wood screens. In the southern chapel is an Early English trefoil niche with piscina, and against its east wall another rich niche of a later period with beautiful triangular canopy and on a bracket sculptured with the figure of an angel. The canopy on its under side has groining. There is also a moulded stone shelf. At the east end of the north chapel near the window are two brackets with heads of animals, and on the south side of the window a stone ledge resting on three grotesque heads. Part of the rood-loft screen

remains. In the east wall of the chancel are two stone ledges for images, and in the south wall two apertures nearly square, perhaps for cupboards or lockers. There are no rails enclosing the altar.

BIRDSALL.

This church has been rebuilt in the Gothic style with a lofty tower having pinnacles, the whole done in rather a handsome style but with many of the usual defects of modern Gothic churches. An ancient monumental effigy has been preserved from the old church, representing a lady with her head beneath a canopy supported by angels and three kneeling figures by her side.

RILLINGTON.

April 23, 1842.-This church has a nave with north aisle, a chancel with north chapel now a vestry, and a western tower surmounted by an octagonal stone spire. The steeple appears to be Perpendicular.

(To be continued.)

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 :

2643 acres

· 2659 acres

1311 acres

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