50
BOROUGH AND COURT
The south of England, outside Kent, where large boroughs
were rare, but small boroughs were many, shows the borough
community in quite a different relation to the division into
hundreds. The borough which is an area entirely distinct
from the rural hundreds around it occurs,1 but is never actu-
ally called a hundred in Domesday Book.2 More often, the
southern borough is physically imbedded within some rural
hundred to which it not infrequently gives a name and a
place of meeting.3 Even Exeter lay within the great hundred
of Wonford, the meeting-place of which at Heavitree was only
a mile from the city. This broad contrast between the Mid-
land and the southern borough is not surprising in view of
the later date of the hundred divisions north of the Thames
and the comparative fewness of boroughs there. What is
unexpected is the conformity of the Kentish borough to the
Midland type.
In central and, to a less extent, eastern and south-eastern
England the boroughs could be treated as distinct hundredal
areas when the hundreds were first plotted out. In the south
and south-west, where the hundred first appears ipso nomine
in the second quarter of the tenth century, that would have
been Usuallyimpracticable. Withfewexceptions, the boroughs
were too small and too awkwardly situated. It seems possible,
even likely, however, that the problem had not normally
to be faced and that the boroughs were founded within local
administrative and judicial areas, with their centres in royal
burhs or tuns, which were often substantially the same as the
later hundreds. The hundred court was apparently here,
we have seen,4 a re-organization of an earlier local court, the
folkmoot of the ninth century. A complete system of local
judicial areas would appear to be implied in the existence of
this early court, and these may not have been very greatly
altered in the re-organization of the next century. This was
substantially Liebermann’s view,5 it affords a reasonable
explanation of the burh courts of Athelstan’s reign without
resorting to Professor Chadwick’s theory of special creation,
and recent research tends to confirm it.6 Professor Chadwick
ɪ Three rural hundreds, for example, adjoined Chichester.
2 For a suggestion that MaImesbury may have had a hundred organiza-
tion, see below, pp. 51, 53. Ilchester was perhaps another instance.
3 E.g. Bath, Bruton, Frome, Cricklade, Dorchester, Pevensey.
4 Above, p. 36. 6 Ges. ii. 450, § 4g ; 452, §§ 13d-k ; 518, § 10.
ɑ β J. E. A. Jollifie, " The Hidation of Kent,” E.H.R. xliv (1929), 612 ff. ;
" The Domesday Hidation of Sussex and the Rapes,” ibid. xlv. (1930),
427 fi. ; H. Cam, '' Manerium cum Hundredo,” ibid, xlvii (1932), 353 fi.
THE DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
51
himself was the first to call attention to this continuity,1 but
unfortunately gave an entirely different interpretation to
what seems to be the most cogent piece of evidence for it.
In the south-west, the classical land of the West Saxon
small borough, we get our clearest glimpse of its relation to
the hundred in Iθ66. The borough here is actually or origi-
nally on the demesne that pertained from of old to the crown
and, like all estates of that demesne, it was free from danegeld.
It usually stood within a hundred and was quite commonly
its caput, but for this particular tax it was an exempt area.
An exemption shared with every rural manor of the crown
did not of course constitute a burghal distinction or imply a
separate borough court. A real burghal distinction, on the
other hand, was possessed in 1066 by the Devon and Dorset
boroughs and one in Wiltshire,2 which owed certain military
or naval services, some of which were commuted, and this
may have been one reason why, with the exception of the
three smaller Devon boroughs, they were surveyed separately
at the head of their counties, though the exception is a warning
not to press the suggestion too strongly. These not very
onerous services, perhaps of recent origin, did not, however,
relieve the boroughs of Dorset at any rate, except Shaftesbury,3
from the ancient and much heavier burden of the firma unius
noctis which accounts for the general exemption from danegeld
of the ancient demesne of the crown and the boroughs which
arose upon it. The evidence of Domesday is not complete,
but it shows that all the boroughs of Somerset save Bath and
three out of four in Dorset were included in one or other of
the groups of ancient demesne estates among which this now
commuted food-rent was apportioned, while four out of the six
great Wiltshire manors which are recorded as rendering each
a full firma noctis had already burgesses at their centres.
Involved in hundreds and often in firma noctis groups, limited
to local trade, the lesser boroughs of the south-west had for
the most part little future, even where they did not sink into
mere market towns or villages as at Bruton and Frome.
More prosperous places such as Ilchester and Milborne Port
ɪn Somerset and Calne and Cricklade in Wiltshire, though
they afterwards ranked as boroughs by prescription and were
represented in Parliament, never attained the status of
towns of separate jurisdiction. It is not surprising that their
l A.S.I. pp. 233 ff., 249 ft. 2Malmesbury.
3 Two-thirds of which had been alienated to the abbey (D.B. i. 75a, ɪ).