DOMESDAY SURVEY had an escort to provide. We are told that ' Qui equum habebat ter in anno pergebat cum vicecomite ad placita et ad hundrez ad Urmelauia.' Mr. Ballard assumes that this refers to the hundred court for Hereford itself, and is proof that it was not held within the borough.^*' But, why should only the horse-owning burgess attend the court ? To identify it we must first inquire where was ' Urmelauia."*" The answer is simple: it was the place of assembly for the Domesday hundred of ' Wermelau,' now Worme- low, and this meeting-place was ' Wormelow tump' (a mere pleonasm), some six miles south of Hereford, where the road to Ross branches off from that to Monmouth. To reach it, the cavalcade must have passed through the Domesday hundred of Dinedor {Dunre), and entered that of Wormelow. Obviously, the court to which they rode could not be that for Hereford itself, and my solution is that it was that which the Welsh of Archenfield attended, and that the Hereford horsemen formed an escort for the sheriff on his some- what hazardous visit. ' Thrice in the year ' they had to go. Have we not then in this entry an allusion to the ' sheriff's torn ' of later days, the only reference, apparently, to that institution in Domesday, and perhaps, indeed, the earliest mention of its existence .? ^^^ The only special industries alluded to at Hereford are brewing and iron- work. The customary payment of lod. by every man whose wife brewed within or without the city reminds us that this industry was so largely in the hands of women as to originate the name of 'Brewster.' As to the six smiths, who are the subject of a special entry, we read that each of them used to pay id. for his forge and make 120 horse-shoes from the king's iron, and that he received, by custom, 2^. There are only two renders of iron recorded in the county, it being more frequently mentioned under Gloucestershire. It was probably worked in the south of the county, where traces of iron-working, said to be Roman, are found at Peterstow, and if 'Alwintune' was Alton ' Court,' ^^° south-east of Ross, its render of iron would thus be accounted for. Shortly before 1700 Ross was described by Brome as noted 'for the great Vulcanian tribe of Blacksmiths which there inhabit,'"^ and it is styled, somewhat later, in Defoe's Tour, ' a great manufacture of iron-ware.' "^ Space does not permit of discussing every point in the Hereford entry, but the now famous ' laws of Breteuil ' must not be passed over. Here, as in several other towns, ' French ' burgesses had settled after the Norman Con- quest, and Domesday says of them, ' Francigenae burgenses habent quietas per xii denarios omnes forisfacturas suas preter tres supradictas.' As I have
- ' The Dam. Boroughs, 53.
^" Mr. Ballard oddly reads ' Urmer-lavia ' (ibid.). There is no second ' r ' in the Domesday text. "" I do not ignore that the sherifPs torn, when it emerges in records, was held twice, not thrice a year, but in what is considered to be the earliest reference to it, the Leges Henrki, sec. 8 — assigned to 1114-18 the words are : — ' Speciali tamen plenitudine, si opus est, bis in anno conveniant in hundretum,' &c. [ed. Prof. Liebermann, 554), implying that the number was then hardly fixed. The burgemot was, according to the Leges, to be held twice, and the hundred court twelve times, a year ; but this latter rule did not endure, and the borough court, by the laws of Edgar, was to be held thrice a year, and appears to have been so held till Henry I altered the rule to twice a year. The suggested change in the sherifFs torn would be parallel. ^'"^ Mrs. J. G.Wood rejects this identification. "' Brome, Travels (ed. 2), 95. "' William Fitz Baderon's son Baderon gave (iron) forges at Monmouth to Monmouth Priory, and was lord of Longhope (five or six miles south-east of Ross), where Baskerville describes under Chas. II the method of iron-working with charcoal, which had probably altered little since the time of Domesday {Jllst. MSS. Com. Rep. xiii, App. pt. ii, 293-4). 299
