104 THE BURGESSES AND THEIR TENURE
of holdings in neighbouring manors by burgesses of Bedford,
London, and Norwich. “This,” he says, “is not burgage
tenure ” 1 It certainly is not, but who has ever claimed it as
such ? The investments of later citizens in rural land might
with equal reason be used as evidence that they did not hold
their town houses by burgage tenure.
More plausible is Dr. Stephenson’s deduction from a
well known and much disputed set of entries in the Domesday
survey of the rather abnormal borough of Canterbury.2 In
these he sees evidence of three different forms of tenure by
burgesses, and concludes that uniform burgage tenure did not
yet exist. These difficult entries will be best discussed in the
next chapter. All that need be said here is that the “ book-
land ” was apparently held by a gild not by individual bur-
gesses and that tenure in alodia was not incompatible with
rendering of the royal customs, as we have seen in the case of
the Ipswich burgesses who “ lived on their own land and
rendered all custom in the borough.” 3 The Canterbury
alods are indeed expressly said to have been held of the king.
It must be kept in mind that before the Conquest the king’s
customs were not merely exigible from royal demesne in the
Norman sense of the term, but in fact or in theory from all
land which had not received exemption from them. Liability
to these customs on the part of the alodiarius on the one hand
and the tenant of a church or thegn on the other, practically
established a double tenure of which the tie with the king was
the early form of burgage tenure. Burgage tenure itself, as
every collection of medieval town charters shows, was, as the
result of more or less free sale and devise, combined with fee-
farm and lease tenures, under which economic rents for larger
than the landgable were paid to others than the king.4 The
landgable had become merely a quit rent on land which was
accounted royal demesne in the Norman settlement, but in
the eleventh century, combined as it was with the other
customs, it was more than an ordinary rent, it had a wider
and public aspect and in practice was exacted by the king
not as landlord in the strict sense but as lord of the borough.
1EHR xlv (1930), 186 One of the Bedford burgesses' holdings at
BiddenhamisnotedtohavebeenpurchasedaftertheConquest(Z)B ɪ 218)
2 Ibid ɪ 2a, I 3 Above, p 92
4As early as the Winchester survey of 1107-15 the former was some
times distinguished from the landgable as renta (D B ιv 536a, ɪ—Gardmi)
The rent as well as the landgable might be the king’s (ibid 532a, ι∙—Hugo
Oilardus) Professor Stephenson notices these entries (p 190), but the
volume number is misprinted.
CUSTOMARY TENURE AND BURGAGE 105
With Dr. Stephenson’s more speculative argument against
the existence of anything like burgage tenure before the
Conquest, based upon his conception of the normal Anglo-
Saxon borough as almost purely agricultural and of its bur-
gesses as in the main cultivators of the land of a rich minority,
we have already dealt1 Burgage tenure he considers to have
been almost entirely 2 a new development in England due to
the commercial energy and urban experience of the new
Norman lords of the land.
Except in the case of Norwich, Domesday unfortunately
tells us little about the communities of French settlers estab-
lished in various towns or round new castles before Iθ86.
It was only natural that they should be treated with special
favour. At Shrewsbury, they were exempted, as the English
burgesses bitterly complained, even from the danegeld.3 At
York nearly 150 tenements occupied by them had ceased
to render customs.4 This was no doubt in large part a tem-
porary state of things and, as Hemmeon correctly noted,5
the general tendency later was towards assimilation of these
settlements in the old boroughs to the model of their English
neighbours and not the reverse, but their influence and that
of the new castle-boroughs may certainly have tended towards
the disappearance of personal services of the kind which was
occasionally required from the burgesses in some Anglo-Saxon
boroughs.® The id. custom of the “ new borough ” (Mancroft)
at Norwich, which covered everything but forfeitures,7 un-
1 Above, p 78
2 For exceptions allowed by him, see pp 96, 100
3DB 1 252a, I iIbid t 298a, I
5 Burgage Tenure in England, p 168 He refers particularly to devise
of land
β On the other hand, we find the abbot of Battle exacting light
manorial services as well as rent from his new burgesses there (Chron
Mon de Bello, pp 12 ft , E H R xxιx 428 f ) and the Conquest brought
with it some danger of feudal burdens, especially in small mesne boroughs
The three aids were customary in the thirteenth centurv at Egremont
(BBC 1 91), and at Morpeth (ibid 11 119) all but ransom at Saltash
(ibid p Ir6) Special grants of liberty of marriage were found necessary
ɪn the twelfth century (ibid 1 76 ff ) Nor were the new burgesses all
French Of over 100 at Battle, t Hen I, about three fourths were
Fnglish At Baldock, Herts, where also the names and holdings of the
burgesses are recorded, old English names were rare in 1185 (Lees, Rec of
Templars, 66 ff ) From the fact that only the first in the list is said to
hold de burgagio, Miss Lees infers that it was the only such tenancy
(P Cxxxviii ) The words were of couιse understood in all the following
cases
'DB 11 u8a Professor Stephenson's suggestion that there was a
rent at Southampton " for all customs ” seems untenable See above, p 100,