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

by Frederic William Maitland

Stability of the vill.

When that book mentions the name of a place, when it says that Roger holds Sutton or that Ralph holds three hides in Norton, we regard that name as the name of a vill; it may or may not be also the name of a manor. Speaking very generally we may say that the place so named will in after times be known as a vill and in our own day will be a civil parish. No doubt in some parts of the country new vills have been created since the Conqueror’s time. Some names that occur in our record fail to obtain a permanent place on the roll of English vills, become the names of hamlets or disappear altogether; on the other hand, new names come to the front. Of course we dare not say dogmatically that all the names mentioned in Domesday Book were the names of vills; very possibly (if this distinction was already known) some of them were the names of hamlets; nor, again, do we imply that the villa of 1086 had much organization; but a place that is mentioned in Domesday Book will probably be recognized as a vill in the thirteenth, a civil parish in the nineteenth century. Let us take Cambridgeshire by way of example. Excluding the Isle of Ely, we find that the political geography of the Conqueror’s reign has endured until our own time. The boundaries of the hundreds lie almost where they lay, the number of vills has hardly been increased or diminished. The chief changes amount to this:—A small tract on the east side of the county containing Exning and Bellingham has been made over to Suffolk; four other names contained in Domesday no longer stand for parishes, while the names of five of our modern parishes—one of them is the significant name of Newton—are not found there[31]. But about a hundred and ten vills that were vills in 1086 are vills or civil parishes at the present day, and in all probability they then had approximately the same boundaries that they have now.

Omission of vills.

This may be a somewhat too favourable example of permanence and continuity. Of all counties Cambridgeshire is the one whose ancient geography can be the most easily examined; but wherever we have looked we have come to the conclusion that the distribution of England into vills is in the main as old as the Norman conquest[32]. Two causes of difficulty may be noticed, for they are of some interest. Owing to what we have called the ‘notional movability’ of land, we never can be quite sure that when certain hides or acres are said to be in or lie in a certain place they are really and physically in that place. They are really in one village, but they are spoken of as belonging to another village, because their occupants pay their geld or do their services in the latter. Manorial and fiscal geography interferes with physical and villar geography. We have lately seen how land rated at five hides was comprised, as a matter of fact, in the vill of Abington; but of those five hides, one virgate ‘lay in’ Shingay, a half-hide ‘lay in’ Litlington while a half-virgate ‘lay and had always lain’ in Morden[33]. This, if we mistake not, leads in some cases to an omission of the names of small vills. A great lord has a compact estate, perhaps the whole of one of the small southern hundreds. He treats it as a whole, and all the land that he has there will be ascribed to some considerable village in which he has his hall. We should be rash in supposing that there were no other villages on this land. For example, in Surrey there is now-a-days a hundred called Farnham which comprises the parish of Farnham, the parish of Frensham and some other villages. If we mistake not, all that Domesday Book has to say of the whole of this territory is that the Bishop of Winchester holds Farnham, that it has been rated at 60 hides, that it has been worth the large sum of £65 a year and that there are so many tenants upon it[34]. We certainly must not draw the inference that there was but one vill in this tract. If the bishop is tenant in chief of the whole hundred and has become responsible for all the geld that is levied therefrom, there is no great reason why the surveyors should trouble themselves about the vills. Thus the simple Episcopus tenet Ferneham may dispose of some 25,000 acres of land. So the same bishop has an estate at Chilcombe in Hampshire; but clearly the name Ciltecumbe covers a wide territory for there are no less than nine churches upon it[35]. We never can be very certain about the boundaries of these large and compact estates.

Fission of vills.

