134 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION TO 1066
burgesses had no share in the fields.1 As a source of revenue
burgess and house were convertible terms. It is true that
otherwise land tenure in the boroughs, differed little, if at all,
from free tenure outside them, but the peculiarities of the
later burgage tenure, especially that of devise of land, were
not due to foreign innovation but to changes in the common
law from which they were protected by their charters. Just
as borough law was merely an evolution from general law,
burgage tenure of land in England cannot historically be dis-
sociated from the common freehold tenure which came to be
known as “ socage.” As late as 1306 the mayor and aidermen
of London reported to the king that all tenements in the city
were held in socagio,i and it was half a century before in libero
burgagio replaced it in the conservative city.
For long after the Conquest liberum burgagium comprised
not merely land tenure, but the whole body of burghal privilege,
the status of a borough. Thus Henry I granted it to Beverley
“ secundum libéras leges et Consuetudines burgensium de
Eboraco.” It is not possible to take these “ laws and customs ”
as wholly of Norman introduction. The Domesday surveyors
would hardly have devoted a column and a half to the leges
of Chester before the Conquest, had they become altogether
obsolete. Henry Γs survey of Winchester shows no radical
change there nearly sixty years after that event. The rather
irregular landgable rents of 1066 were still in force, and even
a few of those occasional personal services which were required
from royal burgesses in some Anglo-Saxon boroughs and which
Dr. Stephenson regards as inconsistent with real burgage
tenure. None of them, however, were servile according to
English ideas and they occasionally lingered on to the eve of
the thirteenth century.3 That Norman castle-building and
mere ravaging made gaps in certain boroughs, which en-
ɪ More than half the whole body at Colchester, over nine-tenths at
Maldon.
2 See above, p. 107, n. 2. In the twelfth century the tenements then
held of the crown were known collectively as the king’s soke (Page,
London, p. x17). Cf. the payment de socagio to the king in the St. Paul's
rental of c. xι30 (Essays presented to T. F. Tout (1925), p. 56).
3 By a fortunate chance we are able to give a lower limit of date for
their disappearance at Chester. About 1178 Earl Hugh granted a charter
in which its citizens are described as Itben custumarιι and as having
Consuetudinanam Iibertatem, rendering only rent pro omni serυitio. Several
of the customs from which they were free are specified : tolls, arresting and
guarding prisoners, taking distresses, Carryingwritsand keeping night watch
(Chester Archieological Society's Journal, x. p. 15). Consuetudines is here,
of course, used in another sense than in the Beverley charter.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION TO 1066
135
tailed some early changes, is not to be denied, but they were
changes of detail not of principle. The Winchester burgesses
of c. IIio seem to have thought that the chief result was too
often to substitute pauperes for boni cives. They certainly
did not regard themselves as better off than their Anglo-
Saxon predecessors.
York, indeed, and perhaps Winchester, Dr. Stephenson
allows to be an exception to his general idea of the Anglo-
Saxon boroughs. But a re-examination of the Domesday
evidence for the “ ordinary ” borough of that date points
to a substantial continuity with later conditions which the
small and lifeless burg of the Netherlands, with which he
compares it, never exhibited. If absorbed in the poort, which
did not always happen, the burg became a mere fraction of
an entirely new organism. In England, on the contrary, the
beginnings of urban life were worked out within the walls of
its burhs not without them. The universal features were a
market and a free burgess tenement of urban type, held at a
low rent and within certain limits, which were enforced also
after the Conquest, transferable. A purely urban court was
less general. The London husting was then exceptional and,
at the other end of the scale, the minuter of the boroughs
of the south-west could have had no other court than those of
the hundreds in which they lay. It may, indeed, be conceded
to Dr. Stephenson that the court of most boroughs was in
origin an ordinary hundred court and that the hundred did
not always, as it did at Sandwich, for instance, coincide exactly
with the urban area. But the addition of three or four rural
vills to such an area, to make up a full taxative hundred or
half-hundred, left the court predominantly urban. The needs
of traders involved specialization and the tract Episcopus,
written before 1050, distinguishes between burhriht and
Iandriht. The appendant vills, the “ liberties ” of the later
municipal boroughs, were a wholly secondary element in their
judicial as in their administrative organization. No argument
against the urban character of the pre-Conquest borough can
fairly be drawn from the antecedents of a court which per-
sisted into the age of self-government, not infrequently, as at
Colchester, under its original name.
In these urban courts, which were administrative as well
as judicial, and in their ultimate responsibility for the borough
farms, the burgesses could not fail to develop some communal
spirit. Its scope was limited, no doubt, before, as for long