The three places where the term occurs in the Domesday of St. Paul's are Drayton and Sutton in Middlesex, and Tillingham in Essex. Hale would seem to have arrived at no clear idea of what the word meant. At p. xiv he wrote that 'a _solanda_ consisted of two hides, but probably in this case the hide was not of the ordinary dimension'. At p. lxxviii he inferred, from a reference to 'la Scoland' in a survey of Drayton, that '"ploughed land" would seem to be opposed to "Scoland"'. At p. cx he was led by the important passage--'De hydis hiis decem, due fuerunt in dominio, una in scolanda, et vii. assisæ'--to suggest that it 'appears to denote some difference in the tenure'. This last conjecture seems the most probable. If we take the case of Sutton and Chiswick, we read in the survey of 1222:
Juratores dicunt quod manerium istud defendit se versus regem pro tribus hidis preter solandam de Chesewich que per se habet duas hidas, et sunt geldabiles cum hidis de Sutton.
Hale (p. 119) believed that this _Solande de Chesewich_ was no other than the _Scotlande thesaurarii_ of 1181, namely the prebend of Chiswick. The above passage should further be compared with the survey of Caddington (1222):
Dicunt juratores quod manerium istud defendit se versus regem pro x. hidis ... preter duas prebendas quæ sunt in eadem parochia.
The formula is the same in both cases, and a _solanda_ was clearly land held on some special terms, and was not a measure or unit of assessment at all. Indeed Hale himself admitted that it could not be identified with one or with two hides.
Fortunately I have discovered an occurrence of the word _solanda_ which conclusively proves that it meant an estate, such as a prebend, and was not a unit of measurement. We have, in 1183, a 'grant by William de Belmes, canon of St. Paul's, to the chapter of that church, of the Church of St. Pancras, situate in his _solanda_ near London' (i.e. his prebend of St. Pancras), etc.[193] This solves the mystery. The three _solandæ_ at Tillingham were no other than the three prebends--Ealdland, Weldland, and Reculverland--which that parish actually contained.[194]
Hale, however, misled Mr Seebohm, who in his great work on the _English Village Community_ (p. 54), wrote of Tillingham: