84 THE BURGESSES AND THEIR TENURE
a glimpse of a transition period in the conversion of a villein
into a fully free burgess, when, if his manor was near, he did
not immediately escape from all his customary duties there.
The two Shrewsbury burgesses who were cultivating St.
Julian’s half-hide at Shelton 1 were certainly doing agricultural
work, but they were paying rent and were clearly not of
villein status.
It may be noted, in conclusion, that in all the six cases
but one (Steyning) the service is stated as obtaining in 1086
only, and is not necessarily therefore of Anglo-Saxon origin.
And even if it were, the freedom of these burgesses from the
cultivation of (at least) manorial “yardlands” placed them
in a position very different to that of the purely agricultural
villein. They were, too, an almost negligible minority 2 among
the thousands of burgesses enumerated in Domesday. It is
unsafe to argue without further proof, as Dr. Stephenson does,
that these cases are only casual records of a more widespread
custom and further evidence that the Anglo-Saxon borough
was, socially and tenurially, as lacking in uniformity as the
countryside. It is evidence that burgage tenure in its fullest
form had not been attained in the eleventh century, but an
equal want of uniformity in its successor might be deduced
from the emancipation of the burgesses of Lancaster from
ploughing and other servile customs as late as 1193,3 the release
of the burgesses of Leicester by the earl their lord from a
mowing commutation about the same date 4 and the reserva-
tion of a day’s ploughing and a day’s mowing every year by
the founder of the new borough of Egremont c. 1202.5
The villanus even on his manor, and a fortiori in a borough,
was personally a free man, but if Professor Stephenson’s
interpretation of a passage in Little Domesday holds good,
a burgess might be a serf, and a serf in the eleventh century,
though not a mere chattel, was “ in the main a rightless
being,” a slave. The passage in question runs : “ In the
same borough [Ipswich] Richard [Phtz-Gilbert] has thirteen
burgesses whom Phin had T.R.E. ; over four of these he had
soke and sake, one of them is a serf (servus), and over twelve
commendation only.” The numbers, if not also the sense,
have suffered from over-compression, but taking the wording
1 D.B. i. 253a, i.
2 The total is 154, of which 118 (if each haw had its burgess) were at
Steyning.
3B.B.C. i. 95. 4 Ibid. p. 94. 6 Ibid. p. 95.
SOCIAL STATUS OF BURGESSES
85
as it stands, it is plain that the burgess, though a serf in Iθ86,
had not been one or at least not known to have been one
twenty years before, for a serf could not be subject to sake
and soke or free to commend himself to a lord. If this is
not merely an instance of that degradation of status which was
so common an effect of the Norman Conquest, it may be the
earliest recorded case of the reverse process, the enfranchise-
ment of the serf in the free air of the town.
To sum up. There is little direct or unambiguous evidence
about the personal condition of the burgesses before the
Conquest. Yet it is not impossible to make some more or
less general statements on this head. There were certainly
men of thegnly rank among these burgesses in some boroughs,
and the rest, the great majority, must necessarily, unless
altogether unjustifiable inferences are drawn from the Ipswich
“ serf-burgess,” have been ordinary free men. For there was
no middle rank between thegn and ceorl. In this aspect there
was no distinction between burgess and villein, their wergild
was the same. Another kind of distinction was, however,
drawn between them by their different relation to the land
and this was reflected in their heriŋts. The agricultural
villein’s Iieriot was his best beast,1 while even in those western
boroughs which diverged most widely from later standards
of borough freedom, money heriots only were required from
the ordinary burgesses. This contrast, which was vastly
accentuated by the deterioration of the villein’s status under
Norman manorialism, did not indeed extend to the rural rent-
paying tenant, for his heriot was also a money one,2 yet
conditions peculiar to the boroughs had long been drawing
other, though far less sharp, lines between the rental tenures
which the Normans distinguished as burgage and socage.
The very existence of the former before the Conquest has been
denied, but the sceptics have allowed themselves to be so
impressed by the developments of two centuries as to overlook
completely the essential unity of a nascent and a fully organized
system.
1 Leis Willelme, 20, 3 ; Liebermann, Ges. i. 507. Liebermann strangely
states that burgesses paid their best beast as heriot until released from it
by the crown in the twelfth century (ibid. ii. 307 s.v. " Besthaupt ”).
2 A year’s rent in the Norman period (Leis Willelme, 20,4; Liebermann,
Ges. ɪi. 507, 515, ɪii. 291).