Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England

by Frederic William Maitland

The great lords.

The kings, the earls and the churches have of course many demesne manors. Of the ecclesiastical estates we shall speak in our next essay, for they can be best examined in the light that is cast upon them by the Anglo-Saxon charters. Here we will merely observe that some of the churches have not only large, but well compacted territories. The abbey of S^t. Etheldreda, for example, besides having outlying manors, holds the two hundreds which make up the isle of Ely; her property in Cambridgeshire is valued at £318[677]. The earls also are rich in demesne manors and so is the king.

The king as landlord.

King William is much richer than King Edward was. The Conqueror has been chary in appointing earls and consequently he has in his hand, not only the royal manors, but also a great many comital manors, to say nothing of some other estates which, for one reason or another, he has kept to himself. Edward had been rich, but when compared with his earls he had not been extravagantly rich. In Somersetshire, for example, there were twelve royal manors which may have brought in a revenue of £500 or thereabouts, while there were fifteen comital manors which were worth nearly £300[678]. The royal demesne had been a scattered territory; the king had something in most shires, but was far richer in some than in others. It was not so much in the number of his manors as in their size and value that he excelled the richest of his subjects. Somehow or another he had acquired many of those vills which were to be the smaller boroughs and the market towns of later days. We may well suppose that from of old the vills that a king would wish to get and to keep would be the flourishing vills, but again we can not doubt that many a vill has prospered because it was the king’s.

The ancient demesne.

Among the manors which William holds in the south-west a distinction is drawn by the Exeter Domesday. The manors which the Confessor held are ‘The King’s Demesne which belongs to the kingdom,’ while those which were held by the house of Godwin are the ‘Comital Manors[679].’ So in East Anglia certain manors are distinguished as pertaining or having pertained to the kingdom or kingship, the regnum or regio[680]. This does not seem to have implied that they were inalienably annexed to the crown, for King Edward had given some of them away. Neither when it speaks of the time of William, nor when it speaks of the time of Edward, does our record draw any clear line between those manors which the king holds as king and those which he holds in his private capacity, though it may just hint that certain ancient estates ought not to be alienated. The degree in which the various manors of the crown stood outside the national system of finance, justice and police we can not accurately ascertain. Some, but by no means all, pay no geld. Of some it is said that they have never paid geld. Perhaps in these ingeldable manors we may see those which constituted the royal demesne of the West Saxon kings at some remote date. Of the king’s vill of Gomshall in Surrey it is written: ‘the villeins of this vill were free from all the affairs of the sheriff[681],’ as though it were no general truth that with a royal manor the sheriff had nothing to do.

The comital manors.

As with the estates of the king, so with the estates of the earls, we find it impossible to distinguish between private property and official property. Certain manors are regarded as the ‘manors of the shire’ (mansiones de comitatu[682]); certain vills are ‘comital vills[683],’ they belong to ‘the consulate[684].’ Hereditary right tempered by outlawry was fast becoming the title by which the earldoms were holden. The position of the house of Leofric in Mercia was far from being as strong as the position of the house of Rolf in Normandy, and yet we may be sure that King Harold would not have been able to treat the sons of Ælfgar as removable officers. But one of the best marked features of Domesday Book, a feature displayed on page after page, the enormous wealth of the house of Godwin, seems only explicable by the supposition that the earlships and the older ealdormanships had carried with them a title to the enjoyment of wide lands. That enormous wealth had been acquired within a marvellously short time. Godwin was a new man: nothing certain is known of his ancestry. His daughter’s marriage with the king will account for something; Harold’s marriage with the daughter of Ælfgar will account for something, for instance, for manors which Harold held in the middle of Ælfgar’s country[685]; and a great deal of simple rapacity is laid to the charge of Harold by jurors whose testimony is not to be lightly rejected[686]; but the greater part of the land ascribed to Godwin, his widow and his sons, seems to consist of comitales villae.

Private rights and governmental revenues.

The wealth of the earls is a matter of great importance. If we subtract the estates of the king, the estates of the earls, and the estates of the churches—and, as we shall see hereafter, the churches had obtained the bulk of their wealth directly from the kings,—if we subtract again the lands which the king, the earls, the churches have granted to their thegns, the England of 1065 will not appear to us a land of very great landowners, and we may obtain a valuable hint as to one of the origins of feudalism. A vast amount of land is or has recently been held by office-holders, by the holders of the kingship, the earlships, or the ealdormanships. We seem to see their proprietary rights arising in the sphere of public law, growing out of governmental rights, which however themselves are conceived as being in some sort proprietary. Many a passage in Domesday Book will suggest to us that a right to take tribute and a right to take the profits of justice have helped to give the king and the earls their manors and their seignories. Even in his own demesne manors the king is apt to appear rather as a tribute taker than as a landowner. Manors of very unequal size and value have had to supply him with equal quantities of victuals; each has to give ‘a night’s farm’ once a year. Then from the counties at large he has taken a tribute; from Oxfordshire, for example, £10 for a hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, £23 for dogs and 6 sesters of honey[687]; from Worcestershire £10 or a Norway hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse[688]; from Warwickshire £23 for ‘the dog’s custom,’ 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, £10 for a hawk and 24 sesters of honey[689]. The farm of the county that the sheriff pays is made up out of obscure old items of this sort. Many men who are not the king’s tenants must assist him in his hunting, must help in the erection of his deer-hays[690]. Then there are the avera and the inwards that are exacted by the king or his sheriff from sokemen who are not the king’s men. The sheriff also is entitled to provender rents; out of ‘the revenues which belong to the shrievalty’ of Wiltshire, Edward of Salisbury gets pigs, wheat, barley, oats, honey, poultry, eggs, cheeses, lambs and fleeces; and besides this he seems to have ‘reveland’ which belongs to him as sheriff[691]. Then we see curious payments in money and renders in kind made to some royal or some comital manor by the holders of other manors. In Devonshire, Charlton which belongs to the Bishop of Coutances, Honiton which belongs to the Count of Mortain, Smaurige which belongs to Ralph de Pomerai, Membury which belongs to William Chevre, Roverige which belongs to S^t. Mary of Rouen, each of these manors used to pay twenty pence a year to the royal manor of Axminster[692]. In Somersetshire there are manors which have owed consuetudines, masses of iron and sheep and lambs to the royal manors of South Perrott and Cury, or the comital manors of Crewkerne and Dulverton[693]. Then again, we find that pasture rights are connected with justiciary rights:—Godwin had a manor in Hampshire to which belonged the third penny of six hundreds, and in all the woods of those six hundreds he had free pasture and pannage[694]; the third penny of three hundreds in Devonshire and the third animal of the moorland pastures were annexed to the manor of Molland[695]. Many things seem to indicate that the distinction between private rights and governmental powers has been but faintly perceived in the past.