Closely connected with all this is the question of the existence of downright error in Domesday Book itself. To show how this might happen, it will be necessary to give a sketch of the manner in which the great survey was compiled. “The king,” says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, “sent his men into every shire all over England.” We cannot be quite sure whether they went on circuit through the several hundreds of each shire or merely held one session in its county town[[336]]; in either case there appeared before them the entire hundred court, consisting, as we have seen, of the priest, the reeve, and six villeins from every vill. But out of this heterogeneous assembly there seems to have been chosen a small body of jurors who were responsible in a peculiar degree for the verdict given. We possess lists of the jurors for most of the hundreds of Cambridgeshire, from which it appears that eight were chosen in each hundred, and, a very important point, that half of them were Frenchmen and half were Englishmen. Thus the commissioners obtained for each hundred the sworn verdict of a body of men drawn from both races and representing, so far as we can see, very different levels of society. We cannot assume that precisely the same questions were put to the jurors in every shire. The commissioners may well have been allowed some little freedom of adapting the form of the inquiry to varying local conditions, and the terminology of their instructions may have differed to some extent according to the part of England in which they were to be carried out; but the similarity of the returns obtained from very distant counties proves that the whole Domesday Inquest was framed according to one general plan. It is more likely that the differences which undoubtedly exist at times between the surveys of different counties are really due to the procedure of the scribes who shaped the local returns into Domesday as we possess it.[[337]]
It will be evident that the completed returns from each county must have consisted of a series of hundred-rolls arranged vill by vill according to the sequence followed by the commissioners in making the inquiry. The first task of the Domesday scribes was to substitute for the geographical order of the original returns a tenurial order based on the distribution of land among the tenants-in-chief in each shire. They must have worked through the returns county by county, collecting all the entries which related to land held by the same tenant-in-chief in each shire, and arranging them under appropriate headings, and we know that they paid no very consistent regard to local geography in the process. Where a vill was divided between two or more tenants-in-chief the division must have been marked by the jurors of its hundred in making their report; but, whereas the unity of the vill as a whole was respected in the original returns, it was disregarded by the Domesday scribes, for whom the feudal arrangements of the county were the first consideration. The first step to be taken in drawing a picture of the condition of any county surveyed in Domesday is the collection of their scattered entries and the reconstruction of the individual vills in their entirety. As any one who has attempted this exercise can testify, the risk of error is very great, and we may be sure that it was no less for the Domesday scribes themselves. We cannot often test the accuracy of Domesday by a comparison with other documents, but the few cases where this is possible are enough to destroy all belief in the literal infallibility of the great record. The work was done under great pressure and against time, and we should not cavil at its incidental inaccuracies.
Domesday Book as we possess it consists of two volumes, the second, known as Little Domesday, dealing with Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, the first containing the survey of the rest of England. The two volumes are very different in plan and treatment. In Essex and East Anglia, the scribes have followed as nearly as possible the directions which we have quoted on page 458. They enumerate the live-stock on the several estates with an abundance of detail which quite justifies the complaint of the Peterborough Chronicler that there was not an ox or a cow nor a swine that was not set down in the king’s writ. It is from the survey of these counties also that we draw the great body of our information about the different sorts and conditions of men, their tenurial relations and personal status. But this wealth of detail is accompanied by considerable faultiness of execution, and in the first volume of Domesday the plan is different. In compiling Great Domesday the scribes abandoned the idea of transcribing the original returns in full, and contented themselves with giving a précis of them; the details which had been collected about sheep and horses are jettisoned and the whole survey is drawn within closer limits. The most reasonable explanation of this change is that the so-called second volume of Domesday represents the first attempt at a codification of the returns[[338]]; that the result was found too detailed for practical purposes, and that the conciser arrangement of the first volume was adopted in consequence. The volume combining Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk contains 450 folios and even the Conqueror might have been appalled at the outcome of his survey if all the thirty counties of England were to be described on the same scale. Whatever the reason, the change is accompanied by a marked improvement in workmanship and practicability.
The “first” volume of Domesday contains 382 folios and its arrangement deserves notice. In regular course the survey proceeds across England from Kent to Cornwall; the first 125 folios of the volume are in fact the description of the earldom of Wessex. Next, starting again in the east, the counties between Middlesex and Herefordshire are described; to be followed by the survey of the north midland shires from Cambridgeshire to Warwick, still following due order from east to west. Warwick is followed by Shropshire, for Worcestershire belongs to Domesday’s second belt, and the rest of the survey progresses from west to east from Shropshire to Notts, Yorkshire and Leicestershire completing the tale. In general the boundaries of the counties are the same as at the present day, but portions of Wales are included in Gloucester, Hereford, and Berkshire; the lands “between Ribble and Mersey” form a sort of appendage to Yorkshire, and Rutland in 1086 has not yet the full status of a county. It is not quite easy to explain why Domesday stops short at the Tees and the Ribble. Cumberland and Westmoreland were indeed reckoned parts of the Scotch kingdom at this time, but Northumberland and Durham were undoubtedly English. Possibly they had been too much harried in recent years to be worth the labour of surveying; possibly in that wild and lawless land an attempt to carry out the survey would have led to something more than local riots. At any rate Domesday’s omission is our loss, for it is in the extreme north that the old English tenures lingered the longest; we could wish for a description of them in the Conqueror’s day and conceived on the same plan as the full accounts which we possess of the feudalised south.
