1. INTRODUCTION

 

Domesday Book is the greatest testimony to the genius and energy of Anglo-Norman government for, although parallels have been adduced, no document of the period is as comprehensive in its account of a realm.[1] Its central importance was recognised from its inception. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicler expressed wonder mixed with horror at the very enormity of the survey,[2] and the name Domesday itself, first recorded within a hundred years of the Inquest, attests to the special place that it thereafter occupied in the mediaeval mind. Like the Last Judgement, there was no appeal from its testimony[3]. Its high reputation was, indeed, merited for it was a departure of some moment in the theory and practice of government. Anglo-Saxon administration had made much use of documentation. It was the very efficiency of the system that made the inquest possible. But, more than any other single act, the Domesday survey moved governance out of the realm of custom and personal relationship onto the firm foundation of written record. Throughout the Middle Ages it was the source of ultimate authority in matters of tenure[4].

In legal terms, then, and more often than not in fact, the documented history of most English settlements begins with Domesday Book. If it assumed an aura of almost mystical power in the Middle Ages, its primary importance as an historical source was recognised in the sixteenth century. The survey  has  been  studied ever since. Its potential, however, is far from exhausted. Not only does its very size defy an easy grasp of its data - in the modern edition it is published in some 39 volumes - but its singular uniqueness and comprehensive subject matter provide an almost unlimited field for new insights into eleventh-century society. A field of study in its own right, Domesday Book is also a vital source for all manner of disciplines: political, social, economic, legal and landscape history; physical, human and economic geography; genealogy; English language, Latin and place-name studies; and much else. New methods of analysis are continually wresting novel information from it.

            The Nottinghamshire section of Domesday Book, however, has been little studied compared with the attention paid to other counties. In the first and only serious examination of the text,[5] Stenton clearly felt it was barren ground for historical research:

(The Nottinghamshire Domesday) is not one of the more attractive parts of the great record, for its subject matter is somewhat severely restricted to such details as were strictly relevant to the main object of the Domesday Inquest, which was the assessment and distribution of the geld. Many problems are raised in the course of the portion of the survey with which we have to deal, but in general we can only hope to solve them in the light of evidence drawn from beyond the borders of our county......[6]

In his subsequent study of manorial structure in the  Northern  Danelaw, he was unable to draw a significant volume of evidence from the Nottinghamshire Domesday.[7] the reasons for this despair become readily apparent after the most cursory reading of the text. The accounts of both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire are terse in the extreme. There are few explanatory notes within the text, and, unlike in other counties, there is no record of the disputes that came to light in the course of the enquiry which is elsewhere so useful in elucidating the text.[8] Moreover, Nottinghamshire is unfortunate in having little documentation both before and immediately after the Survey. There were few religious houses with land in the county before the Conquest and therefore only a handful of Anglo-Saxon charters have survived.[9] Several foundations came into existence within seventy years of the Domesday survey, but none has extant records comparable to those of Peterborough Abbey which are invaluable in studying the early history of Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire.[10] In addition, no Domesday satellites like the Yorkshire Summary, or early twelfth-century surveys like those of Lindsey, Leicester, and Northampton have survived.[11] The Domesday account, then, stands alone, and we are left with an impression of simplicity of social structure and stunted development within the county. Needless to say, this impression is misleading. Indeed, the Domesday scribe himself, or a collaborator, may have recognised the danger and tried to remedy it. Almost all explanatory notes which reveal the complex reality behind the standard formulas are postscriptal and suggest that he was aware that the information had been over-compressed to the point of obscurity.[12]

