The Norman aggregation of estates and settlement in eleventh-century Nottinghamshire

Abstract

The distribution of landed property in the Danelaw at the close of the Old English period, so far as our evidence goes, had by the process of time been thrown out of all relation to the ancient and natural agrarian divisions of the country, the vills. And it is just here that the work of the new Norman lords, as revealed by Domesday, is on the whole most obvious and beneficial. In restoring, if not in creating, a general correspondence between the unit of agrarian life and the unit of seigneurial organization, they had begun, twenty years after the conquest, a process which was to arrange the manorial geography of England on the lines most conducive to agricultural efficiency; a process which in an unconquered England could never have been attempted (Stenton 1910, pp. 62–3).