The name is absent

from hundred courts and not from any originally purely urban
tribunal and the difficulties which beset the attempt to estab-
lish the urban character of the tenth century burhgemot and
to connect it up with the post-conquest borough courts may be
properly appreciated.

It is easier to find evidence of the existence of borough law
and of borough courts in the first half of the eleventh century
than to identify these courts with Edgar’s burhgemot. The
contemporary author of a tract on the duties of bishops,¹
writing apparently at Worcester, may have exaggerated their
powers partly from ecclesiastical bias and partly from local
usage, for the bishop of Worcester, as we have seen,² had lord-
ship in his see town, but he cannot have invented the dis-
tinction (c. 6) between borough law (burhrihi} and rural or,
shall we say, common law (Iandrihf)? both of which, he says,
should be administered by the bishop’s advice (raede) and
witness, not necessarily, we may presume, in the same court.
There is no need to suppose that the further duty ascribed to
the bishop of seeing that every borough measure (burhgemet)
and every weight was correctly made could be exercised in-
dependently of a court, for it so happens that the first mention
of an Anglo-Saxon court which was beyond dispute purely
urban introduces it not in its judicial capacity but as the
authority for a borough weight.

Towards the close of the tenth century, between 968 and 985,
Ramsey Abbey received a gift of two silver cups of twelve
marks ad pondus hustingiae Londoniensis.⁴ A court of some
standing is implied, but its name, which shows strong Scan-
dinavian influence, forbids the assumption of any long previous
existence. Can it be identified with the burhgemot of Edgar’s
law, which was enacted between 959 and c. 962, according to
Liebermann ? Unluckily our next information about the
husting is of ρost-Conquest date, but if we can venture, with

ɪ Episcopus ; Liebermann, Ges. ɪ. 477, iii. 270-1. The editor dates it
c. 1000-1050.                                     ²Above, p. 20.

³ This distinction was apparently long preserved at Cambridge in the
name of Landgrytheslane (now Pembroke Street) which ran just outside
the town ditch. Maitland inferred that it marked the boundary between
the ordinary land-peace and the stricter burhgrið within the ditch (Township
and Borough, p. ɪoɪ ; of. p. 74). That the king’s grith or special peace
was enforced in boroughs as in his court or on highways by the heavy
fine of /5 we know from IV Ethelred, 4, ɪ (Liebermann Ges. i. 234), though
burhbrece is probably a misreading for borhbrece (ibid. iii. 165).

⁴ Chron. Abb. Rameseiensis (Rolls Series), p. 58. Foralater reference—
in 1032—to the hustinges gewiht see Napier and Stevenson, Crawford
Charters, p. 78.

THE PRE-DOMESDAY EVIDENCE

all reserves, to argue back from that to the tenth century,
such identification is difficult. The later husting was a weekly
court without trace of three or any smaller number of “ great
courts.” Three special courts yearly were, however, a feature
of the larger open-air folkmoot of post-Conquest London and,
so far as that goes, there is a stronger case for seeing in it an
instance of Edgar’s burhgemot. But if it were, it might have
been re-organized by him, but could hardly have been a new
creation, since the evidence of its pre-existence implied in the
very title of the husting, and confirmed by the primitive con-
stitution of the folkmoot, indicates a court that went back
beyond the reign of Edgar. It has been suggested above ¹
that the folkmoot may have been a curtailed relic of the district
court with its centre in London which seems to be implied
in the so-called Judicia civitalis Lundonie of Athelstan’s
time,² but this is to venture still further into the wide and
dangerous field of conjecture.

More difficult to interpret than the London evidence is that
contained in the invaluable record of the land suits and
purchases of Ely Abbey under Ethelred II preserved in the
twelfth century, Liber Eliensis. The abbey had been deprived
of an estate at “ Staneie,” apparently in the isle of Ely, by
relatives of the donor, “ without judgment and without the
law of citizens and hundredmen ” Ipivium et hundretanorum).
Aiderman Æthelwine frequently summoned the offenders to
sessions {placita) of the said citizens and hundredmen, but
they always refused to appear. Nevertheless the abbot con-
tinued to bring up his case at “ pleas ” both within the borough
(urbem) and without, and to complain to the people (populo)
of the injury to his house. At last Æthelwine held a grande
placitum at Cambridge of the citizens and hundredmen before
twenty-four judges who gave judgment in favour of the abbot.³
These “ pleas ” were clearly not sessions of a borough court in
the later sense, they look more like meetings of a county
court,⁴ though the clumsy title does not favour this supposi-
tion, but the prominence given to the does deserves attention.

¹P. 14.

³ VI Atheist. ; Liebermann, Ges. i. 173. It is not necessary, however,
^wιth Liebermann, following Quadripartitus, to translate the byrig in the
Lundenbyrig of the Prologue by " judicial-political centre ’’ [ibid. iii. 116).
For Lundenburh as a regular name for the city in this age, see above, p. 23.

³ Liber Eliensis, i. (Anglia Christiana Soc.), p. 137.

⁴ Or district court with the borough of Cambridge as centre. But the
^r≡ferences elsewhere to the comitatus of Cambridge and to the comitatus
and Vicecomitatus of Huntingdon (p. 139) may not be wholly anachronisms.

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