The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  We can well believe that Malmesbury was right, therefore, when he said ‘the king was very scared’. William’s first action on arriving in England was to summon an emergency council of magnates to debate how to deal with the crisis. The first and most pressing consideration was what to do with the mercenary army. Unlike every other force William had brought to England, their job was not to harry the kingdom but to defend it, and as such they could not resort to the usual medieval practice of living off the land at the expense of its inhabitants. ‘People wondered how this country could maintain all that army’, says the Chronicle. The solution arrived at in council – proposed, says Malmesbury, by Archbishop Lanfranc – was to disperse the troops all over the kingdom. ‘All agreed that the households of the magnates should be reinforced by the presence of knights, so that if need be everyone could unite to defend the public weal and private fortunes against the barbarian.’ As Malmesbury’s account makes clear, this made the magnates themselves responsible for the mercenaries’ every need. Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, for example, ‘began to maintain a sizeable force, keeping them happy with high pay and filling them up with choice food’.10

  It was not just the poor magnates who suffered. ‘People had much oppression that year’, recalls the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and the king had the land near the sea laid waste, so that if his enemies landed, they should have nothing to seize.’ According to an early twelfth-century source, William also ordered the coastline to be closely guarded; castles were strengthened and town walls repaired and manned. The towns themselves were required, like the magnates, to billet large numbers of French mercenaries, to the extent that there was hardly enough room left for their English inhabitants.

  So, as the days grew shorter and autumn turned to winter, England entered a state of high tension. As in 1066, the whole kingdom held its breath and waited for news. Then, shortly before Christmas, news came. ‘The king found out for a fact that his enemies had been hindered’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and could not carry out their expedition.’ It was only a temporary reprieve – Cnut had apparently decided to delay his invasion until the new year – but it must have eased the tension a little. William responded by sending some of his mercenary troops back to the Continent. Others, however, he kept in England throughout the winter, indicating that the fear of invasion remained.

  Christinas 1085, which the king once again kept at Gloucester, must therefore have been a stressed affair, with the thought of the ongoing Danish threat never far from the minds of the assembled magnates. William revealed his own anxiety at this time by dismissing from office the abbots of Crowland and Thorney, a pair of neighbouring monasteries in the Fens. This, of course, was a region where the Danes had landed in the recent past and received considerable support from the local population – not least the local monks. Not wanting another Ely on his hands, and evidently doubting the loyalty of Crowland’s and Thorney’s existing abbots, the king replaced them with two monks from the Norman abbey of St Wandrille.11

  The Christmas court at Gloucester lasted five days, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Church council that followed a further three. The Chronicle then goes on to tell us what happened next:

  After this, the king had much thought and deep discussion with his council about the country – how it was occupied and with what sort of people. Then he sent his men over all England into every shire and had them find out how many hundred hides there were in the shire, or what land and cattle the king himself had in the country, or what dues he ought to have in twelve months from the shire. Also he had a record made of how much land his archbishops had, and his bishops and abbots, and his earls, and – though I relate it at too great length – what or how much everybody had who was occupying land in England, in land or cattle, and how much money it was worth. So very narrowly did he have it investigated, that there was no single hide nor yard of land, nor indeed (it is a shame to relate but it seemed no shame to him to do) one ox nor one cow nor one pig was there left out, and not put down in his record.

  Such is the Chronicle’s description of the Domesday Survey, which produced the Domesday Book, one of the most famous documents in English history (in terms of celebrity only Magna Carta trumps it), and certainly the most voluminous. It is, in fact, two volumes: a large one, called Great Domesday, and a smaller one, known as Little Domesday. Between them they contain 832 folios, filled on both sides with closely written, abbreviated text, and containing somewhere in the region of two million words.12 Because of its vast size Domesday is, and always has been, unique. A handful of subsidiary documents relating to the survey have survived – sectional drafts which scholars have dubbed ‘satellites’ – but the book itself, in two volumes, survives only as a single copy. It is, without question, the most important document in English history, for, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle indicates, it contains the results of an inquest of unparalleled scope and magnitude: a kingdom-wide investigation of rights, dues, land and economic assets, which produced the single greatest description of a pre-industrial society anywhere in the world.

