BOLDON BOOK 



30J. ' de cornagio' and one milch cow. In 1384 ' Willelmus de Hilton miles 

 tenet ii partes vilhv de Magna Uscworth, et Alicia de Modcrby tcrciam 

 partem dicta; villa; per servitium torinsccum, et reddunt per annum ad iiii 

 terminos usuales loj. lidem Willelmus et Alicia . . . reddunt pro cornagio 

 dictae villa; per annum, ad festum Sancti Cuthberti in Septembri, 30J-. lidcm 

 reddunt pro i vacca de metrith, ad festum Sancti Martini, 6/.,'' etc. The 

 omitted portions contain a list of money payments for the renders and services 

 of the villeins as recorded in Boldon Book. Like cases will be found at 

 Iveston, Sheraton, and Herrington.' 



Let us bring together now the results of our examination of the Durham 

 evidence. In the first place, whatever the origin of cornage may have been, 

 it was, when we meet with it in the documents of the twelfth century, an 

 incident of unfree tenure. Further, it was not universal in the bishopric, but 

 occurred only in such vills as had pasture, and here it represented at once the 

 villeins' recognition of their lord's proprietorship of the pasture and a payment 

 for the use of it by their cattle. This payment, it would seem, had originally 

 been made in kind out of the annual increase of the herd, but in the twelfth 

 century was already compounded for a money payment and the render of a 

 milch cow. Then we have marked in the twelfth-century documents the 

 tendency of this payment to fasten itself to the soil and become a burden on 

 the land without regard to the status of the holder. Finally, from later 

 documents we have been able to assert the predominance of this tendency 

 which caused cornage — or rather the money composition for cornage and the 

 milch cow together — to merge in the forinsec service of such lands as were 

 charged with this burden. 



Certain other results, no less important because they are negative, may 

 also be stated as the outcome of our inquiry. We have seen no warrant for 

 describing cornage as a tenure such as might be co-ordinated with socage or 

 serjeanty or the like. It was rather one of many incidents of villein-tenure 

 peculiar to such vills as enjoyed certain advantages from their lord. Again, 

 we have met with no reason for connecting cornage with any special form of 

 military service incumbent on the entire bishopric. That is on the face of it 

 impossible, because cornage was not universal. This last objection, again, 

 will hold against any attempt to describe cornage as a general impost or tax. 



The terms ' yolwayting ' and ' michelmeth ' occur four times in Boldon 

 Book, always in the sense of some villein services which have been commuted 

 for a money payment. These obligations rested on the villeins, and on the 

 villeins only,^ of Heighington, Killerby, Middridge, and Thickley. It is 

 noticeable that these vills are all of the cornage-paying type, all situated in the 

 Darlington ward, and all members of the same manor, that of Auckland.* 

 Yolwayting had been compounded for at the rate of is. per capita^ michelmeth 

 at ^d!" These payments all recur in Hatfield's Survey,^ and were therefore 

 surviving in the fourteenth century, but they are not mentioned in any other 



1 HatficWs Surv. (Surtees Soc.;, 102 



* Ibid. 119, 152, 157. This point is very strikingly illustrated by the Northumberland texts, which are 

 brought together and discussed in Amer. Hist. Rev. ix. 678-680. 



* The entry in Canon Greenwell's text of Boldon Book which describes the cottiers of Heighington as 

 associated with the villeins in the payment of yolwayting is an interpolation, vid. inf. App. No. ii. 



* Vid. sup. pp. 267, 270. ' A fraction over at Heighington and Killerby. 

 ' Hatfield's Surv. (Surtees Soc.), 18, 22, 24, 28. 



277 



