A HISTORY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE 



ploughland and 1,769 acres of meadow in 1086, as compared with 111,101 

 acres of arable (besides 20,676 acres of orchard), and 203,902 acres of pasture 

 (permanent, and hay in rotation) in 1895-9. As compared with 58,407 acres 

 of woodland in I895 1 Domesday mentions 80,760 acres, but this estimate 

 must have been far below the real area covered with woods, as royal forests 

 were omitted from the survey. Dean, beyond the Severn, was only one of 

 the royal forests which bounded Gloucestershire on the west, south, and south- 

 east. With Malvern Chase on the Worcestershire margin, Bedminster and 

 Kingswood on the Somerset side, Braden Forest in North Wiltshire and 

 Wychwood in Oxfordshire, it is hardly probable that the boundaries of the 

 county were very closely respected. Probably there were debatable areas, 

 adjoining these forests, which remained wooded and unenclosed. Buckholt, 

 as its name implies, was already famous for its beechwoods, which, together 

 with a wood at Frocester, provided Gloucester Abbey with the whole of its 

 yearly stock of firewood in the thirteenth century. 8 Between Berkeley and 

 Bristol there was another large tract of forest, called Horwood, which has 

 now vanished, though traces of it long remained about Hawkesbury and 

 Horton. 8 It was not disafforested till 1227-8, when the men of the neigh- 

 bourhood paid Henry III the large sum of 700 marks (466 ijj. 4^.) in 

 order to be quit of the interference of the royal foresters and the royal deer.* 

 While its principal characteristics have thus not materially altered since 

 the days of Domesday, a Gloucestershire landscape between the eleventh and 

 the fifteenth century lacked one very marked feature of the present day. 

 Instead of lying amid fields enclosed by hedges, or by the stone-walls of the 

 Cotswolds, each village was surrounded by two or three vast open fields, 

 divided into strip-holdings with ' balks ' of turf as their only boundary. The 

 only enclosures to be seen were a few pieces of meadow-land, which, before 

 the days of winter-roots, were doubly precious to the stock-owner. And this 

 outward difference in the village was significant of a difference in the 

 condition of its inhabitants. The average mediaeval villager was superior to 

 his modern descendant in the fact that he was a landholder, and inferior in 

 his personal subjection to dues and services of a more or less galling character. 

 He was, in fact, unfree in the eye of the law. This is, at least, true of the 

 average man in Gloucestershire, which was pre-eminently a county of villeins. 

 In Domesday Book nineteen-twentieths of the population are recorded as 

 unfree, 6 and an analysis of the extents of twenty-five manors belonging to 

 Gloucester Abbey in the thirteenth century ' shows very little advance in the 

 number of freemen by that date (1266). At least three-quarters of these 

 tenants were still unfree, and in some cases their descent from the villeins 

 of the Domesday period can be traced with some certainty. The ' villanus ' 

 of the great survey was primarily a shareholder in the plough-team necessary 

 to work a hide of land ; his normal holding was a ' virgate,' or quarter of a 

 hide, 7 and rendered him liable to contribute two oxen, or a quarter of a team, 



1 Agric. Returns for 1899 (Bd. of Agric.), C.J. 1 66. 



* Hist, et Cart. Mm. S. Petri Glouc. (Rolls Ser.), iii, 107. This work will be referred to as Glouc. Cart. 

 throughout this article. 



3 For notes from Domesday see C. S. Taylor, ' Analysis of Domesday Book for Gloucestershire,' Brist. and 

 Glouc. Arch. Soc. Trans. 1889. 4 J. Smyth, Berkeley MSS. iii, 237. 



5 i.e. serfs or villeins. * Glouc. Cart. (Rolls Ser.), iii, 44-213. 



' Both hide and virgate were rather vague measurements. In the Glouc. Cart, the latter varied from 

 28 to 80 acres, but the term is used especially to denote a peasant's holding. 



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