A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



characteristic of the type), or, as in the case of Norton, are relieved from 

 cornage ' pro defectu pasture.' Further, fourteen vills, having compounded 

 for all or nearly all their service for a money payment, might be regarded as 

 doubtful. Still, as one of these is noted in Boldon Book itself as paying a 

 composition for cornage, and two others in Bishop Hatfield's Survey, a four- 

 teenth-century record similar to Boldon Book, it may be inferred that the rest 

 are of another class. Finally, thirty-nine vills in Boldon Book are held of 

 the bishop in chief, and here the services are not enumerated ; but on turning 

 to Hatfield's Survey we find that only three of them are paying a cornage 

 composition. This rough calculation shows that of the 141 vills enume- 

 rated in Boldon Book only forty-five, or less than one-third, are of the 

 cornage type. 



At the close of the twelfth century, then, cornage in Durham was an 

 incident of unfree tenure in certain specially situated vills. It was being paid 

 partly in kind and partly in a money payment specifically described as the 

 composition for the render of a cow (vacca de metride), indicating that the 

 institution was already ancient and had been made the subject of at least a 

 partial composition. 1 From the nature of the evidence connecting cornage 

 at every turn with cattle and pasture we are led to the inference that it was 

 a payment made for the agistment of cattle, and from the survival of the 

 render of a milch cow that it had originally consisted of an annual render of 

 cattle, perhaps a proportion of the increase of the herd. 



On the other hand, Littleton says, * It is said that in the marches of 

 Scotland some hold of the king by cornage, that is to say to wind a horn to 

 give men of the country warning when they hear that the Scots or other 

 enemies are come or will enter England.' * It has been the fashion to deride 

 this as fantastic, as indeed it is, but there is no question that cornage is 

 described as a tenure in documents relating to all the northern counties 

 except Durham ; and some form of serjeanty, probably connected with forest 

 service, the note of which, so to say, was horn-blowing, occurs in various 

 parts of England throughout the Middle Ages. 8 An Oxfordshire manor was 

 held by the service of blowing a horn to keep a certain forest, and a similar 

 tenure which Camden noted at Bradford, in Yorkshire, was still in existence 

 when Gough was editing the Britannia at the end of the eighteenth-century. 4 



The difficulty is serious, and one is quite prepared to admit that those 

 who contend that cornage in England was a seignorial due and was never 

 anything else ought to show some way of accounting for the perplexing 

 talk about cornage tenants in the other northern counties. It is impossible, 



1 The word 'gild,' used in connexion with cornage in the forms 'geldum animalium,' 'noutegeld,' and 

 horngeld, is in itself an indication that a composition had occurred ; in this sense it is used interchangeably 

 with ' mal,' as in ' malmannus.' See Vinogradoff, op. fit. 293. An illustration of this may be seen in a kind 

 of glossary of hard or barbarous words occurring in legal documents which seem to have been current in 

 mediasval England. It was subjoined to the custumary of the soke of Rothley in Lincolnshire (1312), and 

 at Durham it was written into the ' Registrum Primum' of the Dean and Chapter, under the rubric, 

 ' Exphcatio vocum veterum.' The passage is as follows, ' Gildi hoc est quietum de consuetudinibus servilibus 

 qua: quondam dare consueverint sicuti HorncbilJ. . . . Hernchild [hornbiel, and hornegeld in the Durham copy], 

 hoc est quietum de consuetudine exacta per talliam per totam Angliam terram scilicet de quacunque cornuta 

 bestia [de omni bestia cornuta, in the Durham copy].' See Vinogradoff, loc. cit. ; Arch., vol. xlvii., pt. i., QQ ff. : 

 Boldm Bk. (Surtees Soc.), App. p. lv. 



8 Coke, Second Institute (many editions), Par. 156. 



T. B. Trowsdale, in The Reliquary, xx. 157-160 (I owe this ref. to Prof. Gay, of Harvard). 

 These cases, the first of which is from Harl. MSS., No. 34, are cited by Mr. Trowsdale. 



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