            Such are the limitations that any study of the Nottinghamshire Domesday must accept. However, much can still be learnt from the text itself. In Stenton's day, the assessment and distribution of the geld were seen as the main function of Domesday Book. Thus, it was natural that the historian's primary analysis of the seigneurially arranged text involved its rearrangement into a geographical form.[13] As will become clear in the following pages, much of the evidence is thereby lost. The management of the geld is now seen as only one of a number of objects of the enquiry. But first and foremost, it is clear that the seigneurial form of the text was intended from the inception of the enquiry at Gloucester in 1085.[14] The starting point of the present study, then, is the form of the text as it is written in the Exchequer Domesday. However, ultimately, like Stenton, we must draw upon evidence from outside the county to elucidate many of the problems posed by the Nottinghamshire folios. But we have a useful datum in the accounts of the counties which were drawn up by the same Domesday commissioners. The diplomatic of the Exchequer text reveals that the Nottinghamshire account was compiled in the same form as the Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Roteland, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire sections.[15] This is one of the more obvious groups of counties that can be identified in the Exchequer text, and the similarities suggest that the six shires constituted a circuit entrusted to a single group of  commissioners. It is conventionally known as circuit 6.[16] The terms used to express tenurial relationships are standardised within the circuit and the procedure employed to collect and compile the information was probably much the same throughout this large area of England. Comparison therefore becomes more meaningful. Although the formulas may not be exact descriptions, they approximate to what the commissioners believed they were examining and are therefore probably used consistently. There are, of course, dangers. Over-formulation can give the impression of greater conformity than was actually present. Nevertheless, differences in social, economic and tenurial structure are apparent within the standard forms. The different entry formations of the counties of Roteland and Lincolnshire, for example, give an impression of very different types of estate structure and local administration.[17] Therefore, with due caution, comparative analysis can be used with some confidence.

            The peculiarities of the text have been appreciated as long as the survey has been used by government officials and  antiquarians. William Woolley, the seventeenth-century historian and topographer, recognised the inconvenience caused by a document which was arranged by manor and fee, and was one of the first to produce elaborate indices to facilitate the use of the folios in which he was interested.[18] Few students of Domesday Book, however, appreciated the significance of the form of the text to the interpretation of its data until the pioneering work of Round and Maitland in the late nineteenth century.[19] The one subjected the survey to the most minute criticism in the search for sources and procedures, while the other analysed its data and formulas with a hitherto unparalleled insight and sensitivity. Neither paid very much attention to the manuscript itself, though, and the various editors and translators of the Victoria County History editions they inspired noted with only varying degrees of thoroughness additions and duplication of material. Only in recent years has the manuscript been examined as artefact. The rebinding of both volumes in 1953 provided an opportunity to examine the text in detail: the gatherings were recorded, a general analysis of the hands was undertaken, and rulings and the like were noted.[20] The material has recently been reassessed by Alexander Rumble in a broader context.[21] Both studies are general, however, and no attempt has been made to look at the folios of a specific county in detail. The potential of such a study was adumbrated by both Maxwell and Welldon Finn in their studies of the Yorkshire folios,[22] but the editors of the subsequent Phillimore editions have not  always  accepted the challenge by noting all the variations that are apparent in the manuscript.[23] This is of considerable importance to an analysis of Domesday Book for the traces of sources and procedural processes. The text is the best testimony that we have to the details of procedure and compilation, but its data cannot be used until the forms and stratigraphy of the manuscript are understood. In chapter 2, therefore, the conventions of the Nottinghamshire folios, both diplomatic and calligraphic, are examined, along with peculiarities of compilation such as addition of material and irregularities of form.

            With the establishment of a text, the sources of the Inquest and the process of compilation are discussed in chapter 3. This area of Domesday studies has been perhaps the most contentious subject of debate for problems of purpose are inseparable from procedures. Round was the first historian to produce a coherent and reasoned account of the making of Domesday Book. He argued that the commissioners produced original returns in the form of hundred rolls which were only cast into a seigneurial form at the Exchequer in Winchester where the final version was written. Based upon an analysis of the Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis and the Cambridgeshire folios, his hypothesis gained support from the widespread evidence of a sequence of hundreds within most county texts.[24] Indeed, the 'headquarters' theory went unchallenged for some 50 years until Galbraith produced a new thesis based upon the Exon Domesday.[25] He argued that the seigneurial form of the text was intended from the very inception of the survey in 1085. Local juries were consulted on the data collected, but much information was provided by the tenant-in-chief or their agents, and the text was compiled fee by fee through various recensions. This view in its broad outline has now been almost universally accepted. We are all Galbraithians now. The recensionist model, however, has been modified. In 1955 P. H. Sawyer drew attention to the considerable body of evidence for hundredal order in Domesday Book, and subsequently argued that the text known as Evesham A attested to a hundredally arranged recension in the production of the text.[26] The effect of such studies was to multiply the stages of compilation to an incredible degree, and it was not until 1971 that S. Harvey broke the vicious circle by postulating the obvious role of pre-existing documentation such as geld accounts.[27] In a further publication, she went on to argue that some of these sources, of which the Yorkshire 'Summary' is an example, may themselves have been seigneurially arranged.[28] More recently H. B. Clarke has re-examined the whole problem of the Domesday satellites and compilation, and has put forward a simple schema.[29] He argues that the first stage in the enquiry is represented by Evesham A. A geographically arranged source recording the name of each manor, value, and sometimes ploughs, the document was compiled from seigneurial claims to land, and checked against a geld list, which were subsequently presented to the hundred juries in the initial court sessions. Suitably annotated, this document was redrafted in seigneurial form, a stage represented by Evesham K, and the county return was compiled by reference to the court proceedings and seigneurial returns of manorial resources, while a second group of commissioners resolved disputed matters.[30]

