THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 



connection, except at Graveley and St. Paul's Walden, where we read that 

 there is wood enough for ' the fences and the buildings.' Another 

 Graveley entry (fo. 140^) contains a word of great rarity in the phrase 

 ' rispalia ad sepes.' 



Out in the open fields of the vills, such as those of Hitchin pictured 

 and described in Mr. Seebohm's famous work, 1 there lay that mosaic of 

 strips, usually half acres, on which in strict rotation the crops of the 

 time were grown. The St. Paul's leases, spoken of above, show us 

 wheat, oats and barley, to say nothing of peas and beans, stowed in the 

 barns on the canons' estates. And the chapter's accounts enable us to 

 check the deliveries of grain from its Hertfordshire manors in what is 

 now ' Paul's bakehouse yard ' for conversion into bread for the canons 

 and not into bread alone ; for much of it found its way to the great 

 brewhouse of St. Paul's, and barley, wheat and oats alike vanished down 

 their throats in the form of beer. 2 



Urban life, at the time of the Survey, was limited and of small 

 account. Hertford had acquired a certain importance from the forts 

 erected there against the Danes about the beginning of the tenth century 

 and it was essentially a king's borough under Edward the Confessor. 

 Concerned as it was almost exclusively with fiscal and jurisdictional 

 rights, the Domesday Survey has not much to tell us about Hertford, 

 which it begins by calling a ' borough ' and ends by calling a * suburb ' 

 (suburbium). Indeed the most notable feature in the short entry on the 

 town is not what it contains, but what it does not contain. The ' hetero- 

 geneity of tenure,' as Professor Maitland terms it, which he connects with 

 ' the garrison theory ' of the borough, 3 is significantly absent at Hertford. 

 And yet, in the words of Green, ' Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and 

 Bedfordshire are instances of purely military creation, districts assigned to 

 the fortresses which Edward raised at these points.' * We should conse- 

 quently expect to find the traces of those ' borough haws ' of the rural 

 thegns, which are held, according to ' the garrison theory,' to represent 

 the military service they were bound to render in defending the borough ; 

 but comparison with Oxford and other instances selected by Professor 

 Maitland will show that they are here wanting. The chief interest of the 

 Hertford entry is, in fact, fiscal. Under Edward the Confessor it used to 

 escape with an annual payment to the Crown of 7 i os. When Peter (de 

 Valognes) the sheriff took it over to ' farm ' it for the Crown, this amount 

 was doubled, though still payable as before ' by tale.' But at the time of the 

 Survey the Crown drew from it 20 a year, which had moreover to be 

 paid in ' assayed and weighed ' money, implying a substantially greater 

 amount of pure silver than did 20 ' by tale.' An increase in the sums 

 wrung from the boroughs was a marked result of the Norman Conquest. 



Next in importance to Hertford was St. Alban's, where there were 



1 T^i? English Village Community, pp. 1-6 and frontispiece. 



8 See Archdeacon Male's Domesday of St. Paul's, pp. xlviii.-li. 160-75. Eac ^ f tile 3 canons 

 received the generous allowance of 30 bowls (bolle) of beer a week. 



3 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 176-92. * Conquest of England, p. 237. 



295 



