44
BOROUGH AND COURT
The twelve judices of the city of Chester may very well,
like those of York, have been known in the vernacular as
lawmen, for Chester and Cheshire, though in English Mercia,
came very strongly under Scandinavian influence and the
number of these judges is therefore possibly significant.
Domesday Book gives less space to them than to the lawmen
of Lincoln and Stamford, but that little is fortunately more
to our purpose. In the time of King Edward they were
drawn from the men of the king, the bishop and the earl, and
if any of them absented himself from the Hundred court
(hundret) on the day of its session, without sufficient excuse, he
paid as penalty ios. to the king and the earl.1 From this it
would seem clear that, even if these Chester judges bore the
same name, they had not the same status as the lawmen of
the Danelaw boroughs. The mention that the city court was
called the Hundred will be seen to be of vital importance
when we come to discuss the nature and origin of the Anglo-
Saxon borough court.
The brief glimpse of the Chester court in Iθ66, given by
Domesday Book, owes its special value to the great rarity of
such information for the pre-Conquest period, but otherwise
the chief interest of the Domesday description of the city lies
in its exceptionally long list of offences and their penalties.
The question arises whether all these pleas, including the
highest, the profits of which the king seldom granted to a
subject, such as breach of his peace, came before the Hundred
and its twelve doomsmen.2 The palatine earls of Chester
are afterwards found holding a special court of crown pleas for
Chester presided over by their justiciar, minor offences coming
before a court called the pentice, where the city sheriffs
presided, while the portmote held by the bailiffs dealt with
civil business only.3 It is obvious, however, that, in the form
* D.B. i. 262b, 2.
2 The list of “ the laws which were there ” draws no line between the
reserved pleas and other offences. At Shrewsbury they are separated by
intervening matter, though the pleas are said to be the king’s “ there ”
(ibi), at Hereford the pleas are mentioned as in the royal demesne and so
outside the customs farmed by the city reeve and shared between the king
and the earl, while the description of Worcester mentions them as being
the king’s in the whole county. This might seem to suggest that there
and elsewhere they came before the shire court, held in the borough, but
before the Conquest there were no grades of jurisdiction in local courts.
The hundred court could apply the severest method of proof, the ordeal,
and inflict the extreme penalty of death (Liebermann, Ges. ii. 454, § 25b).
3See the Calendar of Rolls of Chester County Court, etc., 1259-97
(Cheth. Soc. N.S. 84), Introduction.
THE DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
45
it comes before us at any rate, this distinction of courts
was of post-Conquest creation. On the whole, it seems likely
that the Anglo-Saxon borough court, if Chester was at all
typical in this respect, could entertain cases which from the
twelfth century at least would be tried by royal justices or
those of great immunists like the earl of Chester. If this were
so, the withdrawal of “ high justice ” from the borough
court must have given it a more domestic character and so
proρortionably have facilitated its use as an organ of the muni-
cipal aspirations of the burgesses.
With one doubtful exception, to which we shall come pre-
sently, the Chester court is the only borough court which is
directly mentioned in Domesday Book. It is there called
the Hundred. How far was this a general name for this class
of courts and if it was, what inferences are to be drawn as to
their origin ?
The Chester Hundred was the court of a hundred (or more
accurately half-hundred) district which besides the city com-
prised four adjacent vills contributing about one-fourteenth
to the danegeld due from the hundred. Thirteen other
boroughs are definitely described in the great survey as
forming hundreds or half-hundreds in themselves, with or
without a rural belt outside.1 To these we ought perhaps to
add Malmesbury.2 Bath, which while held by Queen Edith
(d. 1075) had paid geld with the rural hundred of its name,3
was in the thirteenth century accounted a hundred and its
court was called the hundred, as at Chester, the rural hundred
being distinguished as the forinsec or out hundred.
Later evidence further suggests that other boroughs than
Malmesbury which are not described as hundreds in Domesday
Book were actually reckoned as such in the eleventh century.
The Worcester city court was known as the hundred so late as
1241 4 and Gloucester was reported by the sheriff in 1316 to
1 Shrewsbury, Winchcoinbe, Bedford, Cambridge, Norwich, Thetford,
Ipswich, Colchester, Maldon, Canterbury, Rochester, Fordwich, and
Sandwich. Pevensey hundred in the Anglo-Saxon period was probably
an ordinary agricultural hundred with its caput in the borough and its
union with the borough as the “ Iowey ” of Pevensey a Norman innovation.
For its constitution in 1256, see Sussex Arch. Coll. iv. 210.
4 See below, p. 53.
3 D.B. iv. 106. When it reverted to the crown after the queen’s death,
ɪt was evidently claimed as an ingeldable royal manor of the south-western
type (see below, p. 51), the collectors of the geld of 1084 reporting that it
had not paid on the twenty hides at which it had been assessed (D.B. iv. 68).
4 V.C.H. Wore. iv. 382.
E