A hidage to nothing? Military
organization and the origins of the shires in southern England [slide – title]
Marlow Archaeological Society, 20
September 2012
For the PowerPoint presentation that
accompanies this lecture, please contact the author
I wonder whether any of you have got round to reading J. K. Rowling’s
new novel, The Casual Vacancy [slide 2 – book]. The book tells the
story of the Machiavellian machinations behind a parish council by-election.
It’s a sort of bitter comedy of manners not unlike Clochemerle. The communal bone of contention here is a drug
rehabilitation centre rather than a pissoir.
All very droll: there’s nowt as queer as folk wherever you go. On sober
reflection, however, there is a profound difference between the two stories. In
Clechemerle, the mayor is a state
official, an officier de police
judiciaire. In Pagford, Rowling’s middle England town, by contrast, the
chairman of the parish council is a representative of the people. This is a
significant distinction that takes us to the very heart of a unique
characteristic of the English polity. For at least a thousand years local
government has been firmly grounded in local communities rather than the state.
That may sound rather
hollow today. Since the nineteenth century the state has increasingly intruded
into the lives of ordinary people through state control of local government.
Nevertheless, in a very real way local officials have always been ours rather
than theirs. It is a bottom-up rather than a top-down system as you have in France. We
first see it in operation in the Domesday inquest in 1086. Even as early as
then it was almost complete in a form that was to remain recognizable until the
reforms of the 1830s onwards. I’ll describe it briefly.
At the lowest level
there was the vill [slide 3a – vill].
This was a village or group of hamlets that was responsible for the policing of
the area. Each person was in a tithing, a group of ten people under a
tithingesman who were mutually responsible for each others behaviour. Whenever
a crime was detected, the tithing had to raise hue and cry and pursue and
apprehend the criminal if at all possible. It was a system of prospective bail,
as it were. If the tithing failed in its duties all of its members were
amerced, that is fined in the modern sense. Some vills had courts of their own,
especially in the north. They were competent to deal with minor misdemeanours
and regulated the affairs of the village. Most did not.
The main court of the
community was the hundred. This consisted of a group of vills [slide 3b – hundred] – usually about 20
or so – and it was the forum in which the tithings were regulated. The
tithingsmen had to present crimes committed within their villages and these were
adjudged by the suitors of the court. The suitors were technically all the male
inhabitants of the hundred over the age of twelve. In practice, though, there
was a smaller group chosen for the occasion or by custom. They effectively
acted as judges. It may seem strange today to be judged by neighbours. But it
is from this practice that we ultimately derive our trial by jury. The hundred was
competent to deal with all manner of cases, both what we would now call
criminal and civil. It also organized a local militia for the defence of the
community and collected taxation, the geld.
The hundred met once a
month or so, usually in ancient meeting places on boundaries or common land.
They were often marked by distinctive trees, stones, or burial mounds. Here is
one of the more spectacular meeting places, Silbury Hill in Wiltshire [slide 4 – Silbury]. By contrast, the
shire assembled only twice or three times a year in the county town, usually in
the king’s hall. It consisted of a group of hundreds, often 12 or 24 [slide 5 – shire], and oversaw the
military functions of the smaller unit and the collection of the geld. But it
was not otherwise a superior court. Its suitors were the king’s thegns, the
local gentry if you like, of the area and they adjudged on a smaller number of
cases than the hundred, usually matters that touched the king’s interests
directly. The local earl and bishop attended and the sheriff, the king’s
representative, presided.
The shrieval system,
as we can call the whole structure, was an instrument of royal government, but
its agents, as it were, were local communities. As such, it was unique to England. In France and Germany the
tenth century had seen an increasing privatization of public authority. The
essential relations in society became less those between ruler and subject than
between lord and man. Society had become feudalized. England experienced the same sorts
of pressure, but kings never completely lost sovereignty over their subjects in
this way. In large part it was the hundred and shire that was responsible for
the preservation of royal authority. How it did so is one of the more
interesting problems of the pre-Conquest history of England. The story begins with one
of the earliest surviving government documents.
