DOMESDAY SURVEY 
Assessment of the county, pp. 191-193—-The royal demesne, p. 194.—Bedford, p. 195— 
The tenants-in-chief, spiritual and lay, pp. 195-204—-Fate of English holders, pp. 205-207 
—Problems of tenure, p. 207—-Legal antiquities, pp. 208-212—-Sources of wealth, p. 
212—Identification of manors, pp. 213-216—The Bedfordshire Hundreds, p. 217. 
F the Domesday student were asked to name the feature of most 
interest to himself in the survey of Bedfordshire, he would probably 
name its ‘hidage.’ For it ranks next to its neighbour Cambridge- 
shire as a county illustrating the system of hidation, that is assess- 
ment, which was based on a unit of ‘five hides.’ This, which is the 
true key to Domesday, is a discovery of our own time. It was formerly 
supposed that the Domesday hide was either an actual measure of area 
or at least the representative of some definite value. But it is now known 
that manors (or more correctly vills) were assessed to the ‘ geld,’ that is 
the land tax, in purely arbitrary multiples of the ‘ five-hide unit.’" A 
small matter, it may seem, and of no general interest. We have, how- 
ever, to remember what Domesday really was, and why the survey was 
made. ‘One great purpose,’ Professor Maitland says of Domesday, 
“seems to mould both its form and its substance ; it is a geld-book.’? And 
because it was the chief purpose of the survey to record assessment, we 
will deal with the assessment of the county first of all. 
The large number of assessments recorded as exactly ten or five 
hides can hardly fail to strike the intelligent observer ; but these are 
usually those of a vill (roughly speaking, a parish) in the hands of a 
single holder. When a vill was divided between two or more distinct 
tenants-in-chief, the assessment of each portion is recorded separately, 
and the total therefore is not obvious. Where, as at Husborne Crawley, 
a vill was divided into moieties, the assessment of each, it is true, is 
entered as five hides ; but in several cases the portions were unequal and 
the assessment consequently fractional. To ascertain the amount at which 
the whole vill was assessed we have to reconstitute the total by adding 
up the fractions, a task often of difficulty and sometimes open to doubt. 
In Feudal England (pp. 55-7) I adduced illustrations from Mr. Airy’s 
‘digest’ of the Bedfordshire survey,’ and these I may here repeat :— 
it is only Mr. Airy’s work that enables us to reconstruct the townships, and to show 
how fractions—apparently meaningless—fit in, exactly as in Cambridgeshire, with one 
1 See Feudal England, pp. 44-69, and Maitland’s Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 156-64, 450. 
2 Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 3. 
3 Digest of the Domesday of Bedfordshire (Bedford), 1881. 
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