Domesday Book: a VCH author s guide 1

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1 Domesday Book: a VCH author s guide 1 Although a translation of Domesday Book for each county generally appears in VCH volume II for each county and is now generally available on British History Online it should not be used. This is because it has been superseded by more recent and, importantly, more accurate versions. The best of these is the Alecto edition published on a county by county basis but available as a single volume from Penguin. For the sake of consistency of references and general accuracy, please use the single volume version only. Citation The full reference should be given in the first instance: A. Williams and G.H. Martin (eds.), Domesday Book: A Complete Translation (London, 2002) In footnotes, subsequent references should be given in abbreviated form as follows: Domesday, 00. Note that the county by county volumes offer very full and useful introductions that highlight the specific differences in the survey s treatment of the estates in that county and it is strongly recommended that you read these. Style In the text should be described as Domesday or Domesday Book with caps and does not require a definite article although the Domesday survey, does. 1 These notes have been compiled with the invaluable assistance of Dr Chris Lewis.

2 Introduction to Domesday Book Domesday Book is a unique source and is, for most places in England, the beginning of their local history. It was commissioned by William I at Christmas 1085 and delivered in 1086; a remarkable testament to the effectiveness of the eleventh century English State. It is in two parts, Little and Great Domesday. The former covers the eastern counties Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk and provides more detailed information than for the rest of England. Great Domesday. The reasons for this are unclear. It is possible that it represents an earlier part of the compilation process as the other surviving version of Domesday, the so-called Exon Domesday which covers the south western counties (Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire) England is described by manor rather than by parish; the two were not necessarily coterminus The holder of the manor (as opposed to the parish) in 1066 (Tempus Regis Edwardi TRE) and in The overlord in 1086 The amount paid in geld and the land-based assessment of this payment in Hides. The amount of land available to plough and the number of plough teams A partial assessment of population: the numbers of different types of people and their relative freedom of action at a very basic level. At best, this indicates the number of households. The information comes from a variety of sources; assessments like hidage and geld which were probably derived from written sources and other information which came by word of mouth either from those who held land or their tenants. Since the document is still part of the archives of the British State, it is housed and conserved by The National Archives, Kew. TNA provides a useful research guide and some suggested secondary reading: The accompanying Discover Domesday pages also give a useful overview: 2

3 Using Domesday A warning from H.P.R. Finberg: The Domesday passage; and there is no better way of unnerving the average reader at the outset than to hurl a chunk of Domesday at him, without any explanation of its terminology or so much a hint that scholars are not altogether certain what some of the entries mean. 2 Although Finberg was writing in the 1960s, the warning is still valid. The terms used in the survey must be approached with caution and used with care. There is much in this source which can be helpful but its limitations must be recognised. Do not use all the information Domesday provides in one paragraph. The Domesday manor, or manors, must be related, using other evidence, to the extent of the later parish boundary. This information should be addressed in the contextual paragraph. The following is given according to the usual sections of VCH parish entries. Introduction The key information that Domesday provides relates to land ownership and land use. Each entry records how much land was given over to arable (ploughlands), wood, waste, meadow or pasture. When cited in the text, these amounts should not simply be given as figures; use the terminology as it is given in the text. As a rule of thumb a ploughland is typically a., that is, an amount of land that would require a single plough team to work. In some cases, it is possible to simply multiply the ploughlands, add the additional land mentioned in the entry and end up with the known size of the ancient parish but this is not the norm. Land Ownership There are some useful interpretative sources. The most ambitious and what will ultimately be the most useful with regard to the pre-conquest land holdings is provided by the Prosopography of Anglo Saxon England (PASE) In Cheshire, Cornwall and Shropshire, there were concealed tenancies which researchers should be aware of (details from specific Alecto editions) Domesday is problematic in the way in which it records ecclesiastical estates; it sometimes omits them entirely and is not interested in estates held by leasehold. 2 H.P.R. Finberg, How not to write local history in Finberg, H.P.R. and Skipp, V.H.T (eds.) Local History: Objective and Pursuit (Newton Abbot, 1967),