  Hence, of course, its ominous name. During the twelfth century, Domesday was kept in the royal treasury at Winchester, and so initially government officials referred to it as ‘the book of the Exchequer’, ‘the great book of Winchester’, or simply ‘the king’s book’. But, as one of those officials noted in the 1170s, ‘this book is called by the natives “Domesday” – that is, by metaphor, the Day of Judgement’. One suspects that this English nickname had existed from the very beginning, because ample other evidence exists to indicate that William’s inquiry left contemporaries awestruck. Part of the reason for their astonishment must have been the speed with which the project was carried out. Begun soon after Christmas 1085, it was apparently completed before 1 August the following year. Producing the final draft of Great Domesday took somewhat longer, but the survey itself was accomplished in a little over six months.13

  Why the Conqueror launched this great investigation in the winter of 1085 is a question that has long been debated by historians. Given its timing, few have been content to believe that it was merely an act of royal curiosity, and most would link its origins to the ongoing threat of invasion. Exactly how the two events were linked, however, remains a matter of dispute. Despite over a century of rigorous scholarship, there is still no consensus as to what the Domesday Book was for.

  By looking at the book itself, the satellites, and the comments of contemporary chroniclers, we can at least understand something of how the survey was made. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle indicates, it began with William sending commissioners into every shire, and from the Domesday documents themselves we can see that the shires were grouped into at least seven circuits (mostly consisting of five counties each, but in one case containing only three). For one particular circuit we can see that there were four commissioners, so overall there were probably no more than thirty or so men directly responsible for compiling the Domesday data.

  Providentially, thanks to a document known as the Ely Inquest, we also appear to have a list of the questions to which these commissioners were required to find answers. From these we see that the principal unit that Domesday was concerned with was the manor – a term that appears to have been coined after the Conquest, which signified something like ‘individual lordly estate’. The commissioners began with the basics: what was the manor called? Who held it in the time of Edward the Confessor, and who holds it now? They then moved on to specifics: how many hides of land are there? How many ploughs? How many slaves? How many freemen? They also asked about natural resources: how much woodland was there? How much meadow? How much pasture? Lastly they asked about value: how much was it worth then? How much is it worth now?14

  This is just a selection from the total list of twenty questions given in the Ely Inquest, all of which had to be posed in the case of each individual manor. Domesday contains many, many entries: at a rough estimate it mentions about 13,000 places and around 30,000 manors.15 The
thirty or so Domesday commissioners, we assume, must have had many assistants. But, even so, how could they possibly have compiled all this information in just six months?

  Part of the answer was that they relied on that perennial government time-saver, self-assessment. Tenants-in-chief – those who held their land directly from the king – seem to have been required to supply the commissioners with written returns; in some instances we can see their fossilized form in the pages of the Domesday Book itself. The commissioners could also have obtained a lot of information quickly from existing written records. Eleventh-century England, it bears repeating, was a much-governed country, a medieval bureaucratic state. By turning to earlier surveys and tax rolls, many answers could be uncovered, especially those relating to the time of Edward the Confessor.16

  Had Domesday involved no more than this, it would probably have generated little comment – indeed, it would have been just another royal survey in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It would also have had little value, because self-assessment by the landowners would have inevitably delivered a skewed result. But Domesday involved a great deal more, and is a great deal more valuable, because all the written evidence assembled, whether from self-assessment or government archives, was subjected to public scrutiny. During the spring of 1086, in every county, extraordinary sessions of the shire court were convened, to which an extraordinary number of witnesses were summoned. Principally these were jurors selected from every hundred, or wapentake. In Cambridgeshire, for example, each of the county’s fifteen hundreds sent eight jurors, including in every case the head of the hundred (the reeve) and a local priest: a total of 120 men. This total is likely to have been low compared to the national average: other counties contained more hundreds, and the juries they sent probably numbered the more typical twelve.17

