A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



fewer than six churches are recorded within the borough, of which two 

 belonged to the king, the remaining four, each of which was the property 

 of a different owner, being made the subjects of as many different entries. 

 Ecclesiastical in character is the statement that the burgesses rendered to 

 the king at Martinmas 1 2 thraves of corn, of which the abbot of Burton 

 had 40 sheaves. The importance of this entry has been discussed by 

 Mr. Round, who has shown that it refers to that somewhat obscure due 

 ' churchscot,' and that it gives us an unusual instance of this due being 

 paid in the first place by a borough, and, secondly, to the king and not 

 to any church. 1 



The last feature of our borough which calls for notice here is the 

 extraordinary number of its burgesses who had disappeared since the 

 Conquest. Only 140 remained out of a pre-Conquest total of 243, and 

 of these forty are described as ' lesser ' burgesses. Nottingham also had 

 suffered, though there the decrease was only from 173 to 120. The case 

 of Derby is more remarkable in every way, as no castle appears to have 

 been founded there by the Conqueror. Castle-building was to 

 Mr. Freeman the cause of most of the evil which came upon many 

 English boroughs as a result of the Conquest, and he was possibly 

 disposed thereby to overlook other causes for their depreciation. It may 

 be remarked that houses in towns were not for the most part large or 

 costly structures, so that a slight decrease in the profits derived from 

 trade in any town might lead many merchants to abandon their houses 

 and seek some other place where they could obtain a more profitable 

 return. Something may also be allowed for the devastation which we 

 know Derbyshire to have undergone at the Conqueror's hands, but the 

 loss by a town of nearly half its population in twenty years is difficult to 

 understand even in the unquiet times of the eleventh century. 



We may now pass from the consideration of the county borough 

 and deal with the rural committees found within the shire. One of the 

 gravest difficulties affecting the study of Domesday Book is our ignorance 

 of the precise meaning which ought to be attached to the terms which it 

 employs. This is especially the case with reference to the words describing 

 the various forms in which the communities of the land are represented 

 in the Survey. It has, for instance, been found impossible up to the 

 present to define such a simple and common term as ' manor ' (manerium) 

 in the sense in which it is employed in Domesday. Professor Maitland, 

 indeed, in a brilliant discussion of this subject, propounded the theory 

 that ' manerium ' simply meant an estate answering to the geld by itself. 2 

 This theory has been proved by Mr. Round to be untenable for several 

 reasons, one of the most important being that ' manerium ' is used in 

 Domesday interchangeably with such a vague term as ' terra.' s A 

 Derbyshire instance of this will be found in the case of Ticknall, which 

 is discussed in the notes to the translation of the Domesday text.* An 

 even more difficult term to define is 'soke,' and its compound 'sokeman.' 



1 Engl. Hist. Rev. v, 101. s Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 107-128. 



s 'The Domesday Manor,' Engl. Hist. Rev. xv. 293-5. * See p. 335. 



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