In the meantime the Domesday Survey is the next evidence which lies before us, and judging from the tenacity of custom, and the extreme slowness of economic changes in the later period, it may be approached with the almost certain expectation that no great alteration can well have taken place in the English open-field and manorial system in the forty [p081] years between its date and that of the _Liber Niger_ of Peterborough Abbey. If this expectation should be realised, the Domesday Survey, approached as it has been by the ladder of the later evidence leading step by step up to it, ought easily to yield up its secrets. «and must give the key to it.» If such should prove to be the case, though losing some of its mystery and novelty, the Domesday Survey will gain immensely in general interest and importance by becoming intelligible. The picture it gives of the condition of rural England will become vivid and clear in its outlines, and trustworthy to a unique degree in its details. For extending as it does, roughly speaking, to the whole of England south of the Tees and east of the Severn, and spanning as it does by its double record the interval between its date and the time of Edward the Confessor, it will prove more than ever an invaluable vantage-ground from which to work back economic inquiries into the periods before the Norman conquest of England. It may be trusted to do for the earlier Saxon records what a previous understanding of later records will have done for it. FOOTNOTES: [11] _Prologus_, lines 17 to 21. [12] _Prologus_, 216 to end. [13] _Passus_, v. 400 to 428. [14] _Passus_, vi. 4 to 6. [15] _Passus_, vi. 107–9. [16] I am indebted to Mr. Bradshaw for having called my attention to this MS., which is now in the Cambridge University Library. [17] MS. Dd. 7. 22. I am much indebted to Mr. Bradshaw for the loan of this MS. from the Library. [18] The MS. is headed 'Extracta Rotulorum de Halimotis tentis apud Manerium de Wynselowe tempore Edwardi tercii a Con uestu' and it embraced _Wynselowe_, _Horelwode_, _Greneburgh_, _Shipton_, _Nova Villa de Wynselowe_, _Onyng_, and _Muston_. [19] See entry under 44 Ed. III. [20] Sub anno 35 Ed. III. [21] The number of tenants with smaller holdings was considerably larger than the number of holders of virgates and half-virgates, but their holdings were so small that in the aggregate they held a much smaller acreage than the other class. [22] Out of 43 jurymen who had served in 1346, 1347, and 1348, 27 died of the Black Death in 1348–9. Out of these 27 who died, and whose holdings therefore can be traced, 16 held virgates, 8 held half-virgates, and of the other 3 one held 1 messuage and 2 cottages, another a messuage and 15 acres in villenage (equivalent to a half-virgate), and the third 8 acres arable and 2½ of meadow. [23] Cases of this are numerous after the Black Death. See in 27 Ed. III. one case, in 28 Edward III. 11 cases, in 30 Ed. III. five cases.