BOLDON BOOK 



profited by the royal favour to issue an episcopal coinage.' It is known that 

 the right of coinage was much coveted and freely usurped at this period, and 

 that both the king and the empress countenanced what they could not or did 

 not care to prevent/ The privilege seems temporarily to have disappeared during 

 the general resumption of royal rights in i 154/ but it must have been revived 

 soon afterward only to be again suppressed in the fashion recorded in Boldon 

 Book. Richaril I. revived the privilege of an episcopal mint in favour of Bishop 

 Philip of Poitou/ and during the vacancy preceding that bishop's accession 

 there was a profitable ' cambium ' or exchange and also in all probability a 

 certain amount of coinage at Durham.^ During the vacancy in 1213 the 

 keeper of the temporalities accounted for 4/. I2j<^/. ' of the profit of exchange 

 of one die.' ^ In 1253 there seems to have been some question of the bishop's 

 title to the privilege of coinage, but after an inquest had been taken and the 

 dies and coins from old time used and made in Durham had been produced, 

 the bishop's right was admitted and embodied in a charter,^ and the right 

 was recognized in the Quo Warranto proceedings of 1293.^ 



The very presence of a mint at Durham points to the need of a medium 

 of exchange. Not even the most favoured community could hope to be 

 quite self-sufficing, and we find that a good many commodities had to be 

 imported into the bishopric. Those that occur most frequently in the 

 documents are wine, mill-stones, salt, and herrings. Foreign wines, German 

 as well as French, were largely imported into England during the Middle 

 Ages, and their use was by no means restricted to the upper classes.^ The 

 frequent recurrence in Boldon Book of the obligation of carting wine indicates 

 that a large amount of it must have been imported. The duty of carting 

 a tun of wine appears to have been a normal incident of drengage tenure. 

 At Herrington a tenant who held two parts of a drengage carted two parts of 

 a tun of wine, and at Hutton a full dreng carted a whole tun to Durham. 

 Sometimes, as at West Auckland, it was no more than the obligation to find 

 four oxen for the purpose. Sometimes the duty was incumbent on a whole 

 vill or a pair of vills, as at Ryton and Crawcrook, or at Iveston, where 

 the villeins had to provide eight oxen. 



The indispensable mill-stones were generally fetched from the neigh- 

 bourhood of Paris, where the best quality was produced, and the task of 

 conveying them by land when they arrived in England fell to the lord's 

 tenants.'" Boldon Book affords us abundant evidence of this custom. The 

 villeins of Bedlingtonshire had to cart ' petras molendini.' At Stanhope the 

 obligation is incumbent on the farmers as well, and at Hutton it is a dreng 

 who must meet it. It seems that in the bishopric mill-stones were sometimes 

 a home product. The villeins of Great Usworth convey mill-stones to 

 Durham and they of Butterwick to Sedgefield, and in 121 1 mill-stones were 

 sent from Durham to Ireland." 



Salt was even more indispensable and was needed in larger quantities than 



1 Noble, Two Dissertations en the Mint of the Episcopal-Palatine of Durham, i. 5 S. 

 ' Stubbs, Constitutional Hist., i. 371. ' Noble, loc. cit. 



* Roger of Hovedcn, Chronica (Rolls Ser.), iv. 13. 



' Pipe R. 8 Ric. I. in Boldon Bk. (Surtees Soc), App. p. xii. 



• Ibid. 14 John, ibid. p. xx ; cf. Ruding, op. cit., i. 179. 



7 Pat. 1 1 Hen. VI., pt. ii. m. 22 ; this is an inspcximus of a ch.irter of 37 Hen. III. 



9 Plac. t/e ^0 IVar. (Rec. Com.), 604. ' Cunningham, op. cit., i. i8z, 184 ; Ashley, op. cit., i. igi. 



1" Rogers, Six Centuries, etc., iizfF. ^1 Pipe R. 13 John, in Boldon Bk. (Surtees Soc), App. p. xviii. 



I 305 39 



