A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE county, reckoned in ounces (of silver).* To say that money was payable
- at 20 pence to the ounce ' means that a payment ' by tale ' of 20 silver
pennies discharged, irrespective of their weight, the liability to pay an ounce of silver. Similarly, a pound paid ' by tale ' meant that the payment could be made in the form of 240 pennies. As I have shown in Feudal England, the Domesday scribes delighted in using alternative phrases for the same thing ; but, although we might have suspected the identity of the two formulas employed above, there is no other passage in Domesday, I believe, that proves that identity, which might otherwise have been questioned.* While on the subject of the coin, something ought to be said about the moneyers of Worcester. For a further source of royal revenue is found in their customary payments. At Worcester, however, Domesday tells us only that each moneyer used to pay 20 shillings, on a change of coinage, when he ' received the (fresh) dies at London.' The same payment was due from the moneyers of Dorchester and Bridport and of Lewes ; but although we gather under Hereford that the moneyers had to go somewhere to receive their new dies, it seems to be only under Worcester that the place is stated to be London. There was one source of royal revenue which is not here mentioned, although it must have existed. This was the proceeds of the forests. When the records of the revenue emerge, half a century after Domesday, we find the census of the royal forests kept distinct from thtjirma of the shire. Under Henry II., we learn from the Pipe Rolls, there was paid for the forest of Feckenham £zo a year and £t, for Malvern chase. The extent of forest shown in Domesday as then existing in the county must have produced, at the date of the Survey, some revenue for the Crown.' Although we have had to deal first, as Domesday does, with the Crown and its rights, the interests of the Church in this county were infinitely greater than those of the Crown. Not only was the sheriff, the King's officer, excluded, by the privileges of the Church, from seven out of twelve hundreds ; as tenants-in-chief, the four houses of Worcester, Westminster, Evesham, and Pershore held between them more than half of the assessed value of the county.* The largest share by far was that of ' the Church of Worcester.' In addition to its great Hundred of Oswaldslow, reckoned at 300 hides, it possessed 94 hides, outside it, in the county, which the Henry I. Survey speaks of as ' in Kinefolka.'* Next to Worcester came Westminster with its 200 hides ; then the 100
- See the Domesday text, passim.
- For in at least two passages (fos. 34, 38^) ' librae ad numerum de xx«' in ora ' are
found, as if the two formulas had independent meanings. ' See further, for the forests, p. 270 below.
- i.e. of the 'hides' recorded in Domesday. The hide, as explained above, was not an
areal measure, but only a unit of assessment. ^ See Feudal England, p. 174. This curious word should, perhaps, be compared with that ' Haliwerfolc,' which, as Mr. Lapsley has explained in his learned monograph on The County Palatine of Durham, was employed, in the 1 2th century, ' to indicate the territorial soke or franchise of the Bishop ' of Durham. 244
