8'2 THE BURGESSES AND THEIR TENURE
the thegn.1 Liebermann, in his glossary under London,2
regarded its £5 wergild as pre-Conquestual and a southern
equivalent to the £8 of the thegns of the Cambridge gild,
whom he took to be the upper class of burgesses there, but in
the article Wergild,3 apparently realizing the difficulties which
this suggestion raised, he seems to associate it with Norman
alterations in wergilds. It is to be noticed that, whatever may
have been the case before the Conquest, there was no dis-
tinction of wergild among the London citizens after it.
Although the mention in 1018 of the witaιι of the
boroughs of Devon 4 is sufficient to show that the aristocratic
organization of the borough community in the Norman age
was no new thing, it is impossible to draw a clear picture of the
upper class in the boroughs from such scanty and ambiguous
evidence as we have been putting together. The most direct
glimpse we get of it in Domesday is perhaps the statement that
the twelve judges of Chester were taken from the men of the
king and the bishop and the earl,5 but it would be highly
dangerous to make inferences from this even to other boroughs
in which all three were interested.
As for the mass of the burgesses, their fully free status is
clearly established by the evidence of Domesday, the almost
complete absence of any private service for their tenements
save rent, the frequent mention of their power to sell them and
the rarer references to mortgages and in some East Anglian
boroughs the striking correspondence of the terms in which
their position is stated to those used of freeholders elsewhere,
all this leaves no doubt that they must be classed, mutatis
mutandis with the freemen who held by what came to be
known as socage tenure, where that prevailed and with similar
but more burdened freeholders elsewhere. Undue stress has
been laid in criticism of this view upon the hunting and
guard services required from the burgesses of Hereford and
Shrewsbury during royal visits, the summer reaping on an
adjacent royal manor by the former and the merchet payable
on the marriage of their daughters by the latter. The demands
made upon the freemen, within and without the boroughs,
varied with local conditions. In the western frontier-land
they were inevitably more onerous than, to go to the other
1 Six times that of the ceorl. 2 Ges. ii. 571, § 9a.
a Ibid. p. 732, § 5. The /5 buvhbrece (more probably borhbryce) of
Ethelred ITs London law (ibid. i. 234) was not, as Miss Bateson supposed
(E.H.R. xvi. (1901), 94), a wergild (see Liebermann, op. cιt. ɪɪi. 165).
4Above, p. 42. 5 D.B. i. 262b.
SOCIAL STATUS OF BURGESSES
ɛʒ
end of the scale, in Scandinavianized East Anglia. The
services exacted were mostly of a public character ; the hunting
and reaping services, which the Normans regarded as servile,
were among those required from thegnly lords of manors in
the land between Ribble and Mersey 1 and merchet, as Maitland
showed long ago, was being paid in Northumberland as late
as the thirteenth century by men who held whole vills in
thcgnage.2 It should be noted, too, that such services—though
not apparently merchet—were laid upon the burgesses of
Hereford indifferently, with no exception for those who had
the horse and arms of the thegn.
More pertinent to the question at issue are the half-dozen
cases collected from Domesday by Professor Stephcnson of
what he terms villein-burgesses, doing some sort of agri-
cultural service.3 There are really only four in which work
on the land is more or less clearly indicated, for the Tewkesbury
burgesses at Gloucester “ servientes ad curiam ” were no more
rendering agricultural service than the bishop of Worcester’s
forty-five demesne houses in that city which rendered nothing
“ nisi opus in curia episcopi,” 4 and the servitiιιm which
Nigel’s five haws at Arundel gave instead of rent is equally
vague nor need their occupants have been burgesses. We
might almost deduct a third, for the Wichbold burgesses in
Droitwich did only two days’ boon work in the year on their
manor besides “ serving at court.” Such occasional agri-
cultural service is indicative of free tenants not of villeins.
The remaining three cases are stronger. That of Steyning in
Sussex is perhaps, however, capable of another interpretation
than Professor Stephenson’s. In that borough, belonging
to Fécamp abbey, it is said that xι8 masures “ad curiam
Operabantur sicut villani T.R.E.,"s but the Worcester “ opus
in curia ” suggests a поп-agricultural service in this instance
also, while “ sicut villani ” need only mean “ as villeins do.”
It was the duty of the West Derby thegns to build the king’s
houses “ sicut villani,” 6 but that did not make them villeins.
The somewhat similar Tamworth passage is not, however,
open to this explanation, for the eight burgesses belonging
ɪn ιo86 to the king’s neighbouring manor of Drayton (Basset)
ɪbi Operantur sicut alii villani.” 7 Possibly we have here
1 D.B. i. 269b, 2. 2 E.H.R. v. (1890)l 630 ff.
3 Ibid. xlv. 189 n. 1 D.B. ɪ. 173b, I.
s Ibid. f. 17a, 2. β Ibid. f. 269b, 2.
7 Ibid. i. 246b, 2.