The Burghal Hidage is
a list of boroughs in the south of England and the hides attached to
them. It survives in a number of manuscripts, but the original is most clearly
represented by the Old English version of BL Cotton MS Otho x. It was destroyed
by fire in 1731 and so it is now known only from a transcript, BL Additional MS
43703, made by Laurence Nowell in 1562. You will see from this photograph that Nowell
tried to produce something like a facsimile [slide 6 - BH]. The date of the document is controversial. It has usually
been assigned to the years 914-19, but recently Jeremy Haslam has argued that
it better fits the circumstances of 878-80. Its purpose, then, is equally
controversial. However, there is general agreement that the Burghal Hidage
relates to a Wessex-wide system of defence set up by King Alfred in the late
ninth century to counter Viking attacks.
As primarily a list of
place-names and the hides assigned to them (slide 7 -figures], the document is not exactly a riveting read. And
yet it has been central to our understanding of the origins of the shire.
Appended to the Nowell transcript is a formula linking the length of the
defences of the borough to the number of hides needed to maintain it [slide 8 – BH formula]. It reads as
follows:
For the establishment of a wall (weal-stilling) of one acre’s breadth,
and for its defence (waru) sixteen
hides are required. If each hide is represented by one man, then each pole (gyrd) can be furnished with four men.
This formula translates thus: each perch (16½ feet, about 5 metres) of
borough wall was to be defended by four men and each hide was to provide one
man. In theory this ought to mean that the length of borough defences was
directly related to the hides assigned to them. Indeed, much ink has been spilt
attempting to prove the point.
It seems to me,
however, that all of this takes the formula far too seriously. True, it seems
to work for Winchester
and Wareham,
but elsewhere it can be made to fit only with special pleading. To take the
formula as a precise prescription is to misunderstand Anglo-Saxon society. The
sources are littered with neat formulas that we know express ideals rather than
reality. No one nowadays sees Anglo-Saxon laws as legislation; no one accepts
hides and wergild at face value. Nor should we see the Burghal Hidage formula
as prescriptive. It is inherently unlikely that the extent of defences was
determined by some quill-pusher in Winchester.
Soldiers know that such matters depend on circumstances and locality. Rather
the formula was intended to guide on the basis of rule of thumb and then only
in a general way
All of this is
bye-the-bye. For our purposes the decisive point is that the Burghal Hidage
formula denotes a departure in relations between king and subject. Up until the
ninth century military obligations had largely been a personal matter. The king
had to rely upon the loyalty of his men to bring out their dependents for the
defence of the locality. He ultimately had no recourse against those who
refused service. For the first time King Alfred forged a bond between himself
and every free man and henceforward military service was due to the crown
directly. The system of defence that the Burghal Hidage records was the
outcome.
It proved a
particularly effective weapon against the hit-and-run tactics of the Viking
marauders. It also proved an effective instrument of royal power. Sovereignty
had become a reality for the first time. So it is that it is assumed that it
was the foundation of the shire in Wessex [slide 9a – Wessex
shires]. It is argued that in the course of time the system was extended to
Mercia [slide 9b – Mercia and Danelaw]
and subsequently imposed upon the Danelaw as the kings of Wessex ‘reconquered’
England and freed it from subjection to the Vikings.
This is a neat pattern,
but I think there are considerable problems with the analysis. it begins to
fall apart once we look at the detail. Your part of the world, here in the
middle Thames Valley, is particularly important in
suggesting a different development. We can start by looking at the three Burghal
Hidage boroughs of Wallingford,
Oxford, and
Sashes. The first two, and almost certainly the third, were indubitably
creations of the Burghal Hidage.
With recent research
by The Wallingford Historical and Archaeological Society and the Wallingford
Burh to Borough Project, a much clearer picture of the origins of Wallingford has now
emerged. Up to the 9th century the major centre of settlement in the
area was not Wallingford
but Brightwell to the west. This was a major estate of the bishop of Winchester that appears
to have taken in all the land of the later town [slide 10 – Brightwell]. Certainly from the mid 10th
century the three churches of St Leonard, St Rumbold, and St Lucian in the
south of Wallingford [slide 11 – St Leonard],
belonged to the bishop. There is more than a good chance that the area around
them was a small pre-burghal settlement. The massive defences, still
upstanding, were clearly a secondary feature [slide 12 – line of defences]. This is a section of ditch on the north west. You can see
how enormous it is. You’ll notice how its line seems to have been deflected to
the south to include St Leonard.
