A HISTORY OF NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 



In every other part of England except East Anglia and Kent the 

 basis of taxation was the * hide ' containing four ' virgates,' and this unit 

 when employed for fiscal purposes is normally found combined in groups 

 of five or ten, for the assessment of the south and west was arranged on 

 a decimal system. In Nottinghamshire and the counties which adjoin 

 it, the place of the hide was taken by the ' carucate,' consisting of eight 

 ' bovates,' and from an analysis of the portion of Domesday relating to 

 this district it has been found that these carucates were normally dis- 

 posed so as to form blocks of six or twelve. This theory of the * six 

 carucate unit ' was first set forth by Mr. Round in Feudal England? and 

 the opposition between the * duodecimal ' system of assessment which 

 prevailed in that part of England which is known on other grounds to 

 have been subjected to ' Danish ' influence, and the * decimal ' system 

 found elsewhere has for the first time enabled the boundaries of the 

 Danelaw to be defined with something like exactitude. It must be 

 remembered that neither the carucate nor the bovate was in this sense 

 a measure of area, nor even when we read of acres in connexion with 

 assessment must we think of real divisions of the soil; these were all 

 purely fiscal terms, the bovate being divided into fifteen parts called 

 acres, and the carucate, as we have seen, containing eight bovates. The 

 ' field carucates ' actually existing on the land bear no necessary relation 

 to the ' carucates assessed to the geld ' ; the number of the latter which 

 a county was reputed to contain was determined not by its acreage but 

 according to the will of the law-givers of the country, who fixed the 

 fiscal responsibility of each shire at their own pleasure. 



The assessment of the Danelaw can most conveniently be studied in 

 Lincolnshire and Leicestershire ; for one reason because a survey of each 

 of these counties made under Henry I has come down to us and throws 

 much light upon the local distribution of the geld. But for our immediate 

 purpose it is more important to note that in proportion to their area Lin- 

 colnshire and Leicestershire were burdened with a much larger number 

 of carucates than was assigned to Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. 

 Now the unequal rating of the several counties of the Danelaw certainly 

 deserves mention in any account of this subject, as it affected the assessment 

 of the whole district in every stage of its subpartionment. Thus Leicester- 

 shire and Nottinghamshire each contained about 270 vills surveyed in 

 Domesday, but whereas the former seems to have paid geld on 2,500 

 carucates, 8 which would give an average of over nine to each vill, the latter 

 only paid on 567 carucates, representing an average of about two per vill. 

 Hence while cases of rating at six or more carucates may be noted on 

 every page of the Leicestershire survey, they are extremely rare in this 

 county. On the other hand, the assessment of vills at 1 2 bovates or 

 3 carucates is very characteristic of Nottinghamshire, and these are just 

 the figures in which we should expect the fiscal liability of the local 



1 Feudal England, 79, et seqq. 



1 Leicestershire statistics are complicated by the peculiar ' hide ' of that county, but in any case its 

 assessment as expressed in carucates was extremely high. 



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