HISTORICAL STUDIES ON
THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH
CENTURIES
BY
J. H. ROUND
FIRST PUBLISHED 1895
Second impression 1909
Third impression 1909
The present work is the outcome of a wish expressed to me frommore than one quarter that I would reprint in a collected form, forthe convenience of historical students, some more results of myresearches in the history of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Butto these I have added, especially on Domesday, so much which hasnot yet seen the light, that the greater portion of the work is new,while the rest has been in part re-written. The object I have setbefore myself throughout is either to add to or correct our existingknowledge of facts. And for this I have gone in the main to records,whether in manuscript or in print. It is my hope that the papers inthis volume may further illustrate the value of such evidence assupplementing and checking the chroniclers for what is still, inmany respects, an obscure period of our history.
As a foreign scholar has felicitously observed:
Je lis avec plaisir le chroniqueur qui nous raconte les événements de sonépoque. Les détails anecdotiques, les traits piquants dont son œuvre estparsémée font mes délices. Mais comment saurai-je s'il dit la vérité si lespages qu'il me présente ne sont pas un roman de pure imagination? Dans leschartes, au contraire, tout est authentique, certain, précis, indubitable. Leurtémoignage est contradictoirement établi, sous le contrôle de la partie adverse,avec l'approbation et la reconaissance de l'autorité souveraine, enprésence d'une imposante assemblée de notables qui apposent leur signature.C'est la plus pure de toutes les sources où il soit possible de puiser unrenseignement historique.1
An instance in point will be found in the paper on 'Richard theFirst's change of seal'.
A collective title for a series of studies covering the period 1050-1200,is not by any means easy to find. But dealing as they do solargely with the origins of 'Feudal England', I have ventured togive them this title, which may serve, I hope, to emphasize my pointthat the feudal element introduced at the Conquest had a greaterinfluence on our national institutions than recent historians admit.2Even Domesday Book has its place in the study of feudalism, rearranging,as it does, the Hundred and the Vill under Fiefs and'Manors'.
To those in search of new light on our early mediaeval history,I commend the first portion of this work, as setting forth, for theircareful consideration, views as evolutionary on the Domesday hideand the whole system of land assessment as on the actual introduction[pg 10]of the feudal system into England. Although I have here broughtinto conjunction my discovery that the assessment of knight-servicewas based on a five-knights unit, irrespective of area or value,and my theory that the original assessment of land was based on afive-hides unit, not calculated on area or value, yet the two, oneneed hardly add, are, of course, unconnected. The one was anAnglo-Saxon system, and, as I maintain, of early date; the otherwas of Norma