The most ancient record in which we find any mention of Lowestoft is Domesday Book. As this is the case with nearly every other town and parish in England, Lowestoft is not behind other places in evidence of antiquity.
But Lowestoft not only appears in Domesday as a parish and a village, but it appears as a Royal manor—or at least as one of the numerous estates or demesnes held by William the Conqueror, as his private property—as the successor of Edward the Confessor and Canute. On the strength of this archæological distinction, the town in the time of Elizabeth and Charles I., claimed the privileges of lands in ‘ancient demesne.’ These privileges were that the town was excused from contributing to the expenses of the members of Parliament for the county, and its inhabitants were not to be called upon to go to Beccles or Bury as jurymen, but only to their own Manor Courts at Corton. The exercise of these privileges has, I understand, been abandoned for some time, and we have condescended to take part in the judicial and political system of the country like other places. What this ancient “demesne of the Crown” was we shall see presently. You have all, I doubt not, heard of Domesday Book, but you will be able to appreciate better the value and meaning of the information it gives us if I remind you shortly of its history.
In 1066 William won the Battle of Hastings, and on the strength of this victory claimed England as its conqueror, and not merely as the chosen successor of Edward. As conqueror of the country the whole of England was at his disposal, and he gave the lands of the Saxon (or according to Mr. Freeman and Mr. Green, ‘English’) proprietors to his French followers. They made full use of the King’s grant, and in a few years almost every Saxon landlord had disappeared, or if any remained, they remained as tenants of small portions of their estates to the ownership of which a Norman landlord had—as they called it—“succeeded.” We are told of one Norman Knight, who having fought for William at Hastings, refused to take any share in this wholesale robbery. He had done his duty as a vassal in fighting for William, and he preferred to return to Normandy and be contented with his own property there; not so though the rest.
You must understand that the great change brought about by the conquest was at first only a change of landlords, and involved no alteration in the laws and customs by which property was held. The parishes, the manors, the farms, the occupying tenants, and the labourers on the estates were not disturbed. Even the live and dead stock on the farms were all claimed by the new owners, and to a large extent actually got possession of by them.
After this process of ousting the Saxon landlords had been going on for some years—not, as you may suppose without a good deal of fighting and cruelty—the country was becoming settled, and the King thought it time to learn in whose possession its lands were, and what their estates were worth. So he appointed a commission of enquiry, to go through the whole country and report to him the names of all the possessors of estates, and what amount of land producing corn their estates contained, and what live and dead stock, including the tenants belonging to each estate, were on the land, and what each manor and estate was valued at. The results of this enquiry, which took some six years to complete, were put together by clerks, and written out in as concise a manner as possible on parchment—and so Domesday Book was formed.
As the commissioners had to ascertain so far as they could, what differences had taken place in the ownership and occupation of land, and in its condition and value, since the Conquest, Domesday Book, although made some 20 years after England was under the Normans, gives us a picture of the country as it was in later Saxon times, and it is from this book that most of our knowledge of the condition of England in the Saxon period is derived.
The Parishes of Lothingland.
The map [13] represents the Hundred of Mutford and Lothingland (then called the two half hundreds of Mutford and Lothingland) as it is now divided into parishes. Nearly all these parishes are mentioned in Domesday under their present names (though of course not spelt precisely in the same way). Many, if not all, of them had probably existed under the same name, and with much the same boundaries some 300 years before, under the Saxon and Danish kings of East Anglia. They appear in Domesday as the known areas in which the estates reported upon were situated, but the parishes themselves were not the subject of the survey, nor does the term “parish” appear either in English or Latin. The word “Villa” is frequently used to denote these areas, just as “Town” was commonly used as an equivalent for “parish” in much later times. The book is written in a sort of Latinised English, but the names of places retain the vernacular form. As they are spelt very differently in different entries, Domesday is no authority for the correct spelling of any of our parish names. But the form they bear in Domesday throws much light on their etymological origin. To what extent the estates mentioned in Domesday were contained in the parishes to which they are allocated is doubtful. In a few cases the several manors returned as being situated in a particular parish would appear to require a larger area than the parish now contains, but in nearly all cases the amount of land reported upon as being under tillage in a parish is very much less than the land now under cultivation.
In his history of the Norman Conquest Mr. Freeman says of Domesday:—“Domesday teaches better than any other witness of those times can teach us, that the England of the 11th century and the England of the 19th are one and the same thing.” We will now see what it teaches us about Lowestoft.