A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE distinguished from the annual farm of a borough, for the several boroughs of the Danelaw varied greatly in this respect. Stamford, to the east of Leicester, paid geld on 150 carucates ; Nottingham, to the north, paid geld only on six, which last sum probably represents the geldability of the arable lands belonging to the borough. 66 In view of the heavy assessment of Leicestershire, as a whole, we might expect its county-town to have a pro- portionate fiscal burden, and the absence of any statement in Domesday to this effect is another of the statistical anomalies presented by this portion of the great survey. The geographical position of the town of Leicester deserves notice here for its bearing on those ancient divisions of the shire, the wapentakes. In 1086 the county was divided into the four wapentakes of Guthlaxton, Gosecote, Gartree, and Framland, and Leicester is situated at the very point where the boundaries of the first three divisions coincide. It is clear, then, that their outlines were originally drawn with reference to the borough which lay in the centre of the county, and the fact illustrates the artificiality of the local organization of the Danelaw. With the aid of the Leicestershire Survey it can be proved that the boundaries of the Leicestershire wapentakes have undergone no material change since 1086, except that in 1346 Gosecote wapentake was split into the two divisions of East and West Gosecote, the Soar being taken as the line of delimitation, and a new wapentake of Sparken- hoe was created out of so much of Guthlaxton wapentake as lay between the Foss Way and the southern border of Gosecote. In both these cases the new boundaries, like the old ones, met, and still meet, in Leicester borough. In this county the Domesday scribes, in describing each tenant's land, have generally adhered to a consistent sequence in dealing with the several wapen- takes in which it may have lain, following the order Guthlaxton, Gartree, Gosecote, Framland. There is always a possibility that the sequence in which these local divisions are entered in the survey may reproduce the order followed by the Domesday commissioners in their progress across the county. This suggestion would agree well enough in the case of Leicestershire, but it would not be well to lay much stress upon it, for in the survey of the adjoining county of Nottingham the disposition of the wapentakes is absolutely prohibitive of any theory of the kind. In conclusion, in view of the statistical difficulties presented by the section of Domesday Book with which we are dealing, it may be well to give below in tabular form the result of an analysis of the county survey. A double figure is given for the value of the shire, because in regard to much of the king's land we are not given any vatuit, so that it may be well to leave the terra regis entirely out of comparison. The ij hides which appear in the table represent merely an addition of all the instances of this unit which occur in the county survey apart from any connexion of the term with the carucates of rating. The total assessment of the shire will stand at 2,534, or at 2,642 carucates, according as we assume the hide to have consisted of 12 or of 1 8 carucates, the latter appearing to be the more probable. At the lowest estimate the assessment of Leicestershire is in striking contrast with the 600 and 567 carucates laid upon the neighbouring counties of Derby and Nottingham respectively. K r.C.H. Notts. , 236. 304
