We have only to compare these holdings with the villein’s
yardland of 30 acres to see that, as there was no question of
impoverishment here, all paying the full royal customs, the
land can only have been a subsidiary element of their liveli-
hood, especially as those who had about as much as a villein
were obviously the leading people in the town. The list is
primarily rather one of tenements than of burgesses since,
besides seven priests and some women, it includes the abbot
of St. Edmunds and three lay Norman lords.

Round’s further remark that many of these small holdings
must have been distant from the walls suggests that he did
not realize that they all lay, as it is pretty clear they must
have done, in open fields belonging to the borough.¹ The
outer rural zone of its territory, an addition of no great age,²
was at this time largely, if not wholly, manorial.

The Colchester terrier enables us to get an idea of what
the Cambridge fields must have been like before gifts and sales
to monasteries and colleges, with other changes, had obscured
their original features in the manner described so vividly by
Maitland in Township and Borough.

It is very unlikely that there was a borough in England
which still fitted into what has been called its arable “ shell ”
more closely than Colchester did. Nevertheless the foregoing
analysis tends to confirm the conclusions we have drawn from
the evidence of Domesday as to burghal agriculture in general.
It gives absolutely no support to Professor Stephenson’s
theory that, in boroughs where agriculture still prevailed, a
class of dependent peasants, occasionally called burgesses in
the general sense of inhabitants of a borough, cultivated the
land of the richer men, who, he holds, are always so called
in the survey. The theory, as we have seen, still more
markedly breaks down where, as at Norwich, the agricultural
shell has almost disappeared—though it is just here that

¹ A " Portmannesfeld ” is mentioned in an early charter of the local
abbey of St. John (Round, op. ctt. p. 423).

² Above, p. 48.

Professor Stephenson finds nearly five hundred burgess
peasants—and where, as at Maldon, it has never been more
than a small appendage to a borough which had been cut out
of a larger estate. The features in certain boroughs on which
the theory is based are capable of other explanation.¹

At Lincoln two of the lawmen held a ploughland apiece
and a third was joint holder of another, but it is doubtful
whether they ranked as burgesses.² Here, if anywhere, were
the theory sound, one would expect mention of peasant bur-
gesses or “ bordars,” but there is none. Nor do we hear else-
where of these peasant burgesses, dependent on fellow burgesses,
who, had they existed, must have become as unfree as rural
bordars.³ Manorialism in borough fields came from without
not from within, and even this extraneous manorialism con-
tained no threat to the personal or economic freedom of the
burgess. On the contrary, for there is much truth in the re-
mark of Maitland that “ we may even regard an arable ‘ shell ’
as an impediment to the growth of municipality.” ⁱ

If the Anglo-Saxon boroughs, which had agricultural
pasts, could lose more or less of their fields and yet be able to
support such large populations, for those times, as many of
them contained, it is clear that economically they were sub-
stantially urban and not agricultural units. Domesday
supplies plenty of figures for estimates of these burghal
populations, but they do not lend themselves to such precise
calculations as we could wish. The numbers given are often
those of messuages (mansiones. masurae) or more rarely houses,
and it may be sometimes doubtful whether each messuage
harboured one house or burgess only.⁵ Moreover, the figures

¹ Above, p. 68.                  ^! See below, p. 87.

³ If the poorer burgesses had had to cultivate richer burgesses’ land,
it might be thought that a fortiori they would have been called upon for
the same service on the little demesne estates of arable, meadow and pasture,
which the king or the king and earl reserved at Colchester (92 acres of
arable, 10 meadow and 240 pasture and meadow : D.B. ii. 107), Lincoln
(231 acres in land and 100 acres meadow : ibid. i. 336a, 2) and Nottingham
(3 ploughlands and 12 acres meadow : ibid. 280a, ɪ). But where mentioned
the cultivators are villeins and bordars of the ordinary rural type. Cf.
Derby (ibid. 280a, 2—Litchurch).

⁴ Township and Borough, p. 45.

^δ At Northampton it is stated that there were as many messuages as
burgesses, and at Derby and Ipswich the equivalence of burgess and
messuage is involved in the comparison of the state of things in 1066 and
1086. On the other hand, the “ 140 burgesses less half a house ” (domus)
at Huntingdon who had only 80 haws or messuages (not 20 as Professor
Stephenson reads) among them (D.B. i. 203a), and the three haws at
Guildford where dwelt six men (ibid. f. 30a, ɪ) suggest that the half burgage

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