%ilts5l)ir2 §Retutb éotietp (formerly the Records Branch of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society) VOLUME XLV FOR THE YEAR 1989 THIS VOLUME IS PUBLISHED WITH THE HELP OF A GRANT FROM THE TWENTY-SEVEN FOUNDATION Impression of500 copies THE WILTSHIRE TAX LIST OF 1332 EDITED BY D. A. CROWLEY TROWB RIDGE 1989 © Wiltshire Record Society ISBN O 901333 22 O Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd. CONTENTS Preface page ix INTRODUCTION xi THE WILTSHIRE TAX LIST OF 1332 1 GENERAL INDEX 131 INDEX OF PLACES 168 List ofMembers 179 List ofPublications 187 PREFACE The Society is grateful to the Twenty—Seven Foundation for financial assistance towards the publication of this volume, and to the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office for permission to reproduce the contents ofCrown copyright material in the Public Record OHICC. Dr. Crowley also wishes to thank the Society’s Honorary Editors during the years of the volume’s preparation, and particularly its President, Mr. C. R. Elrington, for his encouragement and advice. JANE FREEMAN INTRODUCTION On 10 September 1332 parliament granted Edward III a fifteenth and a tenth of the movable goods of the laity of the realm.‘ Those with movable goods in cities and boroughs and on ancient demesne ofthe Crown were to contribute the tenth, others the fifteenth. Parliament had granted fractions of such goods to the king from time to time since 1283 and by 1332 such grants had become a familiar form of taxation. The grants, which were universally understood to be grants of the money value of the fractions, were not always of the same fractions and did not always distinguish the classes of taxpayers. To raise the money in 1332 the king appointed for each county principal assessors and collectors who appointed under-assessors: the under-assessors made the assess- ments, received the money, and transferred it to the principal assessors and collectors who paid it to the king through his exchequer.2 Two assessors and collectors were appointed for each county, including Wiltshire, on 16 Sep- tember 1332.3 There were 134 under-assessors for Wiltshire.4 Lists of the movables ofeach taxpayer were to be made by the under-assessors and summar- ized in a county list.’ No under-assessor’s list of 1332 survives for Wiltshire, where in many cases no more than the total value of each taxpayer's movables, or perhaps no more than his liability for tax, may have been listed.6 The Wiltshire county list, compiled in the winter of 1332-3 and handed in at the Exchequer on 23 February 1333,? is the Wiltshire tax list of 1332 edited below. The document. The tax list consists of 31 parchment rotulets, each measuring c. 70 cm. by c. 23 cm., sewn together at the head. It appears complete; neat and, for the most part, legible writing is in double columns on both sides of rotulets 1-30 and on the face of rotulet 31; and the small holes through rotulets 7-18 cause little loss. Between the short preamble and the short post- scripts the administrative divisions of Wiltshire are named in rubrics, under each of which the names of those assessed for taxation, the amount at which each was assessed, and the total assessment for the division are given. Most of the document is the work of two scribes, presumably working simul- taneously. Under modern conditions the document might take one person between a week and a fortnight to transcribe; in the winter of 1332-3 it may 1. Rotuli Parliamentorum, ii. 66. 2. The background of the 1332 tax, and the way it was collected. are described by]. F. Willard in Surrey Taxation Returns (Surr. Rec. Soc. xviii), pp. i—xix. Calendar 0_fPatent Rolls, 1330-4, 357. Below. Surrey Taxation Returns (Surr. Rec. Soc. xviii), pp. xii-xiii. Below. T‘-"?‘“‘:'*"‘:*‘ Below, pp. 127, 130; the list is in P.R.O., E 179/196/8. xii INTRODUCTION have taken the two scribes about the same time. Rotulets 1-14 are in one hand and 1-13 are numbered, apparently contemporarily, by small Roman numerals; and the faces of rotulets 15 and 16 are in the same hand. Rotulets 14-15 are not numbered, and the entries on the dorse of 15 for Bishop's Row- borough hundred are in a second hand. Rotulets 16-23 are distinguished, also apparently contemporarily, by lower case letters a-h, from 18 bearing addition- ally the inscription ‘per W’; rotulet 24 is not numbered, but 25-30 are marked k-p: from the dorse of rotulet 16 the entries are apparently in a third hand. Rotulet 31 is not numbered and on it the entries for Cannings hundred may be in a fourth hand. It is very unlikely that the work ofthe two main scribes corresponded with a division of the county between the principal assessors and collectors, and likely that the draft returns from the under-assessors