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THE MANORS OF OSGOLDCROSS, IN DOMESDAY.

[A Supplement to the Papers on Dodsworth's Notes, as preserved in Harl. 800.]

By RICHARD HOLMES.

WHILE abstracting from the Domesday Survey the different particulars required to illustrate the series of Notes on Osgoldcross, now concluded, I was constantly struck by the irregular proportion which the number of geldable carucates reported from the various manors, appeared to bear to that which modern accurate surveys have definitely ascertained to be the area of each. Thus, while the geldable area of Ackworth was 6 carucates to an acreage of 2643, that reported from the immediately adjoining group of manors, Badsworth, Rogerthorp and Upton, with a nearly identical acreage of 2659, was a geldable area of as much as 9 carucates and 5 bovates; and still more surprisingly the single manor of Thorp [Audlin], which actually exceeded Ackworth in geldable value by 3 bovates, had a total area of only 1311 acres, less than a half of the acreage possessed by its neighbour. The following are the figures :Ackworth

2643 acres

- 2659 acres

1311 acres

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6 carucates.

Badsworth, &c. 9 carucates, 5 bovates.
Thorp
6 carucates, 3 bovates.

As I found that similar discrepancies in the proportion of geldable carucates to total area (whether, (1) as tabulated by the Domesday Commissioners themselves, or (2) as reported by modern surveyors) existed throughout the whole survey, the geldable area and the acreage of the entire manor having no common proportion or arithmetical relation to each other, I was compelled to acknowledge to myself that my enquiries were being pursued in a direction altogether wrong, and that if I looked for a satisfactory result to follow the search for the unit or units upon which the manor assessment was made and paid, I must direct my enquiries elsewhere. For I felt that the Domesday figures were not to be forced

in order to favour some preconceived theory; but that they represented something tangible and exact to those who prepared them; and that the problem therefore was to ascertain if possible, what they really did represent.

When once I had accustomed myself to look at the subject in this light, it became more and more clear to me that at the very commencement of the attempt to understand the relation in Domesday between carucate and manor, and in what way they depended upon each other, some other element must be imported into the statement of the case. For as the two sides of the equation could not be made to balance each other as they stood, the enquiry resolved itself into the endeavour to discover what could have been omitted from either or both, the proper inclusion of which would make the two sides equate more satisfactorily.

It was in the first place sufficiently evident that though the word carucate as used in the Survey could not denote what it very soon afterwards came to mean; yet on the other hand, being subdivided into bovates, of which 8 always made a carucate, that it was not the mere plot or "carving" out, irrespective of size, as assumed by Kelham and some other writers of the last century.

It then occurred to me, that the area covered by the Domesday report need not necessarily be that of the whole manor, as we understand it; and when I examined the data from this point of view, the result was encouraging. For although this theory will not entirely solve all the difficulties of the case, yet its application diminished them so materially, that I could not resist the impression that I was on the right track, and that the conclusions arrived at by those Domesday authorities, who bring figures to bear upon the subject, were not justified, especially as regards the opinion that the Domesday carucate was exactly and in every case, 120 acres (which would be 15 acres to the bovate), and that the square leuca of woody pasture, and of area in general, contained exactly 12 times as much. In contradiction of these assumptions the fact really is, that as the medieval system developed, the carucate appears as a very uncertain quantity indeed, varying in contents from these hundred and twenty acres, and even more, to fifteen, sixteen, and even fewer; and that while the proportion of carucates to a Knight's fee was not always the same, even throughout a particular manor, so varying was its

extent in different places, that mention was constantly made in early deeds, of the number of carucates, which in the particular place constituted a " Knight's fee," a measure of area which is not even named or hinted at in Domesday.

Now, this previously altogether unknown measure, the Knight's fee, had really become the settled and established unit as early as the reign of Henry I., for the return of 1166, contained in Liber Niger, constantly refers in terms of a Knight's fee to the "old feoffment," and this old feoffment is repeatedly defined to signify the fees which had been created previous to the death of Henry I. and the opening of the reign of king Stephen; that is before the close of 1135. We thus have the carucate as the fixed unit in 1086, with no hint as to a Knight's fee, while in less than half a century afterwards, probably much less, this latter had almost supplanted the carucate, and become the unit, indeed the only unit; while the carucate was of so variable a value that it constantly became necessary to define its relation to the new unit. This transformation was the result, apparently, of the organisation which had been elaborated during the reign of the energetic Beauclerc, the youngest son of the Conqueror, who had in this, as in other ways, applied the names he found in use to values of a different magnitude; and who had, for instance, applied the word yard, which had previously signified a virgate, to the measure of 36 inches, which it still indicates.

