A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



Domesday gives us of the county town itself. In general, it may be said 

 that Domesday fails to satisfy the modern student in the descriptions 

 which it gives of urban life, for its compilers were concerned essentially 

 only with such matters as bore directly on the king's revenue, and were 

 not mindful of the details of borough organisation. Only one column 

 of loosely-written manuscript is assigned to Derby, which, nevertheless, 

 contains some features of special interest. In the first place, the mere 

 position of the account of Derby in the Survey is in itself suggestive. It 

 is usual in the shires north of the Thames for the description of the 

 county town to stand at the head of the county survey. 1 But Derbyshire, 

 in the eleventh century and, indeed, onwards, until the reign of Elizabeth, 

 was united with Notts under one sheriff, and the connexion between the 

 two counties is strikingly expressed by the way in which their surveys 

 are interworked in Domesday. Folios 272 to 279 of the record are 

 occupied with Derbyshire ; one column each in folio 280 is given to the 

 boroughs of Nottingham and Derby ; folio 2 Sob is assigned to a statement 

 of certain local customs affecting the two counties jointly, and the Survey 

 of Nottinghamshire follows immediately. So close an association as this 

 of two counties is probably unique in Domesday, but we learn, in 

 addition, from an incidental notice occurring in the column assigned to 

 Derby borough, that the two shire courts sat together for the purposes of 

 the Domesday inquest. 8 We know that the shire courts of Notts and 

 Derby were combined long after this date, and that it was only by special 

 petition that the Derbyshire men obtained their autonomy. The first 

 line of the description of the borough of Derby contains an unusual 

 phrase, which arrests the attention at once : ' In the borough of Derby ' 

 we read * there were, in King Edward's time, 243 resident burgesses' 

 (burgenses manentes). Now, if the last two words mean anything in 

 particular, they certainly imply the possibility that there might exist a 

 class of burgesses who were not resident in the boroughs to which they 

 belonged. This class has been somewhat neglected by writers on the 

 Domesday borough, although the Survey frequently refers to men styled 

 ' burgesses' whose habitation, nevertheless, is in some rural manor, 3 but as 

 the question does not directly affect Derby, it cannot be discussed here. 

 It is more to the point to remark that the description of our borough 

 clearly reveals the existence of a land-holding class within the borough 

 community in the period before the Conquest, when the 12 geldable 

 carucates belonging to the borough were divided among forty-one out of 

 its 243 burgesses. The same phenomenon reappears at Nottingham, and 

 raises the difficult question whether the geld laid upon the borough may 

 not have been paid only by those burgesses who held shares in the borough 

 lands. It is certain that at Derby the assessment of the borough is 

 brought into unusually close connexion with its agricultural basis. On 

 the face of our record, indeed, Derby appears as essentially an agricultural 



1 For the general significance of this point see Maitland, Dam. Bk. and Beyond, p. 1 76. 



3 ' Testimonio duarum scirarum.' 



8 See for account of these 'burgenses ruremanentes ' Miss Bateson in Eng. Hilt. Rev. xx. 148-9. 



308 