There is no evidence of extensive settlement elsewhere in Wallingford before these works. The bank and
ditch would therefore seem to define what was essentially a new town [slide 13 – ditch].
From the very
beginning the borough of Wallingford
seems to have been tightly controlled. This is most apparent in what was
clearly a deliberate policy of zoning different activities. In the SE quadrant
was what we might term the town proper [slide
14 – SE q] . Most of the inhabitants lived there, including almost all the
lords of the surrounding area who owed service to the king in one way or
another. I have noted them where I have identified their tenements. The bishop
of Dorchester, for example, occupied what is
now Boots the Chemist [slide 15 – Boots].
Appropriately enough the market was also situated in this area.
The northern part of
the town was of a different character. The north-western quadrant [slide 16a – NE] was given over to the
king’s hall or palace and the associated church of All Hallows
and possibly the chapel of St Nicholas, later subsumed within the castle. To
the north-west, by contrast [slide 16b –
NW], was a collegiate church, Christchurch, or Holy Trinity as it was known
in the later Middle Ages, which probably belonged to the diocesan, the bishop
of Salisbury.
Only the function of
the SW quadrant [slide 16c – NW],
the Kinecroft, is unclear. It may have been an enclosure that belonged to the
ealdorman and then earl/staller. It too, then, would be a high status site.
Alternatively, it may have always remained open as a pound for stock in time of
war or was simply an area that was never developed. Wallingford was never to grow much beyond a
small town.
This regimentation of
the town comes out loud and clear in the Domesday account of the town. In 1066 Wallingford was
overwhelmingly a royal borough. A garrison of housecarls, a body of royal
retainers, was maintained there and many of its inhabitants were royal
ministers who were directly dependent on the king for their livelihoods. To
that profile the Conquest added the castle. This, though, perpetuated a
military character rather than introduced it. Wallingford was to remain a garrison
throughout the Middle Ages
Oxford has a similar profile: it too was
effectively a new town of the 9th century. In the Middle Saxon
period [slide 17 St Frideswide] it
seems that it was confined to the minster church of St Frideswide
next to the Thames and possibly a defended
bridgehead. This is an artist’s impression that I have lifted from the Oxford before the University volume. The
laying out of defences in the late Saxon period represents the first intensive
settlement of the site: their exact line is unknown [slide 18a – first borough] . There is uncertainty to the west and
south. However, perhaps reflecting a lower assessment in the Burghal Hidage, the
circuit at its maximum possible extent was somewhat smaller that that at Wallingford. A grid of
streets was set out at the same time as the defences, but as far as I can see,
no evidence for zoning has been found in the early burh. The identifiable fees
and tenements that belonged to rural estates are distributed throughout the
complex.
Subsequently, however,
the defences were extended to the east [slide
18b – extension] to enclose what by Domesday Book was a separate liberty.
It was centred on the church
of St Peter in the East
and was subsequently to be known as the manor of Holywell. The king or alderman
often held estates outside the walls of boroughs. Kingsholm to the north-east
of Gloucester
is a famous example. So this may well have been an early high status site,
Indeed, it is clearly the 8 yardlands that were considered to be the original
geld assessment of Oxford.
Whether the castle perpetuated a further high status site is unknown. The
pre-Conquest antecedents of St
George’s Tower
are, however, perhaps suggestive in this connection.
The military origins
of Oxford are again
most eloquently expressed in the Domesday description of the borough [slide 19 – DB Oxford]. It recounts that
many of the tenements in the town were charged with the upkeep of the town
walls, echoing the provisions of the Burghal Hidage
There are still gaps
in the early history of both Oxford
and Wallingford,
but the main lines of their development are now reasonably clear. By contrast,
Sashes is more or less a complete blank. All we have as solid evidence is the
name Sceafcesege in the Burghal
Hidage and the various medieval references that enable us to identify it with
the island of Shaftesey or Sashes next to Cookham [slide 20 – Sashes]. No defences are
visible and the archaeological evidence goes little beyond vestiges of late
Saxon use at Hedsor
Wharf.
