erent sort. We saw in the
case of Old Windsor that a community of perhaps 1000, probably of
more, but at any rate something more like a large village than a town
(and one moreover not rated as a town), paid in dues the equivalent of
thirty loads of wheat. Wallingford paid the equivalent of only twenty
or twenty-two. But on the other hand the total Farm of the Borough,
the globular price at which the taxes could be reckoned upon to yield
a profit, was equivalent to no less than 400 such loads.

Judged by the number of hagae we should have a Wallingford about five
times the size of Old Windsor. Judged by the taxable capacity we
should have an Old Wallingford of more than ten times the size of Old
Windsor.

Here again a further element of complexity enters. It was quite out of
the spirit of the Middle Ages to estimate dues, whether to a feudal
superior or to the National Government, or even minor payments made to
a true proprietorial owner at the full capacity of the economic unit
concerned. All such payment was customary. Even where, in the later
Middle Ages, a man indubitably owned (in our modern sense of the word
"owned") a piece of freehold land, and let it (in our modern sense of
the word "let"), it would not have occurred to him or his tenant that
the very highest price obtainable for the productive capacity of the
land should be paid. The philosophy permeating the whole of society
compelled the owner and the tenant, even in this extreme case, to a
customary arrangement; for it was an arrangement intended to be
permanent, to allow for wide fluctuations of value, and therefore to
be necessarily a minimum. If this was the case in the later Middle
Ages where undoubted proprietary right was concerned, still more was
it the case in the early Middle Ages with the customary feudal dues;
these varied infinitely from place to place, rising in scale from
those of privileged communities wholly exempt to those of places such
as we believe Old Windsor to have been, which paid (and these were the
exceptions), not indeed every penny that they could pay (as they would
now have to pay a modern landlord), but half, or perhaps more than
half, such a rent.

Where Wallingford stood in this scale it is quite impossible to say,
and we can only conclude with the very general statement that the
Wallingford of the Conquest consisted of certainly more than 5000
souls, more probably of 10,000, and quite possibly of more than
10,000.

Havi