DOMESDAY SURVEY this phenomenon occurs. In addition there is the fact that in 1086 these urban houses are clearly sources of profit to their lords, and an equally plausible explanation of the attribution of town houses to rural manors may be found in the assumption that the former were the abode of men whose place it was to supply the manors to which they were assigned with such articles of commerce as could only lawfully be bought and sold under the stringent conditions of witness and warranty which obtained within the burghal area.' 3 There is every reason to suppose that both Anglo-Saxon thegns and Anglo-Norman lords were sensible of the profit which would accrue to them- selves if their men were to obtain the freedom of the borough market, and that the connexion here and there, as at Leicester, manifested between town and country property in Domesday has its origin rather in a desire for commercial advantage than in any rule of public law. In this connexion it is very significant that the borough was the seat of the county mint, and was, there- fore, the centre of monetary exchange for the district ; nor should we forget that in days when the county town was periodically thronged with visitors to the shire court, to which all freemen in theory owed suit and service, it was no small advantage to a lord to possess houses at which he himself and the men from the various manors of his fief might receive entertainment during the sessions of the assembly. 63 In King Edward's time, however, Leicester had been burdened with a definite if small amount of military service ; it was bound to supply twelve burgesses to serve with the king if he led an army by land, and it would send four horses to London for transport work if the expedition were by sea. Before the Conquest the borough or, as it is described in Domesday, the ' city ' had made the king an annual payment of 30, according to the excep- tional scale of 20 pennies to the ' ora ' or silver ounce, and I 5 sestars of honey. King William derived a revenue of 42 IQJ. by weight 'from all the renders of the city and shire,' a phrase which leaves it an open question whether the 30 from Leicester itself had been increased or not. Quite apart from the
- farm' of the city came the 20 which was rendered from the mint, one-
third of which was in the hands of Hugh de Grentemaisnil, and, in addition to this, the king received from Leicester town and county 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, and the enormous sum of jTio for a hawk, figures which repeat themselves in the description of the neighbouring county of Northampton. 64 With regard to the borough lands of Leicester we only read incidentally of land in, or belonging to, the borough held by the bishop of Lincoln and the Countess Judith ; but we need not doubt that in addition to being a centre of trade at the point where the Foss Way crossed the main road from London to the Trent Valley, Leicester was also an agricultural community like its fellows of Nottingham and Derby. It is an un- fortunate circumstance that Domesday makes no definite statement as to the assessment of Leicester to the geld, a burden which is generally sharply The ' Garrison Theory ' of the borough was enunciated by Professor Maitland in Dam. Bk. and Beyond, section 'The Boroughs,' and was worked out in some detail by Mr. A. Ballard in his book on The Domesday Boroughs. The commercial side of the question was expressed by Miss Bateson in a review of the latter work, Engl. Hist. Rev. xx, 143-56. w Compare the duty of hospitium, not infrequently found at this time in a burghal connexion. M V.C.H. Northampton, i, 274, Warwick, , 271, and Worcester, , 242. 33
