We have now given a brief examination to the main departments of administration, military and political, as they existed under the Conqueror. Two general conclusions may perhaps be suggested as a result of our survey. The first is that, throughout the field of government, revolutionary changes in all essential matters have been taking place under a specious continuity of external forms. The second is, that the Conqueror’s work is in no respect final; the shock of his conquest had wrecked the obsolescent organisation of the old English state, but the development of the new order on which his rule was founded was a task reserved for his descendants. The Curia Regis, which attended King William as he passed over his dominions, was a body the like of which had not been seen in King Edward’s day, but it was a body very unlike the group of trained administrators who transacted the business of government under the presidency of Henry II. The feudal host in England owed its being to the Conqueror, but no sooner was it firmly seated on the land than the introduction of scutage under Henry I. meant that the king would henceforth only allow the Conqueror’s host to survive in so far as it might subserve the purposes of the royal exchequer. King William’s destructive work had been carried out with unexampled thoroughness, order, and rapidity, but it was inevitable that the process of reconstruction which he began should far outrun the narrow limits of any single life.
Penny of William I.
CHAPTER XII
DOMESDAY BOOK
The eventful life of the Conqueror was within two years of its close when he decreed the compilation of that record which was to be the lasting monument of his rule in England. It is probable that if due regard be paid to the conditions of its execution Domesday Book may claim to rank as the greatest record of medieval Europe; certainly it deserves such preference among the legal documents of England. For, while we admire the systematic treatment which the great survey accords to county after county, we must also remember that no sovereign before William could have had the power to draw such wealth of information from all England between the Channel and the Tees; and that the thousands of dry figures which are deliberately accumulated in the pages of Domesday represent the result of the greatest catastrophe which has ever affected the national history. Domesday Book, indeed, has no peer, because it was the product of unique circumstances. Other conquerors have been as powerful as William, and as exigent of their royal rights; no other conqueror has so consistently regarded himself as the strict successor of the native kings who were before him; above all, no other conqueror has been at pains to devise a record of the order of things which he himself destroyed, nor even, like William, of so much of it as was relevant to the more efficient conduct of his own administration. Domesday Book is the perfect expression of the Norman genius for the details of government.[government.]
It is needless to say that William had no intention of enlightening posterity as to the social and economic condition of his kingdom. His aim was severely practical. How it struck a contemporary may be gathered from that well-known passage in which the Peterborough chronicler opens the long series of commentaries on Domesday by recording his impressions of the actual survey:
“After this the king held a great council and very deep speech with his wise men about this land, how it was peopled and by what men. Then he sent his men into every shire all over England and caused it to be ascertained how many hundred hides were in the shire and what land the king had, and what stock on the land, and what dues he ought to have each year from the shire. Also he caused it to be written, how much land his archbishops, bishops, abbots, and earls had, and (though I may be somewhat tedious in my account) what or how much each land-holder in England had in land or in stock and how much money it might be worth. So minutely did he cause it to be investigated that there was not one hide or yard of land, nor even (it is shameful to write of it though he thought it not shameful to do it) an ox nor a cow or swine that was not set down in his writ. And all the writings were brought to him afterwards.”
PORTION OF A PAGE OF DOMESDAY BOOK
(THE BEGINNING OF THE BERKSHIRE SECTION)
Opinion at Peterborough was clearly adverse to the survey, and Florence of Worcester tells us that the proceedings of the king’s commissioners caused riots in various parts of England. The exact scope of the information demanded by the commissioners cannot be better expressed than in the words of a writer belonging to the neighbouring abbey of Ely, who took an independent copy of the returns made to those officers concerning the lands of his monastery, and describes the nature of the inquiry thus: