e quantity from 200 to 600 acres, according to the locality, but
generally it was accounted so much as would serve to maintain a
family--together with one acre of meadow, and a carucate (which was a
measure of about 100 acres of "carved" land) employing three ploughs.
The annual value of Willenhall is set down at 20s. The population
consisted of eight families, or, as the return puts it, five bordars and
three villeins.

A bordar, or boor, was a squatter living in a hut or cottage on the
borders of a manor, having attached a little patch of land, the rent of
which was paid to the lord of the manor in the shape of poultry, eggs,
and small produce. A villein, or serf, was to all intents and purposes a
slave, at the absolute disposal of the lord, except that he could not be
detached from the soil on which he was born. While the bordar, or
cottager, was resident in the manor more or less on sufferance, the
villein was there of right, and was in that sense the superior of the
bordar. The villein certainly might not go away from Willenhall, nor get
married, nor buy and sell oxen, nor grind corn, without the express
permission of the lord of the manor; yet he was not so badly off as all
this would make it appear to our modern ideas. People seldom travelled
in those days, money was little used, life was exceedingly primitive, and
wants were very few and very simple.

Staffordshire at that time was in a chronic state of poverty, an
insurrection in the county having been suppressed in 1069 with the
Conqueror's customary severity, thousands of the wretched hinds having
been slaughtered, the county desolated and the Midlands depopulated.

Bilston was but a cluster of mud huts inhabited by swineherds; and it is
probable Willenhall was a similar little centre of boor life in the next
woodland clearing a little further along the purling brooklet, and near
its junction with Beorgitha's Stream, as the Tame was then called. The
entire population of the county was purely agrarian, the villeins and
boors altogether numbering about 2,800; or on an average of one labourer
to each 167 acres of land registered in Domesday Book. The subsequent
history of the two parts of Willenhall will have to be traced separately.

The two hides set down as ecclesiastical property have remained in the
possession of the church throughout. Erdeswick, writing his history of
this county in 1593, states that within the jurisdiction of the Dean and
Chapt