Domesday Research Articles

Searching for the territorial origins of England

When the Normans arrived in England in AD 1066 they found a kingdom divided into a distinctive and complicated administrative geography. In compiling Domesday Book, the great survey of holdings and liabilities over much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086, the assessors grouped information firstly into ‘shires’—districts that are in many cases the precursors of modern counties—and then into smaller divisions such as hundreds, wapentakes and vills (estates), with additional groupings such as multiple hundreds and regional ealdormanries also discernible in the source. These administrative entities clearly had a territorial composition. Using the boundaries of estates, parishes and hundreds mapped at later dates, numerous scholars have sought to reconstruct the administrative geography described in Domesday Book. The resulting maps have, in turn, been interpreted as the product of several centuries of developing territoriality and of continual social and political change. The shires of Norfolk and Suffolk (the ‘north’ and ‘south folk’), for example, appear to fossilise the extents of the kingdom of the East Anglians as it existed 300 or 400 years before Domesday survey; in other cases, clusters of hundreds have been argued to represent post-Roman tribal groupings.

Doing Things beside Domesday Book

Previous articleNext article No AccessDoing Things beside Domesday BookCarol SymesCarol Symes Search for more articles by this author Carol Symes is Associate Professor of History at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 93, Number 4October 2018 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/699010 Views: 2661Total views on this site Copyright 2018 by the Medieval Academy of America.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Assessing the condition of the Domesday Books from the visual to the molecular

This article presents a collaborative study to determine the condition within volumes of the Great and Little Domesday Book, held in The National Archives, UK. Advances in technology in both biochemical and biophysical analysis have allowed for the first time undetectable sub milligram sampling of the five-volume Great and Little Domesday Books at nine sites in total. Visual analysis was followed by microscopic fibre assessment, hydrothermal stability (shrinkage activity), amino acid analysis and microfocus X-ray diffraction. Based on the visual examination of 887 leaves in all five volumes of the Domesday Book, 587 leaves or 66% of the leaves exhibit a degree of surface gelatinisation due in part to humidification and pressing practices carried out as part of the many re-binding campaigns carried out over the centuries. Microfibre assessment indicated the percentage of damaged fibres detected varies from 56 to 100% in the samples taken, a correlation between the sum of oxidative sensitive amino acids and the observed damage of fibres was obtained. More than 1000 X-ray diffraction patterns collected showed a significant variation in amount of visible fibrillar collagen within each sample scan. Micro analysis performed here on corium collagen, means the results represent an average of the cross section of the structure of which the surface constitutes the smallest part. As the major part of damage is on the surface of the parchment leaves, the condition is likely to be worse than that reflected by the analytical results shown here. This evidence therefore prompted a re-think of the preservation protocols required to extend the usable life of the Domesday Book volumes. To this end, the preservation environment for the volumes is maintained at 40–45% relative humidity (RH) significantly lower than the recommended parameter of 55% RH.

Medieval Lowestoft: The Origins and Growth of a Suffolk Coastal Community, by David Butcher

David Butcher’s book on medieval Lowestoft and its environs charts the development of a medieval town which both changed its location and aspects of its economy during the Middle Ages. The work combines minute attention to detail with some national and European contextualisation and thus represents a good example of a local history. In 2008, the author published a study of the Lowestoft area in the early modern period, also with Boydell. His present book traces the town’s history from its Anglo-Saxon origins until it became unmistakably urban by the first half of the sixteenth century. The first three chapters discuss the town’s medieval development chronologically. The first chapter deals with the pre-Conquest period, the second moves from Domesday Book to the early fourteenth century and the third examines the period in which the town was moved to a coastal location, and its later developments. The three chapters that follow are thematic. Two examine the town’s principal commercial activities of fishing and maritime trade and the third discusses the parish church and its guilds in the medieval period. Finally, Butcher provides a sketch of the town in the early sixteenth century.

Transport networks and towns in Roman and early medieval England: An application of PageRank to archaeological questions

This paper examines the development of a road network through time to consider its relationship to processes of urbanisation in Roman and early medieval England. Using a popular network measure called PageRank, we classify the importance of nodes in the transport network of roads and navigable waterways to assess the relative location of urban places. Applying this measure we show that there is a strong correlation between the status of towns in both Roman and medieval periods and their proximity to transport nodes with high values of PageRank. Comparison between two temporally distinct networks—Early Roman, and that recorded in the Domesday survey of 1086CE—allows for a discussion about the determinants of urban growth at different times. The applicability of PageRank to other forms of network analysis in archaeology is offered in conclusion.

