SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY offer favourable terms to the lords of neighbouring manors who wished to become foreign burgesses, or even accept them as full burgesses if they were willing to be ' at scot and lot ' with the townsmen. The contribution levied annually upon foreign burgesses varied a little, but was generally 4^. and two bushels of wheat for the larger proprietors, and id. and one bushel for a smaller proprietor. Those who desired to be ' at scot and lot ' paid an entrance fee of four or five shillings to the town, and one or two shillings to the bailiff. In this way the town not only absorbed into its life as a free community the originally alien elements within its own walls, but also became the centre of a territory comprising most of the four surrounding hundreds of Bosmere and Claydon, Sampford, Carleford, and Colneis, which owed it a kind of allegiance. The Priors of Holy Trinity and St. Peter, who had estates both in town and country, became full burgesses in 1 244, and their successors took a leading part in organizing the religious activities of the merchant gild, whilst during the latter half of the 13th century at least a score of the lords of the landed gentry within a ten-mile radius had attached themselves to Ipswich as out-burgesses, and promised to give aid and counsel in its affairs." In order to appreciate the civilizing mission of the town we have only to turn our attention to the feudal anarchy by which it was surrounded. In the Hundred Rolls of 1274 we find ourselves treading every- where the live embers of recent strife. At Bentley, for instance, the homage of Sir Hugh ToUemache and the homage of Holy Trinity of Ipswich present a verdict that the death of Jordan of Copdock was hastened by the assault of Robert of Copdock and of John of Copdock, and the homage of Sir Hugh ToUemache in Copdock agree in this verdict. On the other hand the juries of Sproughton, Belstead, Albemarle, Hintlesham, Capel, Raydon, Brantham, and Parva Belstead, and John le Barun and his homage in Copdock itself, declare that Jordan died a natural death and not from the assault of Robert,'^ All the townships here mentioned lie in the hundred of Samford within a few miles of Ipswich, and at the very moment when local feeling was running high over this family affair, Sir Hugh ToUemache, John le Barun, and Robert de Copdock paid their first contributions as foreign burgesses of the town. The earliest detailed accounts of manorial organization in Suffolk belong to the end of the I 3th century, but though many changes were in process of realization, the essential framework of the rural economy was sufficiently stable from the iith to the 14th century to justify our using these accounts as a starting point for our study of the period. The chief economic features of the manorial system were the communal methods of cultivation and the labour rents rendered by the villein to his lord. All the arable land of the village was divided into several portions (generally three), each of which lay fallow in turn, was sown with two different crops in rotation and then left fallow again. The holdings of each tenant, and generally of the lord's demesne also, consisted of acre or half-acre strips scattered about these open fields, no two of them together, and each divided from a neighbour's strip by a narrow balk. No separate access was possible. The whole had to be ploughed, sown and reaped at the same time, and after harvest it was turned into a common pasture. Sometimes there was meadowland, distributed in " The Great Domesday Book in Ipswich Town Hall ; Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. ix, App. i, 240. " Hund. R. (Rec. Com.), ii, 175-6- 639
