SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



bishop of Durham and his secular canons. In Durham, as elsewhere in 

 England, we can assume that the new lords sharpened the traditional claims 

 of their Saxon predecessors and imported a new spirit of order and regularity 

 into the vague relations of former times. We know that Bishop William of 

 St. Carileph reorganized the convent and introduced regular Benedictine monks 

 in 1083, and in doing so suppressed the independence and annexed the 

 possessions of the re-established monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth. 

 William was succeeded by Ranulf Flambard, the minister of Rufus, and it 

 is probably to his genius that the bishopric owed the economic and fiscal 

 organization we find in Boldon Book. Certainly local tradition at Durham 

 painted him as an able and kindly ruler, 1 and the distance which separates 

 Hugh Pudsey from the Norman Conquest makes it very probable that the 

 arrangements described in Boldon Book date from an earlier pontificate. In 

 Pudsey's time, despite the harrying of the north by the Scots under Stephen 

 and the troubles caused by Cumin on the death of Bishop Geoffrey Rufus, the 

 Palatinate appears as a land of scattered but well-organized agricultural vills ; 

 and only by isolated survivals, such as the payment of cornage or castleman- 

 money, do we get any hint of the Durham where the chief, if not the only, 

 wealth of the people lay in their cattle, when the constant raids made it 

 unprofitable to till the ground except in certain sheltered spots. Even when 

 the Halmote Rolls at the very end of the thirteenth century begin to supple- 

 ment the picture of Boldon Book we still get the impression of oases of 

 agriculture in vast deserts of moor and forest, from which the inhabitants 

 were just beginning to annex a few acres of ' f russura ' or, less frequently, to 

 wrest land for new vills. When in the fourteenth century the Palatinate had 

 begun to develop in population and wealth the Black Death aided the Scottish 

 raiders, and the second surviving Palatine Survey, that of Bishop Hatficld, 

 gives a woful picture of ruin and decay which is borne out by the Court 

 Rolls. 



II FROM BOLDON BOOK TO THE BLACK DEATH 



As Boldon Book and its contents are the subject of a special article, they 

 will only be used here as one of the quarries for material out of which a 

 picture of mediaeval Durham must be built up. Of course, Boldon Book 

 only deals with the episcopal vills, 1 but a comparison of the earliest existing 

 Halmote Rolls of the prior with those of the bishop justifies the natural 

 expectation that, down to the fourteenth century at least, the two sets of vills 

 did not materially differ in their general conditions of life and tenure, although 

 in course of time the tenants of the prior had to pay at least in theory a rack- 

 rent for their holdings, while the episcopal tenants pay the same dues in Hat- 

 field's Survey as they did according to Boldon Book. 



When Bishop Pudsey acquired the wapentake of Sadberge by purchase 

 from Richard I, he and his successors became the owners of practically all the 

 modern county 8 as well as of large tracts in Northumberland. Even the 

 prior of Durham was only a tenant of the bishop, but he and a number of 

 other ' barons of the bishop' never exceeding ten in all, occupied a far different 



1 Laurence of Durham, Dia/ogi (Surtect Soc. Ixx), 22. 



1 The survey of Prior Melsanby (1233-44) ' now missing. See FeoJarium (Surtees Soc. Iviii), Introd. 



* Raby and Barnard Castle* did not belong to the bishopric. See Lapslcy, County Palatine, 9 1 n. 



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