The culmination of the Conquest

The culmination of the Conquest

The Domesday survey and Domesday Book have generally been seen as the culmination of the Norman Conquest, and show the results of a great investigation, commissioned by William the Conqueror, of the lands over which he now ruled.

He had it surveyed by teams of commissioners, who toured the country taking statements and hearing land pleas, before compiling all the information they had amassed into Domesday Book. This view is based upon the seminal analysis of Domesday Book conducted by VH Galbraith in 1967, and breaks down into the following phases:

· England was divided into seven great circuits, within which tenants-in-chief supplied details of their lands.

· Sessions of the shire court were held under the jurisdiction of the Commissioners for each circuit. These checked, shire hundred by shire hundred, the claims being made by taking sworn testimonies from the jurors of the courts.

· In areas of special difficulty, an early draft was made: eg The Inquisitiones Eliensis et Cantabrigensis, or Exon Domesday, provides two different examples of the way this was done - though the terms of the Inquisitio bear no relation to any part of Domesday Book (the nearest is Circuit 6 for Huntingdonshire).

· The evidence collected was sent to Winchester, where it was compiled into 'Little Domesday'.

· The final draft, the 'Exchequer' or 'Great Domesday' was achieved by discarding most of the detail and preserving only those facts likely to be useful to the administrators.

· This draft was scheduled to be presented to King William at the Great Convocation of Salisbury, at Old Sarum, on 1 August 1085, at which all the magnates of the land would swear allegiance to him. However, it was not ready in time, and a copy of Little Domesday is believed to have been used instead.

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The Survey

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the creation of Domesday in these terms:

After this, the King had much thought and very deep discussion with his council about this country - how it was occupied or with what sort of people. Then he sent his men all over England into every shire and had them find out how many hundred hides there were in the shire, or what land and cattle the King himself had in the country, or what dues he ought to have in twelve months from the shire. Also he had a record made of how much land his archbishops had, and his bishops and his abbots and his earls - and though I relate it at too great length - what or how much everybody had who was occupying land in England, in land or in cattle, and how much money it was worth.

So very narrowly did he have it investigated that there was no single virgate of land, nor indeed (it is a shame to relate but it seemed no shame to him to do) one ox nor one cow nor one pig which there was left out, and not put down in his record; and all those records were brought to him afterwards... Then he travelled about so as to come to Salisbury at Lammas; and there his councillors came to him, and all the people occupying land who were of any account over England, no matter whose vassals they might be; and they all submitted to him and became his vassals and swore oaths of allegiance to him, that they would be loyal to him against all other men.

This, like all other references to the Domesday Book was written at least 30 years after the events of 1085/6, and views the whole thing with hindsight. That hindsight knows that William died in 1086, and that the compilation of the Domesday Book was therefore the culminating act of his reign.

The sheer scale of it is huge: at least 62,000 witnesses gave evidence. Moreover, it was not just one exercise. Peel back the veneer and you begin to see that there were several Domesday surveys, spread over William's reign. These were Geld surveys, to do with the payment of Danegeld - tax. The whole idea of the inquests based on jurors' testimonies was to turn up discrepancies between the claims of the landholders and the claims of the juries, which could be exploited to charge fines, and produce a lot of money for the King.

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The Danish threat

So why did William want to institute a Geld survey in 1085? Once again, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has the answer, in the preceding paragraph of its 1085 entry:

In this year people said and declared for a fact that Cnut king of Denmark, son of King Swegn, was setting out in this direction and meant to conquer this country... When William, King of England, found out about this, he went to England with a larger force of mounted men and infantry from France and Brittany than had ever come to this country, so that people wondered how this country could maintain all that army.

And the King had all the army dispersed all over the country among his vassals, and they provisioned the army each in proportion to his land. Cnut the Holy was the son of Swegn Estrithson. He had threatened England in earlier years, when he supported Hereward at Ely and raided York in 1075. Now, with his father dead and his elder brother installed on the throne of Denmark, he was seriously looking towards England as a forum for his dynastic ambitions.

...to pay for war with the Danes

So the Domesday Book was a Danegeld survey, summoned in response to the largest Danish threat King William had ever encountered during his reign. Yet it was also more than that. In essence, there were two Domesday surveys: the first raised a royal Geld to pay for war with the Danes; and the second dealt with matters of land tenure arising from the first and the billeting of so many troops on English land.

The Domesday Book put that assessment on a firm basis, so that everybody knew what was owed by them and what was due to them. It was necessary in the wake of the Norman Conquest, because nobody was actually quite sure who owned what in the new Norman kingdom.

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The content of the Domesday Book

The result was Domesday: the most comprehensive survey of land tenure in England ever produced by a medieval king. It tells us all kinds of things, most importantly:

· Who owned the land before 1066.

· Who owned the land at the time of Domesday in 1086.

· How it changed hands.

· What that land was worth, and what manors it was associated with.

· How many peasants (called bordars and villani) tended that land.

This was achieved through judicious use of the Anglo-Saxon 'local government'. Anglo-Norman England was 'governed' by local officers: the sheriff and the reeve, based within the shire. People cooperated with them and took part in the shire courts, because the whole community's very existence depended on the efficient running of the shire.

It was a form of local government, and this is what William depended on. He formed an alliance with the freemen of the shire to run the country, based upon their autonomous local governance, through the agency of the sheriff who formed the natural link between shire and king.

The created a dynamic tension between the lords, the shire and the king, which sometimes erupted into resentment from the earls, as in the revolt of Edwin and Morcar or the Revolt of the Earls in 1075.

It is also possible to see that the Domesday Book commissioners were themselves basically confused about what a manor actually was - we can see their concept of a manor changing throughout the book.

...the Norman barony had taken over the role of the English thegns...

What the Domesday Book shows is that the Norman barony had taken over the role of the English thegns in Anglo-Norman England. The two are almost interchangeable: both held land in return for service (mainly military), both had sub-tenants and both owed their ultimate position, and therefore their allegiance, to the king. In many cases, all that had happened was that the barons had been inserted as an extra social layer between the English king and the English thegnly class.

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