A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



ture but here we shall get small help from Boldon Book, and must proceed 

 cautiously by means of inference and analogy, making use of the meagre 

 supply of documents at our disposal. It will be convenient, then, to proceed 

 from the bottom upward, to study and classify the information that Boldon 

 Book affords before attempting to supply that which it withholds. 



To this end we may begin with the organization of the agricultural 

 community. It is desirable here to fasten our attention on the vill rather 

 than the manor, for our interests are economic rather than legal, and the 

 question of the formation of the manors of the bishopric is very largely a legal 

 one. Still it is a matter which we cannot afford to neglect, and it may be 

 well to interrupt our main inquiry at this point in order to ask ourselves what 

 was the meaning of the word ' manor ' in the bishopric, and how the thing 

 which the word represents came into being. The Domesday manor was far 

 less definite and regular an institution than that of the fourteenth century, but 

 whatever the manor of the eleventh and twelfth centuries may or may not 

 have been, one point is clear, its constituting element was the vill. Either the 

 manor composed itself of vills or else it decomposed vills into manors. In a 

 general way the first of these processes is characteristic of the north of 

 England, the second of the south. 1 The vill is an institution more permanent 

 and more stable than the manor. It is older withal, and stands in a closer 

 relation to the land and its inhabitants. 



With this statement of the general difficulties of the case we may turn to 

 examine the particular problem presented by Boldon Book and the other 

 evidence at our disposal. Briefly it may be stated on this wise, how and 

 when were the bishop's vills grouped or arranged in those economic and 

 judicial units styled manors ? Since the bishopric was omitted from the 

 Domesday survey and not afterwards included in the regular administration of 

 the kingdom, whether judicial or financial, it will be seen that any argument 

 drawn from the fiscal or administrative purpose of the Domesday survey will 

 not necessarily fit our case. Nor, as we have seen, may we argue as though 

 Boldon Book, in respect to its aim and result, were on all fours with Domesday 

 Book. The chief aim of the Conqueror's inquest was to facilitate the collec- 

 tion of danegeld, a tax that was not raised in the bishopric of Durham,* 

 and the two documents are separated by a century which saw the lapse and 

 disappearance of that impost. We must seek, then, some other explana- 

 tion ; we are debarred from assuming that it was financial pressure that 

 grouped men and lands about some house which was responsible to the 

 king for his geld. 3 



We may conduct our inquiry most conveniently by observing the now 

 classical method of proceeding from the known to the unknown. The known 

 in this case consists of the rich series of episcopal halmote rolls which begin 

 in the year 1345.* These documents record the doings of those loca~ 



1 Pollock and Maitland, Hist. ofEng. Law, 1st ed. i. 597, 598. 



2 Lapsley, Co. Pal. of Dur., 29$, 296. 



3 This convenient hypothesis, put forward by Professor Maitland (Dom. Book and Beyond, 128), is not 

 now generally accepted, see Tait in Eng. Hist. Rev. 1897, 770 ff; Round in ibid. 1900, 293 ff. ; and Vino- 

 gradoff, The Growth of the Manor, bk. iii., particularly pp. 300 ff. 



4 These MSS., which are preserved at the Record Office and at Durham, were thoroughly examined 

 by Messrs. Hardy and Page, on behalf of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, with whose permission they have 

 very kindly placed at my disposal several volumes of transcripts. For the convenience of those who wish to 

 verify statements occurring in the text I give the references to the originals. 



260 



