76
FIELDS AND PASTURES
for baronial burgesses are not usually stated for both хобб
and 1086, as are usually those of the burgesses on royal
demesne, but for the latter date merely. Nevertheless, by
assuming the equation of burgess — tenement, choosing the
clearer cases and occasionally using a 1086 figure with all
reserves, some rough estimates may be reached which will
be below rather than above the truth. The usual multiplica-
tion by five for the household has been adopted. The figures
of course would be increased if the number of non-burgesses,
who did not hold tenements rendering royal customs, could
be estimated, but no evidence is available. As London and
Winchester do not appear in the survey, York comes out
easily first. Our estimate of the population on the royal
demesne and in the archbishop’s exempt “ shire ” is over
8000, and if the barons’ burgesses were as numerous as twenty
years afterwards, 700 or so would have to be added. Next
in the list is Norwich, the most satisfactory figure, for it in-
cludes all burgesses in 1066, in number 1320, and gives a total
population of 6600. Lincoln comes third with a royal burgess
population alone of 5750, and as there were about 120 baronial
burgesses in Iθ86, the city may have been only slightly less
populous than Norwich. Thetford ranks fourth with a total
population approaching 4750. There is a considerable drop
to Ipswich which had, however, over 3000 burgess inhabitants,
if we carry back the seventy-one baronial burgesses of 1086.
It is abundantly evident that such populations must have
been predominantly urban in occupations and means of
subsistence.
The validity of Dr. Stephenson’s theory can be tested
in yet another way. If the Anglo-Saxon borough had been,
as he supposes, essentially a group of agricultural units, each
similar to the villein and bordar unit of the rural manor, we
should expect in the one case as in the other to find the unit
treated as a whole for purposes of taxation and charged with
its due proportion of the danegeld laid upon the borough.
But this was not the case. It is true that the borough was
assessed for the tax in hides or carucates, like the open country,
but, as Domesday clearly shows, there was never any question
of the hide (carucate) or its fractions in the repartition of the
geld among the burgesses. It was charged upon the house
of later times was already not unknown. At Colchester there were more
houses than burgesses, but this was in 1086 (above p. 73). They were not
“ waste " houses, however, such as were many in the boroughs at that date.
FIELDS AND PASTURES 77
within the walls,1 or the messuage on which it was built,2
any agricultural land outside being for this purpose, as it
was perhaps usually for rent, regarded as merely an appendage
of the urban tenement. The amount of money due upon the
hidage of the borough was divided equally between these
tenements.
The theory under discussion is, indeed, impossible to re-
concile with the plain facts of Domesday Book. What we
find there is a twofold division of the burgesses into king’s
tenants and tenants of external magnates. The theory
involves a cross division into burgess landlords and their
agricultural dependents, who might or might not be called
burgesses, for which there is absolutely no direct evidence
and indeed every presumption to the contrary. It is based
upon a mistaken interpretation of certain passages in Domesday
and a misunderstanding of some features—in part, temporary
•—of the urban life there described. Maitland’s conclusion in
the case of Cambridge still stands fast, mutatis mutandis, for
early boroughs of the type which had a good deal of agricultural
land :—
“ Already in the Confessor’s time it paid geld for a hundred
hides : that is, it paid ten times what the ordinary Cambridge-
shire village would pay. Clearly, therefore, in the eleventh
century it was not a vill of the common kind ; its taxable
wealth did not lie wholly in its fields. But fields it had.
It was cast in an agrarian mould.” 3 In this respect Cambridge
stands at one end of the scale. At the other end is Maldon
where one-twelfth of the burgesses had (in Iθ86) little more
than half a hide of land apiece and the rest “ nothing beyond
their houses in the borough.” 4
ɪ As at Chester (D.B. i. 262b, ι).
2 As at Shrewsbury (ibid. 252a, ι).
a Township and Borough, p. 54.
4 B.B. ii. 5b. For Professor Stephenson’s later admission of some
urban character in towns such as Norwich, see below, p. 131.