Domesday

Set against this miniaturist view of the Norman state, we have one massive and seemingly incontrovertible piece of evidence: Domesday Book, still proudly displayed in the Public Record Office in London as the greatest archival monument to the Norman Conquest. As is widely known, there are at least two books now stored in the Public Records described as ‘Domesday’: ‘Great’ Domesday and ‘Little’ Domesday, the first covering most of England and parts of Wales, the second covering East Anglia in particularly close detail. A third volume, housed in Exeter Cathedral, known as ‘Exon Domesday’, appears to supply an earlier stage of the survey of the western counties, which were later revised in Great Domesday. Other such ‘satellites’ record various stages in the inquest as it proceeded in the various part of England. As has become apparent in recent years, we badly need to distinguish the Domesday survey itself from the ‘Book’ in which it resulted. As has become equally apparent, the survey would have been inconceivable had it not been for Anglo-Saxon precedent. Far from testifying to Norman efficiency, Domesday actually reveals an enormous amount about the wealth and sophistication of the old English state. The fact, for example, that every manor could be assessed at a valuation applied not only to 1086, the year in which the survey was made, but to the date of the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066, and that such valuations were available for each of the shires of England, speaks volumes about the sophistication of Anglo-Saxon record keeping, and in particular about the need by the Anglo-Saxon state to maintain regular geld rolls, reporting the potential financial obligations of each local unit of assessment. Had Domesday Book not survived, it is highly unlikely that historians would be willing to credit its existence. Certainly, no such detailed accumulation of information survives for any other part of eleventh-century Europe. We would need to look to ancient Rome for a similar level of sophistication and to eleventh-century China for a contemporary regime capable of compiling records on this massive scale and with this degree of detail. Both the extent and the detail of Domesday are chiefly functions of Anglo-Saxon  traditions of local government and record keeping rather than of Norman ‘efficiency’.

The fact that the survey was made at all testifies to the limited number of royal officials involved in its making. If such surveys were to be completed, they were best made in haste. Anything more deliberate or involving larger numbers of officials was likely to remain unfinished, as kings were to discover in the thirteenth century, when both King John and King Edward I embarked upon much more ambitious surveys than Domesday, both of them so extensive and involving so many pairs of hands that neither was ever completed. Domesday as passed down to us was made by about seven circuits of commissioners, each comprising no more than half a dozen persons, written up in the case of Great Domesday Book, for most of the shires of England, by a single editorial hand. In short, it took a ‘government’ of less than forty persons, virtually none of whom was permanently in ‘government’ employ, to make both the survey and the book. What we have is evidence of a tiny and hence easily managed bureaucracy, not of a massive apparatus of state. Nor was Domesday by any means a complete survey of England: it omits most parts north of the Mersey and the two largest cities, Winchester and London. Even within those parts that were surveyed, the apparent monotonous uniformity of each entry – who owns what land, who owned it previously, what is it worth, what was it worth in 1066, how many hides of land, how many tenants, mills, acres of woodland or pasture, etc. – masks very considerable variation between one circuit of surveyors and another, and even between one estate and another. It is apparent, for example, that the greater ecclesiastical barons, such as the bishop of Worcester or the abbot of Bury St Edmunds, were responsible for making their own returns and in the process for exaggerating or playing down their own particular rights and resources.

Far from being a monument to Norman efficiency, Domesday is a highly fallible resource made possible only by the solid Anglo-Saxon foundations upon which it was based.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, despite the identification of its principal scribe as a clerk in the service of the bishop of Durham, despite intensive statistical analysis of the social and economic information that it supplies, and despite more than a hundred years of scholarship that has produced a small library of books and articles devoted to nothing but Domesday, we still have no very certain or agreed idea of why the survey was made or what purpose it was intended to serve. Was it, as early commentators supposed, a Geld Book, intended as part of a reassessment of national taxation? Was it linked to the invasion scare of 1085 and to the need to assess individual baronial resources so as to billet vast numbers of troops in a realm threatened by the King of Denmark? Was it intended as a vast confirmation charter, recording in documentary form the state of landholdings built up piecemeal since the 1060s, in order for the holders of these estates to render homage to the King, by oaths taken at Salisbury in the summer of 1086? None of these explanations has proved entirely satisfactory.

What is clear is that neither the survey nor the book marked an end to the process of Norman colonization in England, and that far from being some sort of valedictory offering or successful shareholder statement presented to King William towards the close of his reign, Domesday testifies to a real flesh and blood process of conquest and to real suffering on the part of those whose land was conquered and who now, in many cases as jurors to the inquest, were called upon to report the process of their own dispossession. What one modern historian has described as the ‘tormented voices’ of history’s poor and put-upon do occasionally whisper their sad tales from Domesday’s folios. Such is the case of the Buckinghamshire tenant of William fitz Ansculf, who according to the local jurors held his land at Marsh Gibbon ‘harshly and wretchedly’. The most detailed documentary monument to Norman success is itself a mausoleum to the vanished hopes of the Anglo-Saxons without whose assistance it could never have been made.