DOMESDAY SURVEY 



which Leicestershire is closely connected by geography, such as Nottingham- 

 shire and Northamptonshire, the commissioners have taken as an answer to 

 the inquiry about team-lands such a seemingly irrelevant reply as a statement 

 of the assessment of several of the vills at some previous unspecified date. 



Now two facts stand out prominently upon a consideration of the 

 Leicestershire plough-lands as a whole. The first is that with rare exceptions 

 they are less in number than the carucates imposed upon the same manor ; 

 the second is that the team-lands recorded in an entry will generally bear 

 some very simple ratio to the fiscal units comprised in the same. 19 The first 

 of these facts makes it very improbable that the Leicestershire plough-land 

 was a fiscal unit in the sense in which this may be said of the plough-lands of 

 Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire. 20 If the Leicestershire plough-land 

 were the record of an old assessment, the amount of geld laid upon the county 

 must have been greatly increased at some time in the period before the 

 survey, but the completeness of the duodecimal system of rating in the 

 county would imply that it was a matter of considerable antiquity, even if its 

 oppressiveness, when considered with reference to the value and economic 

 condition of land in the county, did not rather suggest that it represents a 

 fiscal burden which had gradually come to lose all relation to the facts of 

 agricultural life. So far as we can see, Leicestershire was a county whose 

 assessment emphatically called for a reduction, and there is something in the 

 distribution of the plough-lands in the county to suggest that both commis- 

 sioners and jurors may have been aware of this fact. The Leicestershire 

 Domesday contains 1 6 1 entries relating to plough-lands, seventy-four of which 

 are arranged in the accompanying table according to the relation which they 

 bear to the gelding carucates : sl 



19 Problems of a similar character are raised in connexion with the Yorkshire plough-lands. They 

 have been discussed by Canon Taylor in Domesday Studies (i, 143-86), by Mr. Round in Feud. Engl. (87-90), 

 and by Professor Maitland in (486-9) Dora. Bk. and Beyond. 



K See V. C.H. Notts, i, 212, and Northants, i, 264. 



fl The table could be considerably extended if it were taken to include those cases where an approximation 

 has been made to one or other of these ratios. It will be evident that, since replies expressed in team lands 

 had to be made in teams of the great plough of eight oxen, in many instances where the assessment itself was 

 some irregular number of carucates and bovates, it would be impossible for the jurors to give exactly the ratio 

 between carucates and ploughs which they wished to convey to the commissioners. 



285 



