Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 5.djvu/164

 122 ON CERTAIN OBSCURE AVORDS The extracts are sufficient to shew the general meaning of the term, viz., the improvement and tillage of waste land. It disappears from modern rolls, probably because all the im- proveable waste, not required for common rights, became per- manently enclosed or added to the tenemental lands of the manor, and the reeve was no longer expected to make any return under this head. For the same reason it is observ- able, generally, that the usual head of "exitus manerii" in old account rolls tends to vanish or become unimportant in more recent ones. It is also evident, especially from the compotus temp. Ed. IV,, supra, that the mode of reducing the land to tillage was the one so long practised and still partially used in Devon and Cornwall, locally called heating, i. e. paring and burning it. Enclosures of land so reclaimed are sometimes called " the Battens," and retain the name long after the origin of it has been forgotten. To collect the superficial sward in heaps, and burn them, is called " swaling the beatens," or, sometimes, "beat burning." The heaps are called beat boroughs. The process is described fully by Carew in his Survey, p. 19, ed. 1769, and there are few glossarial dic- tionaries which do not advert to it under the title of beating or of denshiring. In the Herefordshire glossary already quoted it will be found under the word Bett. There is reason to believe that certain local names of places and persons are derived from this practice; as Battisborough, Battishull, Battiscombe, Batishorn, Batisgore, &c. Closely connected with this word is the following : BiNGHAY. — In a grant by Odo, lord of Trcverbyn, in the twelfth century, to the monks of St. Andrew's, Tywardreth, he conveys to them and their native tenants, or men, certain rights of common pasture, " per totara terram meam Trege- nedwid, exceptis bladis, pratis, et clausis ad bingeheies anti- quitus reservatis." Oliv. Mon. Exon., No. xix. p. 42. The same grant confers other riglits of common in Trcver- byn, &c., with the exception of certain land " quam solam mihi et haeredibus meis a kalendis Mali usque ad fest.. Ex- alt. S. Crucis ad bingeheys reservavi annuatim." In another instrument of the thirteenth century, to which the abbot of Tor and Reginald de Albamara were parties, it was agreed that the common rights of pnsturc in Woodbury manor should be subject to certain metes and bounds.