32
BOROUGH AND COURT
other local courts as did the boroughmoots or portmoots or
hustings of a later age. It is not easy, indeed, so scanty and
perplexed is the evidence, to get a clear idea of this court.
On the strength of Edgar’s ordinance that the burhgemot
should be held three times a year 1 it was thought until com-
paratively recently that such a court was a feature of all
boroughs, which was more than could be said of the late
medieval towns. On the other hand, the very infrequency of
these meetings led Ballard to assert that the normal borough
court was not independent, did not exclude the jurisdiction
of the neighbouring hundred court with its monthly sessions.2
A vigorous criticism from Miss Bateson8 induced him to
withdraw this hasty pronouncement.4 From an ambiguous
premise he had drawn a conclusion impossibly wide, though,
as will presently be seen, not without an element of truth.5
Unfortunately, Liebermann had accepted it,6 and never saw
the retraction or realized that Ballard’s view was inconsistent
with his own general theory of the borough court. Almost
simultaneously, Professor Chadwick put forth a very different
theory, namely that the later borough courts were the dwindled
relics of courts which from the reign of Edward to that of
Edgar served for more or less wide districts centred in the
new burhs.7 The hypothesis is more applicable to the Midlands
than to the South for which it was constructed, but discussion
of it must be deferred for the moment.
Professor Chadwick’s theory is an aberration from the
general line of inquiry, which has aimed at fixing the place
of the borough and its court in that new hundred organization
which was carried out in the South in the first half of the tenth
century and in the Midlands and East, somewhat later in
the century. Maitland’s cautious statement that the borough
court was probably, “ at least as a general rule,” co-ordinate
with a hundred court,8 has met with almost universal agree-
ment. This leaves open the question whether a new type of
court was created for the borough or whether it merely re-
ceived separate hundredal jurisdiction. Maitland himself
appears to have had no doubt that the second alternative was
ɪ III Edg. 5, I ; Liebermann, Ges. i. 202.
2 The Domesday Borough (1904), pp. 53 f., 102 f., 120 ff. and Preface.
3 E.H.R. xx. (1905), 146 fl.
4 The English Borough in the Twelfth Century (1914), p. 34.
s See below, p. 54. « Ges. ii. 451, 12 g.
, Anglo-Saxon Institutions, pp. 219 ff., especially pp. 222-3.
8 D.B. and B., p. 209.
THE PRE-DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
33
the right one. “ At starting,” he says, “ the borough seems
to be regarded as a vill which is also a hundred.” He notes
that the later borough court was sometimes called a “ hundred, ’ ’
and suggests that, at least in the earliest time, it had juris-
diction over an area considerably larger than the walled space.
“ In this case the urban would hardly differ from the rural
hundred. A somewhat new kind of ‘ hundred ’ might be
formed without the introduction of any new idea.” 1 Boroughs
with such territory, even comprising several rural vills, are,
of course, not uncommon, but they belong chiefly to the
region north of the Thames. Maitland’s generalization will
hardly cover the case of such southern boroughs as Bath and
Dorchester which were originally capita of ordinary hundreds,
but appear later in possession of hundred courts of their own
and of little or no extra-mural territory.
Miss Bateson, overlooking or silently rejecting this sugges-
tion of Maitland, took the ,' vill that was a hundred ” quite
strictly and saw a “ legal thought ” behind it.2 She was com-
bating Ballard’s argument that if a vill by exception was
also a hundred, that was a mere accident and the court was
an ordinary hundred court. The legal thought was the
deliberate co-ordination of the typical borough and its court
with the hundred and its court. In her view, too, the borough
court was already differentiated from that of the rural hundred
for she identified the three annual meetings of Edgar’s burhgemot
with the “ great courts ” of the fully-fledged borough.3 Dr.
Stephenson, however, sees no evidence of such differentiation
before the Norman Conquest.4 He brushes aside the burh-
gemot in question as the court of a district meeting in a borough,
and agrees with Ballard that the court of the borough which
was a hundred in itself was just an ordinary hundred court.
He differs from him only in holding that such burghal hundreds,
though not universal, were common and not merely isolated
cases, and in finding confirmation of his view in what he
believes himself to have shown to be the purely agricultural
and non-urban economy of the Anglo-Saxon borough. There
is no “ legal thought ” behind the vill-hundred, for non-
burghal hundreds were often quite small and even the single
vill hundred was not unknown.
A review of the whole of the evidence, upon which these
1 E>.B. and B., p. 209, n. 6. t E.H.R. xx. {1905), 147.
3 Ibid. ; Borough Customs, i. (1904), pp. xii f. ; ɪi. (1906), cxlv fi.
1 E.H.R. χlv, (1930), 196 fi.