154
FIRMA BURGI AND COMMUNE
Among minor points of interest in these borough renders
is the appearance even before the Conquest of payments that
anticipate those elemosynae Constitutae which figure so pro-
minently in the sheriffs’ farms in the Pipe Rolls. Small
sums were being paid in 1066 by Norwich 1 and Ipswich 2
“ ad prebendarios.”
The amounts of the borough farms or renders in Iθ86 can
only be used as an index of the relative size and wealth of
English towns at that date with a warning that the royal
demesne, from which the item of rents came, was a variable
quantity and that though the number of burgesses or inhabited
houses seems at times to show a rough correspondence with
the renders, it is subject to startling exceptions. Unfortunately
London, and Winchester are omitted from Domesday, but
the farm of London is known from later sources to have been
£300 in the time of the Conqueror.3 Next come York and
Lincoln with £100 each. The figure at Norwich was £90, but
payments to the sheriff, etc., brought it up to much the
same amount. Colchester paid £82, besides £5 to the sheriff.
Chester and Thetford were charged with £76 apiece, Glouces-
ter, Hereford, Oxford with £60, and Wallingford ought to have
been according to the jurors, though it rendered £80.
The boroughs with the lowest renders were Stafford (£7),
Pevensey (£5 195.), Reading (£5), and Barnstaple (£3). It is
noted that the farmer at Reading was losing 17^.4
3. The Firma Burgi and the Commune, 1086-1154
But for the accidental preservation of the Pipe Roll of
1130,5 the seventy years which followed the great survey
would be an almost barren period in the history of the borough
farms. It is true that the age of royal charters to boroughs
begins with the reign of Henry I, but, with the notable excep-
tion of the great charter to London, his grants did not touch the
financial relations of the towns to the Crown.
As regards these, the reign of William Rufus is a blank,
except in so far as further mediatization of boroughs diminished
the royal revenue from this source. Rufus gave Bath, which
had escheated to the Crown after Queen Edith’s death, to the
1 D.B. ɪɪ. 117b. 2 Ibid. f. 290b.
3 Round, Geoffrey de Mandevtlle, p. 352. 4 D.B. ɪ. 58.
6 It seems to have been mistaken for the lost roll of ɪ Hen. II. See
Stevenson’s preface to the earlier roll, p. vi.
FIRMA BURGI, 1086-1154
i55
bishop of Wells,1 and it was he apparently who rewarded the
loyalty of Henry of Newburgh and Simon of Senlis with the
earldoms of Warwick and Northampton and the lordship of
those towns.2 Simon as the son-in-law of Waltheof had a
hereditary claim to the earldom, though not to the town.
One of his charters to his abbey of St. Andrew is addressed
to his prefect of Northampton and all his men dwelling there,
exempting the monks’ land “ ab omnibus Consuetudinibus
que ad burgum pertinent, a geldo scilicet (MS. set) et a gilda
et ab omnibus aliis de quibus eos quietare possumus.” 3
There is some evidence that Henry I granted the earldom of
Northampton as well as that of Huntingdon to David of
Scotland, the husband of Simon’s widow, but he kept the
lordship of the town in his own hands and it was being farmed
from the Crown in 1130. Colchester was given by Henry with
all its customs to Eudes the Sewer in HOI, but escheated
on his death in 1120 and was not granted out again.4 On
the other hand, it was under Henry I that the count of Meulan,
elder brother of the earl of Warwick, acquired the lordship of
Leicester which he transmitted to the earls of Leicester, his
descendants, and Henry gave Reading to his new abbey there.6
In the first extant Pipe Roll then, in lɪʒθ, the ancient
issues of Bath, Warwick, Reading, and Leicester, along with
those of Chester, were not included, because they were in the
hands of subjects. Against this, however, was to be set the
escheat of Shrewsbury by the rebellion of Earl Robert in 1102
and the vacancy of the bishopric of Durham during which the
city was in the hands of the Crown.
Of the boroughs which remained chargeable to the king,
the greater number would not have appeared by name in
the roll, since their issues were incorporated in the county
farms, were it not that gild fines, penalties in pleas of the
Crown and the borough aid were extra firmas. Except in
the methods of dealing with the problem of a depreciated
currency, the transitional features observable in 1086 have
disappeared and the local system of administration disclosed
1 Davis, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannoruni, no. 326.
2 It has been doubted whether Simon received the earldom before
Henry I’s time (Farrer, Honors and Knights’ Fees, iι. 296), but he attests
a charter of the previous reign as earl (Davis, op. cιt., no. 315) and was
already earl at Henry’s coronation.
8 MS. Cott. Vesp. E. xvii, f. 5b. I owe this reference to Professor
Stenton.
1 Farrer, Itinerary of Henry I, no. 32. 8 Mon. Angl. ιv. 40.