146
FIRMA BURGI AND COMMUNE
small immunities of Archbishop Stigand and Earl Harold,
it seems to have been a matter of indifference whether the
citizens or the lands on which they lived were described as “in
the soke of king and earl.” Very instructive from our present
point of view is the record of the foundation of a new French
borough (the later Mancroft) by Earl Ralph after the Conquest.
In obvious imitation of the old system, he gave land to the
king in common (in commune) to make a borough between
him and the king, the profits of which were divided in the
ancient proportion. At the date of Domesday there were
forty-one burgesses “ in the demesne of king and earl.” 1
In this interesting arrangement the idea of joint holding
was indeed more clearly developed than in the old boroughs
where the derivative character of the earl’s rights was never
wholly lost sight of. The borough “ custom ” is sometimes
referred to as the king’s custom only,2 and the same lack of
precision may explain an apparent inconsistency in the des-
cription of Huntingdon, if it be not a mere error. In the
enumeration of the houses in the borough, twenty are recorded
to have been destroyed in making the castle “ which had
rendered 165. 8d. to the king’s farm.” 3 Lower down, in the
analysis of the borough revenue, this lost rent is described as
“ between the king and the earl.” What was the king’s
farm in question ? Not the firma burgi because that did not
include house rents (Iandgable) and presumably not the king’s
two-thirds since only a proportion of the loss fell on that.
Is it possible that the term is here applied to the whole revenue
of the borough before the separation of the earl’s third ?
King William does not seem to have been drawing the latter in
1086, so a reunion with the royal share is not the explanation.
The incompleteness, no less than the want of precision,
of Domesday Book prescribes caution in generalizing. It is
unsafe to assume that because the earl’s reeve took part in
raising the revenue in some boroughs, it was not finally divided
between king and earl by the king’s reeve as at Hereford.
There is equal danger in arguing from the silence of Domesday
that the earl’s reeve did not participate in the handling of
the revenue before division at Hereford and other boroughs
where he does not happen to be mentioned.
The division of the borough revenues (of which the
firma burgi in this period might only form a part) between
1 D.B. ii. 118. There was not actually an earl at this date.
2 Ibid. ɪi. 290. a Ibid. i. 203.
FIRMA BURGI IN 1066
,47
king aɑd earl maY be thought to have favoured farming by
the burgesses themselves, but the casual references in
Domesday do not include any indication of this procedure.
There is evidence, however, of sufficient communal conscious-
ness, in the larger towns at any rate, to make it possible that
London, Winchester, York, and Exeter1 had been able to
obtain for themselves from the Crown some relaxation of taxa-
tion, though this certainly did not amount to “ the right of
granting their own taxes.” 2 Dover secured from the Con-
fessor exemption from toll throughout the kingdom and, along
with Fordwich, Romney, and Sandwich, the profits of juris-
diction within the town.3 The mixed motives which induced
the Crown to grant charters of privilege so freely to the towns
in the twelfth century were already at work. A willingness
to show favour to communities with which it had close re-
lations and whose support at times was valuable was perhaps
generally accompanied by more immediate considerations.
The price of their judicial privilege to the seaports of Kent,
for instance, was an annual sea service.
From the evidence offered above, incomplete as it is, we
seem entitled to infer that, at all events in boroughs where
the regular issues were shared between king and earl, the pre-
Norman sheriff did not occupy the same dominant position
as his successor in the period of the early Pipe Rolls.4 Even
at Warwick, where (and where alone) borough revenue is
distinctly stated to have been included in the sheriff’s farm in
юбб, he was only responsible for the king’s share. It is not
certain that this itself was always comprised in the county
farm. Twenty years later, despite a notable extension of the
sheriff’s authority after the Conquest, this was not so in every
case. The king’s two-thirds at Malmesbury were in the hands
1 D.B. i. ɪoo.
2As suggested by Dr. Stephenson in American Historical Review,
xxxii (1926), 19.
3 D.B. i. i. See above, pp. 125-7.
4Dr. W. Morris seems to regard the pre-Conquest town reeve as nor-
mally the sheriff’s subordinate (E.H.R. xxxi. 34) but the Wallingford part of
hɪs evidence is based on an error (corrected ih his book The English Sheriff,
P∙ 32), the lumping of judicial income from hundreds with the farm of
boroughs was rare and not necessarily decisive, and it is not the case that
at Chester a certain fonsfactura collected by the reeve was made over
to the minister régis within the city.” The passage in question runs :
ɪnalam Cervisiam faciens aut in cathedra ponebatur Stercons aut quatuor
Solidos dabat prepositis. Hanc forisfacturam accipieb[ant] minis[tri]
ɪɛɪs et comitis in civitate in cιiiuscunque terra fuisset {D.B. i. 262b).
ne ministers of the king and earl are presumably the reeves of the preceding