  But the hundred jurors, while seemingly the most important, were not the only ones required to give evidence. The landowners were also summoned in order to defend their written assessments against the jurors’ oral testimony, and there were also other types of juries, some representing the shire as a whole, some its most important towns, some its monastic communities. According to the Ely Inquest, every settlement (vill) was required to send an eight-man jury, and this statement receives support from the villeins who appear, on two occasions, as witnesses in the Domesday Book. At the very least, therefore – counting only the jurors drawn from the hundreds, shires and boroughs – the survey involved the participation of around 8,000 people; if it really involved juries from every settlement, the number rises to somewhere in excess of 60,000. Each county assembly therefore involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of people, making these meetings far larger than the regular sessions of the shire court, and larger even than the great land pleas (like Penenden Heath) held earlier in William’s reign. One imagines it was these giant gatherings that had the greatest impact on the popular consciousness, and gave rise to the name ‘Domesday’.18

  The jurors were almost certainly required to answer all the commissioners’ questions, including those about the economic assets of a particular manor: from time to time Domesday records their objection to a landlord’s valuation.19 The crucial questions put to them, however, related to ownership: who held the land during the time of Edward the Confessor, and who holds it now? As we’ve seen, the Norman colonization of England had been a sporadic, piecemeal and confusing process, with land being granted out on two different and potentially conflicting principles, and plenty of property simply seized by those with the sharpest elbows.

  In the Domesday sessions of the shire court, this process now came under the spotlight (which is, of course, how we come to know so much about it). In some areas there had been comparatively little disruption, because estates had been transferred unbroken from their former English owner to a Norman newcomer. But Domesday reveals that only a minority of properties had been reallocated in this way – something like ten per cent of the total. A much larger amount of land – over a third of all the land in England – had been granted out on a territorial basis, paying no regard whatsoever to previous patterns of ownership. In the case of the remaining lands, there is no clear pattern of redistribution, suggesting that in these areas the Normans had been helping themselves.20

  Hence the thousands of doubtful or contested claims in Domesday. In some instances the jurors validated the right of a particular landowner, testifying that they had seen the original royal writ that ordered the owner to be put in possession. But very often they said they had seen no such writ, and had no idea by what right the defendant came to be holding the estate in question. Sometimes rival claimants came forward to contest a property. In Hampshire, for example, that notorious predator, Picot the Sheriff (‘a hungry lion, a roving wolf, a crafty fox …’) had his title to a small parcel of land in Charford challenged by a fellow Norman named William de Chernet. William, it is recorded, ‘brought his testimony for this from the better and old men from all the county and hundred. Picot contradicted this with his testimony from the villeins, common people, and reeves.’ Sadly, but typically, we do not know who won, but in general Picot was very successful in hanging on to his acquisitions.21

  Part of the purpose of the Domesday Survey, therefore, was to sort out precisely this sort of tenurial confusion – the net result of twenty years of Norman colonization which had been at best opportunistic and at worst downright rapacious. Richard fitz Nigel, the twelfth-century official who first recorded the name ‘Domesday’, thought that the book had been made ‘so that each man, being content with his own rights, should not with impunity usurp the rights of another’, and there is much to be said for this. Every effort had been made to ensure that the final judgement was as fair as possible. Not only were the jurors summoned to provide a check on the landlords, the names of the jurors, where known, reveal a fifty–fifty split between Englishmen and Frenchmen (thus in Cambridgeshire, each eight-man hundred jury has four English and four French jurors apiece). This ethnic balance meant, of course, that neither nation could use Domesday as an opportunity to settle old scores, but it also implies that ways to ensure the fairness of the survey had been worked out at the very highest level. Similarly revealing is a short, contemporary description of the Domesday Survey by the bishop of Hereford, which states that a second set of commissioners was sent around the country to check the work of the first, and, if necessary, to denounce its authors as guilty to the king. The second team, we are told, were sent into regions where they themselves held no land – another obvious anti-corruption measure – and this, so far as we can judge, was true of their forerunners too.22

