A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE King William ' placed ' (apposuit) eight sokemen belonging to Repton. 1 This probably means that for tenurial purposes these sokemen would hold of the abbot, but that the rights of jurisdiction over them, and perhaps other profits as well, would remain in the king's hands as attached to his manor of Repton. The one remaining class of men in the Derbyshire Domesday con- sists of the priests, of whom the Survey records forty-seven in this county. Usually they are classed with the peasantry, but at times they reach a higher position. Thus at Bakewell, where there were two priests who had two villeins and five bordars under them, no less than three carucates are entered as belonging to the church. At Ashbourne the priest, who possessed one carucate assessed to the geld, had under him two villeins and two bordars with ' half a plough ' and also a man who paid him 1 6 pence, the priest himself having a plough of his own. Both these instances however are taken from the royal demesne ; on the estates of undertenants the church endowments were not so valuable. 8 Derbyshire was one of the few English counties which already by the date of the Survey possessed a distinctive industry. Lead-mining was as characteristic of Derbyshire as its salt works were characteristic of Worcestershire, and in either case the connexion between the county and its most noteworthy production has lasted until our own time. Lead works (plumbarice) occur in the Derbyshire survey at Wirksworth, where there were three, at ' Mestesforde,' Bakewell, and Ashford on the royal demesne and at Crich on the fief of Ralf fitz Hubert, in each of which places there was one, the pre-eminent position of Wirksworth in the industry being thus shown even in Domesday. In his foundation charter to Lenton Priory William Peverel gave the" tithe of his lead to that house, and in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 the value of the tithes of lead in the High Peak which resulted to the priory from that grant is estimated at 6 1 3 s. tyd? We have already dealt in another connec- tion with the rents in lead paid by the manor on the royal demesne. It is quite possible that the reference to ' pure silver ' on page 3 3 1 of the translation, a phrase which is very abnormal if not unique in Domesday, may point to some metallurgical connexion between the working of silver and lead. The suggestion is tacitly made by the editors of the Dialogus de Scaccario* who point out that the only instances of payment ' puri argenti ' which they have found in the Survey occur in a lead- mining district. With the exception of the solitary smith who appears at Alvaston no artisan of any kind occurs in the county Domesday. Lead-mining was confined to five manors only ; the universal industry of agriculture was in Derbyshire, as elsewhere, the basis of the survey. The great plough of eight oxen was the unit employed by the Domesday commissioners in estimating the actual agricultural condition of a manor; its potentialities in the matter of cultivation are expressed by the number 1 Fol. 273.
- Bakewell and Repton, which if also on the royal demesne, are the only places which are credited
with two priests in Derbyshire. 8 Dugdale, Man. v. 115. * Oxf. Univ. Press, 1902, pp. 34-5. 316
