A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE 



With the materials at our disposal we cannot hope as yet for any final 

 explanation of these figures, but they will at least become intelligible if 

 viewed in the following way. It is quite possible in view of the heavy 

 rating of Leicestershire as a whole that the jurors in the Domesday Inquest 

 may have been allowed to express the agricultural possibilities of their vills 

 and manors in figures which bore a conscious reference to the carucates of 

 assessment in each case. The above table, for instance, contains twenty-six 

 cases where the carucates stand to the plough-lands as three to two. It is 

 highly improbable that in all these instances the geld carucates exceeded the 

 field carucates, actual and potential, by one-third, but it is very possible 

 that, when this was approximately the case, the jurors may have been per- 

 mitted to use figures which brought out an intelligible ratio between these 

 quantities. In the event of an abatement being granted the king's financial 

 officials would find it much more convenient to possess figures which ex- 

 pressed the relations between assessment and agricultural fact in arithmetical 

 proportion than to work from a collection of unorganized statements about 

 plough-lands and carucates. It is true that the Domesday scribes did not 

 trouble to include these figures systematically in the completed record, and 

 also that, as the Leicester Survey proves, no change was made in the burden of 

 the Leicestershire geld for forty years at least after 1086, yet the fact remains 

 that over a large portion of the county, so far as our information goes, the 

 replies relative to team-lands were given in a manner which, according to the 

 scheme of the survey, would naturally be construed as a suggestion for a 

 reduction of assessment. 



At the head of the roll of Leicestershire landowners stands the name of 

 the king, to whose estates are allotted some two columns of our record. As was 

 commonly the case elsewhere the royal property in Leicestershire was derived 

 from various sources. From his predecessor Edward the king inherited 

 Rothley and Great Bowden with their wide tracts of dependent sokeland, and 

 on the death of Edith, the Confessor's widow, in 1075, he became possessed 

 of her lands in Wadborough, Saddington, Thorpe Acre, and Dishley. 

 Croxton Kerrial and Nether Broughton, with which the description of the 

 king's land opens, had reverted to the crown on the forfeiture of their former 

 owner, Earl Morcar of Northumbria, whose brother, Earl Edwin, within 

 whose Mercian government Leicestershire lay, does not seem to have possessed 

 any land at all within the county. 22 The large manor of Shepshed, com- 

 prising probably much of Charnwood Forest, had been held by an unknown 



" See below, page 298. 

 286 



