62
BOROUGH AND COURT
a compact group of freemen traders and is mentioned in close
association with weights and measures.1 Even the highest
class of burgesses who did not usually buy to sell, but only to
supply the needs of their own households, would not be
free from these problems. Apart from burgess rents, the
chief sources of the king’s and the earl’s revenue from the
borough were tolls and the profits of the court.
It was mainly in these hundredal courts adapted to the
needs of burgesses that their aspirations to greater liberty
and self-government first woke to life and found in them an
instrument which, powerfully aided by merchant gilds, ulti-
mately secured the realization of those aspirations and be-
came the sovereign body, the Communitas, of the fully developed
municipality. Who can safely say that the foundations of
this revolution were not being silently laid in the two centuries
preceding the Conquest ? It seems unsafe to argue that,
because a rate-book like Domesday tells us little or nothing
of these courts and is too often ambiguous in its references to
the features of the borough which might be communal, there
was no sense of community among its burgesses nor had they
any experience in translating it into action.
The hundred court was in one respect well fitted to foster
the growth of Communalism in the borough. Although a
royal court and presided over by a king’s reeve, it had a strong
popular aspect in its doomsmen and in its second officer, the
hundreds-ealdor, who was certainly not a royal officer and
who very probably, before as after the Conquest, was elected
by his hundred. What became of him in the towns is not very
clear, but perhaps he sank to be the sergeant of the borough
as the aiderman of the rural hundred ultimately dropped to
the position of its bedellus or beadle.2
Though the borough court of the later Middle Ages would
seem to have its fountain-head in that of the hundred, it was
much influenced by a tribunal of different origin, the London
husting,3 the most important of the three unique courts,
folkmoot, husting, wardmoot which the quite exceptional city
possessed. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the composi-
tion and working of these bodies is of entirely post-Conquest
date, but for the husting it goes back to the first half of the
ɪ In the larger boroughs the hundred organization had to be modified.
See Edg. iv. 4, Liebermann, Ges. i. 210. For the king’s peace in boroughs
cf. ibid. ii. 551 ff., 555 and 661, § ɪɪ f. Seealso below, ρ. 119, n. 3.
2 Rot. Hund., ii. 214. 3 See above, p. 40.
THE DOMESDAY EVIDENCE 63
twelfth century, by the end of which the older open-air folk-
moot had become a mere survival as a court of justice. Its
decline had doubtless begun when the “ house court ” was set
up in the tenth century with the object, one may surmise,
of providing more suitable conditions than were possible in
a large popular assembly.1 Thus the jurisdiction which the
open-air hundred court exercised in other boroughs 2 was in
London, for the first time, used under a roof. That side of
the hundred’s work which was concerned with the keeping of
the peace is here found in the hands of the wardmoots after
the Conquest and the presumption is strong that it was done
by them in Anglo-Saxon times, though the wards are not
mentioned in any extant source of that date. It can hardly
be without significance that the aidermen, who presided in
the wardmoots, were also the judges of the Anglo-Norman
husting.3
The most obvious formal differences between the fully-
developed medieval borough court and the rural hundred
court are its weekly or fortnightly, instead of monthly, session,
and its.meeting in Gild Hall, Moot Hall, or Tolbooth,4 instead
of in the open air. In both these features, especially the
former, the influence of the London husting can be seen. The
restriction of the husting meetings to not more than one a
week in Henry Γs and Henry IΓs charters to London was
copied in a whole series of town charters before the end of the
twelfth century,5 and sometimes fixed the name husting upon
their local court.
The conclusions to which the foregoing inquiry has led
seem definitely to discourage the hope of finding a universal
criterion of the early borough in the possession of a court of
1 For this court, see W. Page, London : its Origin and Early Development
(1923), pp. 213 fl. ; E.H.R. xvii. 502.
2 At Leicester in the twelfth century in the common churchyard
(M. Bateson, Records of Leicester, i. 4), at Oxford in the churchyard of
St. Martin (J. Parker, Early History of Oxford, p. 122), at Norwich in
Tombland (vacant land) near St. Michael de Motstowe or ad placita
(W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, Records of Norwich, i. Introd. V), and at
Ipswich in the Thingstead (H.M.C. 9 Rep. pt. I, p. 233).
iE.H.R. χvii. 487, 493.
4 If a court for the old English borough at Norwich continued to be
held separately from that of the Norman new borough for some time after
+κ c°nTuest. ɪt was merged with the latter before the thirteenth century,
the single court meeting in the new borough or Mancroft, as it was now
called, no longer in the open, but in the king’s Tolboth.
6 B.B.C. i. 442. The rule was applied to the hundred court of Bristol
Vbtd- p. 43).