We are left with
speculation. As a site, it is comparable to several other burhs which did not develop into boroughs. It has been proposed
that they were emergency forts which plugged gaps in Wessex’s defences in the late ninth
century. As such it is possible that Sashes was like the earliest phase of
Cricklade. There there was a simple bank and ditch system [slide 21 – Cricklade]. This is Jeremy Haslam’s reconstruction.
Subsequent phases show how the defences developed, but Sashes may never have
progressed beyond the initial fortification. The upshot may the featureless
site we see today. Its as well to remember that earthworks have to earn their
own living. They are only preserved when they are used. Having said that, it is
equally possible that as an island site Sashes simply never had defences
because it did not need them.
Colin Berks’ proposed
geophysical survey is indeed timely. Might I also suggest that it would be
useful to examine the tenurial context of the site? Patterns of tenure in
Domesday Book and early charters may well give clues to its relationship with a
wider tenurial landscape. It is possible, for example, that we have a classical
Middle Saxon dispersed function set up. Ninth-century boroughs came to focus
all manner of royal functions in one place. Viking raids made the arrangement
expedient. But this was not a traditional pattern. Typically, the lord’s manor,
the burh, the church, and the market were on different sites, often widely
dispersed. Is it possible that Sashes conforms to this earlier pattern, that is
it was an element in a larger whole, say Cookham or even Reading? Be that as it may, Colin must surely
be right in suggesting that a garrison was originally placed at Sashes to
impede Viking navigation of the Thames at a
point where portage of ships was unavoidable.
Wallingford and Oxford find their origins in late
ninth-century military provisions for the defence of Wessex. What evidence there is
suggest that Sashes was part of the same system.. What, then, we can perceive
of the territories assigned to them in the Burghal Hidage? We can best start
with Wallingford.
In the Burghal Hidage it was assigned 2400 hides. This sum is remarkably close,
as these things go, to the Domesday assessment of Berkshire
of 2395 hides. In both 1066 and 1086 Wallingford
was the county town of Berkshire. Although we
have no record of the fact, the sheriff was presumably based in the town and
the shire court met there at the appropriate seasons of the year. It would seem
obvious that the Burghal Hidage territory was identical with the extent of the Berkshire of 1086 [slide
22 – DB Berks] and substantially
that of the medieval county until its dismemberment in 1974.
Well, fine, but how do
we fit in the 1000 hides of Sashes which was also in the historic Berkshire? The embarrassment has not gone unnoticed. It
has been argued that these extra hides must have been remitted in the period
between the Burghal Hidage and Domesday Book. In some areas of England
beneficial hidation, as it is called, resulted in the lowering of assessment by
as much as 50%. In Berkshire, however, there
is no evidence of such a procedure. Such changes as there were are
post-Conquest. The pre-Conquest assessments of the county are based on the
original five-hide unit and Anglo-Saxon charters suggest no great changes in
liability between the Burghal Hidage and Domesday Book.
Where, then, was the territory of Wallingford
if not historic Berkshire? The so-called
‘contributory manors’ of Wallingford
provide a clue [slide 23 – contributory
manors]. We have already noted in passing that certain properties in the
south-east quadrant of Wallingford,
the borough proper as I have called it, were held by lords in the surrounding
countryside. In both 1066 and 1086 these tenements were probably of little moment
to their lords, being little more than a source of extra income. At an earlier
date, however, they were probably related to the obligation to fortify and
defend the borough. It is clearly significant, then, that over half of those in
Wallingford
belonged to manors in south-east Oxfordshire. As you can see [slide 24a – counties topography], this
area of the county looks as if it is an afterthought, a later addition to an
earlier, smaller Oxfordshire. This is an impression that is substantiated by
the assessment of the county. In the Burghal Hidage it was assigned 1300 or
1500 hides (the two main recensions of the Burghal Hidage disagree at this
point). By 1066, by contrast, it was assessed at 2434 hides.
