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A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE Domesday gives us of the county town itself. In general, it may be said that Domesday fails to satisfy the modern student in the descriptions which it gives of urban life, for its compilers were concerned essentially only with such matters as bore directly on the king's revenue, and were not mindful of the details of borough organisation. Only one column of loosely-written manuscript is assigned to Derby, which, nevertheless, contains some features of special interest. In the first place, the mere position of the account of Derby in the Survey is in itself suggestive. It is usual in the shires north of the Thames for the description of the county town to stand at the head of the county survey. 1 But Derbyshire, in the eleventh century and, indeed, onwards, until the reign of Elizabeth, was united with Notts under one sheriff, and the connexion between the two counties is strikingly expressed by the way in which their surveys are interworked in Domesday. Folios 272 to 279 of the record are occupied with Derbyshire ; one column each in folio 280 is given to the boroughs of Nottingham and Derby ; folio 2 Sob is assigned to a statement of certain local customs affecting the two counties jointly, and the Survey of Nottinghamshire follows immediately. So close an association as this of two counties is probably unique in Domesday, but we learn, in addition, from an incidental notice occurring in the column assigned to Derby borough, that the two shire courts sat together for the purposes of the Domesday inquest. 8 We know that the shire courts of Notts and Derby were combined long after this date, and that it was only by special petition that the Derbyshire men obtained their autonomy. The first line of the description of the borough of Derby contains an unusual phrase, which arrests the attention at once : ' In the borough of Derby ' we read * there were, in King Edward's time, 243 resident burgesses' (burgenses manentes). Now, if the last two words mean anything in particular, they certainly imply the possibility that there might exist a class of burgesses who were not resident in the boroughs to which they belonged. This class has been somewhat neglected by writers on the Domesday borough, although the Survey frequently refers to men styled ' burgesses' whose habitation, nevertheless, is in some rural manor, 3 but as the question does not directly affect Derby, it cannot be discussed here. It is more to the point to remark that the description of our borough clearly reveals the existence of a land-holding class within the borough community in the period before the Conquest, when the 12 geldable carucates belonging to the borough were divided among forty-one out of its 243 burgesses. The same phenomenon reappears at Nottingham, and raises the difficult question whether the geld laid upon the borough may not have been paid only by those burgesses who held shares in the borough lands. It is certain that at Derby the assessment of the borough is brought into unusually close connexion with its agricultural basis. On the face of our record, indeed, Derby appears as essentially an agricultural 1 For the general significance of this point see Maitland, Dam. Bk. and Beyond, p. 1 76. 3 ' Testimonio duarum scirarum.' 8 See for account of these 'burgenses ruremanentes ' Miss Bateson in Eng. Hilt. Rev. xx. 148-9. 308