            An analysis of the Nottinghamshire folios suggests that similar procedures and sources lie behind the Domesday account of the county. It is argued that the text betrays vestiges of written seigneurial returns, but the breves were formulated by reference to a geographically arranged source based upon a geld list which had been proved in an open court session. In the process, the account of estates was recast in terms of local government units, but throughout seigneurial sources appear to have taken priority in determining the content of breves. Estates were therefore enrolled on the basis of claims to land rather than legal right. The resolution of disputes was clearly independent of, and possibly later than, the compilation of the body of the text, and it would appear that title to land was of less importance to the commissioners than de facto tenure and value to the lord.

            In chapter 4, the transfer of title from Anglo-Saxon lords to Norman tenants-in-chief is explored. In 1086 title to land seems to have been derived from a pre-Conquest predecessor. However, Domesday Book records the names of thousands of holders of land before 1066. In many circuits, there is some indication of status and rank, but in  the  East Midlands folios there are few clues, and it is usually assumed that all named TRE landholders were equally free. Thus, Stenton, while recognising the possibility of a tenurial hierarchy, accepted the mass of Danelaw manorial lords as king's thanes, and subsequently historians have seen the creation of honours as a radical reorganisation of landholders and tenure in response to the need to forge militarily viable units after the Conquest.[31] The starting point of the present analysis is the inherent impossibility of transferring the land of all of these lords to Norman tenants-in-chief by name. It is argued that few of those identified in Domesday Book conferred title in the legal sense, and evidence is cited to demonstrate that most were tenants of predecessors rather than free agents. The grant of one manor, then, brought with it the right to all the estates that were dependent upon it. It is concluded that many honours have a decidedly pre-Conquest identity and, indeed, English families and pre-Conquest tenures survived in Nottinghamshire in large numbers.[32]

            This conclusion raises the problem of the relationship between tenants and their lords both before and after the Conquest. Stenton saw the distinction between demesne and soke as the fundamental feature of tenure. In the one the lord had a proprietorial right, while in the other he was only entitled to certain dues, the most important of which were suit and the profits of justice.[33] This view was challenged by Stephenson who,  recognising  that  many  lords  held  sokeland without jurisdiction, argued that the essential bond was commendation, a far from casual relationship.[34] The concept was developed by Anne Kristensen who drew the distinction between sake and soke as the dues that accrued from the regalian organisation of the centena, that is, something akin to sokes, shires, or multiple estates, and soke as the more precarious bond of commendation.[35] All three, however, have, to a greater or lesser degree, accepted the the basic freedom of the sokeman to alienate his own land. In chapter 5, a different approach is taken to the problem. In the context of continuity of tenure between 1066 and 1086, the tenurial upheavals of the reign of William provide an unique insight into the mechanisms of tenure in the late eleventh century, and suggest that tenants were far less free than has hitherto been supposed. It is argued that the fundamental dichotomy in the transfer of land was not between demesne and soke, but land and soke. The tenure of the one conferred rights to extensive tributary dues which generally precluded any serious claim to title, while the other merely entitled the lord to the relatively minor profits of justice. Most, probably all, predecessors, however, enjoyed the soke of extended groups of manors, but retained a residual interest in land. Their title was normally expressed by the term sake and soke, which is consistently contrasted with simple soca, and effectively amounted to the rights to bookland. The pre-Conquest tenant, then, did not have unequivocal right to his estate, and the emergence of many manors can be seen to be a function of the delegation, as opposed to the alienation, of tributary dues. If predecessors in the legal sense held vast estates by book, they and their lands were still in the soke of the king, and their forfeitures were coordinated through a common system of local government. Throughout the Middle Ages the shire was the basic unit of royal administration. It was articulated through a network of vills and wapentakes, and everyone was theoretically subject to its jurisdiction. The origins of the organisation have been hotly debated. In the fifteenth century King Alfred was credited with the creation of the system, and since then many interpretations have been advanced.[36] In the East Midlands, it has usually been seen as an essentially Danish institution: the wapentake, derived from the Old Norse term vapnatak, the brandishing of weapons to signify assent, was in origin a popular assembly of Danish warriors, and the shire court was the predecessor of the meeting of the whole army in the central borough.[37] In chapter 6, the character and origin of the infrastructure of the system are examined. Its basic characteristic was a series of territorial tithings, the twelve-carucate hundreds of the Northern Danelaw, which were grouped to form wapentakes and what later became the shires. As a late tenth century innovation, this institution is the diagnostic feature of the system, and it is argued that the whole organisation was established after the conquest of the Viking Kingdom of York, possibly in 954-63.

