A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE In the case of Barrow on Soar, it has been suggested above that this vill may have been temporarily attached to Guthlaxton wapentake, 3 with which the record before us does not deal ; but of the other vills, Wymeswold certainly belonged to Gosecote wapentake in 1086, and the omission of the group in question is probably accidental. It cannot be due to a mutilation of the manuscript, for the description of Gosecote wapentake comes in the middle of it. With all its imperfection, however, the Leicestershire Survey supplies a most valuable commentary upon the corresponding portion of Domesday. The manner in which it reinforces the evidence for the duodecimal assessment of the county has already been discussed in the Domesday Introduction.* On the other hand, it must be confessed that the discrepancies between the assess- ments of individual vills as recorded in Domesday and in the present document present a very serious difficulty. In part, no doubt, this is due to the combination of villar assessments after the manner described in the Domesday Introduction, but it is also clear that the Leicestershire Survey is no mere re-arrangement of the Domesday figures, but represents the result of a fresh inquiry into these matters. We know in regard to other counties that the assessments recorded in Domesday were in no sense regarded as final, but were subject to constant revision, 5 and a drastic revision must have been needed to produce the figures recorded here. For the real difficulty presented by the assessments entered in the present record lies in the fact that they normally represent an advance, in many cases a large advance, upon the fiscal burden recorded in Domesday. Had Leicestershire, in 1086, been a lightly rated county, an increase in its assessment would have been natural enough, but no shire in England presents such a striking combination of great poverty with heavy taxation as that afforded by Leicestershire. The difficulty is complicated by the fact that in the Pipe Roll of 1 130, which is almost exactly contemporary with the Leicestershire Survey, the county appears as paying a sum absurdly below that which would be represented by even the Domesday assessment of the shire. The sheriff of Leicestershire in that year accounts for just 100 as the Danegeld of a county rated, according to the lowest estimate, at more than 2,500 carucates. The neatness of the sum certainly suggests that the sheriff of Leicestershire, in contrast to the practice which obtained in relation to all other counties, had compounded for the shire's Danegeld, and we may at least suggest as a reason for this exceptional treatment of Leicestershire, that it had been found impossible in practice to raise anything like the amount of geld which would be represented by the assessments either of 1086 or 1125." This, however, is only a hypothesis. But valuable as is the subject-matter of the present survey, its peculiar interest lies in the manner in which it is arranged. Its discovery for the first time revealed the fact that the several wapentakes of Leicestershire were divided into a number of small territorial hundreds, representing a stage in
- See Domesday Introduction, p. 297. 4 See ante, p. 279.
6 Compare the frequent discrepancies between the assessment of Northamptonshire vills as given by Domes- day and by the twelfth-century Northamptonshire Survey. See also V.C.H. Berks, i, 287. 6 For the sums paid as Danegeld by various counties in 1 130 see feudal England, 94-5. See the same work, pp. 499-500, for the general correspondence between the money accounted for by the sheriff and the assessment of the county in hides or carucates. 34
