What does domesday survey mean

To avoid bias, the juries would have both Normans and native Anglo-Saxons sitting on them. William wanted everything to follow legal form to legitimise his title which he claimed, not simply by right of conquest but as King Edward the Confessor's legitimate heir. All this was to be recorded three times - as it was in the time of King Edward [before ], what it was when King William gave it and as it is now. And it was also to be noted whether more [tax revenue] could be taken than is being taken now.

Compiled at amazing speed for an age without computers or rapid means of communication, and where most of the population could neither read nor write, the returns were then summarized and re-shaped. The scribes followed a set pattern in their organisation of the data. Each county section began with an entry describing all the boroughs, followed by a list of landholders and then a detailed description of their manors, beginning with those held by the king himself and followed by those of the tenants-in-chief, itemised in rank order.

Red ink was used for key headings. Most of the names that appear are those of landowners. The king and his family held about 17 per cent of the land, bishops and abbots about 26 per cent and around tenants-in-chief held about 54 per cent.

Some holdings were huge, with some twelve barons controlling nearly a quarter of the country but it is not always easy to distinguish between individuals with the same names who may have held lands in the same county or across a number of different counties. Anglo-Saxon names appear mainly as under-tenants of Norman lords. Some , entries relate to Anglo-Saxon lords, such as Aelfric, the pre-Conquest lord of March Gibbon in Buckinghamshire, who, Domesday records, paid his rent 'miserably and with a heavy heart'.

Providing definitive proof of rights to land and obligations to tax and military service. Some women's names appear in Domesday. One Aelgar was granted enough land to live on by the Sheriff of Trent in return for teaching his daughter the art of gold embroidery.

Exceptionally, Asa of Scoreby in Yorkshire is noted as holding her land 'separate and free from the control and power of Bjornulfr her husband, even when they were together'. Now separated, she had withdrawn 'all her own land and possessed it as a lady'.

Of the , individuals described in Domesday, some 40 per cent are listed as villani. This Latin term has been translated in different ways by historians, as villein, villager, and villan. Philip Morgan has described them as "simply members of the vill who held a fixed share of its resources, including a changing pattern of strips within the fields, and owed labour services to the lord's demesne" land held directly by the lord of the manor.

Some might have farms of as much as 30 acres, but still owe their lords two or three days' work on his land. Below them in the social hierarchy came the bordars who owed more services but held less land and below them the cottars, with even less, perhaps just a few acres and a vegetable garden.

Finally, a single scribe was assigned the task of turning all seven circuit returns into a single document. This volume is now known as Great Domesday Book. The scribe probably began in late summer while results from the inquest were still coming in.

Scholars estimate it would have taken at least a year to write. This would explain why he did not write up the return for the eastern circuit, which also survives in its original form and is known as Little Domesday Book. During the lifetimes of the Conqueror and his sons, royal officials employed politically correct language when describing Domesday Book.

This is a metaphor. For just as no judgment of that final severe and terrible trial can be evaded by any subterfuge, so when any controversy arises in the kingdom concerning the matters contained in the book, and recourse is made to the book, its word cannot be denied or set aside with impunity.

The name Domesday Book is therefore a function of its awesome reputation among the English. It invokes the Day of Judgment described in the Book of Revelation. This remains deeply controversial.

Many historians have argued it was all about the land-tax, known as the geld. That is, of course, logical. William desperately needed cash to finance his wars. Commissioners were instructed to establish the geld liability of every parcel of land in England, and to collect further information that would enable them to establish that it could pay more.

Every entry in Domesday Book supplies that information. Surely, therefore, Domesday Book was a tax book? The problem is that its layout makes it a spectacularly unhelpful guide to the logistics of taxation. To collect the land-tax efficiently, royal officials needed information arranged in geographical order, hundred by hundred and village by village, so they would know exactly where to go and how much to collect. The holdings of the king and tenants-in-chief are then listed in the same order, under numbered headings, in the pages that follow.

There are no totals and no indexes. Any tax official trying to use this information laid out this way would have quickly lost the will to live because, as historians are painfully aware, it can take days to calculate the tax liability of particular areas or landholders, even with the benefit of modern editions with indexes.

The structure of Domesday Book does, however, make it an extraordinarily effective instrument of political control. Its tables of contents and numbered headings imply that all land was held either directly by the king or from him by tenants-in-chief. It both asserts that principle and made it manageable. Armed with Domesday Book, King William could threaten to dispossess a recalcitrant baron in a matter of minutes. It is not hard to see how that would have brought comfort to a king who needed baronial loyalty more than ever.

This form of political control was also potentially very profitable, for the king could also use his position as the source of all tenure to generate new streams of income. For example, if a baron died, the king could demand the payment of a relief, a kind of death duty paid by an heir to enter into their inheritance; or he could auction off the right to marry the widows or heiresses of deceased barons, with their lands, to the highest bidder; or if a bishop or abbot died, they could choose to delay the appointment of their successors and rake in the profits of their estates during the resulting vacancy.

So was the Domesday survey and Domesday Book intended to improve yields from the land-tax, or from feudal incidents? There is a solution to this problem which embraces both possibilities. Because these questions were very similar in each circuit this brought a certain amount of consistency to the recorded answers. However, not all these questions have answers in every entry in Domesday, and the scribe who wrote down all the answers was not always consistent. Also, the way in which people were described in Domesday varied from one county to another.

Terms such as villan are sometimes used to embrace a wide variety of people, and at other times used in a specific sense. All the above questions to be recorded three times: in the time of King Edward , when William gave it often , and now Before this could happen much had to be edited out. The remaining information was arranged into counties and then sorted, not by place, but by hierarchy of owner starting with the King.

Under each owner the land was described by each hundred or wapentake and then by manor. At some point during his busy schedule, Israel found the time to write a book, titled The Global War on Morris.

The supernaturalist alleges that religion was revealed to man by God, and that the form of this revelation is a sacred book. But Mrs. Dodd, the present vicar's wife, retained the precious prerogative of choosing the book to be read at the monthly Dorcas.