            The administrative centre of the shire was the borough of Nottingham. Since Maitland's pioneering study of the institution,[38] much has been written on the subject of boroughs. His  garrison  theory, developed by Ballard,[39] has generally been rejected, and the gradual emergence of the institution has been charted by Tait.[40] Early discussions, however, were much coloured by concepts which came out of the nineteenth-century municipal reform movement. The great explosion of interest in urban archaeology, consequent upon redevelopment of town centres in the 1960s and 1970s, has led to a reappraisal. A definitive reinterpretation is still awaiting the publication of innumerable sites, but Susan Reynolds work has gone a long way to formulate the problems.[41] Nevertheless, little detailed research has yet been undertaken on the Domesday borough in its own right. In chapter 7, the text of the account of Nottingham is subject to analysis, and its various conventions are examined. Bi-partite in form, much of the account is devoted to a series of fees which were technically outside of the borough. Evidence is adduced, however, to demonstrate that the liberties of the lords of urban tenements were not of long standing. The ecclesiastical structure of Nottingham suggests that royal and comital power was developed to an almost unprecedented degree for a county borough, and that the earl's estate, which was reorganised after the Conquest to form the French Borough, was possibly the centre of a group of thanes settled in the vicinity of Nottingham to ensure its defence.

            The concentration of royal influence in Nottingham was merely the corrollary of a similar concentration of power in the shire. Nottinghamshire was a key march against the North, and the crown retained great estates in the county along with extensive dues over the whole area. The formation of the shire reflects the continuing royal pre-occupation with the area. Nottinghamshire did not emerge as an autonomous entity until the early eleventh century, but it was established as an administrative unit at the same time as the introduction of the hundreds and wapentakes by the 960s. The context was the formation of the Five Boroughs. Until recently,[42] the confederacy of Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester, and Stamford, first noticed as a group in the anachronistic 942 annal, was seen as an essentially Danish institution of the late ninth or early tenth century.[43] Its close relationship with the territorial tithing, however, indicates that it was a later innovation. It is argued that it was a regional organisation introduced by a West Saxon king, either Eadred or Edgar, to create a buffer zone against a still hostile and unstable North. In the process an earlier burghal system was reorganised to create effective units of administration, which in their turn became the shires of the East Midlands with the disintegration of the Confederacy in the early eleventh century.

            In chapter 9, the Domesday evidence for settlement and estate structures is examined. The deficiencies of the data have long been recognised.[44] Despite the unparalleled range and content of the survey, independent evidence frequently demonstrates apparent anomalies and contradictions. Many thriving settlements, for example, are not recorded by name, while commodities that were located in one village often appear to be appended to another for it was public obligations and value to the lord which conditioned procedure and the final record. Nevertheless, Domesday is still used to reconstruct the eleventh-century landscape and economy. In particular, Professor Darby, while recognising the limitations in his monumental Domesday geographies,[45] has assumed that the data are meaningful in geographical terms and can therefore be analysed cartographically. Computer-based studies of the text have accepted this premise, and implicitly assume that data are discrete and statistically valid.[46] In the present work several caveats are expressed. The identifying names of entries are clearly not place, but estate names, and therefore Domesday Book provides little direct information on settlement and its forms. Even information on estate structure is ambiguous. As essentially a tributary nexus, the manor does not necessarily coincide with economic units of production, and its structure as portrayed by Domesday Book is largely determined by the procedure of the enquiry rather than the management of the estate.

