VI
SUMMARY AND GENERAL CONCLUSION TO 1066 ɪ
If the foregoing reconsideration of the evidence leaves no
room for the old idea, which was still held by Miss Bateson,
that a specially created urban court formed a universal legal
criterion of the early borough,2 it does not bear out Dr.
Stephenson’s contention that his own criterion of mercantile
settlement was generally absent, and the normal borough
merely an agricultural group much of the usual manorial
type. Every borough had a market3 and every borough was
a port, a place of trade. The early trade even of the more
considerable of these ports must not be judged by the standard
of the great cities of the Netherlands,4 which, with rare ex-
ceptions, they never reached. Yet by the end of the Anglo-
Saxon period, many of them were evidently prosperous. Of
the thirty-five for which Domesday gives statistics of popula-
tion in Iθ66, twenty-one had more than 200 burgesses and five
of these (not including unsurveyed London and Winchester)
more than 900, involving total burgess populations of from
about 1000 to about 9500. In a large proportion of these
cases we should feel sure that the burgesses had some other
means of support than agriculture, even if Domesday did not
tell us that the 1320 burgesses of Norwich had only 180
acres of arable and the 538 of Ipswich (which had eight parish
churches) only forty, and that among the vast majority of the
burgesses of Colchester the average share of the individual
was only a little more than a quarter of the villein’s yardland.
In his article of 1930 Dr. Stephenson recognized no real
1 As this study was written before the appearance of Dr. Stephenson’s
fuller and somewhat modified statement of his views in his book Borough
and Town (1933), I have thought it best to use for this purpose, with some
slight revision and additions, part of my review of that work in E.H.R.
xlviii. 642 fi. г See above, chapter II.
3Except perhaps the abnormal Seasalter (above, p. 67). Cf. p. 207.
1 For Professor Pirenne’s study of the origin of these cities and its
supposed bearing on the English problem, see above, p. 5.
130
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION TO ιo66
ɪɜɪ
towns outside the seaports of the south-east, but since then
he has been impressed by some of the population figures and
in his book Borough and Town,1 admits a considerably wider
extension of urban trade. In his concluding chapter the
large populations of York, Lincoln and Norwich—he might also
have added Thetford with its 943 burgesses—are recognized
as evidence of Scandinavian trade. The fisheries of Dun-
wich and the salt industry of Droitwich are noted. He is
even ready to allow that the beginnings of municipal privi-
lege may have extended beyond the south-eastern seaports,
though evidence of this is wanting, and that the Norman
Conquest only speeded up a process which was well under
weigh. But he still maintains that it had not touched the
ordinary borough and the line between the ordinary and the
extraordinary is left exceedingly vague. The Irish-Scandi-
navian trade in furs at Chester is obscurely alluded to elsewhere,
but nothing is said of the journeys of their cloth merchants as
far as Cambridge, of the iron industry of Gloucester, of the
presence of mercatores advenae at Exeter in 1068. The well-
attested activity of Anglo-Saxon merchants from Iceland in
the north to Rome in the south, the export of English cheese
to Flanders, the testimony of William of Poitiers to the skill
of their artificers in metal, are not taken into account. Even
where mercantile settlement is finally admitted, some incon-
sistency with earlier arguments is occasionally observable.
Not far short of half the population of English Norwich in
1086, for instance, is classed as dependent cultivators and the
municipal growth of the city is derived entirely from the
settlement of 125 French burgesses in a new borough, the
later Mancroft ward, under William L2 In this, as in two or
three other such new foundations, as at Nottingham and
Northampton, there is a certain likeness to the poorts of the
Netherlands which grew up outside feudal burgs, but at Norwich
at least the old borough was of a type very different from the
burg of that region and it is significant that its French neighbour
was known as Newport. Dr. Stephenson is inclined to claim
Cispontine Cambridge as another of these French boroughs,
reviving the old theory, combated by Maitland, which packed
1P. 212.
li It is claimed as significant that when here and elsewhere the old and
the new boroughs were amalgamated, the common centre was fixed in the
ɪatter, but it is an error to assert that this was the case at Northampton,
ajɪd other considerations, such as central position, may have determined
the choice elsewhere.