48
BOROUGH AND COURT
hundreds upon them was not, as he himself admits, a uni-
versal feature of boroughs which had been Roman towns,
nor was it confined to them 1 It was inevitable in the Mid-
lands where towards the end of the tenth century many shires
were drawn each round a borough as centre and divided into
hundreds or wapentakes. A majority of these centres had
never been Roman. Where the shires were ancient and often
contained several boroughs, such neat planning was impossible,
but a fairly central position, if only for a wide section of the
shire area, would produce the same effect, as it did at Can-
terbury and at Winchester. On rhe other hand, Colchester,
formerly so important a Roman colonia, occupied such a
cramped position in the north-eastern corner of Essex that it
was almost completely surrounded by the rural hundred of
Lexden, even after it had become a full hundred by the
annexation from Lexden, probably not long before the Con-
quest, of four adjacent vills, including the hundred caput
itself.®
The distinction between a borough which was a full hun-
dred, as Colchester was, and one which, like Ipswich, ranked
only as a half-hundred, was financial not administrative or
judicial. Outside the borough proper Ipswich had a rural
“ liberty ” not much more than a fourth less than that which
surrounded Colchester.3 The “ half-hundred of Ipswich,”
which in Iθ86 gave evidence as to the land belonging in 1066
to St. Peter’s church in the borough,4 was clearly parallel
with the hundred court elsewhere and just as clearly the court
of the borough. Its clumsy title soon went out of use, but the
Colchester court continued to be known as the Hundred
right through the Middle Ages.6
Maldon, like Ipswich, was reckoned as a half-hundred.
ɪ Three hundreds, for example, met at Northampton which had no
Roman past.
3 It is a curious coincidence, if no more, that the liberty of Ipswich,
which with the borough constituted a half-hundred, was later also reckoned
to contain four vills or hamlets, four men and the reeve from each of which
were associated with a jury of twelve from the borough in coroners’ in-
quests (Hist. MSS. Comm. 9 Rep., pt. ι, app., p. 226 ; cf. pp. 233, 236).
The vills which with Chester composed the hundred of the city (D.B. i. 262b)
may similarly have been reckoned as four in number. In Shrewsbury
hundred there were three rural vills, one of which (Meole) was divided into
two manors.
3Area in 1836 (including the borough) 8450 acres (Rep. of Municipal
Boundaries Commission, 1837), while that of Colchester was 11,700.
lD.B. ii. 393.
5 Colchester Court Rolls, ed. W. Gurney Benham, vol. i. (1310-52),
passim.
THE DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
49
It is a most interesting case, for here we get a glimpse of the
process of forming a borough. The borough in this instance
was clearly cut out of the hundred of Witbrichtesherna (later
Dengie), by which it is entirely surrounded except on the side
of the Blackwater estuary, since Little Maldon, though it
remained in the parish of St. Mary in the borough, was left
in its old hundred.1 Maldon is described among the manors
on the terra régis and so does not comply with the canon that
boroughs of any importance are separately described in
Domesday Book.2 The explanation probably is that the
burgesses were all on the royal demesne and, so far as we know,
the earl did not share the revenue of the borough with the
king. Yet Maldon had nearly two hundred houses, as a
half-hundred it had its own court, it provided a horse for land
warfare and a ship for sea service, there was a mint, it received
charters from Henry II and Edward I, and was incorporated by
Philip and Mary in 1554. It seems possible that heterogeneous
tenure and the earl’s third penny were not essential to the
status of a borough.
The hundred-borough was also general in Kent. Canter-
bury, Rochester, Fordwich, and Sandwich appear as hundreds
in Domesday Book, the two cities each having a good deal of
agricultural land outside their walls. There was a hundred
of Hythe later, and each of the Cinque Ports, including
Hastings 8 in Sussex, had its hundred (court). That of Dover
is mentioned as early as c. 1202-04.4
1 D.B. ii. 29, 73, 75. C/. 5b, 48.
a Ballard (op. cit., p. 36) tried to draw a real distinction among these
between the boroughs which are placed under a hundredal rubric in
Domesday Book as the East-Anglian towns are, and those which have no
such rubric. The former, with or without other vills, were hundreds in
themselves, the latter were outside the ordinary hundred organization
but had a court, co-ordinate with that of the hundred, which originated
in Edgar’s legislation (above, p. 38). This will not do, for neither Chester
nor Shrewsbury has a hundred rubric, yet they are incidentally shown to be
hundreds by Domesday itself. A practical distinction may perhaps be
detected between the borough which, like Gloucester, does not appear as
a hundred until later and then without other vills and the hundredal borough
of Domesday with associate vills. Instances of the former type are found,
however, in 1086. Maldon is one. So, too, apparently are the smaller
borough-hundreds of Kent, Fordwich, and Sandwich.
3The "Cinque Port Liberty” of Hastings has every appearance of
having been cut out of the hundred of Baldslow, and Baldslow itself is
just within the northern boundary of the liberty, as Lexden is within the
hundred of Colchester (above, p. 48). See Place-Names of Sussex, ed.
Mawer and Stenton, vii. 534 and map.
4 S. P. H. Statham, Dover Charters (1902), p. 456. For the " little
borough ” of Seasalter, see below, p. 67.
4