A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



land than the basis or unit of villein service, and we ought probably to think 

 of the villein holding 2 bovates as rather a group of several men in a house- 

 hold on the one hand, or on the other possibly as an indivisible and ideal part 

 of a single man holding several virgates and concentrating in himself therefore 

 several villeins. Again we find bovates of varying content in the same vill. 

 At Boldon the villeins as we know held 2 bovates of 1 5 acres each, but a 

 certain Robert held 2 bovates containing 3 1 acres, and rendered one half- 

 mark but no service. At Cleadon, where the content of the villein bovate 

 was the same as at Boldon, Kettell held 2 bovates, containing 34 acres. The 

 natural inference is that we have to do in these entries with free men who are 

 holding unfree land and holding it at beneficial rating, and we have some 

 evidence pointing in this direction. According to the oldest text of Boldon Book, 

 Geoffrey of Hardwick, ' tenet de terra de Nortona juxta Herdewyc xxxvi acras 

 et reddit ii marcas quamdiu Episcopus voluerit.' But the later text, which took 

 up changes that had occurred between the two recensions, gives a different 

 tenant, Adam son of Geoffrey of Hardwick, who ' tenet de terra de Northtona 

 juxta Heredewyc xxxvi acras, qua? nunc sunt Ix acras.' 1 



With regard to pasture, meadow and other commonable rights generally 

 appurtenant to a servile holding, Boldon Book gives us very little information. 

 But there is enough to make it clear that this omission does not mark the 

 absence of these necessary parts of the village life, necessary because there 

 could be no agriculture without plough-beasts, and the oxen required both 

 pasture and hay. The ordinary pasture of the village was furnished by the 

 field which in any given year chanced to be fallow, and the rest of the arable 

 and the meadow as soon as they had been cropped and the enclosures removed. 

 There would also be permanent pasture on waste and moor land.* The former 

 of these we should scarcely expect to find in such a document as Boldon Book ; 

 its existence was understood, and there was no necessity for recording it. It 

 figures prominently enough, however, in such records of the daily life of a 

 village as the halmote rolls. There we may read of the allotment of the 

 pasture among the villeins, of the wicked breaking-down of frithes in the 

 pasture of a vill, of a man who for eight years had kept sixty sheep on the 

 lord's pasture although he had no land, and so on. s The number of beasts 

 anyone was allowed to keep on the common pasture was generally carefully 

 proportioned to the size of his holding. 4 



The permanent pasture was commonly shared by two or more adjoining 

 vills, as at Flakkesdon and Redworth or Cornsay and Hedley. 6 That 

 this arrangement was general throughout the bishopric appears from a 

 charter granted by Roger Bertram lord of Stainton to the prior and convent 



1 As to all this cf. Professor VinogradofPs conclusion, ' that the hide, the virgate, the bovate, in short 

 every holding mentioned in the surveys, appears primarily as an artificial, administrative, and fiscal unit which 

 corresponds only in a very rough way to the agrarian reality,' Villainage in Eng., 241. The whole subject is 

 treated in a most illuminating fashion in the third essay in Professor Maitland's Dom. Bk- and Beyond; 

 cf. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, bk. ii., chs. iii. and v. 



8 Ashley, Economic Hist., i. 7. 



8 Dur. Halmote Rolls, i. ; 12 Burden, 16 West Merryngton, 20 Over Heworth. 



* In a case that came up in 1342 between the prior of Launde and T. Basset of Welham it appeared 

 that every virgate was allowed to turn out eight oxen, the rest of the pasture was reserved for the lord's 

 agistment. Tear Bk., 16 Edw. III. (Rolls Ser.), ii., 162 ff. 



6 See Bishop Pudsey's charter in Boldon Bk. (Surtees Soc.), App. No. vii. On these inter-commoning vills, 

 which were characteristic of northern England, cf. Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 355. 



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