possession of separate courts in an earlier age has been seriously
questioned.

In the absence of any direct information upon this point,
a solution of the problem may be sought by an examination of
a feature of local jurisdiction, almost confined to the south
and particularly to the region with which we are now concerned,
that distinction between the in hundred and the out or forinsec
hundred which Miss Cam has recently investigated with such
thoroughness.¹ The recognition of the manor which was the
administrative centre of a hundred and gave its name to it,
as a separate inner hundred was far from being confined to
manors which were early boroughs, or which developed burghal
features later. Yet the fact that a number of boroughs,
Andover,² Basingstoke,³ Bath,⁴ Leominster,⁸ Reading,⁶ and
Wells ⁷ were associated or contrasted with forinsec hundreds
of their name, and that at Bath the distinction is possibly
as old as Domesday, suggests that this reveals at least one
way in which separate borough courts came into being. These
in-hundred courts developed urban features while those in
manors which remained mere market towns, or not even that,
became purely manorial.

As Bath alone among the six boroughs mentioned above is
a known Anglo-Saxon borough and the Domesday date of its
in-hundred is not certain, while the evidence for the others
is not earlier than the twelfth century, we are not in a position
to state definitely that this particular source of borough
courts goes back beyond the Norman Conquest. The dis-
tinction of in- and out-hundred is certainly not found in
every case of a pre-Conquest borough in this quarter which
(or a wider manor of its name) was the caput of a hundred.
The Dorset Dorchester, for instance, at the time of the
Domesday survey was locally in, and gave its name, to a
hundred of more than seventy hides. Like other royal
domains and their boroughs, however, in this and the neigh-
bouring counties, it was financially independent of the hundred,
contributing nothing to its geld,⁸ and by the thirteenth century

¹ In the article quoted above, p. 50, n. 6.

² B.B.C. i. 229.                                 ³ Ibtd. ii. 307.

¹ E y ton, Somerset Domesday, i. 105.

⁵ Cotton MS. Domit. A. iii. f. 116 (duo hundreda de Leom^,).

⁸ E.H.R. xlvii. (1932), 360. Cf. B.M. Harl. MS. 1708, f. xix b.

^, E.H.R. xlvii. (1932), 362.

⁸ In the Geld Roll for Dorset (1084) the distinction is in one case ex-
pressed by a statement that Whitchurch hundred contained 84f hides
praeter firmam régis (Eyton, Key to Domesday ; Dorset Survey, p. 141 и.).

the hundred, with some additions, appears as a distinct hundred
of St. George,¹ taking its name apparently from the saint to
whom the parish church of Fordington, another ingeldable
royal manor, running up to the walls of Dorchester, was
dedicated. It is, however, possible that before this re-organi-
zation the geldable hundred was known as the forinsec hundred
of Dorchester, though there is no trace of this in the Pipe
Rolls or, so far as we know, in other records. In the case of
the Wiltshire borough of Malmesbury, on the other hand, the
question does not arise, for Domesday tells us that in its pre-
Conquest farm there was included the king’s share of the pleas
of the two (adjacent) hundreds of Cicementone and Sutelesberg.²
As it is very unlikely that the borough owed suit to two hun-
dreds, the presumption is that it had always been reckoned as
a hundred, and this seems confirmed by an early thirteenth-
century record that the abbot of Malmesbury had by the
king’s grant three hundreds, Malmesbury, Sterkeley, and
Cheggeslawe,³ the two latter being those mentioned in
Domesday under more archaic names.

If this reasoning be sound, we may with some probability
trace urban jurisdiction in the two boroughs to inclusion in
the original division into hundreds or some later revision of
it in the case of Malmesbury and to the fission of a primitive
hundred, before the Conquest, in the case of Dorchester.

Of the eight towns ⁴ in Somerset, the status of which as
boroughs in 1066 is proved by the payment of the “ third
penny ” of the total revenue from each of them to the local
earl, though in two instances no burgesses are mentioned,
five gave their names to hundreds, but it is only at Bath,
the chief town of the county, that we have clear evidence
then or later of fission and the establishment of an in-hundred
of the borough.⁵ Bath and Milverton were in the hands of
Queen Edith, the rest were included with royal manors in
one or other of the firma unius noclis groups. Of the three
which were not capita of hundreds, Axbridge and Langport
were grouped with the neighbouring capita of the hundreds in

¹ Book of Fees, i. 88 (Inquest of 1212).               ² D.B. i. 64b, I.

³ Book of Fees, i. 379. A modern statement (quoted by W. H. Jones,
Domesday for Wiltshire (1865), p. 223) that the boundary of the two latter
hundreds ran through the centre of the borough, is apparently merely
? false inference from the passage in Domesday, for Cheggeslawe (Chedglow)
ɪs called Cicementone, a name which is not found after 1086.

¹ Bath, Ilchester, Milborne, Axbridge, Langport, Bruton, Frome
and Milverton.                                         ⁵Above, p. 45.

<<   <   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   >   >>