            In the final chapter, the origins and development of Nottingham-shire society and institutions are examined in a regional context. The detail that Domesday Book provides about the county adds much to our understanding of the history of the East Midlands in the late Saxon period. But in its turn the data cannot be fully interpreted without reference to the complex of political intrigues in the Five Boroughs and beyond. For much of the period under review, Nottinghamshire was socially, and often politically, an integral part of the North: to the very eve of the Norman Conquest the important boundary between North and South was the Welland rather than the Humber. The West Saxon hegemony in the region, dating from 920, was therefore periodically disturbed by separatist sympathies. Nevertheless, the East Midlands were of vital importance to the security of Mercia and the south against an even more unstable Northumbria, and the emergence of the distinctive institutions of the region owe more to successive attempts by English kings to stabilise the area and divorce it from the North, than to native Danish initiative.

            Some ninety years ago Maitland looked forward to the time when the Domesday data would be available, county by county, in a manageable geographical form.[47] With the Hull and Santa Barbara computer projects nearing completion, that dream is almost a reality. It is apposite at this time, then, to stress more than ever the necessity of studying the Domesday text as it was written. Nowadays, no one seriously holds the view that its form is some strange and inexplicable aberration. Yet nevertheless the arrangement of materials by manor and breve is still experienced as a blessed nuisance, and all too often primary analysis consists of a rapid redrafting into a comprehensible geographical form. It is hoped that the present study illustrates just how much is thereby lost. Historians will always want to contrast and compare Domesday evidence, and, indeed, the ready availability of Domesday data bases will be an inestimable boon to the study of diplomatic and the like. But first and foremost, the historian's primary duty is to the text for, as an eleventh century artefact, it is the best clue we have to the nature of the society that produced it.

 

 



[1] J. Percival, 'The Precursors of Domesday Book: Roman and Carolingian Land Registers', Domesday Book: a Reassessment, ed. P. H. Sawyer, London 1985, 5-27.

[2]  ASC, 161.

[3] E. M. Hallam, Domesday Book Through Nine Centuries, London 1986, 34.

[4] E. M. Hallam, Domesday Book Through Nine Centuries, London 1986, 34.

[5] M. W. Bishop has recently examined the problems of multiple estates in the county and their origins. But general textual considerations were beyond his brief (M. W. Bishop, 'Multiple Estates in Late Anglo-Saxon Nottinghamshire', TTS 85, (1981), 37-47). The historical geography of Domesday Nottinghamshire has been analysed at length in The Domesday Geography of Northern England, Cambridge 1962, eds H. C. Darby, I. S. Maxwell.

[6] VCH Notts i, 207.

[7] TMS.

[8] The Clamores, the record of such proceedings, only survive for three of the six Circuit 6 counties:- Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and Huntingdonshire (DBi f.208a,b; 373a-374b; 375a-377d). Elsewhere claims are noted, often postscriptally, in the text.

[9] ECNE, 111-3.

[10] VCH Notts ii, passim; T. Stapleton, Chronicon Petroburgense, London 1849, 157-83.

[11] DBi f.379; Lincs DB, 337-60; FE, 196-214; VCH Northants i, 365-89.

[12] See Appendix 1.

[13] FE, 3-146; DBB, 1-23.

[14] MDB, 29 and passim.

[15] DB i, f.203a-208c, 272a-379.

[16] C. Stephenson, 'Notes on the Composition and Interpretation of Domesday Book', Speculum 22, (1947), 1-15. Galbraith accepted the general analysis, but wondered whether Yorkshire and Lincolnshire constituted a separate circuit on the grounds of the great size of circuit 6 (MDB, 59). There are, indeed, peculiarities in the Yorkshire folios, notably the lack of marginal M, in the earlier breves. However, conventions are developed that are found in Lincolnshire, and are consistently applied in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Huntingdon-shire, and it is argued in chapter 2 that the variations point to the pragmatic response of a single group of commissioners to the problems of compilation presented to them.

[17] Roteland is characterised by an ancient pattern of discrete multiple estates consisting of a central manorial caput surrounded by contributory berewicks. Fission of estates was not well-advanced (C. Phythian-Adams, 'Rutland Reconsidered', Mercian Studies, ed. A. Dornier, Leicester 1977, 67-9). By way of contrast, Lincolnshire is characterised by large scattered sokes with a multitude of small manors in between. The overwhelming impression is one of fragmentation of large estates. See chapters 5 and 9.

[18] W. Woolley, History of Derbyshire, eds C. Glover, P. Riden, Chesterfield 1981, microfiche 1, f.12r-14r.

