Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/97

 1920 THE FIRM A UNIU8 N OCT IS 89 Maitland thinks may have been the ferm of a night.^ Hence we note that proportion between the hidage and the ferm-custom continuing in Somerset in the time of Domesday, and that even as late as Edward I the hundred-pennies in Staffordshire were levied 4t?, on the hide. The assessment of the ferm upon hundred and hide constituted a ' defence ' of that land, whether it was the royal demesne in the hundred, or the land of others. In nature, therefore, the firma unius noctis was a tax, though when drawn in accustomed renders from royal estates for their lord the king it seems a rent-charge. Indeed, what Maitland says of the ferm in earlier Saxon times remains true of the whole Saxon period : Whatever be the origin of the king's yeorm ... it becomes either a rent or a tax. We may call it the one or we may call it the other, for so long as the recipient of it is the king, the law of the seventh and eighth centuries will hardly be able to tell which it is. The king begins to give it away : in the hands of his donees, in the hands of the churches, it becomes a rent.2 If in following the evidence of Domesday we have come upon a system as complete as this, antecedent to the levy of Danegeld, and indeed followed in levying that tax,^ then this method of taxing every hundred in behalf of the firma unius noctis is closely parallel with a Danish custom surviving as late as 1231,* accord- ing to which every hundred gave to the king a certain number of nights' service paid in money or in kind. Every third year the king came in person, but for the other two years the renders were made to his officers at the nearest royal estate. There has been some difference of opinion whether this service was paid as a public burden or only by dependents of the king, but on the whole the discussion has gone in favour of the former.^ As for Saxon England we are not left in this uncertainty, I take it, but by identifjdng the customs of the ferm with the hundred- pennies, a public due, the nature of the ferm is determined. E. B. Demarest. {Codex Dipt. iii. 203), in which the king declares the hidage of Chilcombe reduced from 100 to 1 hide, ' just as his ancestors before him had set it '. If this date, antecedent to the levy of Danegeld is correct, and if ' his ancestors ' had reduced the hidage of Chil- combe from 100 to 1 hide, then we are dealing with a fiscal hidation, a case of beneficial hidation, having to do with a tax which can hardly be other than the ' ferm of a night ' levied upon Chilcombe for one hide instead of one hundred. Cf. Maitland, Domecday Book and Beyond, pp. 449 f., 496 ff. '' Roimd, Fevdal England, pp. 44, 54. geschichte ; Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 237.
 * There is an imdated writ of King Ethelred which Kemble assigns to the year 984
 * Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 239.
 * Liber Geneva Daniae, ed. 0. Neilsen.
 * K. Ijchraann, Abhandlungen zur germanischen, insbesovdere nordiachen Rechts-