Domesday Book and the Tenurial Revol

Summary

IN a recent article entitled ‘1066-1086; A Tenurial Revolution?’, Peter Sawyer outlined a provocative theory on the mechanism, by which English lands were divided after the Norman Conquest. He argues that many of the lands of minor English thegns and sokemen could be found in the hands of a particular Norman tenant-in-chief, not because they themselves were the antecessores of great Norman lords, but because they had been the men of such lords’ antecessors. Sawyer provides several dozen examples of this, and maintains that these scattered hints of continuity in lordship are typical of much post-Conquest land transference. Furthermore, Sawyer argues that evidence for tenurial continuity is limited simply because Domesday’s commissioners or its scribes ignored the bulk of information on Anglo-Saxon overlords. He concludes that although many Old English lordships are concealed by Domesday Book, it is along these pre-Conquest lines that the Norman tenurial pattern, emerged. Hence, he proposes that ‘such examples suggest that pre-Conquest England had fiefs very much like those of 1086’, and that ‘the changes in tenurial structure after the Norman Conquest were less than revolutionary’.

I think that Peter Sawyer, like many other historians, has been misled by atypical evidence drawn from the vast quantity of data contained in Domesday Book. There is always the temptation when using this exhausting document to pull out a handful of examples from Domesday’s bountiful store and declare that what one has found is representative. What is needed, however, in using Domesday, is a rigorous examination of all the survey’s pertinent information. It is then necessary to chart that evidence and to plot its progress across the circuits and shires of England. Then and only then can one decide what is representative and what is not. This is no simple task, and it is difficult to undertake any broadly comparative, kingdom-wide study based on Domesday’s unwieldy bulk without the aid of a computer. These machines are able in the span of seconds to reorganise Domesday information, locate possible references, find correlations, perform basic statistics, and provide sophisticated maps. The Domesday Book Database, a computerised edition of William the Conqueror’s great survey, is now being completed at the University of California, Santa Barbara.