Page:VCH Hertfordshire 1.djvu/342

 A HISTORY OF HERTFORDSHIRE The one definite statistical fact that emerges for Hertfordshire in Domesday is that its assessment was low, being in proportion to its area little more than half of that which is found in Bedfordshire and Bucks, although the discrepancy is less marked when we compare the total assessment with the total of recorded ploughlands. As has already been explained above, the assessment in detail was purely arbitrary, that is to say it bore no definite relation to area, ploughlands or value. The two manors, for instance, which composed King's Walden contained 10 ploughlands each, and yet they were only assessed at i hide each. Hitchin itself is credited with 38 ploughlands, though its assessment is but 5 hides ; and it would even seem that, when we deduct what was afterwards the rectory manor, the remainder, with its 34 ploughlands, stood at only 3 hides. 1 These are very extreme cases, but any one who reads the pages relating to Hertfordshire in Domesday must be struck by the great variety of the ratio that the ' hides ' bore to the ploughlands. At Hatfield we meet with the exceptional case of a manor with only 30 ploughlands being assessed at 40 hides, while the other two manors that were held by the abbot of Ely escaped with assessments respectively of 5 and 4 hides, although they contained between them 24 ploughlands. One may add, while on this subject, that in Hertfordshire Domesday records a few reductions of assessment, but they are not of sufficient consequence to require special treatment. Prominent instances occur in the extreme west of the county, where Robert de Todeni's manor of Miswell had its assessment of 14 hides reduced to 3! hides, 'although,' Domesday adds, 'there are always 14 hides there' (fo. 138), while Edward of Salisbury secured a reduction from 6 hides to 3 on his manor of Great Gaddesden (fo. 139). Ralf de Todeni's demesne manor of Flam- stead, which had been assessed at 4 hides, was let off at 2 hides. There would seem to be nothing but special favour to account for these cases. There is one occurrence in Hertfordshire of the interesting word wara. We read of ' Westone ' that ' it lay and lies in Hiz [Hitchin], but the wara of this manor lay in Bedefordscire in the time of king Edward, and the manor is there and always was ' (fo. 132^). The place is Westoning in Bedfordshire, nearly ten miles distant, as the crow flies, from Hitchin. This is an excellent instance of the Domesday use of 'jacet' as implying not that the manor ' lay ' geographically in Hitchin, but that, for tenurial purposes, it was an appurtenance thereof. For fiscal purposes the manor remained in its own Bedfordshire Hundred ; its wara, or assessment, lay there, and it consequently paid its ' geld ' as a portion of that Hundred. Wara is also sometimes used of the tax levied on the assessment. Thus we read of a Bedfordshire estate (fo. 211^) that 'it always lay in Kimbolton (Hunts) but rightly paid its ivarra in Bedfordshire.' * Here perhaps should be mentioned a phrase almost as rare. We 1 See p. 272 above. 8 For wara see further my feudal England, pp. 1 1 5-7, where examples are given of its use in Cambridgeshire. 290