has already been said. We do not
accurately know what categories of wealth were registered in Domesday.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, barbaric in this as in most other matters,
would have it that the Survey was complete, and applied to all the
landed fortune of England. That, of course, is absurd. But we do have
a rough standard of comparison for rural manors, though it is a very
rough one. Though we cannot tell how much of the measurements and of
the numbers given are conventional and how much are real, though we do
not know whether the plough-lands referred to are real fields or
merely measures of capacity for production, though historians are
condemned to ceaseless guessing upon every term of the document, and
though the last orthodox guess is exploded every five or six
years--yet when we are told that one manor possessed so many ploughs
or paid upon so many hides, or had so many villein holdings while
another manor had but half or less in each category; and when we see
the dues, say three times as large in the first as in the second, then
we can say with certitude that the first was much more important than
the second; _how_ much more important we cannot say. We can, to repeat
an argument already advanced, affirm the inhabitants of any given
manor to be at the very least not less than five times the number of
holdings, and thus fix a _minimum_ everywhere. For instance, we can be
certain that William's rural England had not less than 2,000,000,
though we cannot say how much more they may not have been--3,000,000,
4,000,000, or 5,000,000. In agricultural life--that is, in the one
industry of the time--Domesday does afford a vague statement to the
rural conditions of England at the end of the eleventh century, and,
dark as it is, no other European nation possesses such a minute record
of its economic origins.

But with the towns the case is different. There, except for the
minimum of population, we are quite at sea. We may presume that the
houses numbered are only the houses paying tax, or at least we may
presume this in some cases, but already the local customs of each town
were so highly differentiated that it is quite impossible to say with
certitude what the figures may mean. It is usual to take the taxable
value of the place to the Crown and to establish a comparison on that
basis, but it is perhaps wiser, though almost as inconclusive, to
consider each case, and all the elements of it separately, and to
attempt, by