Domesday: the Inquest and the Book in Perspective
L'École
des hautes études en sciences socials, Paris,
David Roffe
In 1941 5000 women were interviewed by
British government officials to determine how
many bras and corsets they owned. The subsequent report showed that each
woman had, on average, 1.2 items of underwear of this kind. So much for the
headline figure: there were also important variations to note. The rate of
corset ownership was more or less even across social class and occupation, but not
so brassieres. Housewives, it seemed, owned 0.8 but agricultural workers, the
so-called land girls, 1.9. I'm sorry to lower the tone of this august
gathering, but I think that there is an important point for us here today. The
official explanation for this gross intrusion into the privacy of English
womanhood was at best gnomic:
Only with this information can the
greatest efficiency in planning be secured. It was therefore felt that detailed
information should be secured on a subject which is of interest to most women -
foundation garments.
This statement invites all sorts of
speculation. Was there’re a problem in production? Was underwear to be
rationed? Was a tax to be imposed on it? I could go on. What was the government
up to? Well, it was not concerned about underwear in itself: the focus was on under-wiring
and stays, that is the metal that was needed to manufacture the items. Yes, it
was all about the supply of steel for the war effort.
We
as historians are used to the idea that documents say what they mean and mean
what they say. They are after all, our stock in trade, our bread and butter. It
comes, then, as something of a shock to realize that survey records do not
always speak of the concerns that bring them into being. Without context, we would
continue to wonder why government ministers were obsessed with underwear in
1941. This is a salutary lesson when we come to interpret the records of medieval
surveys. We have lots of records, but more rarely the reason why they were
produced in the first place. This is no more so than with the Domesday inquest,
the first of a long line of post-Conquest inquiries.
The
origins of the Domesday inquest are well known. The 'E' version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 1085 William, king of
What it the manor called? Who held it in the time of King Edward?
Who now holds it? How many hides? How many ploughs on the demesne? How many
men? How many villagers? How many cottars? How many slaves? How many free men?
How many sokemen? How much wood? How much meadow? How much pasture? How many
mills? How many fish ponds? How much has been added or taken away? How much,
taken together, it was worth and how much now? How much each free man or
sokeman had or has. All this at three dates, to wit in the time of King Edward
and when King William gave it and as it is now. And if it is possible for more
to be had than is had.
The commissioners put these questions not
only to the holder of each estate but also to the men of the shire and hundred,
and the priest and representatives of each village, both French and English. It
has been estimated that at least 60,000 people gave evidence in 1086.
The
process produced a mass of different types of documentation – simple lists,
partial surveys, tax records, and the like survive in relative profusion. In
what form these data were initially assembled, however, remains a matter of
debate. For some scholars the immediate aim of the inquest was the compilation
of accounts arranged by lordship, what have been termed circuit returns after
the shires that were assigned to each group of commissioners. The Liber Exoniensis, Exon to its friends, is
a possible example. Others, and I include myself in that group, would argue
that the commissioners aimed rather at the production of accounts arranged by
village, hundred, and shire. The Inquisitio
Comitatus Cantabrigiensis (ICC), an account of much of Cambridgeshire, is
the type document here, although it survives only in the late twelfth-century
copy. Both Exon and ICC are more or less full records of the proceedings in the
areas that they cover. However, they remain the only witnesses to the earliest
stages of organization of the data. The main source for the inquest is Domesday
Book. It is now bound into five parts, but
originally, it consisted of two volumes. Volume II, Little Domesday, contains an
account of the three shires of eastern
The procedure of the Domesday
enterprise and the main sources that came out of it are thus clear.
Unfortunately, this wealth of evidence is not matched by any contemporary
statement of the reason for the inquest. We are well-informed about the when, the
where, the how, and the what of the survey, but in the dark as to the why. In
consequence, historically attention has focused on Domesday Book itself as the
most impressive and comprehensive product of the process. The Book captured the
imagination from early on. Round about 1110 or so its production was seen in at
least one quarter as the aim of the Domesday inquest and later in the century
this perception was given a high political spin. Writing in the Dialogue of the
Exchequer, Richard fitzNigel asserted in c.1179
that it was designed to bring
That
was an agenda – I use the word advisedly - that has run and run ever since. In
the mid thirteenth century Matthew Paris opined that the production of Domesday
Book was where ’the manifest oppression of the English began’. The ‘
The [BSE] inquiry joins a long
English tradition of detailed government-commissioned reports compiled with
state-of-the-art technology. The Domesday
Book was the first and BSE might be thought of as a tardy riposte to that
Norman intrusion - the disease, after all, has crossed the Channel in the
opposite direction.
