122
THE BOROUGH COMMUNITY
lords’ upland estates and the borough market.1 An obvious
objection to the theory is that in the origin of the eleventh
century Cnihtengilds it finds no place for those king’s burgesses
who formed a majority in most towns. True, as Professor
Stenton remarks, these gilds had evidently a long history and
may have undergone many changes before the eleventh cen-
tury. It might even be significant that they are only recorded
in cities, Canterbury, London, and Winchester, where great
churches had large properties which at Canterbury at least
were connected with their rural estates. In these towns the
number of cnihts in the original sense would have been
unusually large.
Possibly, however, the theory has too narrow a basis.
A burgess under certain conditions could become a king’s
thegn. There were also civic thegns of lesser rank, burhthegns.
They are only certainly recorded in London and at the very
end of the Anglo-Saxon period, but in view of the extreme
imperfection of our evidence too much stress should not
perhaps be laid upon that. It should be noted, however, that,
with the exception of the Cinque Ports, London alone had
“ barons ” in the post-Conquest age.2
However this may be, the Canterbury and London evidence
affords clear proof of the existence of gilds of burgesses before
the Conquest and practical certainty that their members
were the leading traders of their towns. These societies must
have made for a stronger sense of community and their pre-
sence weakens the suggestion that the burgesses of an Anglo-
Saxon borough were a mere fortuitous collection of disparate
elements, with no real bond of union.3 But these gilds,
fostered though some of them were by the English kings,
had perhaps a more or less private character. At any rate,
Calveal the portreeve’s headship of the Canterbury gild is the
first evidence of that close connexion with the government of
the borough which made the Norman merchant gild so vital
a factor in municipal growth. The germs of the municipal
1 The First Century of English Feudalism (1932), p. 134.
2See below, pp. 256-9. Liebermann (Ges. ii. 571, 9a) agreed with
Ballard (Domesday Boroughs, p. 112) in regarding the burhthegns of some
of the Confessor’s writs to London as a patriciate and supported the view
by comparing the London wergild of £5 with the /8 wergild of the thegns
of the Cambridge gild (D.B. i. 189a). But it is not certain that these were
borough thegns, and elsewhere Liebermann seems to consider the London
£5 as a Norman innovation (Ges. ii. 732, § 5).
3 Canterbury is not one of the exceptions which Dr. Stephenson allows.
REVENUE-RENDERING AND ADMINISTRATIVE 123
corporation must rather be looked for in the borough farm and
the borough court.
3. The Burgesses as Revenue-rendering and Adminis-
trative Community
That-the burgess was not merely responsible as an individ-
ual for the burdens assessed on his own house is well known,
so far as the danegeld is concerned, from the complaint of
the English burgesses at Shrewsbury in 1086 that, though a
great many houses had been destroyed for the castle or given
free of geld to the new abbey or to Frenchmen, they were still
held liable for the whole of the original assessment. The zeal
with which burgess jurors in some towns reported baronial
absorption of burgess houses and the loss of royal custom,
which almost always resulted, points to a similar communal
responsibility for this ordinary revenue. Such responsibility
seems inherent in the system of collection which was in use.
The usually round numbers of the amounts paid over to king
and earl would suggest that these revenues, at any rate the
variable element, e.g. tolls, were farmed, even if there were not
occasional mention of the “ king’s farm.” The sheriff would
normally be the king’s farmer, as he was after the Conquest
until from the twelfth century onwards the boroughs them-
selves gradually obtained the privilege of farming the town
revenues from the crown and paying them direct into the
exchequer.1 The exceptional farming of the revenue of
Hereford by the town reeve 2 was of course not a case of such
farming by the burgesses, for he, like the sheriff, was a crown
official and his farm a private speculation. Farming by the
burgesses from the sheriff is not recorded in Domesday until
1086 and then only in one borough, Northampton.3 But the
silence of Domesday is not safe evidence and even if the pre-
Conquest sheriff did not adopt this course, he would naturally
leave the actual collection of borough revenue to the reeve and
burgesses as a cheaper and more effective method than levying
it by officials of his own.
It is a defect of the farming system that allowance for loss
of rateable tenements can only be secured by special con-
cession from the ultimate recipient, and this is not usually
easy to obtain. Hence the lament of the burgesses of Hertford
ɪ See below, chapter vɪ. 2 D B. i. 179a, ι.
3 Ibid. f. 219a, i.