II
BOROUGH AND COURT
i. The Pre-Domesday Evidence
The main features of the tenth century vill, or portion of one,
that was also a borough, which distinguished it from the
ordinary agricultural vill, can be but brokenly discerned in
the glimpses afforded by the Laws, the charters and the
Chronicle. For fuller information we have to wait until
Domesday Book affords material for retrospect. Meanwhile,
it is possible to make some definite statements from contem-
porary evidence.
The borough was a place of defence against the Danish
enemy, or vice versa, fortified or refortified by the public
authority and often a natural centre for local administration
whether of the shire or of some small area. It was also a
place of trade, a “ port,” yielding a growing revenue in tolls
which would have been even more important had the son and
grandson of Alfred succeeded in their effort to confine all
trading to the “ ports.” They did restrict the royal minters
to these urban centres, though later kings seem to have auth-
orized exceptions to this rule. If the public status of these
centres were not sufficiently obvious, it might be safely
inferred from the sharing of their revenue between king and
earl which is recorded at Worcester at the first foundation of
its borough, though not elsewhere until Domesday comes to
our aid. The earl had no such pecuniary interest in the ancient
demesne of the kingdom held by the king, being probably
already provided for by the special comital estates of which we
only hear later, albeit the arrangement sounds more primitive
than the earl’s burghal share.
The borough-port further differed from the royal vill
“ upland ” 1 in the division of tenure which it commonly
1 Cf. sy hit binnan byrig, sy hit up on lande (II Cnut, 24). Two and
a half centuries later the same distinction is implied in the ,' viles de uppe-
Iaunde ” of the Statute of Winchester (Stubbs, Select Charters, ed. Davis,
p. 466).
30
THE PRE-DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
3i
exhibited. The king kept much of its soil in demesne, but
a more or less considerable part was granted to religious
houses and local magnates. That both the king and the private
landholders settled “ burgesses ” on their holdings is a natural
presumption, though the positive evidence for it first appears
in Domesday Book. No one now, with Maitland and Ballard,
traces this “ tenurial heterogeneity ” to a territorialization
of the duty of the shire or other district to garrison and repair
the walls of the borough. Other reasons, such as the need of
a hospicium or lodging for visits of business to the local centre
or of a refuge in time of war, as well as the financial attraction
of urban house property, sufficiently account for this tenurial
connexion between town and country. Surviving charters
to churches and thegns show the growth of this connexion
in Kentish boroughs long before the Danish invasions.
With rare exceptions, mostly old Roman towns, the forti-
fied area, in the nature of the case, was of small extent ; houses
and population were much more closely crowded together
than in the countryside, and this of necessity involved some
differentiation from the rural vill. Of the inner life and
growth of the boroughs we know little until the eve of the
Norman Conquest. In the later struggle with the Danes, the
burgesses of London at least proved themselves still an effec-
tive military force. By that time they had an active trade
with the Continent. Municipal growth or even aspirations we
should scarcely expect to find among the slow-moving Anglo-
Saxons, especially as the impulse given to it abroad by feudal
tyranny was entirely absent in England. The boroughs were
still primarily domanial, governed by reeves of the king’s
appointment, though already even in the smaller boroughs of
Devon we hear of a body of witan 1 with whom no doubt the
reeve consulted. It is safe to say that the burgesses did not
yet dream even of securing direct communal responsibility
to the crown for the collection of its revenue, still less of license
to elect their own officers, not that there is any doubt that at
least the more important Anglo-Saxon boroughs from the
tenth century onwards possessed the organ in which the
first strivings towards municipal autonomy were before long
to make themselves felt and which moulded the body (com-
munitas) that was, nominally at any rate, sovereign in the
self-governing medieval town. It does not follow that this
early borough court exhibited such marked differences from
1 Crawford Charters, ed. Napier and Stevenson (1895), p. 9.