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"plain"; and as a matter of fact, the Fields to which I now wish to call special attention, were always "outside the city," as it were in the Border-lands, and moreover in the direction of those borders which were hills, and not rivers. An ascent, not a descent, was in each case made to them from the demesnes and the carucates which formed the centres of the activity of the manor.

We thus arrive, if my assumption is tenable and correct, at the following classification of the various lands in each Domesday manor. I. Carucates of arable land, the nucleus of all; II. Woody pasture, measured by leucæ, and within easy reach of the tillers of I.; III. The outer girdle of Field or Moor land, common to the inhabitants of two or more neighbouring manors, and not reported upon in Domesday, because it did not then belong to any particular manor. was as yet undivided."

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The carucates contained in I. were of two classes: (1) those in the hands of the lord; (2) those in the hands of his tenants. The former were his Park (which would be either meadow or pasture), and his Home Farm, which would be partly meadow, and partly arable; and it would be in the cultivation of only the arable portion, that the ploughs charged against the lord of the manor at the time of the Survey, would be required.

Of the Parks, some still survive, with almost the identical area which they possessed eight centuries ago; some few have been slightly enlarged, as at Stapleton, by an intake, or lessened even more slightly, as at Fryston and Owston, by the cutting off of a segment to provide the site for a church and its surrounding burying-ground; many have disappeared entirely, as at Thorp [Audlin], Featherston, Whitwood, Houghton, Ferrybridge, Kellington, and Whitley, though the sites of some of them might be ascertained, as in the case of that carucate and a half of demesne land at Knottingley, which, in the times of its Grammaticus lords (roughly speaking, throughout the twelfth century), occupied the space west of St. Botolph's Chapel, and which extended, north and south, between the road and the river. (See accompanying Map.)

The second class of the Domesday carucates was composed of those enclosures which can, even now, be singled out on the Ordnance Map in long parallel strips of about half an

acre each, which (perhaps like the twelve and a half carucates at Lincoln, outside the city) were at the backs of the houses of the village or town, and which were occupied by the inhabitants as "tofts" and "crofts." These are now generally, at least in those places which have not greatly outgrown their Domesday characteristics, either pasture lands or orchards; but although, very frequently, two or more of them have been thrown into one by the deletion of boundaries, their original character can be very readily perceived, and but a slight examination is required in order to ascertain that they have many common characteristics.

For instance, it is a singular circumstance which may excite curiosity, that while they always have their abutting boundaries at accurate right angles, those to the adjacent lands and to each other are curved, the curves being parallel throughout the group, and always much nearer one butt than the other. It has been asserted, on what I think is but a superficial examination, that these curves were given to the plots with an eye to the convenience of the plough; but this could not have been altogether their object, since they exist in the corresponding town plots, that never could have been intended for the plough, and they may be traced even now, in the lines of the subordinate streets and passages of all Yorkshire towns of Anglian origin, notwithstanding the vigorous efforts to obliterate them, and to reduce the boundary to a straight line, which their inconvenience has instigated, especially in the last half century.

For such a rectification of boundaries, however urgently necessary for the general convenience, can take place only when two adjacent properties are in one ownership, which is not always the case; and therefore, the process is so slow that many of these pre-Norman boundaries survive to the present day, even in the heart of such towns as Leeds, Wakefield, Pontefract and Doncaster.

Thirdly, there were similar parallel strips at some small distance from the central hamlet, which appear to have been intended to supply the demand occasioned by an increase of population, and to allow that increase to hive out. In some cases, these had been taken up and occupied; but if at the time of the Survey they had not been brought into cultivation, they had at least been allotted for it by those who originally planned the settlement, and "carved" out the allotments,

to use the meaning ascribed to the word "carucate" by Kelham. And very little observation is required to ascertain that the Anglian villages and towns in Yorkshire were all formed on a plan, the undeveloped features of which can still be traced; the village green, for instance, representing the embryonic Market Place, which it would have been, had the increased population demanded it.

But besides the carucates of arable, and a small quantity of meadow-land, most of these Osgoldcross manors possessed a certain amount of "Silva pastilis," though the area occupied by this woody pasture was in no case ascertained more than roughly, and no record at all was made of the quantity possessed by Ackworth, Thorp [Audlin], Neuuose [Moss] and Sutton, Ferrybridge, Fryston and Wheldale, Roall and Eggborough, Whitley, Darrington, Whitwood, [Kirk] Smeaton, Edeshale, Hampole, Skelbroke, and [Little] Smeaton.

