24 THE DOMESDAY INQUEST 



freeman. But, on the other hand, the well-known dislike of the 

 Domesday scribes for tautology will warn us against seeing 

 an essential distinction in every change of phraseology. But 

 although the Commissioners may have drawn no verbal dis- 

 tinction that did not correspond to some essential distinction, 

 it does not follow that the converse is true, and that they 

 recognized every distinction that was drawn by English ideas 

 or English law. The compiler of the (so-called) Laws of 

 Henry I. states, " The division of the English law is triple : 

 there is a West-Saxon Law, and a Mercian Law, and a Danish 

 Law." And the Commissioners were obliged to force all the 

 variations sanctioned by this triple code into the Procrustean 

 bed of a statistical table. And in many cases, especially in 

 dealing with personal ranks and distinctions, we shall have to 

 make allowance for this necessity. 



A second point to be noticed is that the Commissioners 

 understood so well what they were talking about, that they 

 rarely gave any definition or laid down any general rule. I 

 know of only one general rule which is laid down or appealed 

 to by them to justify their verdict on a disputed point. If to 

 us their ideas sometimes seem undefined, this is due to our 

 own limitations, and it should be our aim to put ourselves 

 into their places, and to study their decisions till we see -that 

 the indefiniteness is on our part and not on theirs. 



From these two positions we may deduce a third : Domes- 

 day Book must be studied as a consistent whole; the man 

 who draws general conclusions from the study of one village 

 only, or from one county only, will certainly go astray ; parallel 

 passages in the statistics of different counties throw light on 

 one another. 



One difficulty which confronts the student of Domesday 

 Book is to know whether a custom defined in a particular 

 passage is a custom of general application or merely an 

 exception. To take a specific instance: Certain houses in 

 the city of Oxford belonged to the landowners of the county 



