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66

USES OF DOMESDAY BOOK.

crown. The English, unaccustomed to a census, murmured at the prospect of more accurate taxation, and their chroniclers thought it "shameful to tell," what "the king had thought it no shame to do." Yet the accurate definitions of land in Anglo-Saxon charters, must have familiarized the people with these inquiries on a small scale; and the registries of the old county courts were perhaps part of the evidence which cam before the commissioners. The mere existence of hundreds and tithings is further proof that the people did not live without boundaries or legal divisions before their conquest by William. The idea of Domesday Book, if it had any precedent, was probably derived from the customs of England rather than from those of Normandy. But its true cause lies in the necessities of a new government and of difficult times. It served for centuries as the basis of all taxation, and the authority by which all disputes about landed tenures and customs were decided. But so long as military service was feudal, Domesday Book had a further and almost a higher use as the muster-roll of the nation. Strictly speaking, knights were never quartered on the sixty thousand and odd fees into which the land was divided. But the tenants-in-chief who farmed England of the crown, were responsible for the service of sixty thousand men. It lay with themselves whether they would keep their legal quota always at hand; the warlike baron increased his contingent; the covetous diminished it, and trusted to chance for making up the deficiency when he was called upon to serve. The state did not trouble itself with details, but preferred to treat its immediate feudatories as contractors for men-at-arms.

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In estimating the population of England, it must be borne in mind that Domesday Book is not an exhaustive statement. The three northern counties, and parts of Westmoreland, Lan

1 Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, p. vii.; A. S. Chron., A., 1085. The most probable explanation of the name is that it was derived by a false analogy from Alfred's Dom-Boc.

3 Thus the Bishop of Durham and Roger de Burun owed the crown the same service of ten knights; but the former had enfeoffed no fewer than seventy, the latter only six.-Lingard, vol. ii., pp. 44, 45.

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cashire, and Monmouthshire, were not included in the survey. The north was still desolate and scarcely conquered; Monmouthshire was Welsh. This omission is unimportant, as it would be easy to calculate averages for these districts. But there are other incompletenesses. London and Winhester, and some smaller places, such as Devizes and [arlborough, are not mentioned at all; Bristol, which possessed a large trade, is, for some unknown reason, almost passed over; and abbeys, castles, and their respective liberties, are sometimes either unnoticed or imperfectly described.1 The reason of these omissions is unknown; in some cases, perhaps, a separate record was made, but has been lost; in one instance we are told that the commissioners favoured a monastery by rating its possessions below their value. Although there were more than four thousand churches in England at this period, less than sixteen hundred ecclesiastics are enumerated, and out of these only one thousand are entered as parish priests. These deductions from the completeness of the returns are the more important, because it is probable that they chiefly affect the middle classes- that is, the men who, like priests and citizens in towns, had no necessary connection with land as the owners of freehold property, or as bound down to the soil. The population actually given is 283,342; this of course consists only of able-bodied men, and, multiplied by five, would give an actual population of about

1 Lappenberg, Gesch. Eng., band i., p. 145; Morgan's England under the Normans, pp. 160, 161. The importance of the omission of London may be judged by the fact that fifty years later it was able, according to Fitz-Stephen, to furnish 60,000 men-at-arms and 20,000 knights.-Vita S. Thomæ, pp. 173, 174. This estimate seems excessive, but William of Newbury says (vol. ii., p. 176) that 52,000 citizens gave in their names to the demagogue, Fitz-Osbert.

2 Selden sets the number of churches at 4,511; Dr. Inet reckons them at about 4,000.-Munford's Domesday of Norfolk, p. 80. Sir H. Ellis says:"The whole number actually noticed in the survey amounts to a few more than 1,700. The circumstance of presbyteri occurring most frequently in counties where scarcely any ecclesiæ are noticed, gives strength to the presumption that the officers of the exchequer who abridged the returns, considered the entry of the one as in most cases implying the existence of the other."-Introduction to Domesday, pp. xci., xcii.

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CHARACTER OF THE POPULATION.

1,400,000. Allowing for all omissions, we may probably place it at rather over than under 2,000,000; a number which may seem small, but which was not doubled till the reign of Charles II., six hundred years later. Reverting to the actual survey, we find about 2,000 persons who held immediately of the king (E 1,400, M 1,599),1 or who were attached to the king's person (M 326), or who had no holding, but were free to serve as they would (M 213). The second class, the free upon bond-land, comprised more than 50,000; under-tenants or vavassors (E 7,871, M 2,899); burghers (E 7,968, M 17,105); soc-men (E 23,072, M 23,404); freemen, holding in military service, or having been degraded into tenants to obtain protection (E 13,425); and ecclesiastics (E994, M 1,564). The largest class of all was the semi-servile. Of these villeins (E 108,407, M102,704), and borders, or cottiers (E 82,119, M 80,320), make up the mass, about 200,000 in all. They were bond upon bond-land, that is to say, their land owed a certain tribute to its owner, and they owed certain services to the land; they could not quit it without permission from their lord. But they were not mere property; they could not be sold off the soil into service of a different kind, like the few slaves who still remained in England, and who numbered roughly about 25,000.

