Borough

Latin, burgus.

In many counties, boroughs were treated separately from rural manors. They were usually described at the beginning of the county, in a section confined to urban holdings. Such boroughs were accorded more detailed treatment than those which occurred among the rural manors, making the borough sections interesting in their own right.

H.C. Darby, Domesday England (1977), provides a lucid introduction to the Domesday material on boroughs and the problems it poses; and Susan Reynolds, 'The Domesday town', in Domesday studies, edited by J.C. Holt (1987), pages 295-310, and G.H. Martin, 'The Domesday borough', in Domesday Book: a re-assessment, edited by Peter H. Sawyer (1985), pages 143-63, are useful recent surveys.

See also boroughs, codes for boroughs.