The name is absent

₉8 THE BURGESSES AND THEIR TENURE

secundum libéras leges et Consuetudines burgensium de
Eboraco . . . sicut Turstinus archiepiscopus ea eis dedit.” ¹

Some old English boroughs of less importance than these
were subject to more burdensome “ customs ” and only
slowly obtained release from them. The special favour of
Henry U indeed acquitted the burgesses of Wallingford as
early as 1156 from “work on castles, walls, ditches, parks,
bridges and causeways, and from all secular custom and
exaction and servile work.” ² It has already been mentioned
that agricultural services or their equivalent in money were
exacted from the burgesses of Lancaster and Leicester re-
spectively down to nearly the end of the twelfth century.³
Leicester had been mediatized after the Conquest and its
mowing service may have been imposed by its new lords, and
Lancaster, though a royal borough when freed from its service,
may have owed it to their Norman lord of Conquest date,
Count Roger of Poitou. If so, Norman influence did not always
make for greater simplicity and freedom. As late as the be-
ginning of the thirteenth century, the founder of the borough
of Egremont reserved certain agricultural services from his
burgesses.⁴

Even the “ villanous ” merchet was not immediately rooted
out by the Conquest from boroughs in the regions where it was
prevalent. Had it been, it would hardly have been necessary
for those who drew up the customs of Newcastle-On-Tyne
under Henry I to affirm so stoutly that “ in the borough there
is no merchet.” . . .⁶ It was forbidden in charters which,
like those of Durham and Wearmouth, incorporated Newcastle
customs, but the reactionary Egremont charter retained it, at
least in the case of a burgess who married the daughter of a
villein.®

Peterborough burgesses were liable to merchet for over
ɪʒθ years,⁷ and heriot or relief, which was excluded with it,
under the former name, from Newcastle and its daughter
boroughs,⁸ is not uncommon down to the very end of the
thirteenth century in the charters of boroughs founded by
Anglo-Norman lords, even when they contained a formal

* Early Yorkshire Charters, ed. Farrer, i. 92.

² B.B.C. i. 94.             ³ Above, p. 84.            ⁱB.B.C. i. 95.

⁵ Ibid. Archeeologia Aeliana, 4th series, Vol I (1925). Yet merchet
was not a mere villein custom in the north. See p. 83.

⁶ B.B.C. i. 95.         ⁷ V.C.H. Northants, ii. 425 and Addenda above.

⁸And as “heriot or relief” from Tewkesbury and Cardiff between
1147 and 1183 (ibid. pp. 75-6).

CUSTOMARY TENURE AND BURGAGË

exemption from all customs and services.¹ Normally a money
payment, a year’s rent not infrequently, but sometimes double
that or even more, it is only in the Salford group of boroughs
that it appears in the original heriot form of arms—sword
or dagger or bow or lance.² With one notable exception, it
never occurs in the charters of royal boroughs. Henry II,
however, reserved a relief of 12d. in his charter to Pembroke,³
which contrasts strangely with Earl Robert de Beaumont’s
earlier abolition of relief in his mesne borough of Leicester.⁴
In the demesne boroughs generally it was doubtless abolished,
where it had existed, without written authority or at least
any that has survived. Yet as late as the first quarter of the
fourteenth century the heir of certain tenements at Hereford,
which were held in free burgage, was charged with relief by
the Exchequer on the ground that he had done fealty to the
king. In the end the king ordered that if such tenements
were by custom free from relief, the demand was to be re-
linquished, notwithstanding the fealty.⁶

Further evidence that the Norman Conquest was far from
effecting a revolutionary change in the system of burghal
tenure in the ancient boroughs of the realm is afforded by the
persistence of eleventh-century nomenclature. The concrete
use of the term burgage for the tenement of the burgess which
readily suggested itself in new boroughs cut into approximately
or even exactly equal land shares never got any real hold in
the older cities and boroughs, with their more irregular lay-
out.® For them burgage had for the most part its original
abstract sense of “ borough tenure.” ⁷ The old English word
haw for the burgess’s holding did not wholly die out and the
more common French terms by which it was now designated,
mansion—akin to the mansa of the Anglo-Saxon charters-—

ɪ Relief is reserved in the charters of Bradninch and Lostwithiel which
both have the formula. Cf. B.B.C. i. 46, 48, with ibid., p. 76. Both heriot
and relief were exacted from the burgesses of Clifton-On-Teme (1270).
See R. G. Griffiths’s history of the town (Worcester, 1932), ch. v. p. 47.

^a B.B.C. ii. 95.           ³ B.B.C. i. 76. Between 1173 and 1189.

⁴ Ibid. p. 117. Between 1118 and 1168.

⁵ Madox, Firma Burgi (1726), pp. 257-8.

⁶ In Dr. Veale's calendar of 226 Bristol feet of fines (Great Red Book of
Bristol, Introd., Part I, pp. 180 ff.) burgage in this sense occurs but once, in
5 John (p. 180),

’ Bourgage (burgagium) seems to have developed its several meanings
^ln the following order : (ɪ) Tenure in a bourg or borough ; (2) the area
over which the tenure extended, the bourg or borough in a topographical
sense ; (3) the normal tenement in it ; (4) the rent of the tenement (for
ɪɪɪs see the deed quoted above, p. 93 : “all service but burgage ").

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