DOMESDAY SURVEY community. It would certainly be very possible to exaggerate the significance of this fact ; situated as it was at the point where the ' Ryknield Street ' crosses the Derwent Derby was a natural place for a trading centre, and we read that receipts from its tolls form part of the revenue which it furnished to the king. But we read in much greater detail about its ploughlands, mills, woodland and meadows, which are described in the same terms as those of an ordinary country manor. It must be admitted that no support can be derived from Derby for the ' garrison theory ' L of the borough. We find no references to * wall work,' nor to military service of any kind, nor yet do any rural manors appear to have possessed houses appurtenant to them in the borough. 8 The general impression left by the Domesday account of Derby is that of a group of traders superimposed upon an economic organisation of the land such as was common to the whole of the county. The revenue which the king derived from a borough may be divided into two heads, which are kept well apart in the case of Derby. First comes the sum which the borough contributed to the county ' geld ' ; Derby was assessed at 12 carucates, Nottingham at 6. s In the second place there is the ' farm ' of the borough, a round sum of money repre- senting several distinct sources of revenue which the burgesses paid to the king, or, rather, to his officer the sheriff. 4 At Derby this sum in King Edward's time was 24, in which the prevalent duodecimal system reckoningis still evident; by the time of the Survey it had risen 10^30 'with the mills and the vill of Litchurch.' The twin borough of Nottingham likewise paid 30 by way of farm, but, in addition, rendered 10 from the mint. Now Domesday contains no mention of any mint at Derby, and yet we know, from the evidence of the coins themselves, that money was struck there in the Conqueror's time, 6 a fact which illustrates the danger of arguing from the omissions of the great Survey. We are, however, given one very important statement relating to the pre--Conquest finance of Derby when we are told that ' two parts belonged to the king and the third part to the earl of rent and toll and forfeiture, and of every customary due.' This 'third part,' which belonged to the earl, is clearly the ' tertius denarius redditus burgi ' ; and we have in this passage a distinct proof that here at least it was assigned to the earl in the period preceding the Conquest, just as from the Warwickshire portion of Domesday we learn that the quite distinct ' tertius denarius placitorum comitatus ' was also in that case a recognised possession of the earl in the Conqueror's time. 6 A rather unexpected feature of Derby as it appears in Domesday is the ecclesiastical character of many of the entries relating to it. No 1 Maitland Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 188 et seqq. 8 The importance of the agricultural side of borough life is discussed in Maitland's Township and Borough. 3 For the round sums of geld cast upon the boroughs see Mr. Round in Domesday Studies, i. 117.
- See for a full discussion of the farm of the borough the article on Domesday Finance, ibid. i.
6 Numismatic Chrm. vol. ( 1 904,) iii. 260. ' V.C.H. Warm. i. 273. For the distinction between these two sources of comital revenue see Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville. 309
