DOMESDAY SURVEY Now, if there was one town more than another that needed a garrison and a wall, that town was Hereford. A standing bulwark against the Welsh, after as before the Conquest, fortified, stormed, and fortified anew, with a wall that is specially mentioned in the Domesday description of the city, it is here pre-eminently that we should expect to find the garrison system in operation. And here the champions of that system emphatically fail to find it.^^° They leave Hereford severely alone. All that Professor Maitland could do was incidentally to observe ' these Hereford burgesses were fighting men,'"^ a conclusion that in no way connects them with ' rural properties in the country,' '"^ as required by the ' garrison theory.' When we come to inquire for ourselves the extent of this connexion in Herefordshire, we find that the instances are three in number, just enough to establish the absence of any general system of the kind. Four burgesses at Hereford were connected with the king's manor of Marcle, to which they ren- dered eighteen plough-shoes ; five with the manor of Burghill, to which they rendered ^zd. ; and one with Henry de Ferrers' manor of Frome, to which he contributed 1 2d.^^^ Apart from any locality Roger de Laci had burgesses in the city who paid him 20s. a year, and the bishop had there his own fee, on which the messuages had diminished from ninety-eight to sixty. It may, I think, be fairly said that the evidence of this county is a reductio ad absurdum of the theory that the lords of manors had to keep burgesses in the county town to discharge the duty of repairing the walls incumbent on their 'rural properties.' Mr. Ballard further makes these assertions : — There were several Herefordshire properties It is invariably the case that, except where a which contributed to Worcester.^^' borough lies on the borders of two counties, the villages contributing to it lie in the county in which it lies."" Not only are these assertions mutually contradictory : they are both, strangely enough, erroneous. There was one, but only one,^" manor in Herefordshire which ' contributed ' (the word is unfortunate) to Worcester ; this was Coddington, in the east of the county, to which belonged four messuages in that city. The Domesday description of Hereford, as is so often the case, is largely of the nature of a custumal, and the customs recorded are those which existed before the Conquest, and which, so far as the natives were concerned, were still to remain in force. The burgesses also of Edward's day were enumerated with more precision than those at the time of the Survey. ' Within and without' the wall there dwelt, before the Conquest, 103 men enjoying (and of course subject to) the same customary tenure. The custumal at once enumerates and limits the dues they owed their lord the king. It is also "'Hereford is absent from Mr. Ballard's lists in Dom. Boroughs, 14-16, 35-6. "* Dom. Bk. and Beyond, igg. "' ^he Dom. Boroughs, 31. Mr. Ballard claims that this connexion existed 'in all the county boroughs,' and was ' a universal rule,' and that ' on the contributed houses in these boroughs fell the liability for repair of the borough walls' (p. 34). "' These instances are carefully collected by Ellis {Introd. to Dom. ii, 45 5). Mr. Ballard's figures seem even smaller {Dom. Boroughs, 39). »=' T:he Dom. Boroughs, 18. «» ne Dom. Inquest, 176. "" Mr. Ballard must have here included in error the Worcestershire manors entered under Herefordshire on xZob. I 297 38
