Page:Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries.djvu/246

 Devon Notes and Queries, 179 although it was gelded at only a virgate, it was valued at the comparatively enormous sum of £S according to the Exon book, or £y according to the Exchequer book, the value of an ordinary virgate holding being only a few shillings. Does not this indicate exceptional privileges such as previous royal ownerships might have conferred upon it ? It seems too to have had the right of gallows, for, according to the Hundred Rolls, William de Wydewurthe had erected gallows there, and he does not appear to have been called upon to produce his authority. However, much stress cannot be laid upon this, because the right of gallows accompanied every grant of infanganihef and utfanganthef, and such grants were made somewhat freely. Mr. Reichel truly says '* there is no evidence that it had ever been a Crown estate," but there is equally no evidence that it had not so been, and, in the case of a manor granted to a private individual, we should hardly expect such evidence to have been preserved. There is no evidence, except ,the entry in Alfred's will, that Hartland had ever been a Crown estate, but there is no doubt that it had been. With regard to the Saxon Conquest, no attempt was made in my note to ascertain the precise date. It was a su£5cient reply to Mr. Lancefield's query to indicate the state of Devon in the time of Alfred, and the only new point I wished to bring forward was that, while the north of the coimty was entirely Saxon, the south was still occupied largely by the Cornish. Mr. Davidson's argument is in- genious but not convincing, because his evidence is entirely presumptive, and he ignores or sweeps aside important facts which tell against his theory. He was, of course, unaware of the existence of the early Crediton charter, but the generally admitted facts that Boniface was a Saxon, bom at Crediton and educated in a Saxon monastery at Exeter in 700, he explains away by the amazing suggestion that "parties of Saxons were permitted from time to time to enter the British Kingdom, and to settle, forming their 'tans,' or fortified clusters of residences, on the banks of the streams." {Trans. Devon. Assoc, ix, 199.) What could be more unlikely, considering that the two nations were in a state of continual warfare, and considering their great