DOMESDAY BOOK

Speculum

Domesday Book is the collective name attached to two different bodies of text. Colloquially known as "Great" and "Little" Domesday, they represent successive documentary phases of the inquest undertaken by agents of William the Conqueror in 1086. 1 The more famous (also known as "Exchequer Domesday") is a condensed edition of the inquest's results. The other is an earlier artifact, a "circuit survey" (in the parlance of Domesday historiography) comprising more detailed information gathered from the East Anglian shires of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. 2 In the past decade or so, a growing body of scholarship has established that analogous surveys of England's other regions were also prepared, and eventually became the exemplars abbreviated and anthologized by Great Domesday's chief scribe. Thereafter, however, only the surveys contained in Little Domesday were preserved-perhaps to make up for these specific counties' absence from Great Domesday. 3 I gratefully acknowledge the detailed comments supplied by anonymous reviewers, the insights of colleagues and students at the Universities of Illinois and Stockholm, the help of the individuals and institutions named below, and the expertise of Speculum's editorial team. This article is dedicated to the memories of three influential teachers: Malcolm Parkes and Patrick Wormald, who sparked my interest in the textual history of Domesday Book a long time ago; and the late James Campbell, whose advice and warm support are keenly missed.

Outlines work in progress on a new and significantly revised edition of a Prosopography of English Landholders 1066-1166. Illustrative material draw from work towards a collaborative edition of the Thorney Abbey Liber Vitae.

His main propositions are these. William the Conqueror did not commission Domesday Book. The threat of invasion and the strain on resources created by the need to billet a large mercenary army in England caused him to commission the Domesday inquest at Christmas in 1085. This inquest took place the following year and produced a survey of royal resources and a geld survey, and also a survey of the tenurial resources of tenants-in-chief and their tenants. Prior to 1086, the land which tenants-in-chief held in demesne had been exempt from the geld, and the purpose of the inquest was to identify this land with a view to taxing it. All the records from the inquest were brought to the king. There followed some hard bargaining between the king and his barons: in return for the loss of geld exemption on their demesne, the tenants-in-chief received certain concessions concerning the service they owed to the king, and their requirement to billet mercenaries was also lifted. The production of Domesday Book was an entirely separate and later exercise. Domesday Book was 'unrelated to the concerns which launched the inquest in 1085. It seems to have been compiled, probably under the supervision of Rannulf Flambard, from the records of the inquest after 1089 and is best interpreted as a response to the revolt, and consequent tenurial chaos, of 1088' (p. ix).

This comprises the text and slides of a paper presented to the SNSBI at Athenry. It offers brief discussions of various personal and place-names to illustrate the methodological problems (and some prospographical solutions) faced by onomasts when using the Domesday data.

Archaeologia Cambrensis , 2023

By RACHEL E. SWALLOW Cheshire was a compact lordship along the northern part of the medieval Welsh border, where the late eleventh-century county borders were more extensive than they are today. This is evidenced in Great Domesday Book, which shows that Cheshire included the semi-detached entity of a likely separate administration represented by modern Flintshire and part of Denbighshire in northeast Wales; both modern counties are situated west of the river Dee and the Anglo-Norman Cheshire earls' honorial seat at Chester. Notably, it was in these medieval northern English/Welsh Borderlands of this northeast Wales area where the Cheshire earls and their tenants built approximately half of the entire county's castles (twenty-one definite and possible fortifications), dating from the late eleventh century onwards. The geographical focus of this article will be the northern English/Welsh Borderlands west of the river Dee.

Domesday Now, 2016

Examination of the formation of the honour of Richmond based upon succession to pre-conquest antecessores.

British Archaeological Reports - British Series 571, 2012

The issue concerning the origin of the attachment of urban tenements to rural properties shown in Domesday Book and in other sources, which has generated controversy for more than a century, is examined in a new way. The spatial attributes of these connections in sample areas of five shires in Wessex and the west Midlands are examined to develop a historical model which is explanatory of these connections in both temporal and functional terms. It is concluded that these were developed as an integral part of the process of the setting up of burghal and other royal sites by the king, in partnership with the tenants-in-chief of the time, in the mid and late Saxon period.

The purposes of the Domesday survey and its most famous products, Great Domesday and Little Domesday, have long been debated, as have the means by which the information they contain was gathered and checked. In recent years Domesday scholars have begun to argue that the survey had multiple aims, and that the information it collected benefitted the king, his tenants-in-chief and the wider common weal in a range of ways. This dissertation examines a selection of non-standard material drawn from the Domesday Book and categorises it according to its content. In doing so the dissertation has two aims: firstly, to examine what the non-standard material reveals about the process by which the information gathered during the survey was checked, particularly in public inquests and why these were deemed necessary; and secondly, to contribute to the voluminous but developing scholarship on the purposes of the survey, in the process assessing recent historiographical trends and whether these are in need of refinement. After introducing the topic, chapter 2 examines the historiographical background and where this study stands. In chapter 3 the methodology which has been used is briefly detailed; then in chapter 4 the findings of the study are explored in detail. In chapter 5 the main questions of the study are answered. This chapter examines the usefulness of the nonstandard material and what this can reveal about the purposes of the survey; the chapter also analyses the conduct of the survey and provides an account of how the public inquests of the survey may have been conducted.

Brill, 2024

An antidote to demographic and market-centred approaches to the origins of capitalism. Final proofs of the whole book. Two volumes in one. First, a study exploring the evidence for the forced expropriation of the English peasantry c. 1380-1620. Second, for future researchers especially, a translation from Latin to English of the voluminous findings of the commission into the expropriation of English peasants throughout England in 1517-18.

The Friends of Exeter Cathedral: Eighty-Seventh Annual Report, 2017

A revised version of a text delivered at the Exon Domesday Conference organized by the Friends of Exeter Cathedral, 5 January 2017. Published with the permission of the Friends of Exeter Cathedral. Images withheld for copyright reasons..