The Norman Conquest
Page 39
None of this, however, compares to the amount of waste recorded for Yorkshire, which accounts for over eighty per cent of Domesday’s total for the whole country. This goes a long way to substantiating the chronicle accounts of the Harrying of the North and the scale of the destruction caused by the Conqueror’s armies in the winter of 1069–70. According to Simeon of Durham, the region between Durham and York lay uncultivated for the next nine years, with every settlement uninhabited; William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, declared that the soil there was still bare in his own day. Shockingly, Domesday reveals that in 1086 the population of Yorkshire had dropped to just a quarter of what it had been in 1066, meaning that around 150,000 people had vanished from the record. For once, it seems, the six-figure numbers given by the chroniclers corresponded all too closely with reality.27
Some areas of the country, it is true, seem to have recovered in the twenty years between 1066 and 1086. Whereas, for example, the average value of manors in Yorkshire had plummeted by over sixty-five per cent, in Norfolk it had risen by an impressive thirty-eight per cent. It would be wrong, however, to read too rosy a picture into such rises, for the value of a Domesday manor was the value to its lord in rents, and there is ample evidence to indicate that new Norman lords had racked up rents to intolerably high levels. Domesday abounds with complaints about rents being oppressive, exceeding the actual value of the land (a famous entry records that Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire was held by its English farmer, Æthelric, ‘in heaviness and misery’). According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, such oppressive practices originated at the very top:
The king gave his land as dearly for rent as he possibly could; then came another man and offered more than the first, and the king let it go to the man who had offered more; then came a third and offered still more, and the king gave it up to the man who had offered most of all. And he did not care at all how very wrongfully the reeves got it from poor men, nor how many illegal acts they did.
The Normans appear to have been uniformly rapacious in pursuit of profit: elsewhere the Chronicle laments that ‘the king and his leading men were fond, yea, too fond, of avarice: they coveted gold and silver, and did not care how sinfully it was obtained’. The final question of the Domesday commissioners, as preserved in the Ely Inquest, was whether more could be taken from an estate than was currently being taken.28
For this reason, where the Domesday Book shows a fall in manorial values in areas not associated with widespread ravaging, we can be fairly certain that this was not due to leniency on the part of the landlords. In certain counties it has been shown that the sharpest falls in value coincide quite precisely with brand-new Norman lordships – the kind carved out from scratch, with no reference to previous landholding patterns. One view is that this reorganization process was so disruptive that it caused a drop in economic output. A more likely reason is that new manors had been constructed on a new model, more favourable to the lords and more oppressive for the peasantry. For it is also in these counties that we witness dramatic falls in the number of free peasants. In Cambridgeshire, for example, the number of freemen plummeted from 900 to 177; in Bedfordshire from 700 to 90, and in Hertfordshire from 240 to 43. At the same time, we discover that the number of servile peasants has rocketed. Frequently in Domesday we find the phrase ‘he is now a villein’.29
Values were only lower in these areas, it seems, because the before – and-after figures record different realities. Those for the pre-Conquest period had been calculated by combining the incomes of all the various English freeholders on a particular estate; the figures for 1086, by contrast, simply represented the income the new Norman lord derived in rent, having forced these former freemen into financial servitude. This was a bad bargain for the small landowners, but after the Conquest their bargaining power was not strong. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says at one point that the Normans ‘imposed unjust tolls and did many injustices which are hard to reckon up’. The tenurial revolution, in short, had prompted a social revolution. English society, in certain areas at least, was a lot less free after the Conquest than it had been before.30
Yet even as lords were driving up profits, they were paying less and less money to the king. At some stage, probably during the reign of the Conqueror himself, land held in demesne had been made exempt from paying geld. We see this, for instance, in the Northamptonshire geld roll, where hides held in demesne, like those listed as waste, are treated separately from those that actually paid. As the reign continued, the concessions appear to have increased, so much so that by the 1080s some tenants-in-chief were paying almost no tax at all. Indeed, in some cases, they may even have collected the geld from their demesnes and kept it for themselves.31
Small wonder, then, that revenue from the geld was not all it had once been. Concessions to individuals and communities had led to a massive reduction in the number of hides, and many more had been written off as waste as a result of war and destruction; the Conqueror himself had exempted the demesne land of his tenants-in-chief, and established a further tax-free zone in the form of the Forest. All of these factors had punched great holes in the money-getting system created by England’s pre-Conquest kings. Added to this there was also outright refusal to pay:‘From 6½ hides at Norton,’ records the Northamptonshire geld roll, ‘not a penny has been received – Osmund the king’s secretary owns that estate.’32
