448 REVIEWS OF BOOKS July be strengthened by a Cheshire case of a man who was granted with his land which is now the township of Abbots Cotton. The free peasants of Lincolnshire in the twelfth century, who in some cases can be clearly affiliated to sokemen of 1086, held their land at a rent with, at most, some occasional labour services in summer. They were clearly responsible for the payment of their own taxes. There are cases on record, and, doubtless, others unrecorded, in which they joined in the endowment of a village church, and in this connexion it may be mentioned that the ordinary parish church, whether in town or country, could apparently be described as a minster. It is, however, as individual donors of land by charter to religious houses, and as witnesses to the grants of others, that this class becomes really clear to us. The editor's philological knowledge enables him to state that though names of Old English and of Scandinavian origin are about equal in number, the English terminology had passed into a sterile stage, while the Scandinavian still preserved its formative vigour. This and the use of late names like ' Magnus ' are quite inconsistent with the old view, already hard to reconcile with the evidence of Domesday Book, that the Danes in this area were soon absorbed by the vanquished English. Their culture as well as their names was still strongly northern. In all this Mr. Stenton acknowledges his debt to the researches of Bjorkman, but his refutation of another current view which would restrict the Danish settlers in the district of the Five Boroughs to the limited number who occupied the towns is entirely his own. The ultimate extinction of the characteristic Scandinavian nomenclature by the adoption of Norman names from the military class is illustrated, we may point out, in a higher rank by the names of two Lincolnshire land- holders of the time of Henry I who were brothers, Colsuen and Ivo. Had the editor been at liberty to deal with the evidence of his documents in questions of feudal genealogy, he might have had an interesting note on these two native magnates, who in all probability were brothers of the famous Countess Lucy. The fact that their nephew apparently had a son who was chamberlain of Pontefract (no. 510) raises the question whether the attestation of the Countess Lucy's charter to Spalding Abbey by a group of vassals of the honour of Pontefract was quite as much an accident as Dr. Farrer supposed. 1 Another nail is driven into the coffin of Maitland's hasty generalization that the Domesday hide or carucate could only have had one equivalent in acres, and that 120, by the discovery that the Lincolnshire carucate averaged 160 acres. The rare Old English word so translated. ' plogsland ' or ' ploxland ', occurs once in these documents. Their evidence confirms Professor Gray's conclusion from later material that Lincolnshire, outside the fen district, was a county in which the two-field system of cultivation was general. A good deal of interesting information on the internal disposition of these fields emerges. There was a tendency for the demesne to form large blocks, reckoned in furlongs. Furlongs had names and one bovate at least, but never selions as in Cheshire. The Newhouse charters printed here include the most explicit references to scutage that have yet occurred at a date so early as 1147-66, and x Early Yorkshire Charters, in. 184.
