The name is absent

We hear also of the purchase money of estates being paid at
Cambridge before the whole city (coram tota ciυitate, coram
coetu ciυium), and on one of these occasions when the abbot
asked for sureties (υades) from the seller, all cried out that
Cambridge and Ipswich and Norwich and Thetford enjoyed
such freedom (Hbertas) and dignity that anyone buying land
there needed no sureties.¹ Was this coetus civium a mere
casual assemblage or a regular meeting of their body, largely
perhaps for administrative purposes, but conceivably also for
the administration of justice among themselves ? If Cam-
bridge was a hundred in itself, as it was sixty years later, we
may have here an urbanized hundred court.²

If the burgesses of Cambridge witnessed sales of land
which lay remote from their walls, the witan of the four Devon
boroughs, Exeter, Totnes, Lydford, and Barnstaple were offi-
cially informed (lθl8) by Bishop Eadnoth, of a life-grant
of a piece of land near Crediton which he had made in return
for a loan.³ The likeness between these burhwitan and the
optimales who bore rule in the twelfth century borough court
is unmistakable. Witan was certainly used sometimes in
the sense of “ judges.” ⁴ Liebermann was inclined to think
that the duty imposed on buruhιs>aru in the truce with Olaf,
thirty years earlier, implies a local court in each borough.⁵

What answer does our survey of the pre-Domesday evi-
dence enable us to give to the question with which we started,
whether the distinctive features which marked off the typical
borough from the ordinary vill already included, as after the
Norman Conquest, a separate court of justice ? If we put
aside the burhgemot of Edgar’s law on the ground that its
nature is still in dispute, the only direct mention of such a
court is that of the London husting,^β but the distinction be-
tween borough law and country law attested by the tract
Episcopus^,1 and supported by a post-Conquest survival sug-
gests a distinction of courts, and some more indirect evi-
dence seems to point in the same direction. To this last there
ought perhaps to be added Edgar’s ordinance for the creation
of panels of witnesses (of sales) in all boroughs as well as in

¹ Liber Eliensis, i., p. 140.

^, Doubts have occasionally been suggested as to the trustworthiness
of the Liber Eliensis for this period, but there can be no real question that
it is based on genuine contemporary materials.

³ Napier and Stevenson, Crawford Charters, pp. 9, 77.

¹ Liebermann, Ges. ii. 245, s.v. Wita, 5 ; 565, 6a.

⁵ II Ethelr. 6 ; op. cit. i. 222-4, ii. 451, § 12 f.

• See above, p. 40.                       ⁷ Above, p. 40.

every hundred.¹ It seems likely that in the one case as in
the other the panel would be an emanation of a local court.
A distinctive burhriht, again, must in the nature of things
have dealt largely with cases arising between traders, often
of a technical kind which could only be fairly tried by an
urban body.

2. The Domesday Evidence

The evidence derivable from Domesday Book is still scanty,
which is not surprising in a financial record, and in part not
altogether clear. Most of it comes from the North and the
North Midlands. The Iagemen, “lawmen,” of Lincoln, Stam-
ford, and York, who were or had been twelve in number in the
first two towns and in all probability the same at York, where
their name is Latinized judices, had by 1086 lost or were losing
their collegiate function of judgment-finders, if that was their
function,² at any rate in the Lincolnshire boroughs, for Iagemen
are there defined as “ holders of sake and soke.” They were
thus comparable, as Professor Stenton has pointed out,³
with the owners of “ sokes ” within the city of London. The
office was normally hereditary and there were still twelve
lawmen at Stamford, as late as 1275.⁴ For a longer or shorter
time the lawmen, being leading citizens, may still have played
an important part in their respective borough courts, but as
individuals not as an official body.

Of the lawmen of Cambridge we only learn that their heriot
was that of the thegn class,® but the fact is important because
it raises a doubt whether Liebermann was right in concluding
from the Domesday details as to the soke of the Stamford
lawmen that their wergeld was only that of the ordinary
freeman.⁶

¹IV Edg. 3, 1-6. The larger boroughs were to appoint thirty-six,
small boroughs and hundreds normally twelve. If a court is rightly in-
ferred, this may seem to imply a minor borough court not sensibly different
from that of the hundred, but it equally suggests a wider difference in the
court of the major borough.

² Vinogradoff suggested that they may have been official exponents
of the law, as the lawmen of Scandinavia were (Engl. Society in the Eleventh
Century, pp. 5-6) and is followed by Mr. Lapsley (E.H.R. xlvii. 557). But
cf. Liebermann, Ges. iι. 565.

* Lincolnshire Domesday (Lincs. Rec. Soc. 19), p. xxix.

ⁱ Rot. Hund. i. 354. Alexander Bugge mistakenly concluded that the
lawmen became the governing bodies of their towns (Vierteljahrschrift fur
Social-Und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, iv. 2 (1906), 257).

⁵ D.B. i. 189.

^, Ibid, i, 336b, 2 ; Liebermann, loc. cιt. and ιi. 732, § 6a. See below,
P∙ 80.

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