World of Domesday Discover what life was like in 11th century England, from how society was ordered to what people ate. For teachers and students Explore our online resource about Domesday, with tasks and questions you can use in the classroom. Read Domesday. Domesday Book — a brief material history. Sign up About our privacy policy. Margaret was born in and was a member of an ancient English royal family.
Hampstead is a pigsty… Residents of Hampstead might not be too pleased to learn that their exclusive London village once housed more pigs than people but this is just one of the fascinating insights to be gained from reading the Domesday Book. Related articles. Battle, East Sussex. The English Invasion of Wales. St Margaret. Next article. It was a landmark in the triumph of the centralised written record, once set down fixed forever, over evolving local oral traditions.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the decision was taken at William's Christmas court in Gloucester in , and his men were sent:. Also he had a record made of how much land his archbishops had, his bishops and his abbots and his earls, and what or how much everyone who was in England had So very narrowly did he have it investigated that there was no single hide nor yard of land, nor indeed This survey and audit would clearly establish who held what, in the wake of the Norman Conquest itself.
This may be an exaggeration of what actually happened, but it does show how the survey was perceived at the time. Some historians have seen the immediate cause lying in an invasion threat from Denmark and Norway and William's urgent need for accurate information about the military and other resources at his disposal.
The first general population census of had a similar requirement behind it at a time when England was threatened with invasion from Revolutionary France. Twenty years after King William's successful invasion of England, and the mass re-distribution of land amongst his followers, it was time to consolidate and define.
This survey and audit would clearly establish who held what, in the wake of the Norman Conquest itself; it would also clarify what rights and dues were owed to the King, and would settle the liability of his great barons to provide military resources, in soldiers or cash, for a monarch whose campaigning season never ended. The Domesday Book does not cover certain important cities, such as London, Winchester, Bristol and the borough of Tamworth; nor Northumberland and Durham or much of north-west England.
For Wales, only parts of certain border areas are included. Neither was it ever fully completed, being abandoned at some stage early in the reign of William Rufus, who succeeded to the throne in Not every place that existed in appears in the Domesday Book. We know this from other evidence - such as Anglo-Saxon charters, architectural evidence or the origins of the place-name itself. The place-names found in the Domesday Book are township and estate names, and may include other villages and hamlets that receive no specific mention in the text; for example, the Domesday entry for Shepshed, near Loughborough, includes the settlements of Long Watton, Lockington and Hemington, but they are not specifically mentioned.
Domesday was never a single volume but originally two books, Great Domesday and Little Domesday which was a longer version, covering the counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, which was never written up into the main volume. It is now contained within five volumes, having been re-bound in to improve the prospects for its preservation for another millennium.
Great Domesday was mostly written by a single scribe, with the hand of a second clerk appearing, checking his work and adding some notes and further entries. Minor errors were inevitable and led to some inconsistencies for later scholars to worry over. The counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk appear in a more detailed version known as Little Domesday.
Domesday Suffolk, for example, records goats and 2 donkeys. It was the work of several clerks, perhaps as many as seven, and was neatly but hurriedly written, resulting again in minor errors. Other versions of parts of the Domesday survey, which are not held by the Public Record Office, are the "Exon" Domesday Somerset, Cornwall and most of Devon , held by some to be written by the same scribe who worked on Great Domesday; the 'Ely Inquest' Ely Abbey estates and the Cambridgeshire Inquest parts of Cambridgeshire.
It was only possible because England already had a sophisticated administrative system, built up by the Anglo-Saxons, with shire counties, whose boundaries survived with little change until , and a well-functioning tax system. The traditional view is that all major landowners had to send in lists of their manors and tenants, which were compared to existing tax records. Commissioners were then sent out to assess the situation on the ground, questioning local juries in detail.
Each was assigned circuits containing two or more counties. Their methods of proceeding do seem to have varied from circuit to circuit so comparative analysis by historians can be misleading. To avoid bias, the juries would have both Normans and native Anglo-Saxons sitting on them.
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