The Making of Domesday Book

The circumstances
 
Domesday Book is both a land-register and a tax register. There is little doubt that registers used for tax purposes existed in late Anglo-Saxon England. They were still in use late in William I's time and survive today. (Printed in Libri Censualis Vocati Domesday Book, Additamenta ex Codic. Antiquiss., comprising Exon Domesday, Inquisitio Eliensis, Liber Wintoniensis, Boldon Book; vol. 3 of the Record Commission's edition of Domesday Book, ed. Ellis, London, Record Commission, 1783-1816). However, they were simply tax lists and by no means up to date. William and his advisers, were driven by the experience of the previous year, when an invasion threat from Denmark had forced the King to quarter a large army in the south-east. Difficulty with arranging quartering, caused by inadequate and inaccurate knowledge of his tenants' holdings, plus widespread evasion of the geld - it had been levied at the unprecedentedly high level of 6 shillings on the hide - forced a realisation that a new survey was needed. The survey was decided upon and probably planned at the King's winter feast at Gloucester. (See Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E for 1085 (p. 216). G Garmonsway, trans. and ed., Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, London, J M Dent and Sons, 1953. (there are several other more modern and superior editions of the ASC)).
 
It needs to be emphasized that the conception of the survey was a stroke of genius and its carrying through to completion an amazing achievement. Nowhere else in Europe has a similar survey for this period. Nowhere else did anyone think of a survey for a whole kingdom and carry it through. It may be put down to three distinct elements in the government of the Anglo-Norman kingdom. The first is that the king perceived the whole kingdom as his personal property. The idea of the 'public' and 'private' areas of political life was very blurred. Since he had conquered England the whole kingdom had been at his mercy and he had been able to dispose of it as he saw fit. Unlike in Normandy, he was able to enforce a fairly uniform property tenure which gave the dominant role to the King - as well as being his men, his major followers were also his tenants, rather than being totally independent as land owners - that is allodial landowners. He was therefore surveying a private estate as well as a Kingdom and no one had the right to refuse him information. Secondly, he had inherited a centralised kingdom and government which allowed him to tax the whole country on a uniform basis and where the king had a monopoly on the provision of justice, which gave him access to the tax assessing and collecting system, the Hundred Courts. This was not the case in Normandy. Thirdly, the king actually controlled the whole kingdom. In Francia this was unheard of, even in Normandy, which was the most powerful of the new principalities.
 
The idea of having a survey was not new. Some may have been undertaken by monasteries in England before the Conquest. We know that there were a many surveys, usually of the lands of individual monasteries, especially on the continent. The polyptyques of Frankish monasteries are good examples, but there are a considerable number known from all over Gaul, and they can be traced back to the late Roman tax registers and land registers which continued to function into the early 7th century in Gaul and Italy.
 
2. The making of the survey
 
Recent work has shown convincingly that the survey was carried through by clerks based in a series of regional centres, Exeter for the south-west. Each region (or Circuit) was treated as a self contained unit for survey and collation purposes and the complete survey was built from the local contributions which were drastically shortened so that the work was completed in two volumes, one for England less East Anglia and one for East Anglia alone. The survey covered the whole of lowland England except most of Cornwall, the far north-east and north-west of England; Cumberland and Westmoreland were missed out because they were not yet part of the Kingdom of England. Northumberland was missed out. (did they not get it done in time perhaps?) Some parts of Wales were included where they were under Norman control, but this amounted to very little. Major towns, were mostly surveyed, but there are several missing including London and Winchester, the administrative centre of the Kingdom.
 
The surveyors sent out a questionnaire which was based on a series of questions, but since their output was not centrally supervised they seem to have asked very slightly different questions in each Circuit. This means that one needs to take great care in comparing entries from different Circuits. The south-west Circuit covered Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon and Somerset. The questions were sent to each major land-owner and the returns were then collated in hundredal order. The returns were then read over to the assembled hundred courts, with their representatives from each vill forming a jury on oath. The corrected returns were then re-assembled in land owner order and the whole thing copied up in a volume. We have part of the volume for the south West surviving as the Exeter Domesday Book. This survey is much fuller than the final version, but unfortunately has only a part of the Circuit in it. The local volumes were sent to Exeter where the final compressed version was made. The whole survey took about eighteen months to complete.
 
The process involved much copying and recopying and we know that many errors crept in. These mostly involved roman numerals and they are very widespread and unavoidable for the Local Historian. The possibility of smallish errors is well worth remembering. In addition a very few places were missed out probably because the owner managed to conceal them. However, most settlements which don't appear in DB are probably concealed in the entry for another place.
 
