Introduction

Two blank folios in the Exchequer Domesday, before the counties of Hampshire (fol. 37) and Middlesex (fol. 126), are among the most intriguing and suggestive in the entire work. For they go to the heart of the vexed question of the treatment of boroughs in the great survey, tell us something of the difficulties facing the compiler, and are a silent reminder of why so many questions still remain after a century of profound scholarship on the subject. The borough was a central part of Maitland’s Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), and was carefully considered by Adolphus Ballard in his Domesday Boroughs (1904), by Mary Bateson in Borough Customs (1904–6), and in a series of articles by Ballard and Bateson in the English Historical Review (1900–6). By 1915 all three of those pioneers were dead, Bateson and Maitland in 1906 predeceasing Ballard, and it was left to James Tait to tie up the loose ends in a series of papers (1925–31) and then, spurred on by the American Carl Stephenson (Borough and Town, 1933), with the opening chapters of his English Medieval Borough (1936).

In the second half of the twentieth century it was perhaps thought that Tait had said all that there was to be said, while those who might have done so said little, not least Vivian Galbraith, whose chapter on the boroughs in Domesday Book: Its Place in Administrative History (1974) curiously failed to address the consequences of his own ideas advanced in The Making of Domesday Book (1961). And despite the ground-breaking contribution of Domesday Re-bound (1954), the account in H. C. Darby’s Domesday England (1977) was unaware of its consequences (e.g. in discussing blank folios). Darby, like other more recent commentators, Susan Reynolds and Geoffrey Martin, have tended to retire baffled from the intractable and all too miscellaneous nature of the Domesday evidence for the boroughs, complaining of its inadequacy and inconsistency, while of course adding comments and insights of interest. The study of the early history of towns (and not just those named in Domesday) has in the mean time moved on to look at many aspects of archaeology and topography that were given little consideration by earlier studies (with the interesting exception of Stephenson, who did make use of maps).