[19] FE; DBB.

[20] Public Record Office, Domesday Book Rebound, London 1954.

[21] A. R. Rumble, 'The Palaeography of the Domesday Manuscripts', Domesday Book: a Reassessment, 28-49.

[22] Maxwell, Domesday Geography of Northern England, 456-94; R. W. Finn, The Making and Limitations of the Yorkshire Domesday, York 1972.

[23] For the omissions from the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire volumes, see R. Black, D. R. Roffe, The Nottinghamshire Domesday: a Reader's Guide, Nottingham 1986, 30-33; D. R. Roffe, The Derbyshire Domesday, Darley Dale 1986, 29-30. Later volumes contain much more analysis of the manuscript.

[24] FE, 6-29.

[25] V. H. Galbraith, 'The Making of Domesday Book', EHR 57, (1942), 161-77; MDB, 29. His starting point was F. H. Baring's analysis of  Exon which showed that it was the direct source of the Exchequer text for the West Country shires ('The Exeter Domesday', EHR 27, (1912), 309-18).

[26] P. H. Sawyer, 'The "Original Returns" and Domesday Book', EHR 70, (1955), 177-97; P. H. Sawyer, 'Evesham A, a Domesday Text', Worcester Historical Society, Miscellany 1, Worcester 1960, 3-36.

[27] S. P. J. Harvey, 'Domesday Book and its Predecessors', EHR 86, (1971), 753-73.

[28] S. P. J. Harvey, 'Domesday Book and Anglo-Norman Governance', TRHS, 5th ser. 25, (1975), 175-93.

[29] H. B. Clarke, 'The Domesday Satellites', Domesday Book: a Reassessment, 50-70.

[30] Clarke relates the clamores stage of the enquiry to the mission of the second set of commissioners that Bishop Robert of Hereford refers to (W. H. Stevenson, 'A Contemporary Description of the Domesday Survey', EHR 22, (1907), 74). In chapter 2 and 3, it is argued that there was a separate survey of the king's land.

[31] TMS, 60-1; M. Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, Oxford 1986, 23-28.

[32] This argument has been put forward in D. R. Roffe, 'Norman Tenants-in-Chief and their Pre-Conquest Predecessors in Nottingham-shire', History in the Making, ed. S. N. Mastoris, Nottingham 1985, 3-5), and has been recently elaborated by P. H. Sawyer in '1066-1086: a Tenurial Revolution?', Domesday Book: a Reassessment, 71-85.

[33] Lincs. DB, xxiv-xxv; 'The Danes in England', Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D. M. Stenton, Oxford 1970, 144-6.

[34] C. Stephenson, 'Commendation and related Problems in Domesday', EHR 59, (1944), 289-310.

[35] A. K. G. Kristensen, 'Danelaw Institutions and Danish Society in the Viking Age: Sochemanni, liberi homines  and Königsfreie', Medieval Scandinavia 8, (1975), 74-85.

[36] Ingulph's Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations by Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers, trans. H. T. Riley, London 1856, 56.

[37] ASE, 510; Stenton, 'Danes in England', 138.

[38] F. W. Maitland, Township and Borough, Cambridge 1898.

[39] A. Ballard, The Domesday Boroughs, Oxford 1904.

[40] J. Tait, The Medieval English Borough: Studies in its Origins and Constitutional History, Manchester 1936.

[41] S. Reynolds, An introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns, Oxford 1977.

[42] C. M. Mahany, D. R. Roffe, 'Stamford: the Development of an Anglo-Scandinavian Borough', Anglo-Norman Studies V: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1982, ed. R. A. Brown, Woodbridge 1983, 214-5; P. Stafford, The East Midlands in the Early Middle Ages, Leicester 1985, 139.

[43] Stenton, 'Danes in England', 138.

[44] See, for example, P. H. Sawyer, 'Introduction', Medieval Settlement, London 1976, 1-7; D. R. Roffe, 'Domesday Book and the Local Historian', The Nottinghamshire Historian 37, (1986), 3-5.

[45] For Nottinghamshire, see Domesday Geography of Northern England.

[46] See, for example, J. D. Hamshere, M. J. Blakemore, 'Computerising Domesday Book', Area 8, (1976), 289-94; J. Palmer, 'Domesday Book and the Computer', Domesday Book: a Reassessment, 164-74.

[47] DBB, 520.