DOMESDAY SURVEY
IN proportion to its area Buckinghamshire receives a fairly liberal allowance of space in Domesday Book. As against its twenty-one pages Oxfordshire, which ' marches with ' its western border and has a slightly larger area, occupies but fifteen, while Berkshire, a slightly smaller county, is only allotted sixteen. In Middlesex, although the survey appears to be extremely full, the proportion to area is no greater than in the case of Bucks. Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, how- ever, although between them not quite half as large again as this county, occupy twice the number of pages. At a time when arable land was the chief source of wealth, its hills and its then extensive woodlands can hardly have admitted of Buckinghamshire being reckoned a rich county, in spite of its fertile valleys ; but it is not probable that the space allotted to a county in Domesday had much, if anything, to do with its wealth or its population.
The determining factor in this matter was really the amount of detail that the authorities decided to include. Domesday Book, we must always remember, is only a compilation from original returns for the Hundreds, which included, we have reason to believe, many details in addition to those which appear in that compilation. [1] It is possible that the Domesday Commissioners themselves varied, on their several circuits, in the amount of detail they asked for, but it was clearly the compiler who was chiefly responsible for cutting down the information supplied on certain points in the inquiry. Apart from a certain fulness of detail in this county, its survey, fortunately for us, contains a few of those personal touches which make the men and women even of that remote period something more than mere names. The first information found in an entry after the name of the holder of the land is the number of ' hides ' at which it was assessed. The ' hide ' was merely a unit of assessment, of which the ' virgate ' was a quarter,[2] and this assessment was of arbitrary character, being based on a unit of 'five hides.' In Buckinghamshire this unit becomes peculiarly prominent, as in the neighbouring counties of Bedford and Cambridge, and even the casual reader can hardly fail to be struck by the large number of manors assessed at such sums as 5, 10, 15,
- ↑ We draw this conclusion from the transcripts of the Cambridgeshire original returns, and from the Domesday Survey of the eastern counties, as well as from the ' Exon Domesday.'
- ↑ At Lathbury in this county an entry (probably unique) speaks of ' i hida, v pedes minus.' It is difficult to follow this reckoning.
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