A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE 



foreign scribes, who may well have entered as a ' relief what, in King 

 Edward's days, men would have called a heriot. For the horse and 

 arms of the Berkshire entry are the characteristic of the heriot. 1 The 

 mention of the saddled and the unsaddled horse,* and the provision for 

 offering hawks and hounds, if the dead man possessed them, for the 

 King's acceptance, appear to be peculiar to Berkshire. 



The hunting service of * stabilitio ' spoken of above, 'similarly finds 

 a parallel in the customs of Hereford. 4 There only remain two clauses, 

 which are of a more legal character, relating, as they do, to breaches of 

 the peace. They are both somewhat parallel with clauses in the 

 customs of the closely adjacent county of Oxfordshire. By the first the 

 homicide of a man in the King's peace entailed forfeiture of life and of 

 all one's substance to the King.* By the second, as I read it, the 

 crime of 'borough breach ' involved a fine of a hundred shillings ' to the 

 King, not to the sheriff." But the point is one of some difficulty. Mr. 

 Ballard takes civitatem to refer to the * city ' of Wallingford, a view that 

 we may certainly reject. 7 Prof. Maitland renders the passage somewhat 

 loosely in one place, * he who broke into a city by night paid I oo 

 shillings to the King'; 8 but in another he appears to see in it the old 

 crime of burh-bryce? What the borough-breach actually was cannot be 

 ..said with certainty. The word comes to us from the Quadripartite* , 

 which speaks of it in London, and from the Leges Henrici, where it is 

 burchbreche" and Prof. Maitland suggests that it implied a breach of the 

 special peace attached to the borough, especially a King's borough." 

 Britton might almost be thought to have had in mind ' borough-breach,' 

 or the Berkshire formula, when he defined burglars as ' those who 

 feloniously in time of peace break churches or the houses of others or 

 the walls or gates of our cities or boroughs' ; but he omits the words 'by 

 night,' which, in later days, were essential to the crime of burglary," 

 and which appear, oddly enough, in this Berkshire Domesday entry. 



At Hereford ' burgensis cum caballo serviens, cum moriebatur, habebat Rex equum et arma ejus, 

 (Domesday, i. 179) ; at Cambridge ' De harieta Lagemannorum habuit isdem Picot [vicecomes] viii. 

 lib. et unum palefridum et unius militis arma' (16. 189). In Berkshire ' Tainus vel miles regis 

 dominicus moriens pro relevamento dimittebat regi omnia arma sua et equum i cum sella, alium sine 

 sella.' This passage is of great importance, for its clear correspondence with a clause in the laws of 

 Cnut (A.D. 1027-1034), where, in the chapter on heriots, we read that the King's thegn, ' si notus fuerit 

 regi,' owed as heriot ' duos equos, unus cum sella et alius sine, gladium unum et duas lanceas et duo 

 scuta, et quinquaginta marcas auri ' (Prof. Liebermann's Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 359). 



The number of the horses should be observed, for two were distinctive, in Cnut's law, of the 

 heriot of a thegn midway between those who stood nearest to the King and owed four, and the ' lesser 

 thegns," who owed one. 



3 Seep. 309. 



' Qui monitus ad stabilitionem venationis non ibat 1. sol. regi emendabat ' (Berks). ' Quando 

 rex venatui instabat, de unaquaque domo per consuetudinem ibat unus homo ad stabilitionem in silva' 

 (Hereford). 



6 The expression ' the King's peace ' distinguishes the peace of which this is a breach. In Oxford- 

 shire this peace is more exactly denned : ' Pax regis manu vel sigillo data siquis infregerit ita ut hominem 

 cui pax ipsa data fuerit occidat, et membra et vita ejus in arbitrio regis erunt,' etc. (i. 154^). 



' Qui per noctem effringebat civitatem c sol. emendabat regi, non vicecomiti.' 



' See p. 310 note 5. 



8 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, ii. 455. 



9 Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 184, note. 10 Liebermann, op. cit. p. 558. 



" Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 185. " History of English Law, ii. 491. 



316 



