Page:VCH Rutland 1.djvu/186

 A HISTORY OF RUTLAND attribution to that county of the Martinsley geld would naturally follow from the obvious convenience of making the same officer responsible for the dues payable by the whole of Rutland as it then stood. After giving the assessment of each vill, and describing its agricultural condition, Domesday proceeds to give the value of the vill in question at the date of King Edward's death and in 1086. It is one of the anomalies pre- sented by the Rutland Survey that the values which it assigns to the local vills at the former date seem as artificial as the figures which represent the carucates of assessment. Value 1066 » Greetham. . . • £l Cottesmore Overton and S Thistleton. Thistleton. Alstoe JTeigh. . Wapentake IWhissendine Exton. Whitwell. ' Alestanestorp Burley. .Ashwell {Oakham. Hambleton Ridlington Albert's land 1^0 U^o 1^0, £ho U88 £2°o The neatness of the total va/u/'t for the two wapentakes makes it very doubtful whether the figures of which it is composed represent real estimates of manorial value. We are definitely told that in 1086 Rutland rendered ^150 in assayed coin to the king, and it seems by no means impossible that the j^200 which Domesday asserts to have been the value of the two wapen- takes in 1066 really means that they jointly paid a ^'rma of that amount at the earlier date. The figures for 1086 are irregular, so far as they go, and they may therefore give us values in the normal sense of the word, though we shall presently come upon a fact which decidedly tells the other way." The one serious difficulty in the way of our regarding the Alstoe values of 1086 as representing contributions to a Jirma lies in the fact that the total sum paid by the two wapentakes was only ^150 ; so that if we are right in our explanation of the values of 1066 the share borne by Alstoe Wapentake must have been raised from ^60 to £SS at the same time that the Martinsley con- tribution was being reduced from £14-0 to £62. The question cannot be decided here, but we may notice that by 1 130 the /irma of Rutland had been enormously reduced, for in the Pipe Roll of that year £27 1 3J. 9^. represents the payments due to the Crown on this head. In any case, then, the facts before us suggest that Rutland secured a series of successive abatements on its Jirma ; the first bringing it down from the >C200 seemingly represented by the values of 1066 to the £iSO due in 1086 — a reduction of just one quarter ; the second reducing the latter amount by nearly three-quarters, and giving us the curiously irregular figure recorded in the Pipe Roll of 11 30. But of the " These figures are here set out in the order in which they occur in Domesday. No special importance belongs to the fact that the ' valuit ' of Alstoe Wapentake divides in the manner indicated. " See the case of Thistleton below, p. 130. 128