SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



offer favourable terms to the lords of neighbouring manors who wished to 

 become foreign burgesses, or even accept them as full burgesses if they were 

 willing to be ' at scot and lot ' with the townsmen. The contribution levied 

 annually upon foreign burgesses varied a little, but was generally 4^. and two 

 bushels of wheat for the larger proprietors, and id. and one bushel for a 

 smaller proprietor. Those who desired to be ' at scot and lot ' paid an 

 entrance fee of four or five shillings to the town, and one or two shillings to 

 the bailiff. In this way the town not only absorbed into its life as a free 

 community the originally alien elements within its own walls, but also became 

 the centre of a territory comprising most of the four surrounding hundreds of 

 Bosmere and Claydon, Sampford, Carleford, and Colneis, which owed it a 

 kind of allegiance. The Priors of Holy Trinity and St. Peter, who had 

 estates both in town and country, became full burgesses in 1 244, and their 

 successors took a leading part in organizing the religious activities of the 

 merchant gild, whilst during the latter half of the 13th century at least a 

 score of the lords of the landed gentry within a ten-mile radius had attached 

 themselves to Ipswich as out-burgesses, and promised to give aid and counsel 

 in its affairs." In order to appreciate the civilizing mission of the town we 

 have only to turn our attention to the feudal anarchy by which it was 

 surrounded. In the Hundred Rolls of 1274 we find ourselves treading every- 

 where the live embers of recent strife. At Bentley, for instance, the homage 

 of Sir Hugh ToUemache and the homage of Holy Trinity of Ipswich present 

 a verdict that the death of Jordan of Copdock was hastened by the assault of 

 Robert of Copdock and of John of Copdock, and the homage of Sir Hugh 

 ToUemache in Copdock agree in this verdict. On the other hand the juries 

 of Sproughton, Belstead, Albemarle, Hintlesham, Capel, Raydon, Brantham, 

 and Parva Belstead, and John le Barun and his homage in Copdock itself, 

 declare that Jordan died a natural death and not from the assault of Robert,'^ 

 All the townships here mentioned lie in the hundred of Samford within a 

 few miles of Ipswich, and at the very moment when local feeling was running 

 high over this family affair, Sir Hugh ToUemache, John le Barun, and Robert 

 de Copdock paid their first contributions as foreign burgesses of the town. 



The earliest detailed accounts of manorial organization in Suffolk belong 

 to the end of the I 3th century, but though many changes were in process of 

 realization, the essential framework of the rural economy was sufficiently 

 stable from the iith to the 14th century to justify our using these accounts 

 as a starting point for our study of the period. The chief economic features 

 of the manorial system were the communal methods of cultivation and the 

 labour rents rendered by the villein to his lord. All the arable land of the 

 village was divided into several portions (generally three), each of which lay 

 fallow in turn, was sown with two different crops in rotation and then left 

 fallow again. The holdings of each tenant, and generally of the lord's 

 demesne also, consisted of acre or half-acre strips scattered about these open 

 fields, no two of them together, and each divided from a neighbour's strip by 

 a narrow balk. No separate access was possible. The whole had to be 

 ploughed, sown and reaped at the same time, and after harvest it was turned 

 into a common pasture. Sometimes there was meadowland, distributed in 



" The Great Domesday Book in Ipswich Town Hall ; Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. ix, App. i, 240. 

 " Hund. R. (Rec. Com.), ii, 175-6- 



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