by the Jurats is another matter. As soon as we come to the romantic story of the burglary and the lost charter, we feel the ground slipping under us. With regard to gavel-pence, or govel-pence, Mr. Round has pointed out that this tax was a Saxon service of immemorial antiquity, the "customary tribute" due from the tenant to the lord, commuted into a money payment. He gives several instances from Oxford, Winchester, Chester and elsewhere. The Anglo-Saxon word gafol, meaning a gift (German, gaben.) was joined to the word penniis, or pence, when the service became a tribute in money. The Latin equivalent is gablum. But gablum, Mr. Round thinks, may have suggested to the enquiring Jurats themselves, or to a former generation of guessers, the gable of a house, and hence came the story, familiar in all our histories of Leicester, about the tax of three pennies paid for every gabled house standing in the High Street. He concludes that the tax did not originate in a bargain about the Portmanmote, as the burgesses of the 13th century tried to make out, nor was it remitted by a charter that had been destroyed, nor was it afterwards illegally enforced by Simon Maudit.
Whatever we may think of Mr. Round's ingenious etymological theory, we cannot doubt that the Jurats knew quite well, and correctly stated, who paid the tax about which they were enquiring. It seems clear that at the time of the Inquest the Earl was levying an imposition called govelpence upon the dwellers in the High Street, but this tax, however it may have become so incident, was in fact pre-Norman both in name and origin, and consequently it cannot have been imposed by Earl Robert in the circumstances related by the Jury. The gable of a house in mediaeval Latin is sometimes "gabulla," but in the language of the Inquest it is "gablus." Mr. Round points out that the Jurats maintain the English name of the payment, "govelpence," which is fatal to the pretended "gable" derivation, "for," he says, "though govel is an easy corruption from gafol or gavel, it cannot be a corruption from gable." On the other hand, their use of the form "govelpeniis" would seem to tell against the suggestion that the form gablum, and its supposed derivation from gablus, was in their minds.
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