All over England the scribes so far as was possible followed a consistent plan in the arrangement of the returns for each county. The case of Oxfordshire will do for a typical instance. Here, as in nearly every shire to the north of the Thames, the county town is surveyed first; the interesting description which is given of Oxford filling a column and a half. The rest of the folio is occupied by a list of all those in the county who held land in chief of the crown, arranged and numbered in the order in which their estates are entered in the body of the survey. The scale of precedence adopted by the compilers of Domesday deserves remark, for it is substantially the same as the order which we find observed in the lists of witnesses to solemn charters of the time. First comes the king in the case of every county in which he held land. Then comes the body of ecclesiastical tenants holding of him within the shire, archbishops first, then bishops, then abbots, or rather abbeys, for the tendency is to assign the lands belonging to a religious house to the foundation itself rather than to its head. Among laymen the earls come first, foreign counts being placed on a level with their English representatives, the same Latin word (comes) expressing both titles. Then come the various “barons” undistinguished by any mark of rank, who of course form the larger number of the tenants-in-chief in any shire, and lastly, in most counties, the holdings of a number of men of inferior rank are thrown together under one heading as “the lands of the king’s servants, sergeants, or thegns.” Returning to the case of Oxfordshire we find the king, as ever, first on the list. He is followed by the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of Winchester, Salisbury, Exeter, Lincoln, Bayeux, and Lisieux, who in turn are succeeded by the abbeys of Abingdon, Battle, Winchcombe, Préaux, the church of Saint Denis of Paris, and the canons of Saint Frideswide of Oxford. Earl Hugh of Chester stands first among laymen of “comital” rank, being followed by the counts of Mortain and Evreux, Earl Aubrey of Northumbria, and Count Eustace of Bologne. Then come the barons, twenty-three in number in Oxfordshire, whose order in the survey seems to be determined by no more subtle cause than a shadowy idea on the part of the scribes of grouping them according to the initial letter of their extra names. The list becomes a little miscellaneous towards the close; three great ladies appear: Christina, the sister of Edgar the Etheling; the Countess Judith, Waltheof’s widow; and a lady who is vaguely described as “Roger de Ivry’s wife,” bringing the total up to fifty-five. Then comes another baron, Hascuit Musard, an important Gloucestershire land-owner, whose Oxfordshire holding would seem to have been overlooked by the scribes, for it is squeezed in along the foot of two folios of the survey. He is followed by Turkill of Arden, an Englishman, who was powerful in Warwickshire but only held one manor in Oxfordshire, the description of which is succeeded by “the land of Richard Engayne and other thegns.” Richard Engayne was the king’s huntsman, and a Norman, as were many of his fellows, but about half the names entered under this comprehensive heading are unmistakably English and characteristically enough they are entered in a group after the members of the conquering race. The fifty-ninth and last heading in this varied list runs, “These underwritten lands belong to Earl William’s fee,” a formula which is explained by the fact that the manors surveyed under it had belonged to Earl William Fitz Osbern, who as we know had been killed in Flanders in 1071, while his son and heir had been disinherited in 1075. And so we see that, although the earl’s tenants had lost their immediate lord in consequence of his forfeiture, they were not recognised as holding in chief of the crown, but were kept apart in a group by themselves in anticipation of the later feudal practice by which the tenants of a great fief or honour in the royal hands were conceived of as holding rather of their honour than of the king himself.
