The Domesday Book

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Introduction

The Domesday Book was a detailed survey and valuation of landed property in England at the end of the 11th century. The survey was ordered by William the Conqueror at Christmas 1085 and undertaken in 1086. It was referred to as the Domesday Book as its decisions were unalterable, as in the Last Judgement.

There is an In Our Time podcast on the Domesday Book.

What it recorded

It recorded who held the land and how it was used, and also includes information on how this had changed since the Norman Conquest in 1066.

It was not a census of the population, and the individuals named in it are almost exclusively land-holders.

Sworn juries were appointed to gather the information required.

The Domesday survey was carried out by commissioners holding sworn inquests in local courts, where they asked fixed questions of local men. For each property, each question was asked of three different times, to cover changes over time. The commissioners asked how land had been held:

1. As it had been on the last day of the reign of Edward the Confessor (5 January 1066) – this is abbreviated in Domesday as TRE;

2. As it had been when it was granted by King William;

3. As it was in 1086 (when the survey was taken).

The Domesday Book is arranged by county, and within each county, by landholder. Each new landholder is given a number, written in red in roman numerals at the start of their entry. There is a table of contents at the beginning of each county, which lists the landholders with their numbers, starting with the king, but no index. However, later editors have produced excellent indexes to the online and printed editions which make finding particular entries straightforward.

Domesday records the number of hides of land in each English county, and assesses the size and value of acreage and livestock possessed by each individual landowner. The survey is arranged by tenurial arrangements rather than territory, and lists more than 13,000 vills, which in Domesday on the smallest unit of local administration. A vill was an area of land rather than a settlement, and could sometimes contain several small hamlets; it should not be confused with the word village, which derives from it. It is still not entirely clear whether Doomsday was compiled for the purposes to do with the collection of taxes, or whether it was a tenurial survey to record land holdings and the names of the people who owned them. The five bound volumes of the Great and Little Domesday, currently housed at London's Public Record Office, are a vast resource which has proved very well suited to computer analysis, which is starting to reveal much new information about the economic history of Norman times.

The Domesday book was never fully completed. It was left in two volumes: Great Domesday, which contains most of the information gathered; and Little Domesday, containing the records for. Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, which were the last to be compiled.

Domesday shows that just twenty years after the Conquest, a mere 8% of land in England was owned by people with English names. The rest belonged to Normans, the Crown, or the Church, and of these the Crown had the largest single estate, amounting to about 17% of the available land.

(Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 229).

The questions

The questions included:

· What is the manor called?

· Who held it in the time of King Edward the Confessor?

· Who holds it now?

· How many hides (a land measurement)?

· How much has been added or taken away from the manor?

· How much has or had each freeman and each sokeman?

· How many plough teams?

· How many freemen, sokemen, villeins, cottars and slaves?

· How much wood, meadow and pasture?

· How many mills and fisheries?

· How much was the whole worth in 1066, and how much now (1086)?

Language

Domesday is written in Latin, although translations are available today.

Overall findings

The survey listed land use, minerals and forms of manufacture.

It found:

· 109,000 productive individuals from earls to villeins (villagers), almost all men;

· 28,000 slaves;

· Livestock including plough teams and bees;

· 6,000 mills.

By 1086:

· The King held 20% of the useful land;

· The Church held 25%

· About a dozen large magnates held 25%

· 2,000 foreign knights and 8,000 new settlers from the rank and file held about 30%

So about three quarters of the land was held by some 250 people. Most of the land was held by non-indigenous folk. Of a population at that time of about 2M, only 4 indigenous aristocrats were still significant landowners.

Sources

See Open Domesday.