Surveying the Domesday Book

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Contents

List of boxes, figures and tables

Glossary of terms

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Summary

Preface

1.   A surveyor’s perspective

1.1 Property list

1.2 Opinions and anachronisms

1.3 Agricultural land tenure

1.4 Hierarchy of demesnes

1.5 Quota and quantum taxes

1.6 Consistency

1.7 Geographic focus of the study

1.8 Basic facts

1.9 Mass appraisal

1.10 Timescale: first subjective expectations

2.   Why was the Domesday survey undertaken?

2.1 The issues

2.2 The options

2.3 Is the Domesday survey a land register?

2.4 Estate terriers

2.5 Valuation lists for taxation

2.6 The opinions of others

2.7 The political incentives

2.8 Conclusions about the purpose of the survey

3.   What does Domesday record?

3.1 The two essential elements

3.2 Continual changes

3.3 Comparing Domesday with other evidence

3.4 The geographical ownership patterns

3.5 What are the ad valorem property tax options?

3.6 An analysis of the data

3.7 No hidden evidence

3.8 Summary of procedures

3.9 Hides and ploughlands

3.10 What was omitted from the survey?

3.11 No dwelling houses

3.12 No agricultural buildings

3.13 No other buildings

3.14 Recording other supporting agricultural assets

3.15 Non-agricultural assets

3.16 Resulting restricted tax base

3.17 Identifying the underlying philosophy

3.18 Woodland

3.19 Summary of what is assessed

3.20 Rationale for focus on arable land

3.21 The hide

4.   Valuation

4.1 Annual sums and not capital values

4.2 What annual sums?

4.3 Rents and renting

4.4 Rental value or rent passing

4.5 Ad firmam

4.6 Actual or potential ploughlands

4.7 Rental values

4.8 Rental value dispersion

4.9 The main factors

4.10 Soil and land quality

4.11 Assessing agricultural potential

4.12 Exceptions and anomalies

4.13 King’s direct holdings

4.14 TRE assessments

4.15 Assessments when acquired

4.16 Quality of the assets

4.17 Unresolved problems: summary

4.18 Determining rental levels in Domesday

4.19 No clear valuation method

4.20 Summarised basis of how the manors were assessed

5.   The Boroughs

5.1 Difficulties of analysis

5.2 Summary of borough analyses

5.3 Comparison with Burghal Hidages

5.4 Collecting the information

5.5 Use and purpose

5.6 Incomplete record

6.   The logistics

6.1 The logistic framework

6.2 Logistical issues

6.3 Physical inspections

6.4 The sequence of events

6.5 The ICC as a precedent

6.6 Preparatory stages before the fieldwork

6.7 Logistics of the field surveys

6.8 Logistics of judicial hearings

6.9 The logistics of the editing and production of the written list

6.10 Modern comparisons

6.11 Size of the task

6.12 The constraints

6.13 The calculations

6.14 Conclusions about timetable

7.   Conclusions

7.1 What did Domesday achieve?

7.2 Domesday considered in the historic context of taxation

7.3 Narrow focus of Domesday

7.4 Reflections on value

7.5 Reflections on the logistics and timetable

7.6 Final summary

Appendix A. Agricultural and estate management in the 11th century

Appendix B. Agricultural labour and the Domesday survey

Appendix C. Agriculture, livestock and land use

Appendix D. Landholders and totals

Appendix E. Cornish comparison

Appendix F. Capital sales evidence

Appendix G. Cambridgeshire Shire Reeve Picot’s property empire

Appendix H. Surveying a village

Bibliography

List of boxes

Box 1 A Domesday example or the village of Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire

Box 2 Taxation before title

Box 3 Hides: a system in use

Box 4 Land value taxation

Box 5 The Napoleonic cadastre in France

Box 6 Land measurement in the 11th century

Box 7 Stocking rates on unimproved land

List of figures

Figure 1 The Domesday survey geography

Figure 2 The basic structure

Figure 3 Oxen ploughing

Figure 4 Six hidage assessments in Bede shown in Table 8

Figure 5 Ten county boroughs

Figure 6 Location of seven boroughs

Figure 7 The vills in Armingford Hundred

List of tables

Table 1 A hierarchy of land holdings

Table 2 Numbers of main study areas

Table 3 Tenants in eight vills in Cambridgeshire

Table 4 Odsey Hundred in Hertfordshire

Table 5 Periodic property taxation options

Table 6 Structure of typical Domesday entry for each manor

Table 7 Six Cambridgeshire Hundreds with reduced hides

Table 8 Bede: Some references to hide in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Table 9 Correlations of ploughlands or hides to £s per plough