An obvious way to compensate for the system’s shortcomings was to try to get more geld from hides which were still liable. In 1084, William had ordered a geld at three times the normal rate (six shillings per hide rather than the usual two), probably intending to use the money it raised to finance his ongoing war in Maine. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded this hike with horror, describing the tax as ‘heavy and severe’, and no doubt it was for the limited number of people who had to pay it. At the same time, we have no way of knowing how lucrative it was. Given the manifold inadequacies of the system by this date, and coming hard on the heels of the 1082 famine, the yield may have been disappointing, even though the rate was exceedingly harsh.33
The final straw may have come in the autumn of 1085, with the decision to break up the massive mercenary army and billet it around the kingdom. ‘The king had the host dispersed all over the country among his vassals’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and they provisioned the army each in proportion to his land.’ If the government used the geld lists to try to arrive at this proportional distribution – and it is hard to see how they could have used anything else – then the billeting arrangements would have been no more equitable than a levy of the geld. By the time of the Christmas court, therefore, there may have been many voices being raised in protest, and a realization on William’s part that the system needed to be fixed, in order that future gelds brought in more money, and that any future billeting would be fairer. And part of the Domesday process was an inquiry into the workings of the geld – we can see as much from the circuit return for the south-western shires known as Exon Domesday. An overhaul of the geld system would explain why the survey was so interested in lordly resources: the king was trying to discover precisely where the profits of lordship were going, perhaps with a view to reversing the exemption of demesne. Lastly, a fiscal motive for Domesday would also explain why William felt it was necessary to establish exactly who owned what, for – as those responsible for its administration must surely have attested – it is difficult to collect a land tax when landholding itself is in dispute.34
Such was the conclusion of early Domesday scholars: the Conqueror’s survey was a tax inquiry, intended to remedy the manifold defects of the geld system. As the greatest of all these scholars, Frederick William Maitland, wrote in his Domesday Book and Beyond (1897): ‘Our record is no register of title, it is no feodary, it is no custumal, it is no rent-roll; it is a tax book, a geld book.’ Even today, more than a century after Maitland’s death, many experts would argue that fiscal reform was the primary purpose of the Domesday Survey.35
And yet it cannot have been the purpose of the Domesday Book. As anyone who has ever tried to do so will readily attest, it is all but impossible to use the book as a tool for assessing geld, because of the way its contents are organized. Geld was national, public tax, administered using public institutions: collectors moved from settlement to settlement within each hundred, and from hundred to hundred within each shire, in order to gather in the money. The Domesday commissioners, as we have seen, had used the same public institutions to gather information, summoning juries from hundreds and townships in order to check the written returns provided by individual landowners. But, crucially, when this information came to be compiled and written up for each of the survey’s seven circuits, it was not arranged by hundred and vill. Instead, it was laboriously rearranged – by landowner. Both the surviving circuit returns (Exon Domesday and Little Domesday) are arranged in this fashion, as is the final redaction of the data in Great Domesday. It is an arrangement that makes it fantastically difficult to calculate geld payments; to work out the liability of a particular landowner requires hours of calculations.36 In conclusion, therefore, there is no doubt that a geld inquiry was launched in 1086, and little doubt that a reform of the geld was high on the agenda. Some of the information collected by the Domesday commissioners may have been intended for such a reform. But the selection and arrangement of data in the Domesday Book indicates that it must have been made for a different reason.
While the commissioners had been gathering their data, assembling jurors and landowners in their hundreds and thousands, King William had been travelling around his kingdom (or at least its southern part). At Easter (5 April), by which time the sessions of the shire courts must either have been well advanced or already over, he wore his crown at Winchester. By Whitsun (24 May), when he was at Westminster for the knighting of his youngest son, Henry, the king must have had a clear idea of when the survey would be completed. As John of Worcester explains, ‘shortly afterwards, he ordered his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, sheriffs and their knights to meet him on 1 August at Salisbury’. This was to be the last and greatest meeting of 1086 – an assembly for the whole kingdom, the culmination of the Domesday process.37
Salisbury was not in the same place in 1086 as it is today (the present city is a new foundation of the thirteenth century). In the Conqueror’s time it lay two miles to the north, on the site now known as Old Sarum. The Normans had been drawn to this location from an early date. William had established a castle there, probably before 1070, and the bishop of Sherborne had subsequently moved his cathedral to stand alongside it, thereby becoming the bishop of Salisbury. The site’s attraction in 1086 may have had more to do with its prehistoric past, for Old Sarum is one of the most impressive Iron Age hill forts – both castle and cathedral were planted in the centre of a massive enclosure, 400 metres across, surrounded by an earthen rampart that runs for over a kilometre. It was the exactly the right kind of location, in other words, for the sort of large-scale open-air assembly that the Conqueror had in mind.38
