72
FIELDS AND PASTURES
show that tenements in the city had appendant land outside
the walls, but Domesday Book records little such arable.
Much of the land on the northern and south-eastern sides of
the city now formed the large manors of Northwood and
Langport, belonging to the archbishop and the abbey of St.
Augustine’s respectively.1 Between them, they had no fewer
than 167 burgesses in the city, whose gable or ground rent
went to them, not to the king. The only land outside York
which its burgesses are said to have cultivated 2 belonged to
the archbishop. Ten ploughlands at Leicester, including
the greater part of the eastern field of the borough, were in
the fief of the bishops of Lincoln,3 and had perhaps been so
when their see was in the town (680-869). The Countess
Judith’s possession of six ploughlands outside it, belonging
to the borough, is only recorded for 1086,4 but they may have
been held by her husband Waltheof before the Conquest.
At Lincoln, apart from the bishops maneriolum of Willingthorpe
or Westgate with its one ploughland,5 which may or may not
have dated from before the Conquest, there were, it has been
seen, twelve and a half ploughlands in which the burgesses
had an interest, but four and a half of these had been granted
by 1066 to lawmen and churches.® In the latter they would
possibly pay an economic rent, but in the eight which were
demesne of king and earl the landgable of their town houses
might cover the agricultural appurtenances. Gloucester
seems to have had less than 300 acres outside its walls.7
Possibly the royal manor of the Barton of Gloucester, outside
its east gate, represented its older, wider territory.8
Of towns not of Roman origin or episcopal, few can have
had so little arable land as Oxford. Its northern suburb grew
up on land which from before the Conquest formed a rural
hundred, later known as Northgate Hundred and not incor-
porated with the borough until the sixteenth century. In
1066 the manors of Walton and Holywell in this hundred
came up to the north wall of the town. Maitland was inclined
1 D.B. i. 5a, i, 12a, i. 2 In part {per loca) : D.B. i. 298a, 2.
3 Ibid. f. 230b, 2. 4 Ibid. i. 230a, I.
s Ibid. i. 336a, 2 ; Registrum Antiquissimum, ed Foster, i. 189, 268.
β D.B. loo. cit. Queen Edith’s tenure of the two carucates at Torksey
was temporary. They reverted to the royal demesne at her death.
7 Blakeway, The City of Gloucester (1924), p. 99. There were at least
300 burgesses in 1066 (H. Ellis, Introd. to Domesday, ii. 446).
8 Cf. Barton by Bristol in the farm of which the issues of the borough
were included in ro86.
FIELDS AND PASTURES 73
to fancy that they were formed out of the fields of an older,
more agricultural Oxford.1
Where the borough arable had always been limited in
amount, as at Huntingdon, manorialism was less likely to
creep in.2
Too much stress must not be laid, therefore, upon the
agricultural aspect of the Anglo-Saxon borough. Clearly
there were some boroughs which were practically as urban
as a modem town, while those which retained most arable
land were often much less agricultural than they may seem
since its cultivation was left to a small number of the burgesses.
There is one conspicuous instance, however, in which the land
is known to have been very generally distributed among them.
This was at Colchester, where it was so important a feature that
a complete census of these royal burgesses and the houses and
land held by them was taken and included in Domesday Book.3
The number of burgesses was 276 and the number of acres
divided among them 1297 or not far short of eleven plough-
lands. Round, anticipating Professor Stephenson, remarks :
" The whole effect produced is that of a land-owning com-
munity, with scarcely any traces of .a landless, trading
element.” 4 Closer examination modifies this impression,
despite the complete absence of trade descriptions. In the
first place nearly one-half of these burgesses, 124, had houses
only and must in most cases have got their living otherwise
than off the land. Secondly, the burgesses had often more
houses than one, in two cases as many as ten and a half and
thirteen. There were seventy-seven more houses than
burgesses and their tenants must be added in part to the
landless class, though perhaps they included the twenty-two
burgesses who had land but no houses. Again, the land
shares were usually small, only 8 acres per head on the average
and less than half that for two-thirds of the landholding
burgesses as the following table will make clear :—
ɪ Township and Borough, p. 45. Cf. p. 7. He included Wolvercote,
but this was in a different hundred.
2 Only king and earl drew custom from the fields which " belonged ”
to the borough (D.B. i. 203a, 2).
, Ibid. ii. 104-6. The figures resulting are those of 1086. There may
have been changes since 1066 which are not recorded.
4 V.C.H. Essex, i. 417.