Chapter IV - SUFFOLK

Summary

The Domesday folios relating to Suffolk share the double distinction of those relating to Norfolk. In the first place, they form part of the Little Domesday Book, with its greater detail, its information about conditions in 1066 as well as those in 1086, and its particulars about livestock on the demesne lands. The account of Suffolk comes last, and it is followed by a sentence that forms the concluding paragraph to the book as a whole. This is the famous colophon: Anno millesimo octogesimo sexto ab Incarnatione Domini vigesimo vero regni Willelmi facta est ista description non solum per hos tres comitatus sed etiam per alios. Round believed that the word descriptio refers not to the making of the book, but to the making of the survey; and that the book itself, as we now know it, was not completed until much later. Professor Galbraith, however, does not draw this distinction between the descriptio and the Little Domesday Book, and he believes that the latter was itself completed in 1086.

In the second place, the I.E. again provides an important subsidiary source of information. Indeed, it is more important for Suffolk than for Norfolk because the abbey of Ely held more estates here, and the opportunities of comparing the two sets of information are correspondingly greater; the Ely estates were particularly numerous in the hundreds to the north and east of Ipswich.