A HISTORY OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 



to Risborough, who paid two shillings, which is probably only another 

 illustration of the occasional discrepancies in Domesday. The total 

 amount which Edward the Confessor had received from Buckingham, 

 even with Bourton, was only ten pounds a year, as against the twenty- 

 five pounds which Aylesbury or Wendover brought him, which implies 

 that it was but a small place. Aylesbury, the meeting place of many 

 roads, produced, at the time of the Survey, no less than ten pounds from 

 its toll alone ; but, as there is no mention of burgesses, it can hardly 

 yet have been a place of trade. On the other hand, burgesses occur at 

 Newport (Pagnel), a manor of William Fitz Ansculf, a manor of which 

 the name, in spite of its rural character, implies a market of some kind. 



The ploughland, the meadow, the woodland, and the mill, these 

 were the chief sources of wealth. With wearisome iteration the text 

 records the number of ploughlands in the manor, the ploughteams, each 

 of eight oxen, that were actually at work upon them, the peasants and 

 the lord's serfs, the meadows down by the streams that afforded hay for 

 the oxen, the watermill at which the peasants were compelled to have 

 their corn ground, and the number of swine for which the woodland 

 was reckoned to provide' mast. 



Here and there an exceptional phrase or some peculiar payment 

 deserves notice. The render, for instance, of ploughshares as rent in 

 kind occurs at a few places ; at Bledlow, Burnham, Chesham, and Aston 

 Clinton we find them rendered from the woodland, and at Wing from 

 the pasture. The payment in such cases appears to represent the renting 

 of surplus areas, as at Aylesbury, where twenty shillings were received 

 ' de remanenti.' From the woodland at Caldecot was received twenty- 

 eight pence, from that at Tyringham twenty-six pence, on a nameless 

 manor sixteen pence, and from that at Missenden four ' ores,' that is to 

 say, sixty-four pence. The ' ore,' or silver ounce of sixteen pence, occurs 

 several times in this county ; and it was here as elsewhere a common 

 unit in the rent of mills ; those at Denham, at Chalfont, and Aston 

 Clinton were each of them worth five ' ores,' and that of another manor 

 five * ores ' and four pence. Bledlow mill produced the exceptional 

 render of twenty-four (horse) loads of malt. 



The rent of a mill was sometimes paid in part in eels from the 

 millpool. Eels were thus received from the mills at Winchendon (80), 

 Olney (200), Lavendon 1 (250), Haversham (75), and Stanton (50). An 

 exceptional entry under Iver speaks of four fisheries producing ' 1,500 

 eels and fish on Fridays for the use of the reeve of the vill ' ; as a rule 

 the eel appears as the only product of the ' fishery,' that is of the weir 

 composed of basket-work traps. The course of the Thames is marked 

 by entries of such ' fisheries.' They begin with Wraysbury, a manor 

 which possessed ' four fisheries in the Thames,' bringing in twenty-six 

 shillings and eight pence ; above it were Datchet, producing from its 

 two fisheries 2,000 eels, Upton (by Slough), and Eton, at each of which 

 a fishery produced 1,000. Then came Dorney with 500, Taplow with 



1 This was only the moiety of a mill. 

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