There is no comparable evidence for Sashes. There
is, apparently, a reference to military service due from land in Hedsor to the
honour of Wallingford
at Sashes in a history of Wooburn. Unfortunately, neither Katharine
Keats-Rohan, the expert on the honour, nor I have been able to trace a source
for the assertion. It would be of great importance if it could be found. Otherwise,
there are no known links between the island and the surrounding countryside
comparable to the Wallingford
‘contributary manors’. It must be significant, however, that, like Wallingford,
Sashes is situated across the Thames from another seemingly anomalous area [slide 24b – counties topography]:
southern Buckinghamshire again looks as if it has been tacked onto the county
and again the Burghal Hidage assessment attached to Buckingham was less than
its Domesday assessment, 1,600 hides as against 2130 in 1086.
I would suggest that
the territories of both Wallingford
and Sashes extended across the Thames into
what is now Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire respectively. With the present
evidence it is not possible to reconcile the Domesday assessments hide for hide
with those of the Burghal Hidage. The three counties of Berkshire,
Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire had a combined assessment of 7060 hides in 1086
where there were 6,300 or 6,500 at the earlier period. The discrepancy may be
due to the transfer of hundreds from other counties, piecemeal re-assessment,
or simple plain old error. These are imponderables. But the figures may make
more sense in terms of hundreds.
The hundred was notionally a hundred hides,
but in reality was rarely assessed at precisely that amount. In some areas
there was considerable continuity of numbers. Worcester, for example, in a later addition
to the Burghal Hidage, was assessed at 1200 hides as it was in the early
eleventh-century, while there were twelve hundreds in 1086 assessed at 1189
hides. But, like many another feature of the social landscape, its area was not
immutable. Hundreds might commonly be divided, amalgamated, or otherwise
changed. Nevertheless, counting in government sources seems to have often remained
in notional hundreds. Thus, Northamptonshire was assessed at ’32 hundreds’ in a
pre-Conquest document known as the County
Hidage and there were
precisely 32 hundreds in 1086. The county, however was actually assessed at
1280 hides. It may be significant, then, that Berkshire,
Oxfordshire, and Buckingham in total encompassed 63 hundreds in 1086 where the
Burghal Hidage would suggest 63 or 65.
In these terms, the territory of Sashes
can, I think, be delineated with some confidence [slide 25a – BH Sashes base]. The assessment of 1000 hides suggests
10 hundreds. There are six in the southern portion of Buckingham, assessed at
748 hides and a further four in eastern Berkshire,
again defined by topography, assessed at 292 hides. That makes 1,040 hides in
all [slide 25b – Sashes territory].
Sashes would seem to have taken in the three Chiltern Hundreds of
Buckinghamshire plus a further three, Aylesbury, Risborough, and Stone, on the
scarp to the north.
The figures do not
work out quite so well for Wallingford
because of the uncertainty over the assessment of Oxford in the Burghal Hidage and
subsequently. Topographically, the area to the east of the River Thame would
fit the bill with all but two of the Wallingford
contributory manors in Oxfordshire situated there. The area encompassed 5½ or 6
hundreds at the time of Domesday assessed at 664 hides, while the 18 remaining
hundreds in Berkshire (that is, the 22
hundreds of Domesday less the 4 hundreds assigned to Sashes) were assessed at
2,203. This would approximate to the 24 hundreds predicted by the Burghal
Hidage, but the actual assessment is 2,867 hides.
However, It cannot be
ruled out that the Vale of White Horse, in part or whole, was attached to Oxford in the early tenth
century [slide 25c – Wallingford territory]. That would be
consistent with the Wallingford
and Sashes evidence and, indeed there were tenurial links across the Thames at this point. Abingdon Abbey held a large number
of tenements in the original borough before it was extendeda and these may have
belonged to its manor across the Thames in the
present Berkshire. It must be stressed,
though, that there is positive evidence for only one property. All we can say with
reasonable certainty is that the territory
of Wallingford probably
took in the Oxfordshire Chilterns as well as land to the south.
Well, that’s enough pyramidiocy. I will not
insist on the exact line of these boundaries, for I think that it is unlikely
that they were territories in exactly the same way as the shires of 1086. What
is striking about the Burghal Hidage is that it described a national system of defence [slide 26 – national system]. The list
of boroughs starts at Eorpeburnam, probably
on Romney Marsh in Kent,
and then proceeds westward along the coast to Devon
and then returns along the northern boundary of Wessex to Southwark. The boroughs
were clearly intended to operate as an integrated whole. Indeed, the sources
show that garrisons acted in a concerted fashion on more than one occasion. It
seems very likely, then, that Oxford,
Wallingford,
and Sashes worked together in the defence of the middle Thames
valley.
