Page:VCH Leicestershire 1.djvu/372

 A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE the borough survey as consisting of 10 carucates of land in Leicester on which were settled seventeen burgesses, who rendered him yearly the minute sum of 2J. 8^." The bulk of the town in 1086 belonged to the king and to Hugh de Grentemaisnil, the former being possessed of thirty-nine houses, in addition to twenty-four houses which he held in common with the latter. Hugh's independent estate in the borough falls into two parts, the first con- sisting of 1 1 o houses which appear to have no tenurial connexion with any land outside the borough, the second comprising some seventy houses which are assigned to various manors of his scattered over the county. Mr. Round considers that Orderic's description is somewhat misleading, as Domesday shows us the Grentemaisnil share as out of all proportion to the others. Apart from the houses held in common by Hugh and the king, the former held at least 1 80 in addition to 37 ' burgesses ' (with houses), as against the king's 45, the countess's 28, and the bishop's * 17 burgesses.' And his right to the third penny of the mint implies that he held a privileged position. Excluding the representatives of the four lords mentioned by Orderic the only Leicester- shire tenants in chief possessing a stake in the county-town were Robert de Veci, who held nine houses with sac and soc, of which six were appurtenant to Newton Burdet and three to Kibworth Harcourt ; Geoffrey de Wirce, with one house belonging to Dalby and another belonging to Pickwell ; and Henry de Ferrers and Robert Dispensator, who only possessed one burgess between them. On the other hand Queen Edith's lands in Saddington, Shepshed, and Thorpe Acre were connected with six houses in the county town. The attribution of urban houses to rural manors, which has just been mentioned, is noteworthy because of its bearing on what has been called the garrison theory of the borough. According to this theory every normal borough had originally been a place of defence for the county in which it was situated, and it is further assumed that the burden of manning these strong places, and of keeping them in repair, was laid upon the landowners of the shire. In the discharge of this duty the theory goes on to assert that each landowner was required to keep up in his county-town a number of houses, inhabited by men-at-arms, roughly proportional to the amount of land which he held in the shire, and that each house was considered as fulfilling this obligation with regard to some particular portion of his rural estate. Thus, when in the description of Leicester we read that Hugh de Grentemaisnil has nine houses in the borough which belong to Stockerston, we are by this theory required to understand that Hugh de Grentemaisnil and his predecessor Earl Ralf of Hereford, in virtue of their possession of this important vill, have been expected to maintain a definite number of men-at-arms in the county- town, and that the houses which they occupied were considered as appurtenant to the manor which they represented. This theory has the merit of co- ordinating the burh-bot of Anglo-Saxon law with the ' tenurial heterogeneity ' displayed by the county boroughs in Domesday Book, but the objections to it are serious. In the first place it is only in regard to a small number of county towns that this definite connexion of urban and rural tenure is revealed by Domesday. Leicester itself is the one borough north of Welland in which " This land was subsequently known as the bishop's fee. Its agricultural value is grouped by Domesday with that of two other estates. 302