A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



is curiously slight. 1 There are only ten places in the county, including 

 Derby itself, which possess the typical Danish termination ' by,' and 

 these are all found in the eastern half of the shire. ' Thorpes ' are 

 scarcely more common, although one isolated example Thorpe, near 

 Ashbourne occurs on the Staffordshire border. Under the circum- 

 stances, therefore, the duodecimal character of the Derbyshire assessment 

 is most welcome as reinforcing the evidence for Scandinavian influence 

 in the county. 



The study of the Domesday assessment of Derbyshire, however, is 

 attended by some rather serious complications. To begin with, the 

 number of recorded vills (if we may for a moment assume that every 

 place name recorded in the county survey represents a vill) is very 

 considerable in proportion to the area of the shire, exceeding by more 

 than fifty the total for each of the neighbouring counties Nottingham- 

 shire and Leicestershire. If we were to adopt the elementary plan of 

 dividing the number of carucates assessed upon the whole shire by the 

 number of places mentioned, we should obtain an average of about two 

 carucates for each vill ; if, to form our dividend, we were to use only 

 those places which stand by themselves as ' manors,' and are not merely 

 parts of some larger whole, our quotient would still be well under six. 

 Hence it will be evident that the problem of restoring the groups of 

 assessment in Derbyshire differs essentially from the similar problem as 

 studied, let us say, in Cambridgeshire or Bedfordshire, 2 where we may 

 consider the normal vill to be rated at five or ten hides by itself. In 

 Derbyshire the task is set us, not of combining the scattered fragments 

 of villar assessment to make a round sum for the vill as a whole, but of 

 combining the assessments of different vills to make a single fiscal group. 

 That the process is largely hypothetical will be evident from the fact that 

 we have for Derbyshire no key to the distribution of the geld such as we 

 possess for Leicestershire in the invaluable survey printed by Mr. Round 

 in Feudal England? 



One obvious difficulty may be noted straightway. It is not very 

 uncommon, especially in the description of estates in the east of the 

 county, to find an entry like the following : 'In Morton and Ogston 

 and Wessington Suain cilt had 1 1 J bovates and 8 acres of land (assessed) 

 to the geld.' Now in a case of this kind we have absolutely no means 

 of knowing what proportion of this sum must be debited to Morton, to 

 Ogston, and to Wessington respectively. And, as the bare fact of tenure 

 has no significance in relation to the geld, the combination of unspecified 

 villar assessments in a tenurial group spoils our chances of reconstructing 

 the fiscal groups to which they must have belonged. And to this cause 

 of perplexity we have to add that the Domesday wapentakes of Derby- 

 shire are excessively obscure. There is no consistent rubrication at all, 

 and, unfortunately, in the few rubrics that are given we get the names of 



1 Cf. Green, Conquest of England, 121-2. It is certainly incorrect to say that place names ending 

 in ' by ' extend to ' the very borders ' of Derbyshire. 



2 V.C.H. Eeds. i. 1 92-3, and Feudal England, 44 ff. s pp. 196-214. 



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