54
BOROUGH AND COURT
which they lay, but Ilchester, the second town of the shire in
population and wealth, was associated with Milborne (Port),
a royal manor and borough ten miles away. Here, at any
rate, there can have been no jurisdictional tie, and the burgesses
must either have attended the court of one of the adjoining
hundreds, perhaps that of Stone which their successors are
found farming from Henry II,1 or they had a hundred court of
their own. One fact seems prima facie to favour the first
alternative. The items of the borough revenue which was
shared between king and earl are given in Domesday Book,
and they do not include the perquisites of a court. This is
not, however, conclusive, for the perquisites of a borough
hundred court may have been comprised with those of the
rural hundred courts in the profits of the pleas of the shire
which king and earl shared in the same proportion as they
did the render of the borough.
But whether or not Ilchester, with its 108 burgesses and
found worthy of the liberties of Winchester by Henry II,
had already a separate court, there seems less likelihood that
the minor Somerset boroughs, only one of which had more
than forty burgesses and two had none,2 enjoyed that privi-
lege, especially those in which a hundred court for a wide area
regularly met.3 So far, then, as this type of village borough,
the future market town, is concerned, Ballard might perhaps
have had a good defence for the heterodox view which he
developed in his Domesday Boroughs but afterwards retracted
in deference to the stern reprehension of Miss Bateson.1 The
mistake he made was in extending his theory of the subjec-
tion of burgesses to the jurisdiction of rural hundred courts to
boroughs in general and in combining it with an unquestion-
ing acceptance of that interpretation of Edgar’s burhgemot,
which sees in it a purely burghal court established in most, if
not all, boroughs.5
ɪ Book of Fees, i. 79.
2 Frome and Milverton are not credited with burgesses either in юбб
or 1086. There was a market in both. Milverton, but not Fromel was
afterwards accounted a " Borough town ” and had a portreeve down to
1835-
’ The hundred which with the market at Bruton was granted to the
priory before 1205 (Mon. Angl. vi. 336 ; cf. Book of Fees, i. 80) was clearly
not a burghal hundred and the pleas (placita} which the men of Milborne
(Port) were farming in 1212 with the market for £5 (ibid. p. 79) were doubt-
less those of the whole hundred of Milborne. 4 See above, p. 32.
s One of his main arguments for the burghal suit to external hundreds
was the insufficiency of the three meetings a year of the burhgemot (above,
p. 38) for the needs of a trading community.
THE DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
55
As the smallest boroughs of the south-west almost certainly
did not possess separate courts, hundredal or other, while the
place given to a small minority of its boroughs at the head of
the survey of their counties suggests that they at least had
such courts, the questions arise where was the line drawn and
by what tests. The number of the burgess population would
no doubt be a chief factor in the decision, and with one excep-
tion the six boroughs which occupy this exceptional position 1
had more burgesses on the royal demesne in 1066 than those
which were allotted a humbler place, save Bath and Ilchester.
These had almost exactly the same number of burgesses as
Bridport, which is described “ above the line,” and the only
reason apparently why they were not thus isolated was that
the Domesday commissioners in Somerset adopted a different
arrangement, surveying all the king’s boroughs under their
respective firma, noctis groups and Queen Edith’s under her
separately described estate. We have seen that independently
of this population test, there is some probability that they
already had separate courts. Where the test seems to break
down is at Malmesbury, but Domesday only gives the 1086
figure (51) and the borough may have been more populous
before the Conquest. It is some slight confirmation of this
line of argument that .the six boroughs, with Bath, are the
only mint towns, SaveepiscopalTaunton, recorded in Domesday
Book for this region. All six, with Bath and, for a time,
Ilchester, are afterwards found in possession of courts of their
own, while of the other seventeen royal boroughs in the four
counties which are mentioned in Domesday, only seven appear
later as towns of separate jurisdiction. In this land of petty
boroughs, burghal status was precarious. Cricklade, Caine,
Bedwin, and Milborne, though they attained to no chartered
privileges, were recognized as boroughs by prescription and
sent members to Parliament, but Tilshead, Warminster,
Bruton, Frame, Milverton, and Lydford dropped out of the
list altogether. Frame and Milverton, as we have seen, had
practically ceased to be boroughs by the date of Domesday,
though Milverton retained some burghal features.
An intensive study of the ecclesiastical relations between
the boroughs and their vicinities may some day throw light
upon the problem we have been discussing. There seems to
1 Malmesbury, Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham, Shaftesbury, Exeter.
Yet it is difficult to deny separate courts to the lesser Devon boroughs.
They had buτhwitan like Exeter (above, p. 42).