3 How is it arranged.
 
The questions asked were answered and then copied up in a standard form.
The questions probably went something like this:
 
i. Who is the present holder of the land ? The King first wanted to know who was the person or institution who held from him ? The name of the estate is normally given in the answer. This is often the first time we know of the existence of a place.
 
ii. Is there a subtenant and if so who is it? Probably the majority of estates, although certainly not most land, had been sub-infeudated or sublet to tenants by 1086.
 
iii. Who owned or held the land in 1066, on the day King Edward was alive and dead ? (usually given as TRE.) This was the last day of legal Old English kingship and the base-line for enquiry. Normally the Anglo-Saxon owner was returned, but sometimes no owner is given or he is simply returned as a thegn, which suggests his status was very low.
 
iiii. What is the tax rating of the estate expressed in hides? This was an ancient and now contentious method of assessing the geld.
 
v. How many ploughlands are there? Possibly a new tax assessment method which was never implemented.
 
vi. How big is the demesne ? This was the lord's directly farmed land and was normally not charged geld.
 
vii. What stock has he on the demesne? This is normally an invitation to state the stock of slaves on the manor. It is likely that this refers to male heads of slave households. Female slaves are sometimes enumerated separately. They are referred to as ancillae, hand-maidens, and were probably unmarried women used as household and farmyard servants. (Medieval households had very few women servants, they were considered very dangerous). Note how many slaves there were in the south-west.
 
The survey now turned to the other manorial assets.
 
viii. How many villeins are there? Again the question means heads of households. Unlike so many medieval continental surveys this one is not interested in the peasant's family, probably because the King was concerned to estimate tax paying potential and it was the family or farm unit which paid. The peasant classes were divided by the size of their holdings. In this area it looks as if the villeins had about a virgate and the bordars about half that amount. Cottars had very little, probably no more than three or four acres. In the west of England nearly all the peasants enumerated were unfree. The DB specifically mentions the free status of non-noble men and there are none in this area, in contrast to East Anglia where they were very common. There were virtually no slaves in East Anglia.
 
viiii. How many smallholders are there? This is the Phillimore translation of the Latin bordarius.
 
x. How many cottagers are there (no I didn't invent the terminology)? The cotarius of DB.
 
xi. How many other sorts of people are there? You get returns for beekeepers, saltworkers, swineherds, ironworkers, priests and 'men', but the most common in our area is for coliberti who seem to have been freedmen, that is former slaves, probably even poorer than the cottars and existing by working for others for money wages. (In the Middle Ages and early modern times the poor are by definition those who work for wages!!).
 
xii. How much wood, meadow and pasture is there? These items were all part of the lord's land. They did not (in the south-west anyway) belong to the peasantry, they merely had customary rights. The size of these resources is often a very good guide to the prosperity or otherwise of an estate.
 
xiii. How much was it worth when you received it and how much now? This was a very important question, but very difficult to interpret. It is probably the case that this was an annual 'rentable' value and there is little doubt that it was based on the formula 1 hide = £1 per annum, although there are many divergences. It is interesting in that it helps destroy naive notions about primitive economies.
 
Many entries then move on to list sub-holdings. These are very interesting, since they often reveal the existence of small farm units, with tenants who are not peasants. In the south-west these are usually men who are soldiers and who receive the land in return for service. In a high proportion of cases the 1086 holder is perpetuating an arrangement which existed in 1066. There was no major social reorganisation at this level, rather considerable continuity.
 
4. This description is intended to clarify some of what Domesday Book is about. What you do with the information in it is really only limited by your ingenuity. I do not think even half of the information it contains has been tapped. I am also convinced that the most fruitful way to use the data is to look at regions or districts and to compare estates and regions, rather than to look at entries in isolation.
 
To read.
 
See F W Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, London, Collins, 1963 first pub. 1897. There are many modern editions. This is still the greatest book on the subject.
 
Bates, D., A Bibliography of Domesday Book, Woodbridge (The Boydell Press, 1986).
 
Sawyer, P, (ed.), Domesday Book: A Reassessment, London, (Edward Arnold, 1985)
 
Darby, H C., Domesday England, Cambridge, (Cambridge University Press, 1977)
Holt, J C., (ed.), Domesday Studies, Woodbridge, (The Boydell Press, 1987)
The text of the Domesday Book for Somerset is translated and edited in detail in C & F Thorn, (trans and eds.), Domesday Book, 8, Somerset, Chichester, (Phillimore, 1980).