were divided randomly, but roughly equally, between the scribes. The position of the entries for the adjoining and related hundreds of Bishop’s Rowborough and Cannings,' each at the end of one scribe’s portion, and in a third and possibly fourth hand, suggests that the returns from those hundreds were not the responsibility of the Wiltshire assessors and collectors or, more likely, that they were late. The divisions of Wiltshire. The 1332 tax list apparently covers all Wiltshire as it then was, including what are now parts of Berkshire, Gloucestershire, and Hampshire? The tenth was levied on Wiltshire’s only city, Salisbury, 11 boroughs, and four areas of ancient demesne. The fifteenth was levied on two liberties and on the subdivisions ofa liberty and 39 hundreds. Such were the administrative divisions of the county, distinct from the topographical division into towns, villages, and hamlets, and from the ecclesiastical division into parishes and chapelries.3 The topographical, ecclesiastical, and administrative maps of Wiltshire in 1332 obviously had many lines in common, but the three divisions had different origins and histories and the three maps had many differ- ent pieces in thejigsaws which made them up. Salisbury comprised four wards in 1332, but none of the boroughs was subdivided. The boroughs were Wilton, Downton, Chippenham, Devizes, Malmesbury, Ludgershall, Calne, Cricklade, Bedwyn, Marlborough, and Old Salisbury. They were apparently the parts of Wiltshire with or formerly with systems of self-government based on burghal tenure which were outside hun- dredal jurisdictionfl They had all been summoned to the model parliament of 1295, presumably as such. Bradford, summoned in 1295 but not afterwards,” was not ranked as a borough in 1332. In some cases the extent of the borough is not clear: the taxpayers of Marlborough, Devizes, and Down- ton,° for example, seem likely to have been inhabitants of a small area, more . V.C.H. Wilts. vii. 175-8. Cf. ibid. iv. 326-30. Below. Cf. Crown Pleas ofthe Wilts. Eyre, 1249 (W.R.S. xvi), pp. 124-5. V.C.H. Wilts. v. 72. o\u|-|=<.»t».>- Ibid. x. 225; Xi. 20, 23; xii. 199-200. INTRODUCTION xiii or less built up, but other boroughs, such as Calne and Chippenham, may have included land outside the built-up areas. Rowde, Melksham, Broom, in Swindon, and the barton of Marlborough were assessed as ancient demesne of the Crown. The first and last were the estates attached to the royal castles of, respectively, Devizes and Marlborough,‘ and Melksham was a royal manor until the later 13th century when it was proved to be ancient demesne.2 Broom presumably made good a claim to be ancient demesne on the grounds that Henry I gave it to the priory of Marcigny,3 and it may have been considered such in 1305.4 The two liberties on which the fifteenth was levied were Bromham, a greatly privileged liberty of Battle abbey in Sussex, and Longbridge Deveri_ll, a liberty of the bishop of Salisbury. Each was like a small private hundred.’ Everleigh liberty, subdivided into four, was a private hundred ofHenry, earl ofLancaster.6 Everleigh and the 39 other hundreds of Wiltshire in 1332 had a total of 543 subdivisions. The total includes Broom, Melksham, and all the subdivisions in rubrics in which more than one subdivision is named. Some of the subdiv- isions were territorial tithings, areas of the county represented at a sheriff's tourn or privately held view of frankpledge by a tithingman. Such tithings may have been evolving in Wiltshire in the mid 13th century? and were generally recognized as divisions of hundreds for the adrninistration ofjustice in the later Middle Ages.B Some were still used as divisions of hundreds in the 18th century and early 19th for land-tax assessmentsg and census returns“) In many cases the pieces of the administrative, topographical, and ecclesiastical jigsaws were identical, and in many cases in 1332 the lands of the tithing, a village, and the parish were apparently identical: three of many examples are Stanton Fitzwarren, Stanton St. Bernard, and Stanton St. Quintin. Other subdivisions of the hundred named in the tax list were apparently small villages. Ramsbury, East Knoyle, and Bishopstone near Salisbury illustrate the two kinds of subdivision. Ramsbury parish embraced Baydon and Axford vil- lages and several other smaller settlements including Whittonditch, Membury, Knighton, Hilldrop, and Littlecote; Baydon was a chapelry. For the tax of 1332 the whole parish may be assumed to have been assessed under the rubrics Ramsbury, Ashridge, Eastridge, and Baydon, all four ofwhich names are later known to have been those of tithings.“ East Knoyle parish embraced Hindon borough and East Knoyle, Milton, and Upton villages: East Knoyle and Milton i .