Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/94

 86 THE FIRM A UN1U8 N OCT IS January of Edward I's reign and in the ensuing Quo Warranto proceed- ings, agents of the king seeking to restore old regalities to their master found that one among them, often usurped by self-seeking landlords or withheld by tenants, was so-called hundred-pennies or hundred-scot. By name and in fact it was a tax on the hundred, and at least in Staffordshire was levied at Ad. on the hide.^ Outside these thirteenth-century sources, references to the hundred-pennies are scanty, but a trail leads through twelfth- century charters to a single document describing Taunton, a Winchester estate, in the time of Edward the Confessor,^ the evidence of which is paralleled and confirmed by the Domesday account of the manor.* According to both, himdred-pennies were collected by Taunton from outljdng estates. There can be no doubt that the tax was of Saxon origin, a revenue Saxon kings drew from the hundred. There must be some reason, therefore, why it apparently occurs but once in Domesday, a record which takes account of the conditions in Saxon times ; and this reason I take to be that hundred-pennies are disguised under other names or tacitly included in the larger render to which they were paid. They are discoverable in two or three instances in East Anglia as a hundred census * or consuetudo,^ but usually are well concealed under that vague and comprehensive term consuetvdines, customary dues, which swell the renders of many manors. It is partly because they must of necessity exist under cover in Domesday since we are assured of their continuous existence through the thirteenth century, and partly because of a striking analogy between this tax paid to Taunton in Somerset and certain customary dues paid to the king's ferm at his manors in that county, that the two, hundred-pennies and consuetudines firrtme, can be identified, the latter already familiar to us from the Dorsetshire boroughs and as the dues from the appendicia of the royal manors in Somerset. The analogy depends upon the following points : First, King Edward's manors in Somerset were in hundreds of their own, to which they had given their name, just as Taimton was in Taunton hundred. It would be natural, therefore, that any dues from the himdred should be paid them and entered as part of their render. Secondly, the render of Taunton has the same phraseology as the render of the royal manors. Reddit cuiu libras 13d. cum omnibus appendiciis et consuetudinibus suis.' Haec duo maneria Summertone et Cedre cum appendiciis suis redde- bant firmam unius noctis tempore regis Edwardi.' • Sotuli Hundredorum, ii. 114. * Kemble, Codex Diphm., no. 897. » D. R 87 b. « D. R ii. 277 b. » D. B. ii. 291. • D. B. 87 b. ' D. B. 86. I