4 Economic History Do not place all the Domesday material in one paragraph unrelated to what comes later. Domesday only gives an indication of the shape of agriculture as a whole and not the specifics. Land Use Arable land was the backbone of the Domesday economy. Demesne farming that is, farming carried out by the lord on his own land was complemented by farming by tenants and non-agricultural activity. Measures of land area as noted above, use ploughlands rather than hides. A Hide was a tax assessment and not related to a field or statute acre. In a VCH context, its only real value is in providing context in terms of the relative value of tax liability on peasant and demesne land. This could have an impact on factors such as 17th century assessments by yardlands for copyhold (which applied to land holdings which had originally been part of manorial demesne holdings of unfree tenants). Woodland should be considered under land use, and treated as an economic asset. If guidance is required for understanding the use of woodland as both a landscape feature and an economic resource the work of Oliver Rackham outlines a sensible approach to woodland in general and the treatment of Domesday woodland in particular. O. Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (London, 1990) O. Rackham, The Making of the English Countryside (London, 1986 and later editions) The questions that the Domesday surveyors were given assumed that a ploughteam consisted of eight oxen. As such, it is assumed that this is what is meant in the text. The amounts of wood, meadow and pasture given in a Domesday entry refer to the demesne land only. In other words, the amounts describe the lord s land. There may well have been other woodland, for example, which was in the hands of the tenants or held as common. Population Inevitably, this is a matter of debate and this debate does not belong in a VCH parish entry. Although attempts to extrapolate the figures given in Domesday by means of multipliers (usually in the order of 4.5 5) to estimate the population in 1066 and 1086, these should not generally be used for VCH purposes. Use only the figures given in the text. These give a relative indication of the number of households and stand some comparison with records of later taxation (such as lay subsidies or the poll taxes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). It is more useful to assess the relative sizes of free and unfree population and the number of households. 4

5 Types of Peasant The Ely questionnaire a document which records the questions that the commissioners set out to answer notes five categories: Slaves Villeins Cottars (which for our purposes, are the same as Bordars and Cotsets) Freemen Sokemen Personal Names For other Old English names that occur in Domesday Book follow the spelling given in the headword in O. von Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book (1937), appending the Domesday form in brackets where it is markedly different from Feilitzen s standard form. Old Scandinavian names are nearly always better in the Old Danish or Old Swedish spellings than in the Old Norse used by Feilitzen as the headword, or they can be given an English equivalent, e.g. <Raven> for Feilitzen s Hrafn. Animals and Livestock Like so much else, Domesday is not consistent in its treatment of these. The counties covered by Little Domesday and those found in the Exon Domesday Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire contain references to the amount of livestock on the demesne of each manor, but Great Domesday does not. Since the Alecto edition is based on Great and Little Domesday rather than the Exon Domesday details relating to livestock are omitted. Churches While some counties include relatively complete records of churches others omit them entirely. This is largely because Domesday was concerned with taxable property and churches were not taxed. If a priest is mentioned among the inhabitants, this is a good indication that a church was also present, whether it is recorded or not. All Saints, Brixworth (Northants.), for example, is one of the country s finest Saxon churches; it is not recorded in Domesday. 5

6 The simplest and clearest explanation of the treatment of churches in the Domesday survey remains William Page s article of (1915) W. Page, Remarks on the churches of the Domesday Survey Archaeologia 66 This can be downloaded from Archive.org: Glossary Note that only select terms are given in this glossary. These are the most useful for the purposes of writing a VCH parish entry or are terms likely to give rise to confusion. A full glossary can be found on pages of the Alecto Domesday. BORDAR A cottager: a peasant of lower economic status that a villein. COTTAR A cottager: a peasant of lower economic status that a villein. GELD The English (and therefore pre-conquest) land-tax based on the HIDE. HIDE Notionally this was the amount of land which would support a household: divided into four VIRGATES. Note: the hide was a unit of assessment for the payment of geld which was only notionally related to the amount of land on a manor. It should NOT, therefore be used to describe an amount of land but be thought of in the same way as GELD. PLOUGHLAND is to be preferred; it is, generally, more accurate and more useful for VCH purposes. PLOUGHLAND The number of ploughlands may (1) estimate the arable capacity of an estate in terms of the number of eight-ox plough-teams needed to work it (c. 100 a. c. 120 a.); or (2)record an assessment of dues required from an estate. SLAVE called serfs in earlier translations of Domesday, slave is a more accurate assessment of the status of servi and less ambiguous for the reader. VIRGATE One-quarter of a HIDE: the equivalent of the English YARDLAND. YARDLAND see VIRGATE 6