The Terrae Occupatae of Cornwall and the Exon Domesday

Abstract

Professor Galbraith has recently dealt with the copy of a Southwestern Geld Roll which is preserved in the volume published by the Record Commission under the title of ‘Exon Domesday,’ on the last folio of which it is referred to as an Inquisitio Gheldi. He has argued — persuasively, though without removing all doubts — that the tax record was not only contemporaneous with, but in part dependent on and derived from, the information obtained by the royal commissioners of the southwestern Domesday circuit. Their main object was to provide the central government with the preliminary digest of the ‘original returns’ of the Domesday survey from which the so-called Exchequer Domesday, or volume I of Domesday Book, was finally compiled. According to Galbraith this digest, which was sent on to Winchester, was a fair copy of the rough draft that still survives in the volume referred to above, the Exon Domesday.