How Domesday made modern England

Over the next nine months, visitors to the British Museum’s much-heralded Bayeux Tapestry exhibition will encounter a 1,000-year-old, all-action cinematic masterpiece. On it, they will see warlords hunt and fight and swear oaths on holy relics, and dash across land and sea to fight for glory and the ultimate prize of the English throne. A perjured, oath-breaking usurper, Earl Harold, gets his just rewards on the field of battle at Hastings; stout Anglo-Saxon defense is overcome by superior, God-blessed Norman military muscle. Duke William claims his promised inheritance; carrion feed on the corpses of dead warriors; women and children flee the destruction. Castles are built, cities burned; a new king rides off towards his coronation, only for the Tapestry to abruptly end unfinished. There are other stories to be told of those fateful events and their lasting impacts on England and the English. A string of rebellions lasted well into the 1070s, but one-by-one the English earls were crushed, imprisoned or executed — until only one great Englishman, Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, remained after throwing in his lot with William. Taxes were imposed on the defeated natives to pay off the Conqueror’s armies. But the old English nobility weren’t simply removed from positions of power; even their culture was destroyed. Churches and cathedrals were torn down and rebuilt in the new Norman style, as if to obliterate the visible face of the English past from its skylines and townscapes. Ancient relations between lords and their dependent farmers were severed, never to be rebuilt. The landscape was militarized by the construction of hundreds of motte-and-bailey castles. The “Harrying of the North” in 1069-70, which modern scholars have labeled a genocide, depopulated and “wasted” the country north of York. The most significant English document of this — or any — period is Domesday Book, even if, like the Bayeux Tapestry, it’s told by the conquering Normans. It is a survey of all English lands south of the River Tees, listed for each county by the tenant-in-chief, often the king himself, who enjoyed its revenues and was responsible for raising armies from its fighting men and collecting taxes for the king. The idea of the survey was conceived by William in 1085, in the 20th year of his rule over the English, after hearing rumors of a planned invasion from across the North Sea. He sent to Normandy for a great defensive force, to be billeted on English towns and villages, but he had to find the cash and materiel with which to pay and feed them. Therefore, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded: “…Then, at the midwinter, was the king in Gloucester with his council […] Then he sent his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out how many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.” It seems extraordinary that, just seven months after William sent his Inquisitors out into the countryside, at Lammastide of 1086 they were able to present to him the results of this immense national data-gathering exercise at Old Sarum, the Iron Age fort near Salisbury where he had built a stronghold inside the old defenses. Returns from the survey were checked by moderators; claims and disputes were allowed and given formal legal recognition. The English bureaucratic state was born, and Domesday Book records the internal workings of this stupendous machinery of the ultra-efficient Norman state. The resulting text allows us to encounter the peasant castes — sokemen, villeins, bordars, cottars and slaves — who lived on, worked for and rendered goods to their lords in thousands of manors across 34 counties. The surveyors counted cows, horses, sheep and pigs, plows and oxen; measured woodlands, pastures and meadows, calculated cash renders and recorded crushing labor dues. Their returns were subsequently compiled in the nearly 900 vellum folios of the Exchequer volumes that later became known as Domesday Book: England’s national asset register. As the 12th-century royal treasurer Richard FitzNeal wrote: “The natives call this book Domesday, that is, the day of judgement. This is a metaphor: for just as no judgement 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 without penalty.” The judgments of King William’s Domesday surveyors echo down the ages. The wholesale theft of land by just 200 Norman barons, from some 5,000 Anglo-Saxon thegns, locked England onto a pathway of feudal hierarchy. Domesday Book‘s pages record the depredations of a new class of king’s men, tax farmers and sheriffs, raking off profits from fines, sub-letting lands for cash and engineering land grabs for themselves. The rights formerly enjoyed by England’s free peasants were taken from them. From that time on, English law was constructed on the rights of great landowners and on a form of social apartheid. Domesday Book also recorded how England’s fields, meadows, woodland and livestock had been administered and apportioned in the decades before the Conquest. So, it gives us a tangible sense of the sophistication and wealth of late Anglo-Saxon England — indeed, Domesday Book’s entries could not have been compiled in just seven months had William’s native predecessors not already held such detailed knowledge of its people and communities, some of it documented in charters accumulated over centuries; much of it oral, passed from one generation to the next by a community’s elders. Anglo-Saxon society was steeped in customary traditions of territorial lordship: land held in return for renders of consumable produce, military and domestic service and loyalty. Its resources were well-mapped by a literate, canny royal administration. Rights of patronage and protection worked up and down the complex social hierarchy of caste and kinship: everyone knew where they belonged, and to whom they owed their services and privileges. Twenty years after Hastings, the great survey of England shows how these rights were either terminated with extreme prejudice in the aftermath of Hastings and subsequent rebellions — or else redrawn over time, very much to the disadvantage of the natives. England’s free farmers — the sokemen, liberi homines and radknights (the various regional names for a superior sort of peasant or minor squire) —were largely demoted to the status of villeins; their holdings diminished or reallocated to the new king’s followers, their free status denied. In Domesday Book. Harold, England’s last Anglo-Saxon king, was cast as a mere usurping earl — just another dispossessed lord, his estates now belonging to the new king or his barons. Above all, the legacy of the Norman Conquest is told in the landscape, in its open fields and clustered villages, motte and bailey castles, Norman churches and cathedrals: