DOMESDAY SURVEY
IF the Domesday student were asked to name the feature of most interest to himself in the survey of Bedfordshire, he would probably name its 'hidage." For it ranks next to its neighbour Cambridgeshire as a county illustrating the system of hidation, that is assessment, which was based on a unit of 'five hides.' This, which is the true key to Domesday, is a discovery of our own time. It was formerly supposed that the Domesday, is a discovery of our own time. It was formerly supposed that the Domesday hide was either an actual measure of area or at least the representative of some definite value. But it is now known that manors (or more correctly vills) were assessed to the 'geld,'t that is the land ta, in purely arbitrary multiples of the 'five-hide unit.' [1] A small matter, it may seem, and of no general interest. We have, however, to remember what Domesday really was, and why the survey was made. 'One great purpose,' Professor Maitland says of Domesday, 'seems to mould both its form and its substance; it is a geld-book.' [2] And because it was the chief purpose of the survey to record assessment, we will deal with the assessment of the county first of all.
The large number of assessments recorded as exactly ten or five hides can hardly fail to strike the intelligent observer; but these are usually those of a vill (roughly speaking, a parish) in the hands of a single holder. When a vill was divided between two or more distinct tenants-in-chief, the assessment of each portion is recorded separately, and the total therefore is not obvious. Where, as at Husborne Crawley, a vill was divided into moieties, the assessment of each, it is true, is entered as five hides; but in several cases the portions were unequal and the assessment consequently fractional. To ascertain the amount at which the whole vill was assessed we have to reconstitute the total by adding up the fractions, a task often of difficulty and sometimes open to doubt. In Feudal England (pp. 55-7) I adduced illustrations from Mr. Airy's 'digest' of the Bedforshire survey, [3] and these I may here repeat:—
it is only Mr. Airy's work that enables us to reconstruct the townships, and to show how fractions—apparently meaningless—fit in, exactly as in Cambridgeshire, with one