Domesday Book as political control and
propaganda remains a leitmotif of modern historical discourse.
Traditionally,
then, we have been presented with a very mechanical understanding of the Domesday
inquiry and, indeed, of the inquest as an instrument of government in general.
The focus on Domesday Book has fostered the notion that the inquest was designed
to determine right and embody it in a definitive register. It's almost as if
King William clicked his fingers to activate the well-oiled machine of English
local government, and, within the constraints of the system, it smoothly produced
the goods in extra-quick time to his command, with everyone saying what a
bastard the king was as they went home. It is a picture that is the more plausible
because we all know that William was a powerful and much feared king. And yet it
sits ill with what we know of the major surveys and their records in the later
Middle Ages.
GDB
is not a complete record of the inquest. It is an abstract which follows a
decided programme. The scribe who wrote it most obviously omits the names of
jurors and the details of livestock, but he did more than merely abbreviate.
His sources were various and he saw his task as producing an economical and
uniform account of each estate with an emphasis on ease of reference. Thus, rubrication
draws the eye to names and entries and various devices are used to highlight
the status of land and so on. LDB is usually considered to be a circuit return,
but it too, I would argue, is clearly an abbreviation. Unlike Exon, it is a
source compiled to a neat programme. It too systematically omits the names of
jurors and certain types of data, notably ploughland figures, that had been
industriously recorded in the inquest. Again, carefully laid out and rubricated
at crucial points, it was evidently compiled for reference.
Records
of this type are well-attested in the later middle ages. Alongside Domesday
Book in the Exchequer there were various other books that preserved inquest
records from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. All of them are post hoc
abbreviations, compiled sometimes as much as hundred years after the inquests in
question. A note on the flysheet of one of them, the Testa de Neville, apparently written when the work was compiled
from a series of thirteenth century inquest records in 1302, warns the reader:
Remember that this book was
composed and compiled from several official inquests…and therefore the contents
of this book are to be used for evidence here in the Exchequer and not for the
record.
From the thirteenth century abbreviations,
very like monastic cartularies, had no legal standing and were intended simply
for reference.
All
of this contrasts with the inquest records themselves. Many were discarded once
abstracts were drawn up, but where they do survive, they can be seen to be a part
of a dialectic of investigation, negotiation, and action. The first thing to
notice is that the names of the jurors are carefully recorded, as one would
expect, and their seals appended. More than, this, though, they are carefully
annotated. In the 1275 Ragman rolls, for example, it is noted where jurors had
died. Their continued presence was important. Their answers to the capitula indicate why. The jurors not
only give evidence on the matters demanded of them. They also incorporate the querelae, complaints, of individuals and
the community These querelae were
obviously not recognitions, they were merely a statement of fact that someone
had a grievance. In 1170 it was the misdeeds of sheriffs, in 1258 and 1274/5 of
royal and seigneurial officials in general. So was the rest of the data the
jurors presented merely untested evidence. The verdicts provided information
where records were wanting or local officials could not be trusted to provide
it. The jurors, then, were an integral part of the process of inquiry and as
such their verdicts informed further negotiation and action. Most immediately, measures
might be taken against royal officials, an aid might be determined, or, in the
later thirteenth century, legislation might follow. The complaints of the
community more usually brought up the rear and were relegated to routine legal
processes in the local courts. Nevertheless, it was a reciprocal process which
served both the crown and local communities. The inquest was a channel of
communication between the king and his subject to the end of resolving mutual
concerns.
