By studying individual entries it is possible to discover that upmarket Hampstead in London had woodland containing pigs and was assessed as being worth 50 shillings. Brighton residents may enjoy fishing but how many catch enough to pay their taxes? The Domesday Book reveals that one Brighton landowner did exactly that — with 4, herrings to be precise! The Domesday Book is actually not one book but two. The first volume Great Domesday contains the final summarized record of all the counties surveyed except Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk.
For these three counties the full, unabbreviated return sent in to Winchester by the commissioners is preserved in the second volume Little Domesday , which, for some reason, was never summarized and added to the larger volume.
Unlike their invasion of England, the Norman penetration into Wales took place very gradually after …. History of Scotland. London History. Castles England Scotland Wales. Stately Homes England Scotland Wales.
Monasteries England Scotland Wales. Prehistoric Sites England Scotland Wales. National Trust. Membership details About the National Trust. Scholars estimate it would have taken at least a year to write. This would explain why he did not write up the return for the eastern circuit, which also survives in its original form and is known as Little Domesday Book.
During the lifetimes of the Conqueror and his sons, royal officials employed politically correct language when describing Domesday Book. This is a metaphor. For just as no judgment of that final severe and terrible trial can be evaded by any subterfuge, so when any controversy arises in the kingdom concerning the matters contained in the book, and recourse is made to the book, its word cannot be denied or set aside with impunity.
The name Domesday Book is therefore a function of its awesome reputation among the English. It invokes the Day of Judgment described in the Book of Revelation. This remains deeply controversial. Many historians have argued it was all about the land-tax, known as the geld. That is, of course, logical.
William desperately needed cash to finance his wars. Commissioners were instructed to establish the geld liability of every parcel of land in England, and to collect further information that would enable them to establish that it could pay more. Every entry in Domesday Book supplies that information. Surely, therefore, Domesday Book was a tax book?
The problem is that its layout makes it a spectacularly unhelpful guide to the logistics of taxation. To collect the land-tax efficiently, royal officials needed information arranged in geographical order, hundred by hundred and village by village, so they would know exactly where to go and how much to collect.
The holdings of the king and tenants-in-chief are then listed in the same order, under numbered headings, in the pages that follow. There are no totals and no indexes. Any tax official trying to use this information laid out this way would have quickly lost the will to live because, as historians are painfully aware, it can take days to calculate the tax liability of particular areas or landholders, even with the benefit of modern editions with indexes.
The structure of Domesday Book does, however, make it an extraordinarily effective instrument of political control. Its tables of contents and numbered headings imply that all land was held either directly by the king or from him by tenants-in-chief. It both asserts that principle and made it manageable. Armed with Domesday Book, King William could threaten to dispossess a recalcitrant baron in a matter of minutes. It is not hard to see how that would have brought comfort to a king who needed baronial loyalty more than ever.
This form of political control was also potentially very profitable, for the king could also use his position as the source of all tenure to generate new streams of income. For example, if a baron died, the king could demand the payment of a relief, a kind of death duty paid by an heir to enter into their inheritance; or he could auction off the right to marry the widows or heiresses of deceased barons, with their lands, to the highest bidder; or if a bishop or abbot died, they could choose to delay the appointment of their successors and rake in the profits of their estates during the resulting vacancy.
So was the Domesday survey and Domesday Book intended to improve yields from the land-tax, or from feudal incidents? There is a solution to this problem which embraces both possibilities.
Here it is essential to register a distinction between the survey and Domesday Book itself. It is known that the survey did generate information set out in ways that were useful for the management of taxation. For example, Exon Domesday is bound up with tax lists, which were updated in , and other texts in the collection demonstrate that the Domesday survey for the south-western shires generated documents laid out in geographic order, one hundred at a time — the format most useful for collecting the land tax.
The commissioners from other circuits are known to have done the same thing. The structure of Domesday Book, however, organised within each shire by tenants-in-chief, would have made the management of feudal incidents more efficient.
So by extracting information in different formats at each stage of the process, the king could achieve several objectives: creating a more secure land-tax base, and a formidable instrument of political and financial control over his barons. The Domesday survey was completed with astonishing speed — within six months of the Gloucester council. This could not have been achieved without the active co-operation of the nobility. So what was in it for them?
Something that they had yearned for throughout the long period during which England had been colonised was security of title. The Domesday inquest created a great public stage on which to act out the ritual completion of the process of colonisation, and the records of the inquest constituted unassailable title to those loyal to the king.
In other words, the Domesday survey was a hard-nosed deal between the king and his barons. That deal was sealed at Old Sarum. This extraordinary event was most likely the climax to the Domesday survey.
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