Table 10 Value and distance from London

Table 11 Comparing the Royal holdings

Table 12 Comparing Cambridgeshire TRE with 1086 values

Table 13 Selected figures from seven Boroughs

Table 14 Valuation list logistics: a general framework

Table 15 Logistics and supplies

Table 16 Armingford Hundred comparisons

Table 17 Minimum manpower and timings for field visits to all vills

Table 18 Manpower and timings required for judicial hearings in each Hundred

Table 19 Volume of Work for Writing List

Table 20 Elapsed time

Table 21 A taxation comparison

Table 22 Domesday recorded numbers for Armingford and Clavering

Table 23 Estimated numbers for Armingford and Clavering as if in 1950s

Table 24 Numbers required for Armingford and Clavering in 1086

Table 25 The basic figures for livestock and land use in Armingford and Clavering

Table 26 GLU Ratios

Table 27 Calculations of land use for Armingford and Clavering

Table 28 Landholders in Cambridgeshire

Table 29 Landholders in Huntingdonshire

Table 30 Cornwall, selected statistics

Table 31 Sales transactions in Liber Eliensis (Fairweather 2005)

Table 32 Picot’s sources of revenue

Glossary of terms

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

The starting point for this work was the introduction to the world of landscape archaeology that I received from Nick James and Sue Oosthuizen. I will always be grateful to them for opening this door to me. My former colleague Paul Sanderson kindly examined the first draft of this book and I greatly benefited from his comments, as I did from those of fellow Chartered Surveyor Alec Tompson, and Emily Phillips who examined later drafts. Tom Williamson was kind enough to give me his opinion, and his comments allowed me to see the viewpoint of a historian. Of course this does not imply that any of them agree with my interpretations of the Domesday survey.

I have enjoyed the constructive encouragement and support of all at Oxbow Books, particularly Julie Gardiner.

Sarah Wroot created all the maps. The base map including Armingford Hundred from ‘An Atlas of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire History’ has been re-used with the kind permission of Anglia Ruskin University. Other maps include information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DomesdayCountyCircuitsMap.png used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. The additions and modification to the base maps are mine, as are all mistakes and errors. The image in Box 1 on p. xiii is by Professor John Palmer, George Slater and opendomesday.org and is used under the Creative Commons 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

Summary

The Domesday survey was a property list carried out by men with surveying and valuation skills. This analysis of it, focusing on eastern England, has been carried out by a surveyor and valuer using the evidence contained in Domesday in comparison with other known property lists. Most of the logistical problems encountered by the Domesday surveyors are universal.

The main aim of this work is to calculate a timetable for the creation of the Domesday survey. In order to do so, it is necessary to analyse the text and to use ‘reverse engineering’ to determine the survey’s purpose, what data was collected, the volume of it and how it was used.

The main conclusions resulting from the analysis are, first, that the aim and purpose of the Domesday survey must have been fiscal. It has the essential features of an ad valorem valuation list. The design and data gathered do not properly serve the only other feasible purposes which are an estate terrier or a land register. Secondly, Domesday was an agrarian list. The means of comparison and main determinant of value was the arable land. Other recorded items were generally relevant to a lesser extent to the valuation of the land. The survey was not a record of the built environment.

The significant figure in almost every manor was the 1086 valuation which was a rental value and not the rent passing. All manors must have been physically inspected during or not long before 1086. There is no known precedent for such a large amount of diverse data being collected, and judgements made, solely at judicial hearings. It is likely that plans had been made for the survey in the years before Christmas 1085. Logistical calculations indicate that it is just feasible, although unlikely, that all the physical surveys were made during the year 1086. The editing and writing of the survey would have taken much more than a year and the survey in the form we now have it would not have been available before the death of King William.