Domesday Book and the transformation of English landed society, 1066–86

AbstractThis article presents the first fruits of a long-term project which aims to identify all the landholders named in Domesday Book, and to build up a picture of English landed society before and after the Norman conquest. The first part describes the project's methods and illustrates them with a selection of short profiles of individuals whose careers add distinctive colour to the emerging picture. The second offers firstly an analysis of the social distribution of landed wealth in England in 1066 and 1086, quantifying the numbers of landholders in different groups defined by the amount of the land assigned to them in Domesday. We then turn to a spatial analysis of landed society, using maps to illustrate the geographical distribution of landholding. In doing so, we offer fresh perspectives on the transformation of English landed society in the aftermath of conquest.

Domesday book: An early fiscal, accounting narrative?

Domesday Book is one of the most important documents in English history. It has been much studied by social, economic and institutional historians. At its heart it is an accounting document. Domesday Book of 1086 is regarded as a landmark in accounting history, primarily because it heralded a written system of government accounting in England. It introduced an administrative framework from which eventually the English Exchequer and charge and discharge accounting evolved. Domesday Book was compiled during one of the most significant periods in English History just after the Conquest of England by William I. It reflected new King's need to consolidate his power. The purpose of this article is to examine Domesday Book as an historical accounting record, concentrating in particular, on one shire: Herefordshire. It shows how Domesday Book provided the king with comprehensive information about individual landowning and taxable capacity. In addition, Domesday Book is contextualised within the social and economic conditions of the time. Domesday Book is shown to be a device for royal consolidation, a political expression of royal power and a vehicle to raise taxes. It also provided the administrative and territorial basis upon which the Exchequer's embryonic disciplinary power could be developed.

After Hastings: William the Conqueror’s Invasion Campaign, 15 October-25 December 1066

This article re-examines and further challenges the enduring argument that the evidence of manorial value depreciation in Domesday Book can be used to map the route followed by the Norman army towards London after its victory at the battle of Hastings in 1066. It also offers a new interpretation of the direction of the Norman campaign and the rationale that influenced it. This is based on a consideration of the needs and experiences of marching armies from Roman times to the late Middle Ages, the major sources for the Norman invasion, the nature of the places visited by the Norman army in 1066, and the transportation network, landscape, and meteorological circumstances in which this army operated.

Lord Eldon Redux: Information Asymmetry, Accountability and Fiduciary Loyalty

This article investigates the development of accountability and fiduciary loyalty as an institutional response to information asymmetries in agency relations, especially in firm-like settings. Lord Eldon articulated the crucial role of information asymmetries in opportunistic behaviour in the early 19th century, but its roots are much older. A 13th-century trend towards direct farming of English manors and the transformation of feudal accounting after the Domesday Book and early Exchequer period engendered profound developments. The manor emerged as (possibly the first) profit-maximising firm, complete with separation of ownership and control and a hierarchy of professional managers. This primordial firm relied on primordial fiduciary loyalty—an accountability regime backed by social norms that was tailored for addressing the acute information asymmetries in agency relations. Courts have gradually expanded this regime, which in due course enabled Equity to develop the modern duty of loyalty. These insights suggest implications for contemporary fiduciary loyalty.

Историография исследовательских подходов в источниковедении средневековых государственных поземельных описаний стран Европы. Часть 2. Историография английской «Книги Страшного суда» 1086 г.

Историография исследовательских подходов в источниковедении средневековых государственных поземельных описаний стран Европы. Часть 2. Историография английской «Книги Страшного суда» 1086 г.

Stanley Gregory

Stanley Gregory

THE ONGOING LIVES OF BOOKS AND THEIR LIBRARIES

One early spring afternoon in 1982 I happened to find myself ambling along Fuzhou Road in Shanghai and coming by chance upon a small unattractive bookstore. The brown paint on its outer doors was peeling, the stucco surface of its exterior needed a good scrubbing, and more than a few tiles on its floor were broken. If then no different in appearance from the other bookstores I had earlier visited along this famous Shanghai book street, this store nonetheless boasted a strikingly different kind of stock: it specialized in selling second-hand Western books. While novels abounded on its shelves, the pre-war variety in hardback and the more recent in paperback, one thick non-fiction volume caught my eye. Entitled Domesday Book and Beyond, this classic 1887 treatment of early English history by the great English legal historian Frederic W. Maitland had long been on my reading list. Somehow a copy of it had ended up in this unpromising bookshop. When I opened the virtually virgin pages of this copy and noticed that it could be bought for a proverbial song, I readily leapt to the temptation and acquired it with delight.

