BOLDON BOOK 



Now it would have been quite feasible for Bishop Walcher to meet the 

 requirements of this position of baron and tenant-in-chief, with its accompany- 

 ing responsibility tor military service, without making any serious changes in 

 the internal arrangement of the district confided to his care. The Normans 

 who accompanied him could have been provided for without any very great 

 injustice, or displacement of the native English.' The process of subinfeuda- 

 tion, the imposition of a Norman superstratum over the English population, 

 would thus have gone on gradually between the time of Walcher and that of 

 Pudsey, and there is some evidence indicating that this is precisely what took 

 place. In the first half of the twelfth century we find record of an episcopal 

 baronage composed of great lords, whose dignity derives not from any relation 

 to the king (of whom, indeed, they held at one remove), but rather from the 

 extent of their lands and their tenure-in-chief of the bishop : Hilton, Bulmer, 

 and Conyers — their names are all Norman." Now one of these barons, and in 

 respect to his holding perhaps the greatest of them, was the prior of Durham 

 'pro tempore.'^ Now the institution of a convent of monks under a prior 

 took place in the Conqueror's reign and with his approval, and this fact carries 

 the creation of one feudal sub-tenant of the bishop back to the time of the 

 first Norman king.* 



Then, when in 1140 an intruder, hoping to make himself bishop, had 

 actually got possession of the temporalities of the see, he bore himself, the 

 chronicler reports, ' non ut custos, sed sicut jam episcopus factus dans etiam 

 terras et homagium omnium baronum . . . suscipiens.' ^ Here, then, we have 

 the opinion ot a contemporary as to what a new-made bishop should do ; to 

 grant lands and receive the homage of barons. 



When in 11 30 the temporalities of the see were in the hands of the 

 king he took a ' donum ' from the knights of the bishopric,* and when the 

 institution of scutage came into general use the bishop paid for his knights 

 like any other tenant-in-chief.^ 



This brings us to the period of Bishop Pudsey and of Boldon Book, with 

 the conviction that at the time the survey was made the superficial feudaliza- 

 tion of the bishopric was neither recent nor incomplete. How deeply the 

 feudal institutions had penetrated, to what extent they had absorbed or done 

 away with older tenures and relations, are questions to which we must now 

 turn our attention. 



If we interrogate Boldon Book we shall find that the bishop's relations 

 with his free tenants on his estate were only to a limited extent influenced by 



* Some displacement there must, of course, have been. This is attested by the details of Walchcr's 

 pontificate which have come before us, but the same evidence shows that there was no general confiscation or 

 re-allotment, no 'tabula rasa,' and this is corroborated by our examination of the subject of drengage. 



* This whole matter is worked out in Lapsley, Co. Pal. of Durham, 63-68 ; and cf Tait, Mediaval 

 Manchiiter, pp. 182-199. 



' He was the tenant-in-chief of the bishop ' tanquam dominus,' not ' tanquam patronus,' so that the 

 awkward canonical difficulty of an internal fcudalization of the church was avoided. The distinction was not 

 dearly stated until the middle of the thirteenth century, but it seems to have existed earlier, as we have seen. 

 William and Lanfranc could apply the doctrine of capacities to a bishop ; Lapsley, op. cit. 50 sqq. 



« Zymeon of Durham (Rolls Ser.), i. 1 19-124 ; cf Fcod., pref The charters, indeed, are spurious, but I 

 see no reason to reject Symeon's statement that the bishop obtained permission to make the change from the 

 king and the pope. 



5 Symeon of Durham (RoUs Ser.), i. 146 ; cf ibid. 1 50-1 51. 



* Pipe R. 3 1 Hen. I. in BoUon Bk. (Surtees Soc), App. p. ii. 



1 Red Bk. of the Exch. (Rolls Ser.), i. 15, 19, 26, 28 ; cf Lapsley, op. cit. 285 sqq. 



3" 