The large number of the middle classes and the small number of slaves, are points in this estimate that deserve consideration. It is clear that the conquest did not introduce any new refinement in servitude. In a matter where we have no certain data, all statements must be made guardedly; but the language of chroniclers and laws, and the probabilities of what would result from the anarchy and war that had so long desolated England under its native kings, induce a belief that the conquest was a gain to all classes, except the highest, in matters of freedom. The fact that the large and privileged class of soc-men was especially numerous in two counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, in which a desperate revolt had been pitilessly put down, seems to show that existing rights were not

1 The letters E and M indicate the different estimates of Sir H. Ellis and Sir J. Mackintosh. I have omitted small sub-divisions from each statement.

MIXED RESULTS OF THE CONQUEST.

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lightly tampered with. It is less easy to account for the small number of slaves, except on the supposition that the Normans, unaccustomed to actual slavery, and confounding all the lower classes of the conquered people in a common contempt, allowed many who were born bond to enjoy the privileges of serfs, villeins, or borders. Even the slaves were protected by law from all violence. That English dignitaries and estated gentlemen suffered grievously, is beyond doubt; especially when, like Brihtric, they had provoked the vindictive vanity of a woman, or when, like Cospatric, they were guilty of being powerful and of having large property. But it is clear that the country at large did not suffer by the substitution of a new nobility for the old. During five years (1066-1070 A.D.) England was traversed by soldiers in every direction, and civil war did not end with the subjugation of the north. A change in the tenure of property, involving private feuds and law-suits, is in itself unfavourable to national prosperity. Yet the wealth of England was so great at the end of William's reign, that the conqueror received a large daily income from the national taxes and crown demesne, and left considerable wealth in the treasury. Neither was this wrung

1 In Norfolk alone there were 4,571, a fifth of the whole number. Compare Thierry's account "Des vexations multipliées en ruinérent les habitants Saxons (of Norwich), et forcérent un grand nombre d'entre eux à émigrer dans la province de Suffolk. * Là trois Normands s'emparérent de leurs personnes et en firent des serfs tributaires."-Conquête d'Angleterre, tom. ii., p. 155. But in fact Thierry inserts the correction to his own statement by giving the passage of Domesday Book on which it was based; from which it appears that twenty-eight men were thus enslaved, and some others who stayed behind (alii remanentes) ruined.—See p. 270, note 1, on the increased rental of Norfolk under the Normans.

2 Brihtric is said to have refused the hand of Matilda before her marriage to William. She obtained a grant of all his lands.-Thierry's Conquête d'Angleterre, tom. ii., pp. 39, 139.

3 Orderic, vol. ii., p. 223; vol. iv., p. 162. The statement of Orderic that the treasury received £1,061 10s. 14d. a-day, is so circumstantial that it must be based upon documents, and so monstrous that we must assume some error to have crept in. It would imply payments at the rate of nearly £3 a head. The whole rental of land in England at that time represents a vastly smaller sum. Giraldus Cambrensis says that under Edward the Confessor it only amounted to £40,000.-De Inst. Princ., p. 167. Dane-gelt and feudal reliefs were uncertain

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IMPROVED VALUE OF PROPERTY.

from a poverty-stricken people. In Middlesex and Hertfordshire, which had been the first seat of war, in some of the towns which had been stormed, and in the north, the value of property was diminished. But in counties that had had a fair chance, wealth had prospered with the general increase of order; in Norfolk, though Raoul's rebellion and Sven's invasion must have affected it, the rental of estates altogether was almost double what it had been in Edward's time; in Oxfordshire it had increased fifty per cent. Even in Gloucestershire, which lay near the Welsh marches, and had been the scene of Eadric the Wild's campaigns, the value of real property had rather increased than fallen off.1 The increased rents of the cities are commonly regarded as proofs of Norman extortion. It is natural to suppose that the Normans were rigid taxgatherers. But there is a limit to all oppression, and when we find heavy taxes paid into the treasury, the land covered with castles and churches, the ravages of war repaired in towns such as Chester and Dover, the rent-roll of manors increased,

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sources of income. The entire income due to the crown for its lands, the fees of justices, taxes and reliefs, in the county of Surrey, was only £3,000 a-year in the time of Henry I., and out of this not more than half can have reached the treasury, as the viscount received a third, and the expenses of collection, &c., were defrayed out of the remainder. Lastly, William only left £60,000 of silver in the treasury at his death.—Orderic, vol. iv., p. 162; Dial. de Scac., lib. i., c. 17; Huntingdon, Savile, p. 213.

1 The gross rental of Norfolk under Edward the Confessor had been £2,219 28. 11d. Under William it was £4,154 11s. 7d.-Munford's Domesday of Norfolk, p. 59. Omitting those cases in which there is no change, the manors of the fourteen first tenants-in-chief show respectively in Oxfordshire an advance from £628 15s. to £911 5s., in Gloucestershire from £341 to £352 6s. In Buckinghamshire the decrease is from £354 8s. to £338 2s., and in Hertfordshire from £533 3s. 4d. to £453 138. 8d. In Kent the large estates of the archbishop were valued at £764 10s. 4d., and actually paid £840 14s. 4d. against £459 8s. Od., the rental in Edward's reign. Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire, were the counties that fared best. Kent was perhaps protected by its archbishop; Roger of Montgomery, who held Chichester and Arundel, was a man of high character; and the three other counties were sufficiently Danish to impose respect on their conquerors. Yet as every one of those counties had been the seat of war, there must have been some good government to account for their prosperity.

2 Dovere: "In ipso primo adventu in Angliam fuit ipsa villa combusta.

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