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BOROUGH AND COURT
a few are definitely stated to have existed before the Conquest.1
Whether these went very far back may be doubted. Edward
and Athelstan’s attempt to restrict marketing to boroughs
had failed, but it was in favour of permitted buying and
selling with hundred court witnesses not of private markets.
The vital importance of the market in the borough is well
seen in the record of the building of the burh at Worcester
towards the end of the ninth century.2 Only the universality
of this feature will explain the equivalence of borough and
port. It was the chief source from which king and earl could
recoup the cost of fortification and secure a permanent income.
Before the Norman Conquest then, as indeed after it, the
species borough of the genus vill comprised communities of
the widest diversity in size and importance. Once planned
out, they had prospered or decayed, as local and national
conditions favoured or restricted their growth, without much
regulation from above. Trade of some sort they all had and
the free tenure without which trade cannot be carried on,
but beyond these uniformity must not be expected. These,
however, are fundamental and form in favourable circum-
stances the necessary basis of all future municipal growth.
A new institution has grown up capable of great expansion
and full of unforeseen possibilities.
A very different conception of the Anglo-Saxon borough
has recently been put forth by Dr. Stephenson. Save in the
case of a few seaports it was, in his view, not really urban
at all, but merely a special kind of agricultural group. The
Norman Conquest is not to be regarded as supplying a new
and vigorous impulse to a somewhat lethargic earlier develop-
ment, but as effecting a complete transformation in the
character of the borough community. The history of the
English borough as an urban institution might, in fact,
without much loss, be begun at Iθ66.3 In considering the
case presented for this novel and interesting view, it will be
convenient to deal first with the evidence offered in proof of
the essentially agricultural character of the normal borough
in the Anglo-Saxon period.
1Those at Launceston and ,'Matele ” in Cornwall (Z) B. i. 120b, ɪ),
and at Hoxne and Clare in Sufiolk (ibid. ii. ff. 379, 389b). Launceston was
afterwards reckoned as a borough.
2 Above, p. 20.
3 In his book Borough and Town, Dr. Stephenson has made his con-
clusion somewhat less sweeping. See below, ρ. 131.
Seasalter
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Note on the “ Little Borough ” of Seasalter in Kent
The “ parvum burgum ” of Seasalter by WhitstabIe,
which Domesday Book (i. ʒa, ɪ) says belonged to the arch-
bishop of Canterbury’s kitchen, but the “ Domesday
Monachorum ” of Christ Church (Mon. Angl., i. ɪoɪa) calls
“ burgus monachorum,” has been a stumbling-block to those
seeking a criterion of the borough in the eleventh century.
It was largely agricultural and the only population mentioned
is forty-eight bordars. Being only a little over five miles
from Canterbury, it never seems to have had a market nor
is there any record of burgesses or burgages, of court or third
penny.1 Ballard concluded that it was impossible from the
evidence of Domesday to define the difference between a
borough on an agricultural estate and a village. The only
distinction that appears in this case is that Seasalter had
valuable (oyster) fisheries which yielded in 1086 a rent of
255., increased to £5 by the date of the “ Domcsday Mona-
chorum.” This local industry probably accounts for its being
charged at the higher rate of ι∕ιoth, with boroughs and manors
of ancient demesne, in the parliamentary taxation of the four-
teenth century and so sometimes described as a borough in
the chief taxers’ accounts (Willard in Essays in honour of
James Tait, p. 422). The use of the term in the eleventh
century must either be explained similarly or as a case of that
south-eastern survival of burh as a manor-house which is
found in the well-known London names Aldermanbury and
Bucklersbury and in the more obscure burh of Werrington
in Essex, given by Edward the Confessor to Westminster
Abbey (Mon. Angl., i. 299, no. xxi.). A further possibility
might seem to be raised by the mention in 1463 of the “ Borg
of Seasalter ” (9 Rep. H.M.C., app., pt. I, p. 103b), for borg(h),
“ tithing,” and burg, burh, “ borough,” were inevitably con-
fused in Kent. But the evidence is too late for any safe
inference.
1 It was a liberty and so not in any hundred. Fordwich is also de-
scribed as a small borough in Domesday Book (1. 12a, 2), but it had ninety-
six masures, ι.e. burgess tenements, in 1066.