ordered; controlled; taxable; stable; enduring… till Domesday. The vast majority of the 13,000 or so places named in Domesday Book still exist — indeed, a Domesday name-check is an ironic badge of honor, a historical cachet for our provincial towns and villages. Domesday gives the English a sense of deep-time continuity with their past; and the names it records take us further back to the beyond of Domesday, for the origins of each featured place lie in the pre-Norman centuries of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Wessex and Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia and Kent. They name the topographic features that mattered — the shapes of hills, the characters of rivers, the wild beasts of field and woods; they name farms and farmers, the places where rivers might be crossed by ferry or ford or where a night’s rest and fodder might be had. Their survival shows that even the imposition of a new power in the land cannot erase an entire culture. Nevertheless, between them, the Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book offered later tyrants a playbook: steal a country’s assets and sell or rent some of them back to the previous owners; render their culture decadent and antiquated; erase it; lower their status and impose a new language on them. Pretend that nothing has changed; legitimize your rule by delegitimizing the ancient regime. The English landscape was built by communities working the land. They constructed their world at walking pace and, in decoding the story of the most profound events in English history, the modern traveler to that half-foreign land — the England of a thousand years ago — must tread those same paths, as I have done. With Domesday Book in hand, I walked many of the same paths trodden or ridden by William’s surveyors. Often, I would walk through a wood that had been managed continuously through those centuries, cross a river at a ford that has been in constant use for far longer; navigate by line of sight using the tower or spire of a church that stood before William’s armies crossed the Channel. In over one thousand miles of travels on foot, I came to know as much about England today as I did about the England of a millennium ago. Communities are resilient. Forty generations separate us from those days, but the memories of ten centenarians, strung end to end, would take us back there. Some of what I found — fields and woods for the most part empty of people; bijou cottages with names like The Old Post Office, The Old Forge, the Old School house, in villages where the lanes are empty and there are no shops or schools or forges — showed how communities have been transformed. But I was deeply struck by the realization of how recently so much of that change has happened. I became engrossed by the detail and richness of the late 19th-century Kelly’s County Directories — a sort of Victorian Domesday — in which villages and small towns come alive with their police constables and station masters, their squires and vicars, farriers and carpenters, smiths, schoolmasters and seamstresses. When my grandparents were born, the relations and geographies set out by Domesday Book still largely existed: parish council and agricultural laborer; Inn and smithy’s forge; roads, lanes and trackways linking church, manor and marketplace. These were self-sustaining communities steeped in time’s preserving liquor. The Domesday counties survived almost intact until 1974; the shire hundreds were still used as administrative and electoral units well into the 19th century. Domesday boroughs like Old Sarum, long since depopulated, were returning members to parliament until the Great Reform Act of 1832. In Northamptonshire, I walked through a village in whose Kelly’s pages my great-grandfather appears as a wheelwright; another where the church in which I was christened holds four generations of my family and whose name, Crick, predates even Anglo-Saxon England; and yet another in whose medieval manor the ancestors of George Washington lived. In Worcestershire I visited Droitwich, England’s oldest continuous industrial settlement, where salt has been continuously extracted from brine springs since the Iron Age. Here Domesday records the interests of more than 40 manorial lords who enjoyed financial interests in the salt trade. Here, too, it records some of the activities of the dastardly Sheriff Urse d’Abetôt who owned rights to a virgate (30 acres) of land in Droitwich which rendered 25 sesters or bushels of salt annually but, according to the Domesday entry, he had “oppressed the men to such an extent that now they cannot render the salt”. Beneath the grim legacy of industrialization in the West Midlands, documented by writers from William Cobbett to J.B. Priestley, I found in the pages of a late Anglo-Saxon text the artisans — predecessors of the navvies, potters, colliers and forge-masters of the age of steam — who had mended plows, baked bread, repaired shoes and fashioned carts ten centuries ago in those same places. In Kent, Domesday tells of ancient landholding rights and territorial institutions — the lathes — which show how rights to woodland and grazing for pigs in the High Weald were enjoyed by manors as far away as Minster-in-Thanet, more than forty miles away. In Lincolnshire, I found myself looking at the shape of a distinctive hill whose Old English name, Hōh, described the shape of a human heel. I found that the fen-edge town of Bourne had once belonged in part to the Anglo-Saxon lord named Hereward — the legendary rebel hero. In Norfolk, I was shown a church whose walls were painted with late 11th-century murals, in which Christ appears short-haired and clean-shaven — a good Norman. In Yorkshire, the devastating consequences of the Harrying of the North, the best documented episode of genocide in English history, were clear from the hundreds of manors listed as “waste” in 1086. But here also were the place-name remnants of an earlier colonization, in the Scandinavian Thorpes and Danbys whose warrior farmers had made a better fist of integrating with the natives than their Norman counterparts. England’s ancient institutions — legal and fiscal — interweave the overriding interests of Domesday’s great landowners against commoners and peasant farmers with threads of Norman piety and logic, the centralizing efficiency of the Exchequer, and a profound knowledge of England’s hierarchies of landscape and community: its parishes and townships, hundreds and shires, boroughs and great estates. Domesday’s legacies are, like the English landscape, a complex palimpsest of tensions played out through war and peace, plague and fire, reform and revolution. England is the land of the book; and the book of the land. Each generation adds, will add, a new chapter; but they can’t erase all that has been written before.