In thirty years from the death of Beauclerc, in the body of the Liber Niger (the return of 1166), the carucate again makes its appearance, not however in this case as the unit, but as a fraction and a sub-division of variable signification. In Yorkshire it is named in two returns only. One of these was in connection with the fee of Skipton, and one in the report of that of Stephen, son of Herbert the Chamberlain. In the latter instance, the mention was casual only, that Stephen had a carucate "in hand"; but in the former, the return of the greater part of the newly enfeoffed lands was entirely in terms of the carucate, the explanatory addition being made, and repeated, and reiterated, that, in Skipton, 14 carucates made a Knight's fee; while the phraseology and arrangement of the whole entry is so much that of a century later, and the general style of the return is so little like that which precedes or that which follows it, that a

VOL. XIII.

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reader almost instinctively glances at the margin to be sure that the paragraphs are no interpolation.

But from that day forward, throughout the long reign of the feudal system, the Knight's "fee," which gave name to it, as established by Henry I., was in general use as a measure of area. 4 furlongs, 1 acre; 10 acres, 1 ferdell; 4 ferdells, or 40 acres, 1 yard or virgate; 4 yards, or 160 acres, 1 hide; 4 hides, or 640 acres, 1 Knight's fee, was the subdivision given in the Exchequer Red Book, early in the 13th century; and that this was used during the whole feudal period is well evidenced by Appendix I. added at p. 442, to the volume of Kirkby's "Inquest," as published by the Surtees Society.

Now when the Knight's fee was composed of 14 carucates, it is a matter of simple calculation that each carucate contained not 120 acres, but 45 or 46 only. Thus the number of medieval carucates in a Knight's fee was, as I have said, very variable (indeed, frequently of different values in different parts of the same manor), so that, giving all due importance to this factor of the problem, and taking the carucate even at the large capacity of 120 acres, which has been attributed to it, it is impossible to avoid seeing that the number of carucates given in the Survey, could never by any means be made to cover that portion of the whole manor which was left after the woody pasture had been considered; therefore much, sometimes very much, must have escaped especial registration, even after the full allowance had been made for (only occasional) mention of woody pasture, and for the scanty returns of meadowland, neither of which occur, or could occur, in every district of Osgoldcross.

When this is fairly realised, as I do not think it has been in any adequate degree, the next stage of the enquiry is: What could have been the character of the districts so systematically withdrawn from the purview of such a record as the comprehensive Survey? and, Which were those which were alone considered to be within the scope of the Report of the Domesday Commissioners? In answer to this enquiry, the only conclusion, which, while meeting each of the difficulties I have enumerated, seems to cover all the ground, is that in the first place a report was made of each nucleus of cultivated land on which population having become seated, produced a taxable revenue; that secondly, a fairly correct

estimate was made, where any was needed or possible, of the extent of the woody pasture to which that population drove their flocks and their herds, and which afterwards became assarted; that thirdly, no notice was taken at all of the, as yet, unprofitable Fields or Moorlands which were on the outskirts of each manor. Indeed, when the condition is fairly considered of these Fields, it is clear that they could not, by any possibility, have been taken into calculation in the time of the Survey; for not only were they unsubdued and unmeasured, but as boundaries did not in all cases exist, such Fields were not even allotted to the manor to which they afterwards came to belong, and therefore could not have been included in it by the Survey. In other words, I conclude that the geldable carucates named in Domesday were situated almost solely in those districts which immediately adjoined the various seats of population, and which as arable, or meadow, or woody pasture, formed so many profitable encroachments upon the original uncultivated waste. These tracts were, however, but (comparatively) small portions of the manors, and the remnants of the waste, which were frequently far larger in quantity than the cultivated and utilised plots; that is to say, those districts which the charters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries designate as "Campus," or Field, are so totally ignored in Domesday, that I have been able to trace their mention in but one solitary passage (I. 336, top of col. 2), where there are said to be twelve and a half carucates outside the city, "in campis," a word which Mr. Bawdwen has unfortunately obscured by rendering it "in the plain." There may be other scattered references to the Fields in Domesday, but they cannot be many, and I have not had the fortune to meet with any one of them. That to which I refer is in Lincolnshire.

Unfortunately, however, the student of the Lincolnshire Domesday has not the advantage possessed by his Yorkshire neighbour in having a Recapitulation to refer to, by means of which light is thrown upon many an obscure passage, and additional light frequently thrown upon a difficult one. Had there been a similar entry in the Yorkshire portion of the volume, to that which I find on fol. 336, there would doubtless have been in the Recapitulation, a shade of meaning given to the words which would have prevented such a mistake as the translation of the plural" campi" by the singular

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