Medievalism, Modernity and Memory: Cropthorne Church, 1892–1910

‘An old church is so common and so familiar an object that we are often in danger of forgetting its value...’George Gilbert Scott (1811-78)Recorded in the Domesday Survey for Worcestershire (1086), the Church of St. Michael in Cropthorne, Worcestershire is an ancient building with a rich history. Drawing on surviving manuscript and visual sources, this article examines the repairs, restoration and refurbishments made to the interior of St. Michael’s between 1890 and 1910. This was a period in which the ownership of the village shifted from the Anglican Church to private patronage and a time which witnessed many changes to the fabric of the building; notably the extensive refurbishments carried out to the chancel in 1894 by Francis Holland, the Lord of the Manor and the restoration of the rest of Cropthorne church which took more than eighteen years to complete. Highlighting the significance of the Church in rural areas as a place for personal and community memory, this article will consider how these changes to a sacred space used for communal worship were linked to the social changes experienced by the rural community that worshipped within it: moving beyond a purely architectural survey of the building, it will identify the agents of these changes; the processes involved in accomplishing them; and, responses to these alterations. Consequently, the alterations and additions to the interior of St. Michael’s made at the instigation and expense both of the Holland Family of Cropthorne Court and the people of Cropthorne will be analyzed in the context of the changing religious, technological, social, economic and political conditions of the period, which include the effects of the Agricultural Depression and the devastating impact of war.

The Late-Saxon and Early Romanesque Churches at St Mary, Prittlewell, Essex

THE CHURCH OF ST MARY, Prittlewell is now superficially a late medieval building, but it has long been recognised that the N wall of the chancel contains fragments of Anglo-Saxon work, while the nave retains early Romanesque fabric. It is demonstrated here that these early structures represent two discrete axially aligned churches. The Anglo-Saxon church at Prittlewell has been assumed to date from the 7th century, but comparison with similar church buildings points instead to a 10th-century date, suggestive of an absence of continuity between the 7th-century ‘princely’ burial discovered nearby and the foundation of the church. There is no documentation of the church before the Domesday survey, but it is tentatively suggested that a church at Prittlewell was founded in the 10th century as a successor to the nearby minster at Wakering, whose fortunes were then in decline.

Two Misread Names in the Cornish Folios of the Exeter Domesday

THERE is often much to be gained by studying errors. The descriptio of England initiated by King William I in late 1085 combined formal and out-of-court sessions, oral testimonies, written submissions, and existing records to produce the returns that were later edited at Winchester to form Great Domesday Book itself [hereafter GDB], with the potential for errors and misunderstandings at each stage of the process. 1 Sometimes these errors can be suspected but not proved, the only surviving witness being that recorded by the main and almost certainly English scribe of GDB [hereafter ‘the GDB scribe’]. 2 At other times, however, there survives another witness and the greatest of these is the Exeter Domesday in the Liber Exoniensis [Exeter, Cathedral Library MS 3500, hereafter Exon], the remnants of the exemplar that the GDB scribe almost certainly had to hand as he edited the material relating to the south-western shires. 3 Some twenty scribes were employed in the writing of Exon and no full description of the hand and stints for each yet exists, although Finn and others have made initial assessments of some and Flight has published a provisional account of the stints. 4 In the case of two personal names occurring in entries for Cornwall written by the two major scribes of Exon, identified by Flight as scribes α and β and corresponding to Finn’s scribes G and A respectively, this second witness reveals misunderstandings by both contemporary and more recent readers.

