BOLDON BOOK 



by cottiers;' at Little Coundon twelve cottiers hold 6 acres apiece, they 

 work two days a week in summer and one in winter, they do four boon- 

 works and render one hen and one hundred eggs. Finally, in five places 

 there are cottiers who neither work nor render in kind, but pay a money 

 rent only/ 



The term ' bordarius,' which occurs frequently in Domesday Book, is of 

 French origin and seems to have failed to take root in England. The person 

 it describes does not differ from the cottier.^ In Normandy, where the term 

 was in current use, it seems to have been derived from the fact that the 

 bordar's holding was on the edge or border of the open-fields and that the 

 tenant represented a freedman originally settled there at the time of his 

 manumission.* The term occurs twice in Boldon Book, but the scribes seem 

 to have hesitated between 'bordarius' and ' bondarius ' or 'bondus,' a clerical 

 uncertainty that was not confined to the bishopric, but occurs in other parts 

 of England.' The oldest text of the record certainly gives the form 'bondarii,' 

 a word which was well-established as a general appellation of the unfree by the 

 time of Hatfield's Survey. Still, the later reading 'bordarii' is to be preferred, 

 because the tenants described are certainly not bondmen in the twelfth- 

 century sense of that word, but rather bordars or cottiers. Thus at Sedgefield 

 there are five of them who hold a toft apiece and render 5J-. and do four 

 boon-works, and at Middleham and Cornford there are four more who hold a 

 toft apiece on the same terms. 



It may be conjectured that if the cottiers and bordars escaped many of 

 the villein obligations they equally lacked some of the villein privileges, 

 notably in the matter of the use of commons. There is evidence that the 

 cottiers paid no cornage, and we have seen reason to believe that cornage was 

 a return made for the use of pasture. Thus the vills of Newbottle and Little 

 Coundon, which contained cottiers only, were not charged with cornage, 

 although they were members of the cornage-paying manors of Houghton and 

 Auckland. 



Now the population of a vill included a good many persons who for various 

 reasons formed no organic part of the great agricultural machine of which we 

 have spoken. Some were higher in the social and economic scale than the 

 villeins, others were lower, and we may range all the way from the free 

 farmer of the demesne to the actual bondman without missing this common 

 characteristic of a greater or less degree of individualism. The villeins, the 

 farmers, and the cottiers existed as members of a community, as parts of a 

 machine, and it was their compact body, indissolubly connected with the 

 land they cultivated and occupied that owed such and such renders and 

 services. But the dreng, the rent-paying tenant, the ' hospes,' and the 

 freedman existed as individuals owing services and payments either personally 

 or by reason of their particular holdings to which these obligations were 



^ This is tnken as evidence that cottier-tenure was regarded as a mode of villeinage. It occurs in Dom. Bk. : 

 cf. Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, p. 39. 



' Stockton, Lanchester, Bcdlington, East Sleckbum, Newbottle. 



' Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 36 ff. ; Vinogradoft", op. cit., 145-146 ; Gioath of Ike Manor, 337- 



338, 35^-353- .... * 



* Kovalevski, Die akonom'tsche Entwlckelung Europas, ii. pp. 401-406. 



' VinogradofF, Villainage, 145-146. The term ' bondus ' as the equivalent or even substitute for villein 

 seems to have come into general use in Durham at some period between the composition of Boldon Book and 

 that of Hatfield's Survey. It is very common in the later document : zi.Dur. Ace. R. (Surtees Soc), iii. 896. 



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