In ten instances, moreover, another element is given in Domesday, and it may be instructive to compare the measures and elements thereto belonging, with what we know to be the actual area of the whole. After recording the carucates, the woody pasture, and other incidentals of the manor, the extent of the whole is given in "leuca" as follows :—

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Now it is very clear that the dimensions, as recorded in Domesday, which are stated to apply to the "whole manor,' must refer to something very different to the "whole manor," as we now understand it, and the contrasts here provided are throughout suggestive, so much so, that I need instance, and dwell upon, only one: Adlingfleet, Carlton [Snaith], and Womersley, were each reported to have the same number of carucates, 6; and yet, while Carlton and Womersley had measurements otherwise identical in every respect, Adlingfleet, with only half their woody area, had a Domesday extent equal to twice as much as either, while on the other hand,

its modern acreage is less than a half that of each of the others.

This comparison shows, in a very striking manner, that the existing elements which together make up the whole of the area, afterwards constituting the manor, are imperfectly furnished by the Domesday Survey; and that they are of such a character that the conclusion is irresistible that Domesday considered only those that might contribute to the geld levy, when it should be required, and utterly ignored such constituents of the subsequent manor, as had not yet been subdued by the occupant and, as subjects of taxation, made profitable to the ruler.

As all these various items, so reported in Domesday, could however, after all, have absorbed but a small portion of the total area of the Wapentake, my contention is, that they refer to the cultivated carucates and the woody pastures only. I have therefore, yet to seek what were the very large omissions from the Domesday Statement. The portions so omitted as I consider, were the wide districts between the knots of population, with their appropriated carucates, which still awaited the reclaiming hand of man, and in which there was as yet no special ownership, either by man or manor, by lord or tenant. Each might have been considered to have had some dormant right in them, but as it was as yet unexercised, they were altogether ignored in the Norman Survey. These districts are sometimes called, even now, "the Field," sometimes "the Moor;" but in a few early documents they were less definitely called "the Territory. The more fertile woody pasture was being gradually assarted and brought under the plough; the more sterile Field had to await the convenience of the cultivator.

And it is worthy of notice in that connection, that although the process of apportioning these Fields to the adjacent manors went on with some rapidity-(in the Pontefract Chartulary there is a reference to the fact, that a part of the "North Field" had been "lately" in the Town Field of the adjacent manor of Ferrybridge) in the twelfth century; and when the more fertile districts had been absorbed, with less rapidity in subsequent generations; yet, that this partition. has not even now been entirely completed. For there are still a few of the most sterile moorlands in the North Riding, which are to this day known as the "undivided

Moors" of two or more neighbouring townships. I instance those of Glaisdale Moor, eighteen square miles in area; Abbotside Moor, fifteen square miles; Spaunton Moor, Bainbridge Common and Fylingdale Moor, each covering between ten and twelve square miles; and some smaller areas at Masham, Sheriff Hutton and Kirkby Malzeard. All these are still "undivided," that is, they await the formal partition which has come to all the Moor and Field land of the East and West Ridings. And they are still "common lands; not merely common to the inhabitants of a particular place, but common to those of two or more townships or manors ; indeed, their condition in this respect, at the present date, seems to represent very exactly, the condition in the eleventh century, of the Fields and Moors of Osgoldcross and the West Riding generally.

The method by which such "common " lands have all been partitioned among the adjacent manors, may be easily ascertained. Under Camelsford (vol. x. 364), we have had a sufficient glimpse of the process, and seen a "Final Concord" made, as regards the "bounders" of Camelsford and Carlton. That in that instance, a religious house was concerned in the allocation, was an accident that has resulted in the preservation in their Leger Book, of a memorandum of the particulars of the transaction, which in any other case we should possibly have lacked. For had the lay owner or the village authorities only been engaged in the partition, no written record would probably have been made, still less preserved. The only record would have been the earthen bank, perhaps with its accompanying hedge and even ditch, which exist at this present day; the wooden post, which, although it perished comparatively soon, lasted long enough to perpetuate the memory of the transaction; the noteworthy tree, whose branches could be distinguished against the sky for many a rood, and which might be renewed when it at length succumbed to the gale or perished from old age; and added to all, the ingenious device of making the internal divisions of the newly appropriated lands to be at right angles to each other, so that when the newly formed plots of one manor had their divisions N. and S., those of the

1 These figures are abstracted from the census returns of 1891, but it is possible that some of the areas may have

since been dealt with, or will be dealt with shortly, under one of the Divided Parishes Acts of 1876, 1879 or 1882.

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