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A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE is curiously slight. 1 There are only ten places in the county, including Derby itself, which possess the typical Danish termination ' by,' and these are all found in the eastern half of the shire. ' Thorpes ' are scarcely more common, although one isolated example Thorpe, near Ashbourne occurs on the Staffordshire border. Under the circum- stances, therefore, the duodecimal character of the Derbyshire assessment is most welcome as reinforcing the evidence for Scandinavian influence in the county. The study of the Domesday assessment of Derbyshire, however, is attended by some rather serious complications. To begin with, the number of recorded vills (if we may for a moment assume that every place name recorded in the county survey represents a vill) is very considerable in proportion to the area of the shire, exceeding by more than fifty the total for each of the neighbouring counties Nottingham- shire and Leicestershire. If we were to adopt the elementary plan of dividing the number of carucates assessed upon the whole shire by the number of places mentioned, we should obtain an average of about two carucates for each vill ; if, to form our dividend, we were to use only those places which stand by themselves as ' manors,' and are not merely parts of some larger whole, our quotient would still be well under six. Hence it will be evident that the problem of restoring the groups of assessment in Derbyshire differs essentially from the similar problem as studied, let us say, in Cambridgeshire or Bedfordshire, 2 where we may consider the normal vill to be rated at five or ten hides by itself. In Derbyshire the task is set us, not of combining the scattered fragments of villar assessment to make a round sum for the vill as a whole, but of combining the assessments of different vills to make a single fiscal group. That the process is largely hypothetical will be evident from the fact that we have for Derbyshire no key to the distribution of the geld such as we possess for Leicestershire in the invaluable survey printed by Mr. Round in Feudal England? One obvious difficulty may be noted straightway. It is not very uncommon, especially in the description of estates in the east of the county, to find an entry like the following : 'In Morton and Ogston and Wessington Suain cilt had 1 1 J bovates and 8 acres of land (assessed) to the geld.' Now in a case of this kind we have absolutely no means of knowing what proportion of this sum must be debited to Morton, to Ogston, and to Wessington respectively. And, as the bare fact of tenure has no significance in relation to the geld, the combination of unspecified villar assessments in a tenurial group spoils our chances of reconstructing the fiscal groups to which they must have belonged. And to this cause of perplexity we have to add that the Domesday wapentakes of Derby- shire are excessively obscure. There is no consistent rubrication at all, and, unfortunately, in the few rubrics that are given we get the names of 1 Cf. Green, Conquest of England, 121-2. It is certainly incorrect to say that place names ending in ' by ' extend to ' the very borders ' of Derbyshire. 2 V.C.H. Eeds. i. 1 92-3, and Feudal England, 44 ff. s pp. 196-214. 294