  The question that inevitably arises, though, is why this problem could not have waited. Sorting out property disputes was unquestionably important, for left unresolved they might ultimately lead to violence between rival landlords; clearly, some degree of order had to be imposed. But why did this take priority at a time when the country was threatened with invasion? After all, if the Danes were successful, any record of who owned what in England would be out of date almost before the ink had dried. That the threat of invasion still hung over England at the time of the inquest is implicit in William’s decision to retain some of his French mercenaries throughout the winter. Indeed, in one or two instances we seem to see these troops in the Domesday Book, garrisoned in towns such as Southampton and Bury St Edmunds.23

  The mercenaries themselves provide a further clue as to the survey’s purpose. Soldiers of fortune, by their very nature, rarely come cheap. By dispersing his great army around the country in 1085, William had passed some of its cost on to his magnates, but not all. Many troops had also been quartered on royal estates and towns, and the same situation must have obtained into 1086, requiring the king to find large sums of money to retain the men who remained in his service.

  Earlier English kings had obtained such large sums by taxing their subjects. The geld, as we’ve seen, had been collected since the late tenth century, first to buy off Danish invaders with tribute, and later
to maintain a mercenary fleet in order to guard against future attacks. Edward the Confessor had ostentatiously done away with this fleet in 1051 and ceased to collect the money to pay for it, but it seems unlikely that he abolished the geld entirely. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s comment that the tax for the fleet ‘always came before other taxes’ implies that other forms of geld existed, and these almost certainly continued to be levied on an annual basis for the rest of the Confessor’s reign. The sudden reappearance of geld in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle within days of William’s coronation is thus to be explained by its heavy rate rather than its sudden revival.24

  By 1066, however, the geld was no longer the great cash cow it had once been. This was partly because successive kings had run down the system of assessment. Geld was calculated on the basis of the number of hides a particular estate or community contained, so by reducing this number a king could show political favour. By the reign of Edward the Confessor many hundreds – which notionally ought to have contained one hundred hides – were assessed at considerably less. A surviving geld roll for Northamptonshire, drawn up in the 1070s but recording the situation in Edward’s day, shows some hundreds containing eighty hides, others sixty-two hides, and in one case as few as forty. Thus in 1066 the total number of hides in Northamptonshire’s thirty-two hundreds was not 3,200, but 2,663. This erosion, moreover, had continued after the Conquest. Domesday reveals that by 1086 the hidation of Northamptonshire had fallen to just 1,250.25

  Nor was that the limit of the problem, because only a fraction of the hides in this much-diminished rump actually paid geld. In every hundred in Northamptonshire, the same geld roll shows that large numbers of hides – in some cases up to half the total – had been written off as ‘waste’. This word, which also occurs over and over again in the Domesday Book, has been interpreted in recent times merely as a term of administrative convenience, used indiscriminately by royal officials to describe land which, for whatever reason, paid no geld. But most historians today would argue that waste (vasta) had a specific meaning, and indicated land that had been ruined – devastated – as a result of the Conquest. A thoroughgoing analysis of the word’s use in Domesday shows a quite precise correlation with those areas visited by the Conqueror’s armies in the years immediately after 1066. Thus we find high concentrations of waste in Sussex, particularly in the rape of Hastings, as well as in the counties along the Welsh border, harried in the period 1069–70. We see it in the coastal areas that William had strategically ravaged in 1085, and we also see it in cities. In Lincoln, Domesday records that there were 970 inhabited dwellings before the Conquest, but afterwards 240 of them were waste: 166 had been destroyed ‘on account of the castle’, the remainder ‘because of misfortune and poverty and the ravages of fire’. Similar accounts equating waste with the construction of castles are found for Norwich, Shrewsbury, Stamford, Wallingford and Warwick. When Earl Hugh received Chester, says Domesday, almost half its houses had been destroyed, and the city had lost a third of its value, ‘for it had been greatly wasted’.26