Note 72 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES

These are only some of the passages of direct glossarial value.72 Indirectly, that is to say by analysis of the township assessments, we obtain the same result throughout the survey passim.73 Here, again, we are able to assert that two virgates must have been to the scribes as obviously equivalent to half a hide as ten shillings with us are equivalent to half a sovereign. For here, again, the point is that these scribes had no knowledge of the varying circumstances of each locality. They had nothing to guide them but the return itself, so that the rule, in Domesday, of 'four virgates to a hide' must have been of universal application.