Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/335

THE DOMESDAY SURVEY they marched south on Northampton they would next pass by Little Oxendon, where we have a rise in value from is. to ioj-., and would also traverse Kelmarsh, of which the value had recovered from 5J. to 40J. Meanwhile Eadwine was coming to his brother's help, and must, with his Mercian and Welsh host, have marched down the Watling Street. He would enter the county, therefore, at Lilbourne, where we find a recovery in value from is. to ioj., and have passed on through Crick (jTi lox. to ^^4 ioj.) and Watford (ioj. to £2), striking off through Whilton (ioj. to ^^3), Brington (5J. to ^^i), Althorpe (5J. to £1), and Harleston (5J. to ^i ioj.), and passing between Dallington {£2 to £^), and Duston {£2 to £^) to join his brother at Northampton. Bearing in mind how small, comparatively, was the average rise throughout the county — an average itself largely due to these excep- tional manors — we cannot really doubt that their striking figures have a meaning, and that the explanation must be sought in the devastating march of the earls' hosts in 1065, the results of which must have specially impressed a Peterborough Abbey chronicler. I have elsewhere shown that Sussex presents a similar phenomenon in its record of manors which, although 'wasted' by the presence of the warring hosts in 1066, had recovered, in the main, their value by 1086.* It is one of the advantages presented by this series of county histories that they are enabling the study of Domesday to be carried out in greater detail and on a more uniform system than has ever yet been possible. Writing, for instance, on Domesday as a whole. Professor Maitland could only suggest that Northamptonshire had its assessment reduced by about fifty per cent. But when we examine more closely the survey of this particular county, we are led to an interesting discovery. For, we shall find, it is practically certain that the reduction of assessment was not uniform, but varied, as I have shown it did in Cambridgeshire,^ in different portions of the county. A very peculiar and distinct phenomenon is presented by the Domesday assessment of south-west Northamptonshire. In the modern Hundreds of Fawsley, Warden, Sutton, Norton, Towcester, and Cleyley, in short throughout that portion of the shire which lies south of the Nen — except the Hundred of Wimersley, on the east — we find that the ratio of ' hides ' to ploughlands is constant, and that this ratio is 2 to 5. To use less technical language, if a manor, in 1086, was assessed at two ' hides,' it was normally entered as containing land for five ploughs ; if it was assessed at four hides, its land was said to be for ten ploughs, and so on in proportion. The extreme artificiality of this whole arrange- ment is accentuated by the fact that we sometimes find more ploughs employed on a manor than it is said to have land for. Moreover, though the Domesday assessment in ' hides ' is, in normal counties, conventional, the number of ploughlands usually is not. The figures, • Feudal England, pp. 150-152. » Ibid., pp. 50-53. 263