Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/330

 A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE to be said on both subjects which is not to be found in the exist- ing histories, valuable though they are, of Bridges and Baker. And more especially is this the case with the study of the county assess- ments. It is only very recently that we have begun to realise how ancient and how important is the history which underlies the local assessments entered in Domesday Book. In the southern half of England the Domesday unit of assessment was that mysterious ' hide ' of which the meaning has been long disputed, and of which the derivation is even now obscure. Northamptonshire, like other counties to its south, and like, also, Warwickshire on its western, and Huntingdonshire on its eastern border, was assessed in ' hides ' and ' virgates,' the ' virgate ' being merely the quarter of a ' hide.' But Leicestershire to its north, like Lincoln- shire, belonged to that Danish district of England which was assessed, not in hides, but in carucates and bovates, the bovate representing the eighth part of a carucate. This position of Northamptonshire on the border of the two districts has to be borne in mind. Until explained and reduced to order, the number of the hides and of the ploughlands assigned to each manor in Domesday are, at first sight, meaningless enough. But they represent the disjecta membra, the surviving fragments of a system. To reconstruct that system is the func- tion of the Domesday student. In his Domesday Book and Beyond Professor Maitland has shown that in what he terms ' The county hidage ' — a document which he deems older than the Conquest — North- amptonshire is assigned 3,200 hides. The next document in order of date is what I have styled ' the Northamptonshire geld-roll,' and which I assign to the reign of the Conqueror, although it cannot, I hold, be later than 1075, for it mentions Edward's widow (who died in that year) as ' the lady, the king's wife.' ' Professor Maitland, who accepts my view of this document and its nature, points out that it implies the existence of thirty-two ' hundreds ' of hides, although it only actually accounts for 2,663!^. But it is when we come to Domesday Book (1086) and to the Pipe Roll of 11 30 that we find an extraordinary re- duction on either of the above totals. The latter record debits North- amptonshire with no more than 1,1 92f hides. It is the view of Professor Maitland that this great change is accounted for by a sweeping, though unrecorded, reduction of assessment under William I.'' At this point it may be desirable to give an analysis of the ' geld- roll,' the only document of this character known to exist in England, and one for which I have claimed the status of ' our earliest financial record." The successive columns represent : (i) the land which had paid the tax ; (2) the ' inland ' which was exempt ; (3) the king's land ; (4) the land on which the tax had not yet been paid ; (5) the land which 1 Feudal Englandy p. 154. " Feudal England, p. 156. 258
 * Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 457, 469.