102 THE BURGESSES AND THEIR TENURE
passage in the survey of Lincoln. A certain Godric, son of
Gareuin, on becoming a monk of Peterborough, had conveyed
his church of All Saints and its land to the abbey. The
burgesses in 1086 protested that the abbot had it unjustly
because neither Gareuin nor his son nor any other could give
it out of the city or out of their kin without the consent of the
king. Godric is not said to have been a burgess nor the pro-
perty a landgable tenement, but the rule is laid down quite
generally.1
In burgage tenure restrictions on the alienation of land,
protecting the interests of the kin were commonly and by
ancient tradition2 confined to inherited tenements, those pur-
chased by the burgess himself being left to his free disposition.
It is significant therefore that in a second survey of Gloucester,
made within a quarter of a century of Domesday, the
“ mansions ” of the royal burgesses are enumerated in these
two categories, though without any overt reference to cap-
ability of alienation.3
(4) The Anglo-Saxon burgess could also mortgage his
tenement. This is revealed by the complaint of burgess jurors
in 1086 that king’s custom was being withheld by certain mort-
gagees. At Exeter the abbot of Tavistock had one house
in bond (⅛ υadimonio} from a burgess 4 and Walter de Douai
two,5 from neither of which was custom rendered. A house at
Lincoln, for which the abbot of Peterborough was called to
account for not paying geld, had been held in bond by one
Godred 6 and may have been a burgess tenement, though this
is not definitely stated.’
In the tenurial system thus fragmentarily bodied forth in
Domesday Book the essential features of the burgage tenure
of the twelfth century, a fixed money rent, heritability and
ease of transfer either as security or outright, are sufficiently
recognizable. They are not seriously obscured by occasional
personal services in addition to the rent, by heriots and a
rare due on marriage or by many exemptions ranging from
the individual quittance of custom to the wide church soke.
There is, no doubt, a striking contrast between arrangements
so deficient in neat uniformity and the burgage tenure of the
1 D.B. ɪ. 336a, i.
2 Forthis distinction in early Teutonic law abroad, see E.H.RΛ. (1935), 2.
3 Ellis, Introd. to Domesday Book, ii. 446. The date is between 1096
and ιιoι.
4 D.B. i. 103b, 2. 5 Ibid. f. 112a, i. ∙ Ibid. f. 336b, ι.
’ The clear cases are late, but for A.-S. mortgages cf. pp. 42, 87 n. 5.
CUSTOMARY TENURE AND BURGAGE 103
late Middle Ages, when personal services of a non-civic kind
had entirely disappeared and the traffic in tenements, along
with some fall in the value of money, had reduced the landgable
to a mere quit-rent, often unlevɪable owing to subdivision.
It was only very gradually, however, that this stage was
reached and some irregularities, especially the church sokes,
still persisted. Much of the Anglo-Saxon disorderliness had,
as we have seen, survived into the twelfth century, and even
the thirteenth. And by the time it had been pruned away
burgage tenure had itself become something of a survival
for new avenues to citizenship, membership of merchant gilds,
apprenticeship and purchase had diminished the importance
of the house and levelled the distinction between the tenement
which paid landgable and that which did not.
In this evolution the Norman Conquest and the French
bourgage undoubtedly played a very important part, directly
or indirectly, though the immediate effect of the Conquest was
greatly to decrease the uniformity of tenure in the old borough.
But Dr. Stephenson, confining his attention almost entirely to
the evidence of Domesday on borough tenure and to those
features which differ most from pure burgage tenure, insists
that the Conquest was the starting-point of a wholly new
system. Had he carried on his inquiry into the twelfth-century
sources, he would probably have been more disposed to re-
cognize a development where he sees only a revolution.1 It
is immaterial, for instance, that landgable was a term used
for other than burghal rents. A general term may always
take on a more technical sense in special circumstances and,
as it happens, the gabelle of the French bourgage was also, as
is well known, in general use outside the bourgs.2, The process
of specialization in towns everywhere had necessarily to begin
from the general level, and it might be the effect of changes
without as well as within. Thus that most characteristic
feature of fully developed burgage tenure, freedom of bequest
of land by will, was entirely due to the prohibition by the
common law of what was general custom down to the end of
the twelfth century.
Irrelevant is a fair description of the argument Dr.
Stephenson attempts to draw from the mention in Domesday
ɪ This to some extent he now does, chiefly on consideration of the con-
siderable populations of the larger pre-Conquest boroughs (Borough and
Town, p. 212).
2 See below, p. ɪ ɪo.