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A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE fewer than six churches are recorded within the borough, of which two belonged to the king, the remaining four, each of which was the property of a different owner, being made the subjects of as many different entries. Ecclesiastical in character is the statement that the burgesses rendered to the king at Martinmas 1 2 thraves of corn, of which the abbot of Burton had 40 sheaves. The importance of this entry has been discussed by Mr. Round, who has shown that it refers to that somewhat obscure due ' churchscot,' and that it gives us an unusual instance of this due being paid in the first place by a borough, and, secondly, to the king and not to any church. 1 The last feature of our borough which calls for notice here is the extraordinary number of its burgesses who had disappeared since the Conquest. Only 140 remained out of a pre-Conquest total of 243, and of these forty are described as ' lesser ' burgesses. Nottingham also had suffered, though there the decrease was only from 173 to 120. The case of Derby is more remarkable in every way, as no castle appears to have been founded there by the Conqueror. Castle-building was to Mr. Freeman the cause of most of the evil which came upon many English boroughs as a result of the Conquest, and he was possibly disposed thereby to overlook other causes for their depreciation. It may be remarked that houses in towns were not for the most part large or costly structures, so that a slight decrease in the profits derived from trade in any town might lead many merchants to abandon their houses and seek some other place where they could obtain a more profitable return. Something may also be allowed for the devastation which we know Derbyshire to have undergone at the Conqueror's hands, but the loss by a town of nearly half its population in twenty years is difficult to understand even in the unquiet times of the eleventh century. We may now pass from the consideration of the county borough and deal with the rural committees found within the shire. One of the gravest difficulties affecting the study of Domesday Book is our ignorance of the precise meaning which ought to be attached to the terms which it employs. This is especially the case with reference to the words describing the various forms in which the communities of the land are represented in the Survey. It has, for instance, been found impossible up to the present to define such a simple and common term as ' manor ' (manerium) in the sense in which it is employed in Domesday. Professor Maitland, indeed, in a brilliant discussion of this subject, propounded the theory that ' manerium ' simply meant an estate answering to the geld by itself. 2 This theory has been proved by Mr. Round to be untenable for several reasons, one of the most important being that ' manerium ' is used in Domesday interchangeably with such a vague term as ' terra.' s A Derbyshire instance of this will be found in the case of Ticknall, which is discussed in the notes to the translation of the Domesday text.* An even more difficult term to define is 'soke,' and its compound 'sokeman.' 1 Engl. Hist. Rev. v, 101. s Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 107-128. s 'The Domesday Manor,' Engl. Hist. Rev. xv. 293-5. * See p. 335. 310