ploughlands of the king there is not clear, but this was in 1086
and they are not said to have had bordars.¹ In short, the
attempt to show from Domesday Book that the Anglo-Saxon
borough contained a considerable element of peasants in
subjection to richer townsmen and that it was a matter of
indifference whether these peasants were called bordars or
burgesses cannot be sustained. The contention that “ bur-
gess ” at this date meant no more than an inhabitant or con-
tributory of a borough or walled vill must be made good, if
at all, by other arguments.

The importance of “ fields and pastures ” even to the
eleventh century borough can easily be exaggerated. At the
Conquest much borough territory was in the hands of mag-
nates, lay and ecclesiastical. This was perhaps inevitable
where the territory was wide and included an outer belt of
pure country. Queen Edith and Earl Gurth had had granges
of four and two ploughlands respectively,² and the abbey of
Ely the manor of Stoke, comprising three,³ in the half-hundred
of Ipswich. In the outer ring of Colchester hundred Godric
“ of Colchester,” perhaps a wealthy citizen, had held Greenstead
and, according to the burgesses in 1086, five hides in Lexden
which had been rated with the city in 1066 but no longer
paid its share of the farm.⁴ The wide and rather barren tracts
of arable and pasture which the king and earl are recorded as
holding at Thetford ⁵ were doubtless rated with the borough,
but there is no indication that the burgesses had any agricul-
tural interest in them. The six ploughlands held of the king
by twenty-one of the burgesses in 1086 ^β were probably nearer
the town. The remoter land of Thetford was still national in
1086 save that the Conqueror had enfeoffed Roger Bigot with
the earl’s former share of the portion which lay in Norfolk,
but the wide region west of York, afterwards known as the
wapentake of the Ainsty, though it paid geld and shared in
the Irinoda nécessitas with the citizens, was held before the
Conquest almost entirely by Earl Morcar, the archbishop
and other landowners.

Even the nearer fields and pastures which were all that
many boroughs had inherited from a purely rural past» did
not always escape the encroachments of the manorial lord.
There is evidence, more or less direct, of this process in
Domesday Book, though the survey does not always take

¹ D.B. ɪi. ɪɪg.          ³ Ibid. ff. 290, 294.          ³ Ibid. f. 382b.

⁴ Ibid. f. 104.           ⁶ Ibid. ii. 118b.               ⁶ Above, p, 6g.

note of the borough land, an incidental mention of sheriffs’
requisition of burgess ploughs being, for instance, its only
reference to the double fields of Cambridge.¹ It is a curious
coincidence, if no more, that in a number of the larger
boroughs, widely dispersed over the country, the amount
of arable land, apart from royal demesne, was exactly or
approximately twelve ploughlands.² Cambridge—on later
evidence³—had about twenty, Nottingham and Thetford (?)
six, and small boroughs like Torksey and Lydford only two.
Yet Huntingdon with nearly four times as many burgesses
as Lydford had hardly more.⁴ Some boroughs, especially
among those which were founded late on royal estates, Brid-
port for instance, had little or none. Maldon had apparently
only 81 acres which was held by no more than 15 of about
180 burgesses who possessed houses.⁵ Even Dorchester, an
old Roman town, seems, as we have seen,⁸ to have had no
open fields of its own. But much more populous and im-
portant boroughs were little better provided with land.
Norwich with its 1320 burgesses had no more than Maldon
within its boundaries,⁷ though it had another 80 acres in the
neighbouring hundred of Humbleyard.⁸ Ipswich, with 538
burgesses and 40 acres among them,⁹ stands still lower in
the scale. Nothing but abundance of urban employment
will explain these figures.

In large boroughs like these the growth of suburbs may have
reduced the arable area, but a more general cause was the
extension of manorialism into town fields. At Ipswich the
granges of Queen Edith and Earl Gurth perhaps intruded
upon them.

This eating away of burghal arable probably began earliest
round the old Roman cities. The oldest Canterbury charters

¹ D.B. f. 189a, ɪ. Later evidence shows that this does not mean that
no custom was due from them. The survey records, however, that the
lawmen and burgesses of Stamford had 272 acres free of all custom (ibid.
ɪ- 336b, 2) while the burgesses’ land of Exeter paid it only to the city (ibid.
ɪ. ɪooa, ɪ).

²Exeter and Derby each 12, Lincoln, 12⅛ (excluding the bishop’s
ploughland), Colchester about n⅜ (computed from details including 80
acres “ in commune burgensium ’’).

² Maitland, Township and Borough, p. 54.

* D.B. i. 203a, 2.            ⁶ Ibid. ii. 5b.            ^β Above, p. 56.

’ D.B. ii. 116. Not including 181 acres of arable and a little meadow
belonging in alms to churches held by burgesses, 112 acres and meadow
belonging to Stigand's church of St. Michael and 180 acres held by the king
and the earl.                   4bid. f. 118.

"Ibid. f. 290. A further 85 acres belonged to the churches of the
borough.

<<   <   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   >   >>