Feudal England: Historical Studies on the Eleventh and Twelfth CenturiesRound, John Horace
History
Feudal England: Historical Studies on the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Round, John Horace
Domesday book; Feudalism -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- History -- Norman period, 1066-1154; Normans -- Great Britain
Let us start from the facts. In the Domesday of Kent we find the
form _solin_, or its Latin equivalent _solinum_, used for the unit of
assessment, like the hide and the carucate in other counties. In the
Kent monastic surveys it is found as _sullung_ or _suolinga_. But when
we turn to the Domesday of St. Paul's, we find--first, that instead of
being universal, as in Kent, it occurs only in three cases; secondly,
that the form is _solande_, _solanda_, _scholanda_, _scolanda_, or
even (we shall see) _Scotlande_; thirdly, that it is not employed as a
unit of assessment at all.
The three places where the term occurs in the Domesday of St. Paul's
are Drayton and Sutton in Middlesex, and Tillingham in Essex. Hale
would seem to have arrived at no clear idea of what the word meant. At
p. xiv he wrote that 'a _solanda_ consisted of two hides, but probably
in this case the hide was not of the ordinary dimension'. At p.
lxxviii he inferred, from a reference to 'la Scoland' in a survey of
Drayton, that '"ploughed land" would seem to be opposed to "Scoland"'.
At p. cx he was led by the important passage--'De hydis hiis decem,
due fuerunt in dominio, una in scolanda, et vii. assisæ'--to suggest
that it 'appears to denote some difference in the tenure'. This last
conjecture seems the most probable. If we take the case of Sutton and
Chiswick, we read in the survey of 1222:
Juratores dicunt quod manerium istud defendit se versus regem
pro tribus hidis preter solandam de Chesewich que per se habet
duas hidas, et sunt geldabiles cum hidis de Sutton.
Hale (p. 119) believed that this _Solande de Chesewich_ was no other
than the _Scotlande thesaurarii_ of 1181, namely the prebend of
Chiswick. The above passage should further be compared with the survey
of Caddington (1222):
Dicunt juratores quod manerium istud defendit se versus regem
pro x. hidis ... preter duas prebendas quæ sunt in eadem
parochia.
The formula is the same in both cases, and a _solanda_ was clearly
land held on some special terms, and was not a measure or unit of
assessment at all. Indeed Hale himself admitted that it could not be
identified with one or with two hides.
Fortunately I have discovered an occurrence of the word _solanda_
which conclusively proves that it meant an estate, such as a prebend,
and was not a unit of measurement. We have, in 1183, a 'grant by
William de Belmes, canon of St. Paul's, to the chapter of that church,
of the Church of St. Pancras, situate in his _solanda_ near London'
(i.e. his prebend of St. Pancras), etc.[193] This solves the mystery.
The three _solandæ_ at Tillingham were no other than the three
prebends--Ealdland, Weldland, and Reculverland--which that parish
actually contained.[194]
Hale, however, misled Mr Seebohm, who in his great work on the
_English Village Community_ (p. 54), wrote of Tillingham:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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