A "Hide" of Eighteen Carucates

85

After careful study of the Domesday Survey of Leicestershire, I definitely hold that in that county "carucata terræ " was the geld-carucate and "terra x car[ucis]" the actual ploughlands.158 Now there are only three instances in which the Survey records the assessment both in terms of the "hida" and in "carucatæ terræ," and in all three the figures support my own theory. The Abbot of Coventry's Burbage estate (231a, 2), where a "hide" and a quarter equates 22 "carucatæ terræ," is a test-case, and Mr. Stevenson there takes refuge in a suggested" beneficial hidation." The exact formula, no doubt, is peculiar, but reference to the text shows that "s[un]t "has been interpolated between "ibi" and "xxii." I suspect that the scribe had written "ibi" (from the force of habit) when he ought to have written "id est."

I close this portion of my essay by applying my own theory to the case of " Erendesbi" (Arnesby). The relative entries are:

"Episcopus Constantiensis tenet in Erendesberi iias. car[ucatas] terræ et dim. et unam bovatam (231).”

"W[illelmus] Pevrel tenet dim. hidam et iii. bovatas terræ in Erendesbi (235)."

Put into figures they work out :—

So that Arnesby was a typical Vill assessed at twelve carucates."

159

159 I also hold the formula "T. R. E. erant ibi x car[ucæ]" to refer to ploughs, not ploughlands.

159 Note that the assessment of 2 cars. represented 24 ploughlands, and that of 98 cars. only 7 ploughlands. No relation, therefore, can be traced here.

IX. THE LANCASHIRE "HIDA."

There is one other case of a peculiar "hide" in Domesday. This is that which is found in the land" between Ribble and Mersey," that district of which the description offers so many peculiarities. We find it divided into six hundreds, and of the "hides" in the first, that of (West) Derby, we read: “In unaquaque hida sunt vi. carucatæ terræ " (i. 2696). Whether or not that explanation applies, as is believed, to the whole district, we have here again a "Danish" place-name brought into direct relation with the six-carucate unit. On the opposite bank of the Mersey lay the Wirral peninsula, in which this system of assessment cannot be traced.

Mr. Green alluded to the Danish "byes" as found, by exception, "about Wirral in Cheshire, 100 and held that Norsemen from the Isle of Man had founded "the little group of northern villages which we find in the Cheshire peninsula of the Wirral." 161 I cannot find them myself. In his "Notes on the Domesday Survey, so far as it relates to the Hundred of Wirral " 162 (1893), Mr. Fergusson Irvine, in a paper which shows, though somewhat discursive, how much can only be done by intelligent local research, has collated all the Domesday entries. "Raby" is the one place I can there find in the peninsula with the "bye" termination; while out of fifty-one entries twenty refer to places with the English termination "tone," and the Anglo-Saxon test-words "ham" and "ford" are found in four others. There were, doubtless, Norse elements in the peninsula, but they were not strong enough to change the place-names or divide the land on their own system. In the same way, Chester had its "lawmen," though it was not one of the Five Boroughs, nor is what I have termed the Scandinavian formula applied to Cheshire in Domesday. So, too, there

A "Hide" of Six Carucates

87

were lawmen at Cambridge, and their heriot included eight pounds, which occur in the above formula as the twelve marcs of the Danish "Hundred." Yet the whole system of Cambridgeshire was non-Danish. It was only, in short, where the northern invaders had settled down as a people that they were strong enough to divide the land anew and organise the whole assessment on their own system.

X. THE YORKSHIRE UNIT.

We have seen that the unit of assessment for the carucated districts of England was "vi. carucatæ terræ," just as five hides was the old unit in the south. We have also seen that the former reckoning extended over those districts which the Danish immigrants had settled. There remains the question whether the Danes had merely substituted six for five in the pre-existing arrangement, or had made a wholly new one for themselves based on actual

area.

It is prima facie not probable that they can have adopted the latter course, for the uniformity of their assessment proves its artificial character. Yet, in his remarkable paper on "The Ploughland and the Plough," Canon Taylor has arrived at the conclusion that

" 164

The geldable carucate of Domesday does not signify what the carucate usually signifies in other early documents. The "carucata ad geldum" is not as commonly stated by Domesday commentators, the quantity of land ploughed in each year by one plough, but it is the quantity tilled in one year in one arable field by one plough.185

This "novel and important proposition," as its author truly described it, was probably the most notable contribution to our knowledge that the Domesday Commemoration

163 De harieta Lagemanorum habuit isdem picot viii. lib," etc. (i. 189).

produced. The Canon's theory, which (so far as his own East Riding is concerned) he certainly seems to have established, is, at first sight, fatal to mine. But, on the other hand, my own theory can be proved no less clearly for Leicestershire, where the carucate terræ " and the ploughs are often connected in about the same ratio as in Yorkshire. This leads us to inquire whether, even in the East Riding (where his theory works best), we may not find traces of that assessment by the six-carucate unit which I advocate myself. Such traces in Yorkshire we have already seen,167 but there is other and stronger evidence.

If we take the modern Wapentake of Dickering (the first on Canon Taylor's list) and examine its three Domesday Hundreds of Turbar, Hunton, and Burton, we obtain these results :-168

160 According to Canon Taylor's ingenious theory, the ratio should be i to 1 (for two-field Manors), or 2 to 1 for three-field Manors. But in Leicestershire there is a remarkable prevalence of the 3 to 2 ratio, which his theory can, at best, only explain as exceptional.

167 Supra, p. 80.

168 The figures are taken from the "Index" to the Hundreds at the close of the first volume of Domesday Book, and the names are arranged in the same order as they are there found.

The evidence of this last Hundred is so overwhelming that it cannot be gainsaid.109

I claim, therefore, that my theory holds good even in Canon Taylor's stronghold, but I do so without venturing to dispute the accuracy of his own. How far they can be reconciled I leave to others to decide.

There are certain difficulties, however, which his brilliant suggestion must raise. It is the essence of his theory that in a two-field Manor the ploughland of 160 acres (half

169 There is plenty of similar evidence elsewhere in the shire. Thus we find the Craven Manors assessed at 6, 6, 6, 3, 3, 4, 6, 10, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3 carucates. These assessments would give us 24 (6 +6 +6 10 + 2 + 2) + 18 (3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3)

+

3

+ 3) + 24 (4 + 6 + + II (2 + 3 3).