hundred acres1614’ and probably these rustics reckon by the long hundred.

Antiquity of the large hide.

If now we are satisfied about this matter, we seem to be entitled to some inferences about remoter history. The fiscal practice of reckoning 120 acres to the hide can hardly be new. Owing to many causes, among which we recall the partitionary system of taxation, the influence of an equity which would consider value as well as area, and the disturbing forces of privilege and favouritism, the fiscal hide of the Confessor’s day has strayed far away from the fields and is no measure of land1615. At its worst it is jobbery; at its best a lame compromise between an unit of area and an unit of value. And yet, for all this, it is composed of acres, of 120 acres. The theory that is involved in this mode of calculation is so little in harmony with the existing facts that we can not but believe that it is ancient. It seems to point to a time long gone by when the typical tenement which was to serve as an unit of taxation generally had six score arable acres, little more or less.

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