THE DOMESDAY SURVEY connection, except at Graveley and St. Paul's Walden, where we read that there is wood enough for ' the fences and the buildings.' Another Graveley entry (fo. 140^) contains a word of great rarity in the phrase ' rispalia ad sepes.' Out in the open fields of the vills, such as those of Hitchin pictured and described in Mr. Seebohm's famous work, 1 there lay that mosaic of strips, usually half acres, on which in strict rotation the crops of the time were grown. The St. Paul's leases, spoken of above, show us wheat, oats and barley, to say nothing of peas and beans, stowed in the barns on the canons' estates. And the chapter's accounts enable us to check the deliveries of grain from its Hertfordshire manors in what is now ' Paul's bakehouse yard ' for conversion into bread for the canons and not into bread alone ; for much of it found its way to the great brewhouse of St. Paul's, and barley, wheat and oats alike vanished down their throats in the form of beer. 2 Urban life, at the time of the Survey, was limited and of small account. Hertford had acquired a certain importance from the forts erected there against the Danes about the beginning of the tenth century and it was essentially a king's borough under Edward the Confessor. Concerned as it was almost exclusively with fiscal and jurisdictional rights, the Domesday Survey has not much to tell us about Hertford, which it begins by calling a ' borough ' and ends by calling a * suburb ' (suburbium). Indeed the most notable feature in the short entry on the town is not what it contains, but what it does not contain. The ' hetero- geneity of tenure,' as Professor Maitland terms it, which he connects with ' the garrison theory ' of the borough, 3 is significantly absent at Hertford. And yet, in the words of Green, ' Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire are instances of purely military creation, districts assigned to the fortresses which Edward raised at these points.' * We should conse- quently expect to find the traces of those ' borough haws ' of the rural thegns, which are held, according to ' the garrison theory,' to represent the military service they were bound to render in defending the borough ; but comparison with Oxford and other instances selected by Professor Maitland will show that they are here wanting. The chief interest of the Hertford entry is, in fact, fiscal. Under Edward the Confessor it used to escape with an annual payment to the Crown of 7 i os. When Peter (de Valognes) the sheriff took it over to ' farm ' it for the Crown, this amount was doubled, though still payable as before ' by tale.' But at the time of the Survey the Crown drew from it 20 a year, which had moreover to be paid in ' assayed and weighed ' money, implying a substantially greater amount of pure silver than did 20 ' by tale.' An increase in the sums wrung from the boroughs was a marked result of the Norman Conquest. Next in importance to Hertford was St. Alban's, where there were 1 T^i? English Village Community, pp. 1-6 and frontispiece. 8 See Archdeacon Male's Domesday of St. Paul's, pp. xlviii.-li. 160-75. Eac ^ f tile 3 canons received the generous allowance of 30 bowls (bolle) of beer a week. 3 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 176-92. * Conquest of England, p. 237. 295
