Wiltshire in reference to those of its inhabitants who were called ‘coscets.’ These were evidently inferior tenants of the cottar class, but they were differentiated from the cottars. On some manors in Wiltshire there were at the time of the Survey both coscets and cottars, so that there can be no doubt that these coscets were different in some respects from the cottars. With the exception of five coscets who are mentioned in the Shropshire survey, all the others enumerated are found in Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Devon. The numbers mentioned in these counties are, according to Sharon Turner’s calculation: Wiltshire, 1,385; Dorset, 146; Somerset, 43; and Devon, 32; in addition to the 5 found in Shropshire.[1] Jones, in his book on the Domesday of Wiltshire, makes the total number rather larger than Turner, but substantially the two enumerations agree. Jones says: ‘There are in the whole of Domesday but 1,750 registered, and of these more than 1,400 are found in the Wiltshire portion of the record.’[2] It is to be noted that, with the exception of the five mentioned in Shropshire, all these coscets are recorded in the survey of counties which were occupied by Gewissas at the time of the settlement, and even in Shropshire after the conquest by Ceawlin some may have migrated to that county. It is clear that Wiltshire was the home of the English coscets, and those found in neighbouring counties can easily be accounted for by their proximity to Wiltshire, and the migration of some of their descendants.
The existence in Wiltshire of two classes of inferior tenants of the cottar kind as late as the time of the Domesday Survey is a remarkable fact. The existence of both cottars and coscets in large numbers in Wiltshire—coscets alone being found on some manors, cottars
