The Domesday Book: Life in the 11th Century

August 20, 2023

The Domesday Book: Life in the 11th Century

The Domesday Book, the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manuscript was originally known by the Latin name Liber de Wintonia, meaning "Book of Winchester", where it was originally kept in the royal treasury. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 1085 the king sent his agents to survey every shire in England, to list his holdings and dues owed to him. (Wikipedia)

The Domesday Book, which is kept at the National Archives in London.

Aristocracy

% of land owned
King and family	17%
Bishops and abbots	26%
Tenants-in-chief	54%

As you can see on the right, the upper tiers of the aristocracy held almost half of the land in England, while another half was held by 190 lay tenants-in-chief. Some of the holdings were huge, and a dozen or so leading barons together controlled about a quarter of England. Such estates were geographically scattered: 20 leading lay lords had lands in ten or more counties, and 14 had possessions both north of the Trent and south of the Thames.

The great majority of Domesday landholders came from northern France, but there were still a few Anglo-Saxons and Danes. Only one member of the old nobility still possessed sizable estates - Thorkill of Arden, who had lands in Warwickshire.

Many formerly independent Anglo-Saxon and Danish thanes and their descendants appear in Domesday as the under-tenants of Norman lords. One man called Toli held lands at Cowley in Oxfordshire until 1086 when he became under-tenant of Norman baron Miles Crispin Another, Saewold had kept property worth £10 in the same county but had to mortgage half to Robert d'Oilly.

However, there was one Englishman who occupied a place of the highest importance in 1086 - Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester. At first a monk, he rose to become a schoolmaster, then prior, and in 1062, became bishop, an office he held until he died in 1095. Wulfstan was loved and respected by his community and by the people of his diocese. In Worcestershire alone the monks had more than a dozen valuable manors. Their wealth had not gone unnoticed, however their taxation assessments were fixed at a high level which caused problems in future years.

Castles and Churches

There were few castles and churches built in the 11th Century but those which survive today are a tangible link between the England of 900 years ago and the England of today. Most of the castles were built out of wood and consisted of a simple mott and bailey.

Parish churches constructed immediately after the Conquest are indistinguishable from those built just before in Anglo-Saxon England. They are not recorded systematically in Domesday which mentions only 147 churches in Kent, whereas other sources note at least 400. It does however give details about them such as how they were divided into fractions between different owners.

Manors and Villages

The manors were very diverse in size and although they appear from Domesday to be very typical; compact, centred around a church and separated by open land, they were not.

Instead, habitations in most areas of late 11th century England followed a very ancient pattern of isolated farms, hamlets and tiny villages interspersed with fields and scattered over most of the cultivable land. As in the Iron Age, over time the settlements gradually shifted or were abandoned or reclaimed. This is a pattern which is still retained in Cornwall today.

Landholding and Feudalism

The system of landholding as portrayed throughout the Domesday Book was based on a rigid social hierarchy called the feudal system, imposed in England by William the Conqueror following his successful 1066 conquest. Rather than being owned, as is the case nowadays, land was held from a member of society higher up the social tree. At the top sat King William who granted land to tenants-in-chief - usually lords or members of the Church, in return for their assistance in the Norman Conquest. Next down the ladder came under-tenants who held land from the tenants-in-chief, and so it continued with the bottom of the ladder being occupied by peasants - villagers, bordars and cottars - who earned their opportunity to hold a small amount of land by working on the land of the lordship, and slaves, who held no land.

The basic unit of land in the Domesday Book is the manor; manors could be larger or smaller than just one village, but all consisted of land and had jurisdiction over the tenants. These were part of larger administrative subdivisions of land called hundreds (wapentakes in Danish areas of the country), which contained several manors and had their own assembly of notables and representatives from local villages.

Rents, Tax and Manorial Values

The total value of the land in Domesday has been estimated at about £73,000 a year. The most common form of land ownership was under-tenancies, whose holders owed military services to their lords, and subsequently to the King. Another form was leasing or renting land for money, often large amounts. Thaxted in Essex, for example, was worth £30 in 1066 and £60 in 1086, but its holder had leased it to an Englishman for an annual amount of £60. The tenant was unable to pay and defaulted on at least £10 a year.

The value of an area of land and its resources was calculated according to size, with set values on each resource unit. In some areas, the values of the manors and their geld assessments are also connected, these are the figures in hides, virgates and carucates.

Domesday shows to some extent the cost of the Conquest on land values, which was particularly devastating in Northern England where many small villages were destroyed or damaged so badly their land values decreased by about a quarter since 1066 (these villages were noted as 'waste' in the Domesday Book). King William was partly to blame for his men's ruthlessness, but raiders from Ireland in Devonshire also had a bad effect on land values in the areas they passed through.

Justice was a valuable business in the Middle Ages. Domesday records that the yields of the soke (the jurisdiction) of a hundred or wapentake went to the holder of the manor. While the earl kept a third of the money, the king reserved two thirds of that made from justice in the manor.

Therefore, the value of a manor was an estimate of the money its lord would receive annually from his peasants, including the annual dues paid by a mill or mine, a proportion of the eels caught or pigs kept, etc.

Population

The total population of England in 1086 cannot be calculated accurately from Domesday for several reasons: only the heads of households are listed; major cities like London and Winchester were omitted completely; there are no records of nuns, monks, or people in castles. The population of England at the time of Domesday has been tentatively estimated at between 1¼ and 2 million. However, these figures are much lower than the 4 million people there are estimated to have been in Roman times.

Lincolnshire, East Anglia and East Kent were the most densely populated areas with more than 10 people per square mile, while northern England, Dartmoor and the Welsh Marches had less than three people per square mile. This is because many villages had been razed by the conquest armies.

Agriculture