DOMESDAY SURVEY 



Now in face of these tables it seems as if our choice can only lie between 

 three possible alternatives. Either the recurrence of these duodecimal 

 figures is accidental, or the jurors habitually employed a duodecimal 

 method of reckoning in stating the agricultural possibilities of their vills, 

 or else we have in these figures fragments of an obsolete system of assess- 

 ment as conventional as that which prevailed in the distribution of 

 gelding carucates. The first suggestion seems impossible the above 

 tables account for 20 per cent, of the total number of vills in the 

 county, and as at least two-thirds of the remainder are either surveyed 

 in connexion with other vills or else, through inadvertence on the part 

 of the scribes, are not assigned any plough-lands in the survey, the 

 proportion of duodecimal figures seems much too high to be the result 

 of chance. The second conclusion also is improbable ; we find no traces 

 of such a habit of reckoning elsewhere. The third possibility, unlikely as 

 it may seem at first, is greatly strengthened by the fact that the ' plough- 

 land ' in Northamptonshire and Rutland has been proved to be a con- 

 ventional quantity. The above tables in fact strikingly resemble those 

 given by Mr. Round in the Victoria History of Northamptonshire, of the 

 assessment of Rutland, and of the hundreds of Nassaburgh and Willey- 

 brook, Northants, 1 not only in the steady excess of the plough-lands 

 over the carucates, but also in the fact that no constant ratio can be 

 discovered between these two quantities. Nor must we forget that at 

 the time of Domesday Rutland was closely associated for fiscal purposes 

 with Nottinghamshire, to the survey of which its own account is 

 appended, 3 while the Rutland evidence further reminds us that figures 

 which do not imply a duodecimal system of reckoning may nevertheless 

 be combined into groups based on this principle. After all this, it seems 

 that we shall be fairly safe in saying that the possibility of the Not- 

 tinghamshire plough-land being an obsolete fiscal term ought to be 

 kept in mind in any future discussion of this unit. 



We may now briefly recapitulate the main conclusions suggested by 

 the Nottinghamshire assessment. We have seen that the county as a 

 whole was very leniently treated in the general distribution of the ' geld,' 

 and that this produced a correspondingly low assessment of individual 

 vills, so that the fiscal units characteristic of the shire are of 3 or ij caru- 

 cates instead of the 1 2 or 6 carucate groups which prevailed in Lincoln- 

 shire and Leicestershire. It has been shown that this normal system 

 of rating is displaced in Thurgarton wapentake by a very peculiar series 

 of assessments seemingly based upon a ' unit ' of 9 bovates, and that in the 

 south of the county the extreme subdivision of vills places difficulties in 

 the way of our reconstructing the total villar assessments. Lastly, we 

 have seen that the plough-lands of Nottinghamshire show distinct traces of 

 a duodecimal system of distribution as artificial as that which prevailed in 

 the apportionment of assessment carucates, which connects the terrae 

 carucis of our county with the conventional plough-lands of Rutland 

 and North Northamptonshire. 



1 V. C. H. 'Northants, i, 266-268. * See below, p. 240. 



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