THE MARSHAL FAMILY OF HAMSTEAD

The earliest member of the lineage who is identifiable in the sources is one Gilbert, who possessed an estate of 3½ hides at Winterbourne Monkton (Wiltshire) in 1086 as a tenant of Glastonbury Abbey. The Wiltshire geld rolls identify him as Gilbert ‘Gibard’ (literally, ‘moonface’) and the Marshal descent from him was deduced by Neil Stacy from the possession of the same estate by John Marshal (I) and the incidence of the surname ‘Giffard’ carried by John's clerical brother, William. Gilbert does not appear in 1086 as holder of known Marshal centres (notably Hamstead and Cheddar, though a Gilbert was perhaps the predecessor of John Marshal at Easton Royal in Kinwardstone Hundred, Wiltshire). This indicates that the breakthrough of the family into the royal court and marshalcy came after the Domesday Survey. Was this Gilbert Giffard of Winterbourne the father or grandfather of John Marshal? Chronologically he could be either. Were he the grandfather he might as well have been the maternal as the paternal forbear of John. Though John Marshal had a brother known as William Giffard – which at first sight makes it more likely that Gilbert would have been the father or paternal grandfather – the contemporary Basset-Ridel example indicates that a maternal surname might well be taken by a younger son. The origins of the Giffard-Marshal lineage is only otherwise indicated by a mention of its kinship with the Herefordshire family of Evreux, major tenants of the Lacy family and lords of Lyonshall castle. The kinship might derive from a marriage at the time of Gilbert (I) or it might be that the two families shared a common lineage, though the possession by the Marshals of a Herefordshire estate in 1155 at Upleadon perhaps indicates just such a marriage. There is a reference in Henry II's charter to John Marshal (II) of the family's unspecified lands in Normandy, which tends to confirm that the Giffard-Marshals were ultimately of continental not English origin.

Domesday: book of judgement

Domesday: Book of Judgement provides a unique study of the extraordinary eleventh-century survey, the Domesday Book. Sally Harvey depicts the Domesday Book as the written evidence of a potentially insecure conquest successfully transforming itself, by a combination of administrative insight and military might, into a permanent establishment. William I used the Domesday Inquiry to contain the new establishment and consolidate their landholding revolution within a strict fiscal and tenurial framework, with checks and balances to prevent the king's followers from taking more powers and assets than they had been allocated. In this way, the survey served as a conciliatory gesture between the conquerors and the conquered, as William I came to realise that, faced with the threat to his rule from the Danes, he needed England's native populations more than they needed him. Yes, the overlying theme of the Domesday Book is Judgment: every class of society had reason to regard the Survey's methodical and often pitiless proceedings as both a literal and a metaphorical day of account. In this volume, Sally Harvey considers the Anglo-Saxon background and the architects of the survey: the bishops, royal clerks, sheriffs, jurors, and landholders who contributed to Domesday's content and scope. She also discusses at length the core information in the Survey: coinage, revenues from landholding, fiscal concessions, and taxation, as well as some central tenurial issues. She draws the conclusion that the record, whilst consolidating William's position as king of the English, also laid the foundations for the twelfth-century treasury and exchequer. The volume newly argues that the Domesday survey also became an inquest into individual sheriffs and officials, thereby laying a foundation for reinterpreting the size of towns in England.

The Church in Devon, 400–1560, by Nicholas Orme

During recent decades, an increase of historical sensitivity to local evidence about religious practices has greatly expanded our understanding of the broader narrative of the English Church. In particular, focused research on parish records has entirely revised the literature on the Reformation. Nicholas Orme’s extensive archival work in his corner of the field, the South West, leaves him well positioned to connect these regional trends to wider patterns. Indeed, two of the best-known sets of extant churchwardens’ accounts come from Devon parishes, those of Ashburton and Morebath. As such, the present book is a natural sequitur to his Cornwall and the Cross (2007) in offering a social history of religion in the county from the arrival of Christianity to the Elizabethan Settlement. Professor Orme sets out to offer a general account of the English Church, centred on Devon and with local historians largely in mind. For this, he adopts a chronological approach. The opening chapter begins with the Roman and Anglo-Saxon period, the establishment of minsters and the development of parishes around the tenth century. Helpful maps show locations of minsters and churches. Medieval Devon is treated in more detail, reflecting the greater abundance of evidence, beginning with the period from the Norman Conquest to about 1300. Implicitly, the great surveys of the Domesday Book (1086) and the Taxatio Ecclesiastica of Pope Nicholas IV (1291) are utilised as useful points of reference for showing change and continuity. Thereafter, two parallel chapters assess late medieval Devon’s clergy and laity: the impact of the Black Death; the increased investment in education; piety beyond the institutional church, from hermits and anchorites to parish stores and primers. Finally, the Reformation in Devon is assessed, with a focus on the dissolution of the monasteries and the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, before the book’s conclusion.

Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media ed. by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (review)

Reviewed by: Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media ed. by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson Joel Fredell Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds. Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 294. $69.95 cloth; $14.95 CD. Medievalists consider ourselves experts in disruptive media technologies. One good reason for this self-assessment is our intimacy with a range of media particular to the period that we study: charms on the body, bills on cathedral doors, traveling holster books, household medical compilations, among so many others. Another reason is our struggle with [End Page 321] medieval sources, which abound in textual instabilities, vestiges of orality, shifts in language, scribal mouvance. Print itself is a late transformer of manuscript culture, and a phenomenon that mediates how modern students encounter works that originally circulated in manuscript. At a global historical moment when the mobile device has evolved in the course of a few years from Star Trek-style communicator to magic book, medieval media beckon as possible analogues to the digital disruptions that are forcing scholars of later periods to reexamine the homogeneities of print-think. Fiona Somerset’s ambitious introduction to Truth and Tales argues that this collection’s essays show us “the interplay between media, the modes and truth-claims they deploy, and the social status of the speakers and writers of that media” (7). Not all the essays here boldly go where media theory rewrites cultural history, but a consistently high level of discussion offers many pleasurable recognitions. Any multi-author anthology, print or digital, now offers scant hope that readers will encounter its chapters in dialogue rather than in pdfs of single chapters from interlibrary loan, much like the lamentable JSTOR effect on journal editors’ attempts to create thematic clusters—how many students or scholars now read articles in their published contexts? The editors of this collection do strive successfully to create dialogue despite the double whammy that this book represents a conference (the fourth Canada Chaucer Seminar) and serves as a festschrift for the distinguished literary scholar Richard Firth Green. Among the most interesting lines of inquiry that develop over this collection is the position of orality in an England that was becoming increasingly dependent on documentary traditions, a topic treated extensively in Green’s important study, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Indeed, Crisis of Truth has served as the inspiration for several of the authors included here, a fact acknowledged by the collection’s title. The medieval interpenetrations of orality and literacy in their various forms do provide fascinating analogies to emergent problems of digital literacy. A charming feature of this volume is that Green, the honoree, begins the discussion with an essay that sees continuity between medieval and modern orality in the use of truth-claims. “‘The Vanishing Leper’ and ‘The Murmuring Monk’: Two Medieval Urban Legends” argues that authenticating details in storytelling, specifically the citation of “friend-of-a-friend” sources (or “FOAF” in current messaging parlance) remain to this day as oral strategies, and that no real difference [End Page 322] exists between medieval and modern credulity as “true stories” circulate among social networks. Orality’s power as an authenticating medium echoes through many of the other contributions. Four contributors follow Green’s Crisis of Truth directly in showing how medieval law intertwined oral and literate authorities in ways that exceed the rote formulae for oaths and vows with which many of us are familiar. English common law and cherished traditions of “ancient customs and liberties” were grounded in an oral memory that was suspicious of—yet dependent upon—written witness. Stephen Yeager, in “The New Plow and the Old: Law, Orality, and the Figure of Piers the Plowman in B 19,” argues that Piers and his plouʓ of land symbolize a preliterate tradition of land tenure based on the Domesday Book and on oral transmissions of early English law. Barbara Hanawalt’s “Toward the Common Good: Punishing Fraud among the Victualers of Medieval London” cites Green directly to show that the “interplay between oral and written, popular and high culture, official law...

Testing Like William the Conqueror: Cultural and Instrumental Uses of Examinations

The spread of academic testing for accountability purposes in multiple countries has obscured at least two historical purposes of academic testing: community ritual and management of the social structure. Testing for accountability is very different from the purpose of academic challenges one can identify in community “examinations” in 19th century North America, or exams’ controlling access to the civil service in Imperial China. Rather than testing for ritual or access to mobility, the modern uses of testing are much closer to the state-building project of a tax census, such as the Domesday Book of medieval Britain after the Norman Invasion, the social engineering projects described in James Scott's Seeing like a State (1998), or the “mapping the world” project that David Nye described in America as Second Creation(2004). This paper will explore both the instrumental and cultural differences among testing as ritual, testing as mobility control, and testing as state-building.