Where is domesday book kept

Download: Lesson pack. What can we learn about England in the 11th century? Tasks 1. Who holds Patcham after ? How did the change in ownership of land help William increase his control over the country? How many oxen are there in the village?

Remember each plough is pulled by a team of eight oxen. How many people live in this village? Make a list of all the people in the village, starting with those who hold the most land and ending with the poorest members of the village.

Name two jobs, apart from ploughing, which this source reveals. Work out the number of acres of land in the village. What do you think the woodland was used for? What was the value of the land when William the Conqueror became king in ? What had happened to its value by ? Think about your answers for question 9. 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. Here it is essential to register a distinction between the survey and Domesday Book itself. It is known that the survey did generate information set out in ways that were useful for the management of taxation. For example, Exon Domesday is bound up with tax lists, which were updated in , and other texts in the collection demonstrate that the Domesday survey for the south-western shires generated documents laid out in geographic order, one hundred at a time — the format most useful for collecting the land tax.

The commissioners from other circuits are known to have done the same thing. The structure of Domesday Book, however, organised within each shire by tenants-in-chief, would have made the management of feudal incidents more efficient. So by extracting information in different formats at each stage of the process, the king could achieve several objectives: creating a more secure land-tax base, and a formidable instrument of political and financial control over his barons.

The Domesday survey was completed with astonishing speed — within six months of the Gloucester council. This could not have been achieved without the active co-operation of the nobility. So what was in it for them? Something that they had yearned for throughout the long period during which England had been colonised was security of title. The Domesday inquest created a great public stage on which to act out the ritual completion of the process of colonisation, and the records of the inquest constituted unassailable title to those loyal to the king.

In other words, the Domesday survey was a hard-nosed deal between the king and his barons. That deal was sealed at Old Sarum. This extraordinary event was most likely the climax to the Domesday survey. Exon Domesday was written at Old Sarum, and it was almost certainly there that all the records of the survey were delivered to the king.

That was enough to persuade them to swear allegiance and pay homage to the king. They did so in return for the land that William had granted them — with those rights now enshrined in the greatest charter of confirmation ever made in the medieval world. It is the earliest English document preserved by the government that created it.

But its importance extends well beyond the origins of English red tape. Domesday Book is the most complete survey of a pre-industrial society anywhere in the world.

It enables us to reconstruct the politics, government, society and economy of 11th-century England with greater precision than is possible for almost any other pre-modern polity.

It certainly proves that pre-Conquest England was rich and effectively administered. Forget those ideas. The population was large — there were at least two million people in Domesday England. The landscape was intensively exploited. About 90 per cent of places on the modern map of England south of the Tees are recorded in Domesday Book.

There was also heavy investment in agriculture. That was enough to cultivate about 3. A survey in reveals the cultivated area in England was then about 3. 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.

Sometimes those with trades - millers, blacksmiths, potters, shepherds and the like - receive specific mention and are named such as Fulchere the Bowman. Others appear with names associated with more personal characteristics, such as Alwin the Rat and Ralph the Haunted. Often listed with the number of ploughs, it has been assumed that most would have worked as ploughmen, domestic servants and dairymaids.

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This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. The Domesday Book. On this page Introduction Why was the Domesday Book compiled? The questions Who appears in Domesday Book? Page options Print this page. Introduction The Domesday Book - compiled in - is one of the few historical records whose name is familiar to most people in this country. Why was the Domesday Book compiled? According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the decision was taken at William's Christmas court in Gloucester in , and his men were sent: 'all over England into every shire [to] find out how many hides there were in the shire, what land and cattle the king had himself in the shire, what dues he ought to have in twelve months from the shire.

Great and Little Domesday Domesday was never a single volume but originally two books, Great Domesday and Little Domesday which was a longer version, covering the counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, which was never written up into the main volume. 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. Question 10 to be recorded three times: in the time of King Edward , when William gave it often , and now Now I have a suspicion that probably the peasants were able to conceal a certain amount from the commissioners, using that well known peasant cunning and deviousness.

However deviousness notwithstanding, there is no doubt that it cast a mighty light on the resources of the Kingdom at that time and is a priceless heritage for our country. Its not sure whether William intended the great survey to be written up. Unfortunately for him he died in , from injuries caused by being impaled upon the pommel of his horse, according to legend, during the siege of Mantes in France.

It is believed that it may have been his son and successor, William Rufus, who ordered the survey to be transcribed. The Domesday book is actually two books.

Great Doomsday and Little Doomsday. Great Domesday appears to have been largely written by the one scribe although some six scribes were used for Little Domesday. This, as you would imagine covers the greater area of land. This is the final edited down version of the information compiled and covers most of the country apart from Winchester, London, Bristol and Tamworth which were unaccountably left out of the survey and East Anglia which is the subject of Little Doomsday.

There is also limited coverage of parts of the North, and Durham and Northumberland are omitted entirely — due doubtless to the fact that the William had had problems enforcing his authority there. Indeed he had ravaged the land ferociously during the Harrying of the North — no doubt they had not forgotten.