nquest, and for
centuries later, would rather have lived as part of a community than
as an individual householder, and conversely, those indices of
importance and social position which we now estimate in furniture and
other forms of ostentation were then to be found in the number of
dependants surrounding the head of the house. A merchant, for example,
if he flourished, was the head of a very numerous community; every
parish church in a town represented a society of priests and of their
servants, and of course a garrison (such as Wallingford pre-eminently
possessed) meant a very large community indeed. We are usually safe,
at any rate in the towns, if we multiply the known number of tenements
by ten in order to arrive at the number of souls inhabiting the
borough. To give the Wallingford of the Conquest a minimum of 5000, if
we were certain that 500 (or, to speak exactly, 491) was the number of
single units of taxation within the borough, would be to set that
minimum quite low enough.

The second difficulty is that of establishing the meaning of the word
"haga." In some cases it may represent one single large establishment.
But on the other hand we can point to six which between them covered a
whole acre, and no one with the least acquaintance of mediaeval
municipal topography, no one, for instance, who knows the history of
twelfth-century Paris, would allow one-sixth of an acre to a single
average house within the walls of a town. A close would have one or
more wells, it is true; some closes certainly would have gardens, but
the labour of fortification, and the privilege of market, were each of
them causes which forbade any great extension of open spaces, save in
the case of privileged or wealthy communities or individuals.

From what we know of closes elsewhere, it is more probable that these
at Wallingford were the "cells" as it were of the borough organism. A
man would be granted in the first growth of the town a unit of land
with definitely established boundaries, which he would probably
enclose (the word "haga" refers to such an enclosure), and though at
first there might be only one house upon it, it would be to his
interest to multiply the tenements within this unit, which unit
rendered a regular, customary and unchanging due to its various
superiors, whatever the number of inhabitants it grew to contain.

If we turn to a comparison based upon taxation we have equal
difficulties, though difficulties of a diff