Domesday was a revaluation of the Hidage assessment system using the same underlying concept and the same administrative machinery but updating the data and adding monetary values. Although the survey provided a sound cadastre, it was never used to collect tax directly. It was therefore a fiscal failure.

Preface

The 1086 Domesday Book is of considerable historic significance. It is a large land-based list containing more than 250,000 facts recorded in more than a dozen categories. It covers an area of England of more than 44,000 square miles (114,000 km²). It identifies more than 20,000 manors in 13,000 vills which mostly correspond well to modern parishes and thus almost every recorded item can be located within an area of on average less than 3 square miles.

It is a document that would be of value and interest in any age. Its antiquity makes it uniquely significant. There is a scarcity of written sources in 11th century Britain compared with later centuries and the Domesday survey fills a big gap. There is no other similar database extant for this period anywhere in Europe and probably nothing quite comparable in the World still surviving from the 11th century or before.

The Domesday survey is a rich mine of statistical information. It provides the historian with evidence of how England was governed after the 1066 Conquest. It provides for the geographer evidence of how resources were distributed. It reveals much about feudal England and the medieval agriculture which supported it. But the fascination for many is that it provides, through a narrow window, an intimate glimpse of life in their own village in 1086.

The Domesday Book is a list written in abbreviated medieval Latin and in that form is not easy for a non-specialist to read. It first became widely available from 1738 and, over the years, English translations, studies, analyses and commentaries have proliferated. Nevertheless, there is more to be said.

The purpose of this book is to analyse the 1086 Domesday survey with the perspective of a Chartered Surveyor and agricultural valuer in order to see if that point of view reveals any fresh insights. It does do so. Those who compiled the Domesday survey were the writer’s professional precursors. The underlying theme of the work is to evaluate the logistical steps required to complete such an enterprise. This apparently simple and quite narrow aim became more complex during the process of this analysis. In order to calculate the logistics, the exact nature of each task has to be defined. Surprisingly, it is not always clear what the surveyors were recording and why, and how they used the captured data. This analysis sets out to identify the most likely probabilities.

The Domesday Book is primarily a national list of agrarian assets. A better understanding of it requires an examination of farming methods in the 11th century. Domesday itself reveals much about that agriculture. Other sources of information on medieval farming and land management are examined. They suggest an entirely recognisable agrarian landscape. In order to set the Domesday Book in a wider fiscal context of similar records, it is compared to other cadastres, for property taxation, and property lists for two other purposes in several countries in different ages. In many ways Domesday was not unique when compared with later lists. All these comparisons are essential for a proper understanding of Domesday.

Box 1. A Domesday example for the village of Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire

Gamlingay is a large vill in the Longstowe Hundred on the western border of Cambridgeshire next to Bedfordshire (NGR TL 2455). In 1086 Eudo held 90% of Gamlingay with two separate hides held by others. The parish was, until 1958 in size 4460 acres (1801 ha). The vill was probably similar in size in 1086. The soil is sandy, mainly derived from the Cretaceous Greensand. An ICC page which includes Gamlingay is missing.

The Latin entry in Domesday is as follows.

Phillimore’s English Translation (Morris 1981, 25:9):

In Gamlingay Eudo holds18 hides. Land for 18 ploughs. In lordship 9 hides; 3 ploughs there.

30 villagers with 12 small holders have 15 ploughs. I Frenchman has ½ hide; 12 cottars; 4 slaves.

Meadow for 12 ploughs; woodland for 10 pigs; pasture for the village livestock.

Total value £18; when acquired £10; before 1066 as much.

Wulfmur of Eaton held this manor. 9 Freemen were there who held 4 hides; they could grant and sell; in addition to these hides they held 1 virgate which belongs to (Little) Gransden, the Abbot of Ely’s manor, and which Lisois of Moutiers appropriated in the Abbot’s despite, as the Hundred testifies.

Many of the topics covered and conclusions reached have been identified before by others although, in some cases, the methods of analysis here are new. Quantitative approaches are used where possible. The aim is that all the analyses and conclusions should be capable of falsification should better evidence become available. Some of the conclusions will not completely surprise those with a particular expertise of the Domesday Book. Some of the other conclusions do not accord with generally accepted opinions. The analyses result in different