46
BOROUGH AND COURT
form a hundred in itself.1 Both of these boroughs belong to
that important type which is given separate treatment at
the head of each county in Great Domesday, and has therefore
been presumed fairly enough to have possessed a court in-
dependent of any rural hundred and co-ordinate with its
court, but, as hundred rubrics are not attached to them,
as they are in Little Domesday, the probability that the
borough court was still very generally a hundred court itself
has not always been duly appreciated.
It may very well be that the great condensation of the
original returns imposed upon the clerks who compiled Great
Domesday, caused them to omit hundred rubrics in these
cases as unnecessary, while those who put together Little
Domesday, having a much freer hand, inserted them together
with much other detail which was suppressed in Great
Domesday. It is true that the latter often gives the assess-
ment of the borough to danegeld, and where this is exactly
a hundred hides, as at Cambridge and Shrewsbury, there can
be no doubt that it had a complete hundred organization. But
the assessment of many boroughs, especially in the south-west,2
was so low that it tells us nothing. Even Worcester was
rated at no more than fifteen hides and that in a non-adjacent
rural hundred. The obvious unlikel.hood that the citizens
of Worcester did suit to the distant court of Fishborough
hundred may help to resolve the m re difficult problem
presented by Northampton and Hunting Ion. According to
the Northamptonshire Geld-Roll (1066-75, the county town
was rated as twenty-five hides byrigland in the hundred of
Spelho,3 perhaps a fourth of its original assessment. Domesday
Book itself records that until King William’s time Huntingdon
paid geld on fifty hides as a fourth part of Hurstingstone
ɪ Feudal Aids, ii. 263-4. Hereford, however, was returned as in Grims-
worth hundred (ibid., p. 385). It lay close to the southern border of the
hundred. Hertford occupied a similar border position in the hundred to
which it gave its name. In 1066 it paid geld as ten hides. It does not
necessarily follow that either town was subject to the hundred court.
A court of the vill of Hertford is mentioned in 1359 (V.C.H. Herts, iii.
459-6). On the other hand, the hundred court of Bristol, which is evidenced
as early as n88 may very well be of post-Conquest origin. In Domesday
Book the borough is surveyed with the adjacent royal manor of Barton
in Edredestane hundred (D.B. i. 163a, 2).
a Where, indeed, it was not an assessment to the danegeld. See below,
P- 51∙
3 Ellis, Introduction to Domesday Book, i. 186 ; Round, Feudal England,
p. 153. The hundred adjoined the town.
THE DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
47
hundred, a double hundred.1 Each borough stands centrally
in its county, after the Midland fashion, and, as at Leicester,
three rural hundreds converge upon it. We may be practically
as certain in the one case as in the other that these hundreds
stopped short at the borough boundary and that the borough
itself, as a separate administrative and judicial area, was an
integral part of the division of the county into hundreds.
As in the case of Worcester, their danegeld payments were
allocated to a neighbouring rural hundred to make up its full
hundred or two hundred hides. This was merely a matter
of convenience and it does not imply any judicial dependence
upon rural hundred courts, the meeting-places of which were
some miles away. Low assessments, such as Worcester
enjoyed, were evidently due to reduction by royal favour,
beneficial hidation as it has been called, but there were many
boroughs, even county boroughs, whose resources could not
bear the taxation of even half a rural hundred, and their
assessments sometimes came in useful to make a round number
of hides in one of these.
Ballard suggested in 1914 2 that the convergence of rural
hundreds upon the bounds of old Roman towns like Leicester
is a very early feature, going back to their resettlement by
the English, whose first bishoprics and mints were fixed in
them, and indicating that they were treated as urban hundreds
with independent courts. The new boroughs fortified long
afterwards during the struggle with the Danes were given the
same type of organization. This theory, it will be seen, as-
sumes the early origin of the hundred and its court, a theory
which was never applicable to the regions north of the Thames
and is now pretty generally abandoned in the case of those
south of the river. Nothing is known of the area over which
the folkmoot, the predecessor of the southern hundred court,
exercised jurisdiction, but there is a possibility, not altogether
unsupported by evidence, that its centre was a royal burh 3
and the court of an old Roman town may have been a dis-
trict court, such as there is some reason to conjecture was the
case at London,4 and not the purely urban tribunal of Ballard’s
theory. However this may be, the convergence of rural
ɪ D.B. i. 203a, 2. William I had substituted for it a " geldum monete."
The Northampton assessment was also obsolete. The " boroughland " is
recorded with waste land, etc., as not having paid danegeld (Round, op. cit.,
P∙ 156), but we are not told what had taken its place.
3 The English Borough in the Twelfth Century, p. 37.
3 See above, p. 36. 1 Above, p. 41.