88 THE BURGESSES AND THEIR TENURE
of Ipswich,1 and the burgesses rendering custom only from their
heads of Colchester 2 had fared but slightly better, the latter
rendering only a small poll-tax towards the king’s geld,
yet they had not wholly lost their burgess status. These
were the wreckage of the Conquest and its sequel of castle-
building, rebellion, heavy taxation and official and baronial
extortion. Such losses of burgess customs are carefully noted
in Domesday Book, for these customs formed an important
part of the royal revenue and the diminished body of bur-
gesses was struggling to avoid being forced to make up the
deficiency. Nor was the king likely to make allowance for
the compensation he was receiving in another direction. It
was, as we have seen, one of the features which distinguished
most old English boroughs from the ordinary vill that the king
had to share their revenue with a high local official, almost
always the earl, usually in the proportion of two to one.3
These comital thirds, though not formally abolished, were by
the escheat of earldoms practically crown revenue in most
cases in 1086. Yet the formal distinction and the possibility
of the creation of new earls must have stood in the way of
any abatement of royal demands.
In holding that the burgess tenement rendering customs
was the unit for the collection of this revenue in the eleventh
as in the twelfth century, we have fortunately not to rely
solely upon indirect inferences from Domesday data. The
great survey itself incidentally supplies direct confirmation
of this view. In its description of Chester it records an
illuminating decision of the Cheshire county court that the
land, on part of which the church of St. Peter in the market-
place (de Foro) stood, had never, as its Norman grantee, Robert
of Rhuddlan, claimed, been attached to an outside manor,
was not therefore thegnland (Ieinland),i but belonged to the
borough and had always been in the custom (in Consuetudinei)
of the king and earl, as that of other burgesses was (sicut
aliorum burgensium).5 From this it may be concluded that
1 D.B. ii. 290a. 2 Ibid. fi. 106a, b. 3 Above, ρ. 64.
4 This was not the ordinary meaning of the term—" a plot carved out
of the manorial territory for a special purpose ” (Vinogradoff, English Society
in the Eleventh Century, p. 371). The theinland at Winchester, on the
bishop’s fief, from which Herbert the Treasurer rendered T.R.H. the same
custom as his antecessor T.R.E. (D.B. iv. 535a) perhaps belonged to this
latter category.
s Ibid. i. 262b, 2. The manor in question was apparently West Kir[k]by
in Wirral which Robert had given along with St. Peter’s to the Norman
abbey of Evroult. His gift was confirmed by William I and. Henry I,
THE “CUSTOM OF BURGESSES”
89
land in a borough which had long been recognized as not subject
to this custom might be treated as part of a rural manor. Its
inhabitants were not burgesses, and this seems to be confirmed
by Robert’s calling his three tenants on the land in dispute
hospites in a charter executed before the decision and b u rgences
in one granted after it. The vital distinction in the early
borough then according to this decision, was between customary
land tenanted by burgesses and land free from custom which
was not so tenanted.1 The former was, strictly speaking, the
only borough land. In two boroughs, remote from Cheshire,
it seems possible to identify it as a definite area. A chance
remark in Domesday that one of the messuages in Oxford
held in 1086 by Walter Giffard had been granted to his ante-
cessor by King Edward out of the eight virgates which were
then Consuetudinariae2 carries back beyond the Conquest
the “ Octovirgate régis ” from the custom of which twelfth-
century kings made grants of landgable.3 It is certainly no
mere coincidence that at Wallingford King Edward had also
eight virgates in which were 276 haws rendering gable and
special service by road or water to four royal manors.4 It
would seem that in both cases this area represents the original
lay-out of an artificial borough, the revenue from which was
reserved for king and earl. In boroughs which had grown up
within Roman walls, so simple a plan is not to be expected.
Canterbury, for instance, was more an ecclesiastical than a
royal city. The king received gable from no more than fifty-
one householders, though he had jurisdiction over 212 more.5
There seems to have been some hesitation locally as to whether
the latter should be described as burgesses. The transcript
of the original Domesday returns made for the monks of St.
Augustine’s calls them first homines, then Hberi homines and
perhaps finally burgenses, as Domesday Book does.6 At Norwich
and Thetford, probably too at Buckingham, there is evidence
as well as by Earl Ranulf I of Chester (Orderic Vitalis, Hist. Eccl., ed. Le
Prévost, iii. 19, v. 186 ; Davis, Regesia Regum Anglo-Normannorum,
no. 140 ; Round, Cal. of Docs, in France, nos. 632, 636 ; Chartulary of
Chester Abbey, ed. Tait (Chetham Soc.), pp. 288 ff.). ɪt was not the owner-
ship of the church and its land that was in dispute but the terms on which
they were held.
ɪ The territorial distinction is clearly expressed in a Thetford entry:
abbas de Eli habet iii aecclesias et ɪ domunɪ Iiberae et ii mansuras in
Consuetudine, in una est domus (D.B. ii. 119a).
2 Ibid. i. 154a, i.
2 H. E. Salter, Early Oxford Charters, nos. 66, 78, 96.
4 D.B. i. 56a, 2. Cf. p. 17, n. 5. s D.B. i. 2a, ι.
• Inq. St. August., ed. Ballard (British Acad. Record Series IV), 7, 9, 10.