The name is absent

a different interpretation of these texts. There is no ambi-
guity, at any rate, in the testimony of Domesday Book,
that all who dwelt in a wide district round Taunton had to go
to that borough to take oaths or undergo the ordeal.¹ It
may be objected that Taunton was a mediatized borough
and that its episcopal lord, the bishop of Winchester, was
responsible for the centralization, but it is recorded in close
association with the regal privileges which had been conferred
with this great estate.

So far, rejecting Liebermann’s counsel of despair, we have
caught fleeting glimpses of courts in “ boroughs,” new and
old, but a borough court in the urban sense has not come in
sight. Until a comparatively recent date, no one doubted
that the burhgemot which Edgar ordered to be held three times
a year was such a court.² Its three annual meetings were
linked up with the three “ great courts ” of the London folk-
moot and of a number of other town courts after the Conquest,
and parallels were found in the three echte dinge of some early
urban courts on the Continent.³ But this, too, is now claimed
by Professor Chadwick and his followers, including Dr.
Stephenson, as a district court with a borough as its centre,
though they are not in accord as to its precise nature. Professor
Chadwick, adopting Maitland’s “ garrison ” theory, suggested
that “ it was a meeting of the landowners who possessed
hagan in the borough and had to provide for its defence.” ⁴
Dr. Stephenson ⁵ discards that unlucky hypothesis, but follows
Professor Chadwick in inferring from the close association of
the burhgemot with the scirgemot in Edgar’s ordinance that
the boroughmoot was simply the equivalent of the southern
shiremoot in the (as they suppose) still unshired Midlands.
This is an ingenious suggestion and may be thought to gain
support from the closely connected clause that follows,®
which may be read as prescribing the presence in the one as
in the other of the shire bishop (ðɑere scire biscop) and the
ealdorman, to declare respectively ecclesiastical and secular
law. On the internal evidence alone, however, several
objections may be taken to so construing these clauses.
The abrupt introduction of two sets of courts which differ only

¹ D.B. i. 87b, i.            ² III Edg. 5, I ; Liebermann, Ges. i. 202.

^s See e.g. Miss Bateson in E.H.R. xv. 503 ; xx. 146. “ The whole
question,” she says, “ is of great importance in tracing out the origin of
the borough court."

⁴ A.S.I. p. 220.       ⁶ E.H.R. xlv (1930), 200-1.      ∙ III Edg. 5, 2.

THE PRE-DOMESDAY EVIDENCE

in name, locality and frequency of meeting, is unusually
awkward even for the Anglo-Saxon Laws. The division of
the clauses, again, is not original and read continuously, as
they were intended to be, the second may quite well refer only
to the last mentioned court, the shiremoot. Indeed, the
description of the bishop as “ the shire bishop ” would not
be applicable to a region which still remained unshired.
Lastly, if burhgemot and Scirgemot were the same court under
different names, why should the one have met oftener than the
iɔther ? The external evidence against the suggestion under
consideration is still stronger, for Cnut re-enacted Edgar’s
ordinance ¹ long after the Midlands had been divided into
shires,² and this cannot be explained away as the inclusion of
an obsolete law in a general code, since Cnut himself introduced
an amendment which allowed the two courts to be held
oftener if necessary. That the burhgemot in Cnufs time was
no equivalent of a shire court appears clearly in the clause ³
which provides for appeal for defect of justice in the hundred
court to the shiremoot, but not to the boroughmoot.

The theory that Edgar’s burhgemot was a Midland district-
court may therefore be put aside, but the new court (if new it
was) still presents a difficult problem. Cnufs amendment
itself adds a fresh complication, for if the court was urban and
the three meetings “great courts,” echte dirige, which imply
intermediate petty or ordinary meetings, why was special
authorization needed for these ? Unfortunately, too, there is
no further record of a burhgemot in the Laws or other Anglo-
Saxon sources, and indeed the name is not found again until
the twelfth century. Continuity cannot be assumed without
strong corroborative evidence, and this is, to say the least,
not abundant. The complete absence of the unambiguous
portmanimot in Anglo-Saxon records and literature deprives
us of what would have been an invaluable link. Add to all
this the undoubted fact that the courts of many of our medieval
boroughs, including several of the more important, developed

¹II Cnut, ι8 (1028-34) ; Liebermann, Ges. i. 320.

² With one exception indeed the Midland shires are not mentioned
in the Chronicle before ɪoɪɪ, but they owed that mention to renewed
Danish attacks and there is nothing to show that they were of quite recent
origin. Cheshire appears as early as 980. The region of the Five Boroughs
was still unshired about 997 (Liebermann, Ges. iii. 156), but Lincolnshire
and Nottinghamshire appear in the Chronicle under 1016. In any case
these Danish boroughs were not taken into account in Edgar’s ordinance
which was enacted for his English subjects only (op. cit. iiι. 134, § ɪɪ, 139,
⅞ ɪɪ).                                ³ II Cnut, 19 ; op. cit. i. 321-2.

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