For the meeting at Salisbury was massive. ‘There his counsellors came to him,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and all the people occupying land who were of any account all over England.’ To give us some idea of what that might mean in terms of numbers, we can turn to Domesday. The book names around 1,000 individuals who held their land directly from the king – his tenants-in-chief. Their direct connection with the king, and (in most cases) their superior wealth and status meant that most if not all of them would have attended. Domesday also records a further 8,000 or so landowners at the next stage down – i.e. the tenants of the tenants-in-chief, or the king’s subtenants. How many of these men might have come to Salisbury is open to debate. Some of them were as wealthy, or even wealthier, than the lesser tenants-in-chief, and so would correspond to the Chronicle’s notion of ‘people of account’. But many others were considerably less wealthy, with half of them owning land worth less than £1 a year, and so might be reckoned to lie outside of that description. Depending on how strictly the king’s summons was interpreted, therefore, we should imagine an attendance figure well into four figures, and just possibly nudging towards five.39
The impression of an exceptionally large meeting is reinforced by the composition of William’s court. Sadly, we have no record from the day of the Salisbury assembly itself, but we do have a document issued at another location in Wiltshire, datable to the middle of 1086, with a witness-list that suggests it was drawn up at a time very close to the event. Alongside the Conqueror stand his two younger sons – the newly knighted Henry and his older brother, William Rufus. Then come the higher clergy: Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, Archbishop Thomas of York, and with them the bishops of Durham, Winchester, Lincoln, Chester, Hereford, Salisbury and London. The great lay magnates come next, a list of eighteen names. Odo, still confined to his cell in Rouen, is notably not among their number; but William’s other half-brother, Robert, is present, along with the king’s lifelong friend, Roger of Montgomery. Also among the throng of laymen we see Richard fitz Gilbert, lord of Tonbridge, the greatest landowner in south-eastern England; Henry de Ferrers, a great baron from northern England, and Robert of Rhuddlan, the conqueror of north Wales. Another name that leaps out from the list is Abbot Thurstan of Glastonbury, whose massacre of his own monks just three years earlier was evidently no bar to his attendance at court.40
It is an impressive roll call – one of the greatest we have seen since the coronation of Queen Matilda in May 1068. Yet what a change has been wrought in the intervening eighteen years. Royal charters issued at the time of Matilda’s coronation reveal a mix of English and French names, with the majority being English. But in 1086 the English are gone, and the list is exclusively Norman (or at least, in the case of the bishops, Continental). In 1068 ten of England’s fifteen bishoprics had been held by Englishmen, three of the remaining five having been given to Germans by Edward the Confessor and only two recently filled by the Conqueror. But by the time of the Domesday Survey only one English bishop – the wily and venerable Wulfstan of Worcester – remained in office. As for the English aristocracy, the eclipse is total. The three native earls who witnessed in 1068 were all long gone by 1086: Eadwine murdered, Waltheof executed, and Morcar still languishing in prison. Also gone are the lesser English nobles present at the queen’s coronation – men with names like Æthelhead, Tovi, Dinni, Ælfgeard, Bondig, Wulfweard, Herding, Brixi and Brihtric. When we turn to the witnesses of 1086, there is not a single English name among them.41
What is true of the court, moreover, is also true of the country. Of Domesday’s 1,000 tenants-in-chief, a mere thirteen are English; only four have lands worth more than £100 and the wealthiest, Edward of Salisbury, despite his English name, may well have been half-Norman. The king’s thegns – the ninety or so lords who had each owned more than forty hides of land – were all gone. Even when we descend to the next tenurial level, where we start to find natives in more significant numbers, they remain very much in the minority. Of the 8,000 or so subtenants recorded in the survey, only around ten per cent are English, and, as with the tenants-in-chief, the survivors are small fry – men like Æthelric of Marsh Gibbon, holding ‘in heaviness and misery’. England’s middling thegns, who had numbered around 4,000–5,000, have been swept clean away.42
Domesday therefore reveals cataclysmic change to the composition of England’s ruling class, with Normans replacing native lords in almost every village and hamlet. It also, moreover, reveals dramatic changes within that class in the distribution of material wealth. Put simply, there were more super-rich men in Domesday England than there had been twenty years earlier. Whereas in 1066 there had been several thousand middling English thegns, by 1086 half the land in England was held by just 200 Norman barons.43 Having in most cases obtained the estates of multiple English predecessors, these newcomers were many times more wealthy. In Edward the Confessor’s day, for example, only thirty-seven individuals had held l
ands with an annual value of more than £100; by the time of the Domesday survey the number of such men had more than doubled to eighty-one.44 At the very top, the spoils of Conquest had been colossal. Half the country was in the hands of 200 barons, but half that half – i.e. a quarter of all the land in England – was held by just ten new magnates. Their names are by now a predictable roll call of William’s friends and family: Odo and Robert, Roger of Montgomery, Richard fitz Gilbert, Hugh of Chester … Orderic Vitalis had not exaggerated when he said that the Conqueror had raised his dependants to high rank and heaped great honours upon them. ‘He was a great lover of the world and of Worldly pomp,’ said Orderic of Earl Hugh, ‘lavish to the point of prodigality, a lover of games and luxuries, actors, horses and dogs.’ With 300 manors in Domesday valued at £800 a year, he could well afford to be.45