DOMESDAY SURVEY functionary {daia) appears on a Worcestershire manor in addition to ancillae}^ From the non-servile classes of peasants the lord was entitled to that week-work — rusticum "* opus as it is styled in the Worcestershire Domesday — which was a characteristic of their status. This was so essential a feature of the agricultural system at the time that it needed no special mention. But the very important Leominster entry gives details particularizing the service. The villeins, we read, used to plough 140 acres of the lord's land and sow it for wheat with their own seed. At the time of the Survey, when the manor was diminished, 125 acres were still thus ploughed and sown; but the duty is entered, not as that of the villeins alone, but as that of all the classes named, ' Radmans ' included, which tends to obscure the matter. On the Crown manor of Marcle the villeins alone are entered as ploughing 80 acres and sowing it for wheat with their own seed, as at Leominster, and they further had to do the same for 7 1 acres of oats."^ As I understand these entries, they record a special arrangement by which, instead of having to work a certain number of days for the lord, the villeins were responsible for certain work on a certain number of demesne acres. There is, however, a mention of week-work under Ewyas Harold, where we read of 12 bordars ' opcrantes una die ebdomad.,' and a phrase distinctly implying week-work as due, not from them, but from the baronial holders of Leominster and dependent manors. At the very end of their entry we read : ' et ii dies in ebdomada operantur.' Unlikely as it may appear that this phrase applied to the lordly holders of these 32 hides, Domesday, in accord with its regular practice, would regard them as inheriting the obligations of their English predecessors, and if these were ' Radchenistres,' ' Radmans,' or liberi homines, they might, nevertheless, be liable to week-work."° In addition to the evidence cited in the footnote one may refer to that from Staffordshire collected in my paper on the Burton Abbey Surveys,^" where rent-paying tenants {censarii) of estates, with villeins under them, were personally liable therefor to so many days' work in the harvest-field. From this I deduced, of the censarius, ' that his money payment represented only a commutation of the more oppressive services. ' "* Commutation of service for money and any payment suggestive of it is extremely important to note, as indeed are rents in money or kind.^^" '" Fol. i8o3. "* In the specialized sense of villeins' work. '" The entry accounts for the difference of nine acres. "' In Gloucestershire, to the south, ' Hi rachenistres arabant et herciabant ad curiam domini ' (fol. 163); and ' De terra hujus manerii tenebant Radchen[istres] idest liberi homines T.R.E. qui tamen omnes ad opus domini arabant et herciabant etfalcabant et metebant ' (fol. 166). This second passage is followed by a list of the ' Rachenistres ' with their holdings and of their Norman successors, including such Herefordshire tenants in chief as William Fitz Baderon, Turstin Fitz Rolf, and Gilbert Fitz Turold. Again, to the east, in Worcestershire, on the great manor of Pershore, we find villeins responsible, as in Herefordshire, for ploughing a certain number of acres and sowing them with their own seed, but the ' Radmans ' or liberi homines (for the terms are treated as identical) uniformly described as bound to mow one day a year in the lord's meadows and (normally) to perform ' all such services as they were bid.' Here also the English holders had been replaced by such men as the sheriff Urse, Gilbert Fitz Turold, and Turstin Fitz Rolf '" EngL Hist. Rev. xx, 275-89. "« Ibid. 285. 179 i We might easily underrate the amount of money that was already being paid as the rent of land at the date of the Conquest. In several counties we come across small groups of censarii, censores, gablatores, who pay for their land in money, of cervisarii and mellitarii, who bring beer and honey. Renders in kind in herrings, eels, salmon, are not uncommon, and sometimes they are " appreciated," valued in terms of money ' {Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 57). 291