In the present chapter we have mainly dealt with Domesday Book from its own standpoint as a fiscal register, but for the majority of the students its real value lies in the unique light which it throws upon legal and social antiquities and upon the personal history of the men of the Conquest. In these latter respects the different parts of the survey are by no means of equal value. The space assigned to each county in Domesday was determined solely by the caprice of the scribes; counties of approximately equal area are assigned very different limits of space in the record. Equally due to the action of the scribes is the amount of social and personal details, above the necessary minimum of fiscal information required, which is included in the description of each county. The surveys of Berkshire and Worcestershire, for instance, are many-sided records which throw light upon every aspect of the history of the times; while on the other hand for the counties of the Danelaw the fiscal skeleton of the record is left bare and arid; we get columns of statistics and little beside. The interest of Domesday of course is vastly increased when we are able to supplement its details with information derived from some other contemporary record; Buckinghamshire, for example, in which county there was no religious house in 1086, is at a disadvantage compared with Berkshire, where the local history of Abingdon Abbey fills in the outline of the greater record, and gives life to some at least of the men of whom the names and nothing more are written in its pages. Apart from this adventitious source of light, Domesday imparts some of its most precious information when recording a dispute between two tenants as to the possession of land, or noting new “customs,” tolls, and so forth, which have been introduced since the Conquest, for then we may look for some statement of local custom or some reconstruction of the “status quo ante conquestum.” And this leads naturally to the last division of our present subject—the legal theory which underlies Domesday Book.
It is abundantly plain from all our narratives of the Conquest that King William regarded himself, and was determined that he should be regarded, as the lawful successor of his cousin King Edward; he was the true heir by blood as well as by bequest. Unfortunately wicked men had usurped his inheritance so that he was driven to regain it by force and arms; the earl of Wessex had taken upon himself the title of king and the whole nation had acquiesced in his unlawful rule. But the verdict of battle had been given in William’s favour; he had been accepted as king by the great men of the realm, and he had been duly crowned; it would be no more than justice for him to disinherit every Englishman as such for his tacit or overt rebellion. Moreover even after he had been received as king his rebellious subjects in every part of the land had risen against him; they had justly forfeited all claim to his royal grace; their lands by virtue of these repeated treasons became at his absolute disposal. Some such ideas as these underlie that “great confiscation” of which Freeman considered Domesday to be essentially the record, and two all-important conclusions followed from them. The first is that the time of King Edward, that phrase which meets us on every page of Domesday, was the last season of good law in the land; should any man claim rights or privileges by prescription he must plead that they had been allowed and accepted under the last king of the old native line. Just as his subjects cried for “the law of King Edward” as the system of government under which they wished to live, so to the king himself these words expressed the test of legality to be applied to whatever rights claimed an origin anterior to his own personal grant. Rarely does Domesday refer to any of the kings before Edward; the Conqueror’s reign has already become the limit of legal memory; never, except by inadvertence, does it refer to the reign of Harold by name. And then in the second place he who would prove the lawful possession of his land must rely in the last resort upon “the writ and seal” of King William. The whole tenor of Domesday seems to imply that all Englishmen as such were held to have been disinherited by the result of the Conquest. Save for the lands of God and his Saints all England had become the king’s; the disposition he might make of his vast inheritance depended solely upon his own will. If he should please to allow to an Englishman the possession of his own or others’ lands, this was a matter of pure favour, and Thurkill of Warwick and Colswegn of Lincoln could put forward no other title than that which secured their fiefs to the Norman barons around them. But then comes in that principle which is above all distinctive of the Norman Conquest—if William stepped by lawful possession into the exact position of the native kings who were before him, so each of his barons in each of his estates must be the exact legal successor, the “heir,” of the Englishman whom he supplanted. The term used by Domesday to express the relationship of the old and the new landlord is very suggestive: the Englishman is the Norman’s antecessor, a word which we only translate inadequately by the colourless “predecessor.” We are probably right in calling the Norman Conquest the one catastrophic change in our social history, but the change as yet was informal; it went on beneath the surface of the law; the terminology of Domesday testifies to the attempt to bring the social conditions of 1086 under formulas which would be appropriate to the time of King Edward. When we are told that there were ten manors in such a vill in the time of King Edward, or that there used to be twenty villeins in a certain manor but now there are only sixteen, we may gravely doubt whether the terms “manor” and “villein” were known in England before the Conquest, and yet we may recognise that the employment of these words in relation to the Confessor’s day is of itself very significant. King William as King Edward’s lawful heir wishes consistently to act as such so far as may be; his scribes in their terminology affect a continuity of social history, which does not exist.
Perhaps nothing could be more illustrative of these principles than a few extracts taken from the Lincolnshire “Clamores”—the statement of the various disputed claims which had come to light in the course of the survey, and the record of their settlement by the Domesday jurors. The following are taken at random in the order in which they are entered in Domesday:
“Candleshoe wapentake says that Ivo Taillebois ought to have that which he claims in Ashby against Earl Hugh; namely one mill and one bovat of land, although the soke belongs to Grainham.
“Concerning the two carucates of land which Robert Dispensator claims against Gilbert de Gand in Screnby through Wiglac, his predecessor [antecessor], the wapentake says that the latter only had one carucate, and the soke of that belonged to Bardney. But Wiglac forfeited that land to his lord Gilbert, and so Robert has nothing there according to the witness of the Riding.