58
BOROUGH AND COURT
A borough might be attracted into another hundred than
that in which it was locally situated, for financial reasons,
for payment of geld or of farm. Worcester, though probably
already a hundred of itself, was placed, as we have seen, in
another hundred for geld, and a further case will meet us
presently in the east of England. An illustration of the second
type is found in Surrey, where Southwark, though it lay actu-
ally in Brixton hundred, is surveyed in Domesday Book under
the hundred of Kingston, for no other reason apparently than
that the royal revenue from the borough was included in the
farm of the king’s important manor of that name. It is not
necessary to suppose that the men of Southwark had to go
to Kingston for justice, and indeed the Domesday account
contains a passage which points almost as directly to the
existence of a court within the borough as the similar but
more explicit record at Wallingford.1
The same kind of association may explain the survey of
the other Surrey borough Guildford under Woking hundred,
for though it actually lay within that hundred the king’s reeve
there is recorded as taking amends for forfeitures within the
vill.a
It has been claimed 3 that the nature of the relation of
boroughs to hundred courts is settled by a passage, unique in
Domesday, which relates to a borough at the opposite side of
the Thames, but here again mediatization makes certainty
unattainable. Dunwich, which lay in Blythburgh hundred,
Suffolk, four miles from its caput, belonged to Edric of Laxfield
before the Conquest, and to Robert Malet, his Norman successor,
afterwards. Domesday reports that the king had this right
{consuetude) in Dunwich that two or three should go to the
hundred (court) if properly summoned and if they failed to
appear were amerced, and that if a thief was taken there he
should be judged in Dunwich, but his execution should take
place at Blythburgh. His goods, however, were to fall to
the lord of Dunwich.4 There is a court therefore at Dunwich
which can try even a capital case, though it cannot carry out
the sentence, but it is a feudal court and we cannot be sure
that it has ever been anything else. Or the other hand, the
small and special attendance at the hundred court reserved
by the king does not seem absolutely clear evidence of an
earlier and fuller hundred suit from the town. If the arrange-
1 D.B. i. 32a, i. 2 Ibid. f. 30a, I.
’ Ballard, Domesday Boroughs, p. 53. 4 D.B. ii. 312.
THE DOMESDAY EVIDENCE
59
ment was Norman, and it is not said to be older, it may only
be an early instance of the common stipulation which bound
feudal tenants to afforce higher courts in certain cases.
Whether such a custom could have arisen before the Conquest
in the case of a mesne borough, it would be idle, in the present
state of our knowledge, to speculate.1
Two other East Anglian boroughs are surveyed in Domesday
Book under rural hundreds which did not bear their name.
Yarmouth is given separate treatment among the other
Norfolk boroughs at the end of the Terra Regis. Sudbury
appears on the Suffolk Terra Regis as an escheated possession
of Ælfgifu, mother of Earl Morcar. Sudbury, therefore, as
well as Yarmouth, was in the king’s hand in Iθ86. Both
were considerably less populous than Dunwich in юбб and
very much less twenty years later. They have lived to see
that already doomed town almost vanish into the sea.
Yarmouth, which was subject to the earl’s “ third penny,”
may have been the meeting-place of the hundred of East Flegg
to the danegeld of which it contributed no more than one-
twelfth. Its borough court first appears, but not as a novelty in
John’s charter of 1208 with the name husting which is certain
evidence of London influence.
Sudbury was locally situated on the south-western border of
Babergh hundred in Suffolk, but at some unknown date it
had been transferred to Thingoe hundred, though ten miles
from its nearest point. Round has shown 2 that this was done
to replace the exactly equal assessment to danegeld of Bury
St. Edmunds in Thingoe, the tax having been granted to the
abbey. Babergh, being a double hundred, could afford the
loss. It is surely most unlikely that this book-keeping change
involved suit to the Thingoe courts for the Sudbury burgesses,
any more than a somewhat similar allocation of the Worcester
assessment did.3 Perhaps the remark : soca in eadem villa,
with which the Domesday description ends, means that Morcar’s
mother had left a court there. The usual phrase when
hundred soke was claimed by the crown was : “ the king and
the earl have soke.” Sudbury, unlike Yarmouth, was a rural
manor with an urban centre, but the latter had undoubtedly
two of the supposed criteria of a national borough, “ hetero-
geneous ” tenure and a mint.
1 On Malet’s forfeiture under Henry I, Dunwich reverted to the crown,
ɪt was in the queen’s hands ɪn 1156 {Pipe R. 1156, p. 9), but this did not
ɪast long {ibid. 1169, p. 99).
2 Feudal England, pp. ɪoo, ɪoɪ n. 3 See above, p. 46.