This brings us back to our starting point:
what does the Burghal Hidage tell us about the process of shiring? Clearly,
there was no simple extension of the Burghal Hidage system to Mercia and
beyond. Between the Burghal Hidage and the shires of Domesday Book there was
extensive remodelling of territories in the middle Thames
valley. Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and
Buckinghamshire were not alone in this. There is evidence that Gloucestershire,
Warwickshire, and Northamptonshire also underwent similar changes.
The chronology is unclear, but we are
probably looking at developments in the mid to late tenth century. What seems
to have prompted them was the different circumstances obtaining north of the Thames. In Wessex propaganda the defeat of the
Danes was portrayed as the liberation of England from the Danish yoke. The
myth has been pervasive. Even today it is usual to refer to the campaigns of
Alfred, his son Edward the Elder, and grandson Athelstan as the ‘reconquest of England’. The
reality was otherwise. Mercia
had been an independent kingdom right up to 919: the expansion of Wessex north of
the Thames was a conquest. The shrieval system
that was set up in Mercia
and beyond was at once an instrument of that conquest and a settlement. Like
the Burghal Hidage boroughs, the Mercian shire had military functions. The
fyrd, the county militia, was organized through its hundreds. But its
fundamental remit was the maintenance of the peace. At every level, from
village to borough, it enlisted the support of the free communities of the
shire to that end. Title to land, law-worthiness, and free status all depended
on cooperation: if a free man failed in his obligations he was in danger of
losing everything. The upshot was the isolation and neutralization of regional
aristocracies with separatist tendencies and Viking raider alike. By localizing
loyalties and forging links with the free men of the shire, the kings of Wessex enlisted
local communities to their cause.
So was born the principles of the shire in
what we might call today a neo-colonial regime. Our uniquely English system of
government was born in Mercia
in the wake of conquest. The shire was to prove a remarkable successful
strategy. After the final defeat of the Danish kingdom of York,
the system was introduced into the Danelaw in the later tenth century. In the
course of the Middle Ages it was to be imported into almost every corner of the
British Isles that successive English kings
aspired to rule [slide 27 – spread].
Only in Wessex did the principles of the
Burghal Hidage persist. The relationship between assessments and later shires
is complex as in the middle Thames valley. But
there was there was no radical reorganization of society around the freeman. Elements
of the Mercian shire were introduced into the area in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. Courts were reorganized and hundreds were reformed, but the
militarization of its society in the late ninth and early tenth centuries
continued to colour its history and institutions. Berkshire
above all, despite its dismemberment, preserved the society of Alfred’s Wessex. Just as
Wallingford was
a pre-eminently royal, so was the shire of which it was the chief town. Royal
estates predominate and many others were held by ministri; the earls were weak and great lords few. It looks as if
successive kings had taken steps to maintain their undivided authority in the
area. The reorganization of territory that saw the creation of Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire may have been intentionally designed to preserved the
concentration of royal authority there. In origin Berkshire was probably little
more than a royal appanage, a private jurisdiction. Its closest parallels are
thus areas like Rutland, Cornwall, and the Isle of Wight. It was to remain so for many centuries. As I
have said on more than one occasion, Royal Berkshire was a potent reality throughout
the Middle Ages.
So, I suppose that we
must conclude that the Burghal Hidage was not an assessment to nothing. In
radically organizing the kingdom for war, it shaped Wessex. In Mercia and
beyond, however, it proved something of a dead end. Peace required a different
ordering of society. The shire was the solution that emerged. And it is in that
institution rather than the Burghal Hidage that we find the roots of our modern
democracy. The casual vacancy in J. K. Rowling’s novel may have unleashed a storm
of local rivalries and the consequences may have been dire for all concerned.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to give away the ending. But it all happened within
a local compass and it was local people who were responsible for sorting out
the mess. Although we may not always like what happens, that is our heritage.
©David Roffe 2012