A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE may refer to this latter time as a general rule, the words quando recepit being incidentally added in the instance given above. The case of Burbage may even help us to a rough date for the period in question. The vill had been granted to Coventry Abbey by Earl Leofric of Mercia in the latter part of the Confessor's reign, 18 so that the words quando recepit cannot refer to the abbey's first possession of the estate. At the time of King Edward's death, the abbey was under the rule of the famous Leofric, the pluralist abbot of Peterborough, who was mortally wounded at the battle of Hastings. The fact that Abbot Leofric had actually taken part in the great battle would enable the new king, without undue straining of the law, to take the possessions of the abbey into his own hands, and there exists an original writ of the Conqueror 17 in which he restores the temporalities of the abbey to Leofwine, Leofric's successor. This writ can only belong to the latter part of 1070, and there is therefore a distinct probability that this is the year to which the first value given for Burbage really refers. But if the Leicester- shire 'valuits' in general refer to about the same time we may not improbably connect the wasted condition of the county with the Conqueror's march from Warwick to Nottingham when he suppressed the first revolt of Edwin and Morcar towards the close of 1068. 18 And if we may make due allowance for the general poverty of the county the distribution of the wasted area agrees well enough with the supposition that it was harried in the first instance along a line extending from High Cross, the point at which the road from Warwick to Nottingham would enter the county, to the Soar at Lough- borough. If we indicate on a map those manors which have increased four- fold in value between the date at issue and 1086, the point where Watling Street and the Foss Way meet becomes a focus of devastation which extends over the western half of the county to Barrow on Soar and Loughborough, and also along the Welland Valley as far as Slawston and Medbourne. The latter district would readily be reached by raiding parties by way of the Watling Street and Upper Avon ; but Framland wapentake, the part of the county most remote from William's line of march on this occasion, was also the part where Domesday reveals the smallest variation in general value. But whatever the validity of this explanation of the depression of one county, we cannot well refer the Leicestershire ' valuit ' to a date anterior to the Conquest, and some at least of the difficulties presented by our portion of the survey become more intelligible on that hypothesis. The last question to demand discussion at this point is the meaning of the Leicestershire * team-land.' The phrase ' there is land for x teams ' is always ambiguous, for it may refer to the amount of arable land actually under cultivation in a manor, or to the cultivated area plus unreclaimed waste, or even to the latter quantity alone. Also in certain counties with 16 See his reputed charter in Man. Angl. iii, 191. * 7 Facsimiles ofMSS. in Brit. Mta. 18 Professor Freeman (Norman Conquest, iv, 196-7 [ed. 1871]) suggested that Leicester borough had under- gone at this time ' a doom . . . which might ... be spoken of as utter destruction.' He derived this suggestion from a misreading of the History of Leicester Abbey, printed in Dugdale's Monattieoa (see Round, feud. Engl. 456), and he regarded the displacement of the English landowning class in the shire as almost complete, taking no account of the Englishmen who in 1086 were holding land of Norman lords. But he does not seem to have realized the peculiarities of the Leicestershire valuit and valet, and if the former are due to a devastation of the shire it can hardly be placed at any other date. It cannot be laid to the charge of the northern insurgents of 1065, for Leicestershire was part of the Mercian earldom, and Earl Edwin himself led a detachment of the rebel army. 284
