to Risborough, who paid two shillings, which is probably only another illustration of the occasional discrepancies in Domesday. The total amount which Edward the Confessor had received from Buckingham, even with Bourton, was only ten pounds a year, as against the twenty- five pounds which Aylesbury or Wendover brought him, which implies that it was but a small place. Aylesbury, the meeting place of many roads, produced, at the time of the Survey, no less than ten pounds from its toll alone ; but, as there is no mention of burgesses, it can hardly yet have been a place of trade. On the other hand, burgesses occur at Newport (Pagnel), a manor of William Fitz Ansculf, a manor of which the name, in spite of its rural character, implies a market of some kind.
The ploughland, the meadow, the woodland, and the mill, these were the chief sources of wealth. With wearisome iteration the text records the number of ploughlands in the manor, the ploughteams, each of eight oxen, that were actually at work upon them, the peasants and the lord's serfs, the meadows down by the streams that afforded hay for the oxen, the watermill at which the peasants were compelled to have their corn ground, and the number of swine for which the woodland was reckoned to provide' mast.
Here and there an exceptional phrase or some peculiar payment deserves notice. The render, for instance, of ploughshares as rent in kind occurs at a few places ; at Bledlow, Burnham, Chesham, and Aston Clinton we find them rendered from the woodland, and at Wing from the pasture. The payment in such cases appears to represent the renting of surplus areas, as at Aylesbury, where twenty shillings were received ' de remanenti.' From the woodland at Caldecot was received twenty- eight pence, from that at Tyringham twenty-six pence, on a nameless manor sixteen pence, and from that at Missenden four ' ores,' that is to say, sixty-four pence. The ' ore,' or silver ounce of sixteen pence, occurs several times in this county ; and it was here as elsewhere a common unit in the rent of mills ; those at Denham, at Chalfont, and Aston Clinton were each of them worth five ' ores,' and that of another manor five * ores ' and four pence. Bledlow mill produced the exceptional render of twenty-four (horse) loads of malt.
The rent of a mill was sometimes paid in part in eels from the millpool. Eels were thus received from the mills at Winchendon (80), Olney (200), Lavendon [1] (250), Haversham (75), and Stanton (50). An exceptional entry under Iver speaks of four fisheries producing ' 1,500 eels and fish on Fridays for the use of the reeve of the vill ' ; as a rule the eel appears as the only product of the ' fishery,' that is of the weir composed of basket-work traps. The course of the Thames is marked by entries of such ' fisheries.' They begin with Wraysbury, a manor which possessed ' four fisheries in the Thames,' bringing in twenty-six shillings and eight pence ; above it were Datchet, producing from its two fisheries 2,000 eels, Upton (by Slough), and Eton, at each of which a fishery produced 1,000. Then came Dorney with 500, Taplow with
- ↑ This was only the moiety of a mill.
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