Vacarius: A Correction.

Abstract

I think, that there was none at Dover and Gnildford, where not a word is said of the king's houses being decayed, though it is mentioned that their number had been reduced in other ways. On the other hand, though the general valuations give no sign that Dorsetshire was visited by any army, half the houses in Dorchester and Wareham, and nearly as many in Shaftesbory, were ' entirely destroyed since the time of Sheriff Hugh.' It is not clear that the 478 houses in Oxford were actually burnt out or abandoned; they were only ' so waste and destroyed that they cannot pay geld,' and destruetae may mean no more than destitutes. Of Robert d'Oilgi's houses only 8 were vastae, 26 others were hospitatae, though from poverty they could not pay geld, and (pace Mr. Parker) seem presumably included in the 478, for the other 248 houses in the town did pay. 4 In any case, as the county recovered, the town should have recovered its trade, its population, and its prosperity. Must we not attribute the continued decay of Oxford in 1086 to loss of its political importance, to the pressure of increased taxation, or to the extortions of sheriffs, as to which the Saxon chronicler in summing up the reign makes special complaint, that the Iring recked not how sinfully they gathered money or how much wrong they did ? The last cause appears to have naturally suggested itself to the Domesday commissioners, for we are expressly told that the decay of 74 houses at Lincoln was due 'not to the oppression of sheriffs and officers, but to misfortune, poverty, and fire.' At Norwich the burgesses are said to be omnino vastati by Earl Roger and fire and the king's geld and Waleran; while the description of the Dorsetshire boroughs seems to point to Sheriff Hugh. The country manors were protected by powerful owners, but on the towns king and sheriff pressed heavily, and it seems better, in the south, to attribute the poverty of some of them in 1086 to this cause and to fires rather than to the ravages of twenty years before. F. BASING.