Ill
THE BOROUGH FIELDS AND PASTURES
In the article 1 to which reference has already so often been
made, Dr. Stephenson finds no difference between the hundred
court of the borough and those outside it, and sees in this a
confirmation of his main thesis that the Anglo-Saxon borough,
with a few exceptions in the south-east, was merely a walled
microcosm of the rural world without. Domesday Book, he
claims, shows that it had the same social and economic struc-
ture as the countryside.2 Trade played little part and the
burgesses were still essentially an agricultural group. It
was only the growth of commerce stimulated by the Norman
Conquest which transformed such groups into urban com-
munities, towns in the modern sense of the word.
That the student of burghal history, no less after than
before the Conquest, “ has fields and pastures on his hands ”
we learnt long ago, but it is new doctrine, unknown to Maitland,
that in the middle of the eleventh century they were being
cultivated by peasant burgesses for their richer fellows. The
evidence offered for this view consists substantially of the
mention in Domesday Book of ‘ ‘ burgesses outside the borough ’ ’
at the small Devon boroughs of Barnstaple, Lydford, and
Totnes,3 and of bordars at Buckingham, Huntingdon, and
Norwich. Of the former, it is only those at Totnes, a mesne
borough since the Conquest, who are reported to be terram
Iaborantes, and even they may have been cultivating it for
themselves or for the whole of the burgesses. Buckingham
1 E.H.R. xlv. (1930), 177 ff. ; Borough and Town, pp. ɪɪɪ ff.
2 For his similar deduction from the tuns of the early grants of land
in Canterbury and Rochester, see above, p. 7. It is more plausible at
that date, but the amount of agricultural land there could have been
within the walls is greatly exaggerated.
3 The in-burgesses were respectively 40, 28 and 95, the out-burgesses 9,
41 (not 48 as Professor Stephenson says (p. 179)), and 15 (D.B. i. ɪooa, 2 ;
108b, ι). The further suggestion that the burgenses Exonie urbis who had
outside the city 12 carucates of land (ibid, ɪooa, ι) were individual rich
burgesses, employing such out-burgesses, is surely rash. See below, p. 114.
68
FIELDS AND PASTURES
69
was a small borough on a royal manor,1 like those of the south-
west, the bordars belonged to the manor and are carefully
distinguished from the burgesses. So are the IOO bordars at
Huntingdon who indeed are expressly said to be subordinate
to the burgesses (sub eis), though helping them in the payment
of the king’s geld.2 The 480 bordars of Norwich who first
appear in 1086, contrasted with the burgesses as paying no
custom owing to poverty, were clearly former burgesses im-
poverished by the rebellion, fire, taxation and official ex-
tortion which had almost halved the burgess body in twenty
years.3 They had lost all burgess qualification and become
mere cottagers,4 getting their living, we must suppose, in the
minor employments of town life. A similarly impoverished
class of “ poor burgesses ” at Ipswich and Colchester is claimed
by Dr. Stephenson as evidence that the Domesday compilers
used “ burgensis ” and “ bordarius ” indifferently, but is
really proof of a careful distinction, for, unlike the Norwich
bordars, these poor burgesses, though they had ceased to
pay the full custom, were still able to pay a poll tax.5 In
any case, this class could have found little agricultural work
at Norwich or Ipswich, for both had a singularly small amount
of borough arable.
It is true that this arable at Derby and Nottingham was
divided (partita) between a fraction of the burgesses, about
a sixth in the first case and a fifth in the other, but these were
not rich landowners for their “ works ” (opera) and, according
to one possible interpretation of a difficult passage, their rent,
were part of the royal revenue nor were they bordars for, at
least at Nottingham in 1086, they had bordars under them.6
They ought perhaps rather to be compared with the lessees of
borough land of whom we hear at Huntingdon, where the
officers of the king and the earl seem to have allotted the
leases among the burgesses.’ The tenure of the twenty-one
burgesses (out of 720) of Thetford who held more than six
1 " Buchingeham cum Bortone ” (D.B. i. 143a, ι). Bourton may
mark the site of the southern of the two forts built there by Edward the
Elder (Place-Names of Bucks., p. 60).
2 D.B. i. 203a, 1. These bordars, whose existence is only mentioned for
ιo86, are not definitely said to have worked in the fields, which the burgesses
cultivated (ibid. 2). 3 Ibid. ii. 116b, 117b.
4 Borde, '' hut," " cottage " had no inherent rural meaning.
t D B. ii. 290, 106b. At Dunwich in 1086 there were 236 burgesses
and 178 pauperes homines. The population had largely increased since 1066
when there were only 120 burgesses (ibid. ii. 3πb).
. β Ibid. i. 280a, i. These twenty bordars are mentioned in connexion
with the agriculture of the burgesses. ’ Ibid. f. 203a, 2.