Later
medieval practice, then, is clear. The business of the inquest is a separate
enterprise from the abbreviation and preservation of the records that came out
of them. How does the Domesday process chime with this model? From internal
evidence Domesday Book has been re-dated to the reign of William Rufus or the
early years of Henry I. If this remains controversial, then there is no doubt
that it was compiled as a register of the king's dues in the shire. The scribes
of both volumes carefully re-arranged the data, where possible, to facilitate
reference. It is the shire that becomes the basic unit of organization, and
land holdings within it, for the first time in the Domesday corpus. Boroughs,
as special royal estates from which the sheriff administered the shire, are
enrolled as a whole and, in GDB, brought to the front of each shire, and the
dues of the king from his regalia are appended to each. The account of
But
what of the inquest records themselves? There is evidence that some were kept
in the Exchequer for a while, but were subsequently lost or destroyed. Apart
from those incorporated into Domesday Book itself, the few that now survive are
found in private archives. What is clear, regardless of later perceptions, is
that the jurors' presentments were not recognitions either. Judgements there
are in the corpus, notably in
Domesday Book, with its own administrative programme, is unlikely to
tell us what was. A series of summary documents that came out of the inquest
are more revealing. In these sum totals are recorded for the salient details of
the estates of each lord county by county. That relating to
Ely Abbey’s lands in
The same abbot [of Ely] has in demesne in
His knights have 2 manors in the same county [assessed] at 5 hides.
There are 3 ploughs in demesne, and 6 villeins, 7 bordars, and 7 slaves who
have 6 ploughs. It is worth £8. This land suffices for 61 ploughs. It has increased in value by £9 in the hands of Abbot Symeon.
Two items are of especial interest, the
number of ploughlands and the number of manors. The nature of the ploughland
data, like much else in Domesday studies, has been the subject of ongoing
academic debate. Now is not the time to rehearse the arguments of whether they
represent a new tax assessment or merely a measure of arable. What is more or
less agreed is that, since the figures are linked to tax assessment,
ploughlands are in some way a measure of tax capacity. Can the king get more? Again,
the nature of the manor is much disputed. But, whatever it was, we know that in
the inquest the commissioners were concerned about how many there were and what
had been added or taken away from each. Fees, it seems, had initially been measured
in terms of manors and it was important to determine how many were still held
in 1086. It seems to me that here we have a proxy for service. Tax capacity and
knight service, I would suggest, are the primary concerns of the Domesday
inquest.
This
reconstruction of the business in 1085 accords well with the immediate context
of the Domesday survey. The contemporary sources show it was a time of crisis.
In
the event Cnut was unable to launch the invasion armada before the onset of
winter and by the end of the year William stood down some of the mercenaries,
while maintaining a more limited garrison over the winter into the following
year. The Domesday inquest was launched at a time when cash was clearly at a
premium. In this context a review of the royal demesne and the capacity of the
taxation system becomes immediately comprehensible. And equally so was a
re-assessment of service. The nature of the servitia
debita – the number of knights owed by the king's men in return for their
lands – before 1086 is not known, but, whatever form it took, it appears to
have proved inadequate in the face of the invasion. Mercenaries had had to be
hired at great expense to all and not a little inconvenience for those you had
to billet them. Something had to be done. A conference was held in early August
1086 in
: The
upshot of the meeting at
But
all that is another story. The point I want to make here is that the Domesday
inquest, in common with all the later national inquests, was communal business
of the highest order. In it we see a king, in the face of a common problem, working
with his subjects rather than in spite of them. King William may very well have
brought to
In
that great classic of English history, 1066
and All That, there are only two types of king, the strong and the weak,
and two types of subject, the oppressed and the rebellious. The reality is, of
course, more complex. In introducing the idea of consultation and negotiation
into royal government I have been criticized for my ‘socialist’ sensibilities.
Nowadays that is as much a hanging offence in academia as it is in public life.
I do not repent. The Domesday inquest fits in to a long tradition of
cooperation which is embodied in the shire. The sworn verdict and the inquest
was its motor. Yes, from time to time, the instrument became bureaucratic and even oppressive, but
in times of emergency and uncertainty it reverted to type. It was a vital channel
of communication between king and subject. As such, the Domesday inquest, and
those great surveys that followed it, should rightly be seen as the prehistory
of Parliament rather than an instrument of autocratic government that preceded
it.
The
moral of this tale is that we should take care not to be dazzled by the bras
and the corsets, as it were, in our records. Inquests are a major source for
the history of
©David Roffe 2013