Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/441

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DOMESDAY SURVEY In this East Anglia is not singular. A similar omission is found in Gloucester- shire, Worcestershire, and Herefordshire, and also in Essex, the third county in Little Domesday.*^ What is really distinctively East Anglian is the occurrence in Norfolk and Suffolk of the new term placed at the end of the entry, which gives the lineal measurements of the vill or manor, and its assessment to the geld, e.g. ' King Edward held Barrow for a manor and for 7 carucates of land . . . then the whole was worth [valuit) £io, now £zo by weight {ad pensuni). It has one league in length and 8 furlongs {quaren- tenas) in breadth and yd. for the geld.' *' There are here two sets of measure- ments, and two valuations, and the connexion between the lineal measurements and the ' leet ' system has long been a puzzle to students of Domesday. Three suggestions have been made : (i) The hypothesis, which Professor Maitland rejects, that these measurements represent geld carucates and that the carucates in the East Anglian formula represent the ' team-lands,' the ' potential arable.' (2) That the lineal measurements themselves represent the * real ' area or 'potential arable' and are the equivalent of the' team-lands 'of other counties. (3) That they have no essential connexion with the geld, but are only one item in a cadastre of which the geld also forms a part, placed with it at the end of the ' villar ' entry, and hence, when the cadastre was, so to speak, absorbed in a manorial terrier, clinging to the geld and repeated with it whenever it occurs.*^ Professor Maitland inclines to think that the ' geld ' represents the contribution fixed for the vill as a whole, while the statement of the number of carucates held by each tenant represents the apportionment of this sum among the various landholders in the vill," and the lineal measure- ments are a rough estimate of size, not intended for purposes of fiscal assess- ment. ' If the jurors had superficial measures in their heads,' he writes,*' ' and were stating this by reference to two straight lines, they would make the length of one of these lines a constant (e.g. one league or one furlong). This is not done.' And then he refers to Norfolk instances. The same argument applies to Suffolk, but here, as in Norfolk," there is a tendency to make i league a constant in the lineal measurements, and moreover, the same equation tends to recur, notably the equation of 6 carucates [i league X I league = 720 acres] to a 20^. geld. Take for instance Lackford Hundred, a very perfect example in every respect. If its lineal measurements be reduced to superficial measurements, it contains 126§ carucates, and of the sixteen ' villar ' measurements, thirteen have 1 2 furlongs or i league as their line of length, one has 18 furlongs, or a league and a half, one has 6 furlongs or half a league, and one has 10 furlongs. Of the lines of breadth, two are leagues, one is a league and a half, seven are half leagues, three are 8 furlongs, one is 5 furlongs, and two are 4 furlongs. The measurement i league X J league occurs seven times : six times in connexion with a 2od. geld, and once with a od. geld. Possibly in the original scheme the leets, like the small ' Danish hundreds' of Lincolnshire, may have been 6-carucate or 12-carucate units." " Dm. Bk. and Beyond, 429, 431, n. I. *' Dom. Bk. 289^. •' Cf. below p. 366, Table 11.

    • Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 429-31. " Ibid. 371. " Ibid. 432.

" Round, Feud. Engl. 72 et seq. ; cf. 80, 196 et seq. for the 'small local hundreds ' of Leicestershire ; Roy. Hist. Soc. Trans, (new sen), xiv, 213; Corbett, ' The Tribal Hidage.' Mr. Corbett suggests that the East Anglian leets may represent small 'early hundreds.' These 12-carucate ' Danish hundreds ' and the East Anglian leets maybe based on the 'tenmanland' or 'tenmanlot' of 120 acres which occurs exceptionally in Norfolk ; VinogradofF, Engl. Soc. in the Eleventh Cent. 102-3, 280-1. 363