DOMESDAY SURVEY Perhaps the very irregularity of these arrangements may be the result of a liberty that tended to licence. It is significant that in Suffolk the carucates break up, not into virgates or bovates, quarters and eighths, based on the plough-team, but into many small fractions, groups of acres, based on the individual freeholder. Suffolk does not know the virgatarius or the bovatarius, but it is the stronghold of the small liber homo}^ The leet system was political and administrative rather than agrarian. The leets, as parts of the hundred, were concerned not only with taxation but with justice and police, and possibly also with military service. The 1 2th-century survey of the abbey of St. Edmund, which gives the names of the Thingoe leets," connects them with ' suit [secta) of court,' and records of Sudbury that ' nullam sectam facit in hundreto, nee de aliquo reddet, nisi tamen coram justiciis errantibus, et tunc est coram illis pro quarta parte hundredi, scilicet pro tribus letis. Sunt enim in hundredo cum ilia 12 lete.'" This jurisdictional function still survives in the court leet, which again connects with the police institution of frankpledge." One point, at least, seems to stand out clearly in the midst of much that is vague and uncertain. The vill or township, rather than the manor, appears as the original gelding unit.^* The 12th-century survey notes that the leets are made up of vills : ' In hundredo de Tinghowe sunt xx villae ex quibus constituuntur ix lete,' and the lineal measurements are frequently given for the whole vill, coupled with the geld. ' Canappetuna habet v quarentenas in longitudine et ii in latitudine et 6d. de gelto.' ' Totum Brantham habet leugam in longo et dimidiam in lato & i^d. de gelto.'*" In one case, even, the only mention of a vill, Chattisham (Cefessa), in Samford Hundred, is the entry of its lineal measurements and geld pence. No agrarian or ' tenurial ' details are given." If the scattered fragments of the vills in the Domesday Survey be joined together, the geld assessment and the lineal measurements for the whole vill will be found attached sometimes to a manor, sometimes to a non-manorial estate, to the holding of a single tenant, or to the farm worked by a group of freemen. This diversity in the position of the geld entry, which is illustrated in the following table, may indicate that the vill was both measured and assessed as a whole, and that the responsibility for the geld lay on the township, not on individual landholders, or manorial lords, though the assessment is often connected with the largest holding in the vill." " VinogradofF, £wj/. Soc. in the Eleventh Cent. 36, 196 et seq. " Above, p. 361. Gage, Suffolk, xii, et seq. From Liber de Consuetudinibus monasterii Sancti Edmundi. " The curious position of Sudbury, as a quarter of the hundred, assessed at the heavy geld of 6od. will be discussed later. In connexion with the above passage from the Liber de Consuetudinibus cf. the famous jingle in the ' BecwoeS,' or Saxon law formula, ' ne gyrne ic pines, ne laeSes ne landes, ne sace ne socne,' which seems to link the ' land or leet ' with jurisdiction ; Liebermann, Ger.. der Angelsachsen ; Glossary, ' laet ' cf Select Pleas in Manorial Courts (Selden Soc), p. Ixxv. Prof Maitland and Mr. Round quote Skeat to show that the Danish ' laegd ' is a division for military conscription, and Mr. Round points out the analogy with the East Anglian leet, 'a division of the country for purposes of taxation ' ; Feud. Engl. 1 01. " Vinogradoff, Engl. Soc. in the Eleventh Cent. 197, 214-17. " Ibid. 391. " Gage, Suffolk, xii. ~ Dom. Bk. fol. 287^, 303. " Ibid. 2873 ; 'Cetessa habet viii quarentenas in Ion. et vi in lat. et (sd. de g(elto).' " The substance of this and the preceding five paragraphs was originally read as a paper in Professor VinogradofF's Seminar at Oxford. 36s
