DOMESDAY SURVEY by that reduction of the Rutland assessment for which the evidence has been given in the preceding pages. It seems certain that the assessment of Leicestershire had not been reduced at all by the date of Domesday,"' and, in regard to Lincolnshire, the high rating of the individual vills, and the fact that the carucates are normally equal to the team-lands in the district of Kesteven, with which alone Rutland can have been connected, seem to preclude all possibility that a reduction had been granted in that quarter since, at any rate, the beginning of the Confessor's reign. ^^ Northamptonshire alone remains ; and we have seen good reason to believe that this county had undergone a reduction of geldability precisely similar to that which is implied in the Domesday description of the wapentakes of Alstoe and Martinsley. The fact that the north of Rutland is assessed in carucates, while the south like Northamptonshire is assessed in hides, is no great difficulty, since we know that the hides in the north-east of the latter county tend to be arranged in duodecimal groups similar to those on which the assessment of Alstoe and Martinsley Wapentakes is based." And at this point the one piece of direct information which we possess falls into line. When Edward the Confessor made his grant of Rutland to Westminster Abbey he directed his writ to the county authorities of Northamptonshire — a clear proof that Martinsley Wapentake, to which probably the document exclusively relates, was for the time being at least under the jurisdiction of the latter. We can therefore hardly hesitate to believe that in Rutland, as it exists to-day, we have a fragment of 11th-century Northamptonshire, detached from its parent county through causes which were in operation between the close of the Confessor's reign and the date of Domesday Book."^ On a consideration of the survey of this district which is contained in Domesday Book, the one fact which suggests a clue to the nature of these causes is the position formerly occupied in this quarter by Queen Edith. She owned in demesne one of the two wapentakes which comprised the Rutland of 1086 ; and from the terms of the document in which her husband granted the district to Westminster Abbey, it seems clear that she possessed rights of some kind over the whole of it. From a passage in a late but trustworthy authority, the Estorie des Engles of Geoffrey Gaimar, we learn that Edith was not the first queen of England to be connected in an especial manner with Rutland, for in 1002 Emma, the Confessor's mother, had received this district, together with the cities of Winchester and Exeter, upon the occasion of her marriage with Ethelred IL^* It is at least a working hypothesis that in the successive possession of Rutland, first by Emma and then by Edith, we have the real cause which originally separated this district from the local shire organization, and thus made possible the gradual development of the modern county. We may with some confidence infer, not only that the queen would immediately enter into the receipt of all profits of jurisdiction arising out of her Rutland lands, " V.C.H. Letcs. i, 285. '^ The evidence in this matter will be found in the first volume of the F.C.H. Lines. " y.C.H. Northants, i, 266, 268. "" It is worth noting that in 1285 a jury of the county stated definitely that 'antiquitus comitatus Rotel' fuit de corpore comitatus Northantonie ' ; Assize R. 725, m. 7 d. "* Uestorie des Engles (Rolls Ser.), 1, 41 39. The queen's possession of Exeter is to be inferred from the Angl.-Sax. Chron.
