DOMESDAY SURVEY 



In this East Anglia is not singular. A similar omission is found in Gloucester- 

 shire, Worcestershire, and Herefordshire, and also in Essex, the third county 

 in Little Domesday.*^ What is really distinctively East Anglian is the 

 occurrence in Norfolk and Suffolk of the new term placed at the end of the 

 entry, which gives the lineal measurements of the vill or manor, and its 

 assessment to the geld, e.g. ' King Edward held Barrow for a manor and for 

 7 carucates of land . . . then the whole was worth [valuit) £io, now £zo 

 by weight {ad pensuni). It has one league in length and 8 furlongs {quaren- 

 tenas) in breadth and yd. for the geld.' *' There are here two sets of measure- 

 ments, and two valuations, and the connexion between the lineal measurements 

 and the ' leet ' system has long been a puzzle to students of Domesday. Three 

 suggestions have been made : (i) The hypothesis, which Professor Maitland 

 rejects, that these measurements represent geld carucates and that the carucates 

 in the East Anglian formula represent the ' team-lands,' the ' potential arable.' 



(2) That the lineal measurements themselves represent the * real ' area or 

 'potential arable' and are the equivalent of the' team-lands 'of other counties. 



(3) That they have no essential connexion with the geld, but are only one 

 item in a cadastre of which the geld also forms a part, placed with it at the 

 end of the ' villar ' entry, and hence, when the cadastre was, so to speak, 

 absorbed in a manorial terrier, clinging to the geld and repeated with it 

 whenever it occurs.*^ Professor Maitland inclines to think that the ' geld ' 

 represents the contribution fixed for the vill as a whole, while the statement 

 of the number of carucates held by each tenant represents the apportionment 

 of this sum among the various landholders in the vill," and the lineal measure- 

 ments are a rough estimate of size, not intended for purposes of fiscal assess- 

 ment. ' If the jurors had superficial measures in their heads,' he writes,*' 

 ' and were stating this by reference to two straight lines, they would make 

 the length of one of these lines a constant (e.g. one league or one furlong). 

 This is not done.' And then he refers to Norfolk instances. The same 

 argument applies to Suffolk, but here, as in Norfolk," there is a tendency to 

 make i league a constant in the lineal measurements, and moreover, the 

 same equation tends to recur, notably the equation of 6 carucates [i league 

 X I league = 720 acres] to a 20^. geld. Take for instance Lackford 

 Hundred, a very perfect example in every respect. If its lineal measurements 

 be reduced to superficial measurements, it contains 126§ carucates, and of the 

 sixteen ' villar ' measurements, thirteen have 1 2 furlongs or i league as their 

 line of length, one has 18 furlongs, or a league and a half, one has 6 furlongs or 

 half a league, and one has 10 furlongs. Of the lines of breadth, two are leagues, 

 one is a league and a half, seven are half leagues, three are 8 furlongs, one is 

 5 furlongs, and two are 4 furlongs. The measurement i league X J league 

 occurs seven times : six times in connexion with a 2od. geld, and once with a 

 \od. geld. Possibly in the original scheme the leets, like the small ' Danish 

 hundreds' of Lincolnshire, may have been 6-carucate or 12-carucate units." 



" Dm. Bk. and Beyond, 429, 431, n. I. *' Dom. Bk. 289^. •' Cf. below p. 366, Table 11. 



** Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 429-31. " Ibid. 371. " Ibid. 432. 



" Round, Feud. Engl. 72 et seq. ; cf. 80, 196 et seq. for the 'small local hundreds ' of Leicestershire ; Roy. 

 Hist. Soc. Trans, (new sen), xiv, 213; Corbett, ' The Tribal Hidage.' Mr. Corbett suggests that the East Anglian 

 leets may represent small 'early hundreds.' These 12-carucate ' Danish hundreds ' and the East Anglian leets 

 maybe based on the 'tenmanland' or 'tenmanlot' of 120 acres which occurs exceptionally in Norfolk ; 

 VinogradofF, Engl. Soc. in the Eleventh Cent. 102-3, 280-1. 



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