

DOMESDAY SURVEY 



The account of the borough land of Nottingham opens up another 

 interesting subject. One of these 6 carucates had been held by Earl 

 Tostig ' of the soke of whose land the king had two pennies and the earl 

 himself the third.' This entry has a definite bearing on the difficult 

 question of the earldom to which Nottinghamshire had belonged in the 

 time of Edward the Confessor. Professor Freeman, who had noticed 

 this passage, remarked that Tostig ' is not distinctly spoken of as 

 earl of the shire.' 1 This no doubt is true, but when an earl is 

 found in possession of the third penny of land in a county town the 

 fact affords a reasonable presumption that he was the earl of the shire to 

 which the town belonged. Tostig's possession of Bothamsall, an im- 

 portant manor with much sokeland appurtenant, is also suggestive ; 

 such estates were not very common in Nottinghamshire, and the Con- 

 queror's retention of it in his own hand agrees well with the plan, which 

 we know him to have followed in other counties, of keeping for himself 

 the forfeited estates of the local earl. 



At any rate Earl Tostig's land in Nottingham is of importance in 

 another connexion. At some uncertain date before 1086, Hugh fitz 

 Baldric was sheriff of this shire, 2 and he established thirteen houses on the 

 land in question, although the population had fallen from 173 to 136. 

 An interlineation describes these houses as in novo burgo, a phrase which 

 gives us our first evidence for the existence of the ' French borough ' in 

 Nottingham. Similar ' new boroughs' had been founded in other towns, 

 as at Exeter and Northampton. 3 The peculiarity of the Nottingham 

 case is that it accidentally affected our legal phraseology. The ' old 

 borough ' of Nottingham, so early as the beginning of the reign of 

 Henry I, had come to be described in contradistinction to the new 

 borough as the Anglicus burgus^ and in it the old English customs as to 

 the inheritance of land continued to prevail. In particular, that form of 

 succession according to which the youngest son succeeded to his father's 

 land was found there, and there seems to be no deeper reason for the 

 name, Borough English, which ever since the twelfth century has 

 attached to this kind of tenure. 



Although five Nottinghamshire tenants in chief held houses in the 

 county town, we do not see any of that attribution of town houses to 

 country manors which was such a prominent feature of the survey of 

 Leicester. There is, therefore, no direct evidence in favour of the 

 ' garrison theory ' of the borough to be gathered from Nottingham.* On 

 the other hand the survey of Nottingham contains one very characteristic 

 feature in the domus equitum, which appear in two entries. The word 

 eques is very rare in Domesday, and it seems as if it can have had no 

 other Anglo-Saxon equivalent but cnibt, a word which, by the eleventh 



1 Norman Conquest, ii, 580. 



* He figures as sheriff (of Yorkshire) before 1069 in the foundation legend of Selby Abbey. 

 Freeman, Norman Conquest, iv, 794. 



' V. C. H. Northants, i, 276. 



* See the section on ' the Borough ' in Domesday Book and Beyond, where particular reference is made 

 to Nottingham in 1200. 



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