A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE Ratio i : 2 -Rof/'fl 2 : 3 .#fl//0 i : i Team- Team- Team- Vill lands Car. vm lands Car. Vill lands Car. Belgrave . i Waltham II l6 Leire . . 2 2 Frisby I I 2 Thorpe Arnold 10 15 Frolesworth i
Shearsby and Suttor 2 4
2 3 Walcote . 2 2 Cadeby . I 2 Misterton . 3 4 Cosby . . 3 3 ' Nevlebi ' , i I Thrussington 12 18 Dalby . . i I Shangton . I 2 Starmore 6 9 Harby . . i I Peatling . 2 3 Thorpe Langt an i I Beeby . . 7 io Sproxton . 3 3 Potters Marston 2 3 Diseworth . 3 3 Oadby . . i 4 Osbaston . 4 4 With the materials at our disposal we cannot hope as yet for any final explanation of these figures, but they will at least become intelligible if viewed in the following way. It is quite possible in view of the heavy rating of Leicestershire as a whole that the jurors in the Domesday Inquest may have been allowed to express the agricultural possibilities of their vills and manors in figures which bore a conscious reference to the carucates of assessment in each case. The above table, for instance, contains twenty-six cases where the carucates stand to the plough-lands as three to two. It is highly improbable that in all these instances the geld carucates exceeded the field carucates, actual and potential, by one-third, but it is very possible that, when this was approximately the case, the jurors may have been per- mitted to use figures which brought out an intelligible ratio between these quantities. In the event of an abatement being granted the king's financial officials would find it much more convenient to possess figures which ex- pressed the relations between assessment and agricultural fact in arithmetical proportion than to work from a collection of unorganized statements about plough-lands and carucates. It is true that the Domesday scribes did not trouble to include these figures systematically in the completed record, and also that, as the Leicester Survey proves, no change was made in the burden of the Leicestershire geld for forty years at least after 1086, yet the fact remains that over a large portion of the county, so far as our information goes, the replies relative to team-lands were given in a manner which, according to the scheme of the survey, would naturally be construed as a suggestion for a reduction of assessment. At the head of the roll of Leicestershire landowners stands the name of the king, to whose estates are allotted some two columns of our record. As was commonly the case elsewhere the royal property in Leicestershire was derived from various sources. From his predecessor Edward the king inherited Rothley and Great Bowden with their wide tracts of dependent sokeland, and on the death of Edith, the Confessor's widow, in 1075, he became possessed of her lands in Wadborough, Saddington, Thorpe Acre, and Dishley. Croxton Kerrial and Nether Broughton, with which the description of the king's land opens, had reverted to the crown on the forfeiture of their former owner, Earl Morcar of Northumbria, whose brother, Earl Edwin, within whose Mercian government Leicestershire lay, does not seem to have possessed any land at all within the county. 22 The large manor of Shepshed, com- prising probably much of Charnwood Forest, had been held by an unknown " See below, page 298. 286