A second cause of difficulty lies in the fact that in comparatively modern times, from the twelfth century onwards, two or three contiguous villages will often bear the same name and be distinguished only by what we may call their surnames—thus Guilden Morden and Steeple Morden, Stratfield Saye, Stratfield Turgis, Stratfield Mortimer, Tolleshunt Knights, Tolleshunt Major, Tolleshunt Darcy. Such cases are common; in some districts they are hardly exceptional. Doubtless they point to a time when a single village by some process of colonization or subdivision become two villages. Now Domesday Book seldom enables us to say for certain whether the change has already taken place. In a few instances it marks off the little village from the great village of the same name[36]. In some other instances it will speak, for example, of Mordune and Mordune Alia, of Emingeforde and Emingeforde Alia, or the like, thus showing both that the change has taken place, and also that it is so recent that it is recognized only by very clumsy terms. In Cambridgeshire, since we have the original verdicts, we can see that the two Mordens are already distinct; the one is rated at ten hides, the other at five[37]. On the other hand, we can see that our Great and Little Shelford are rated as one vill of twenty hides[38], our Castle Camps and Shudy Camps as one vill of five hides[39]. Elsewhere we are left to guess whether the fission is complete, and the surnames that many of our vills ultimately acquire, the names of families which rose to greatness in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, will often suggest that the surveyors saw but one vill where we see two[40]. However, the broad truth stands out that England was divided into vills and that in general the vill of Domesday Book is still a vill in after days[41].

The nucleated village and the vill of scattered steads.

The ‘vill’ or ‘town’ of the later middle ages was, like the ‘civil parish’ of our own day, a tract of land with some houses on it, and this tract was a unit in the national system of police and finance[42], But we are not entitled to make for ourselves any one typical picture of the English vill. We are learning from the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen’s guidance we are beginning to decipher) that in all probability we must keep at least two types before our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the true village or the nucleated village. In the purest form of this type there is one and only one cluster of houses. It is a fairly large cluster; it stands in the midst of its fields, of its territory, and until lately a considerable part of its territory will probably have consisted of spacious ‘common fields.’ In a country in which there are villages of this type the parish boundaries seem almost to draw themselves[43]. On the other hand, we may easily find a country in which there are few villages of this character. The houses which lie within the boundary of the parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or three, there three or four. These clusters often have names of their own, and it seems a mere chance that the name borne by one of them should be also the name of the whole parish or vill[44]. We see no traces of very large fields. On the face of the map there is no reason why a particular group of cottages should be reckoned to belong to this parish rather than to the next. As our eyes grow accustomed to the work we may arrive at some extremely important conclusions such as those which Meitzen has suggested. The outlines of our nucleated villages may have been drawn for us by Germanic settlers, whereas in the land of hamlets and scattered steads old Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly effaced. Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way. In the meantime let us remember that a villa of Domesday Book may correspond to one of at least two very different models or may be intermediate between various types. It may be a fairly large and agrarianly organic unit, or it may be a group of small agrarian units which are being held together in one whole merely by an external force, by police law and fiscal law[45].

Illustrations by maps.

Two little fragments of ‘the original one inch ordnance map’ will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse. The one pictures a district on the border between Oxfordshire and Berkshire cut by the Thames and the main line of the Great Western Railway; the other a district on the border between Devon and Somerset, north of Collumpton and south of Wiveliscombe. Neither is an extreme example. True villages we may easily find. Cambridgeshire, for instance, would have afforded some beautiful specimens, for many of the ‘open fields’ were still open when the ordnance map of that county was made. But throughout large tracts of England, even though there has been an ‘inclosure’ and there are no longer any open fields, our map often shows a land of villages. When it does so and the district that it portrays is a purely agricultural district, we may generally assume without going far wrong that the villages are ancient, for during at least the last three centuries the predominant current in our agrarian history has set against the formation of villages and towards the distribution of scattered homesteads. To find the purest specimens of a land of hamlets we ought to go to Wales or to Cornwall or to other parts of ‘the Celtic fringe’; very fair examples might be found throughout the west of England. Also we may perhaps find hamlets rather than villages wherever there have been within the historic period large tracts of forest land. Very often, again, the parish or township looks on our map like a hybrid. We seem to see a village with satellitic hamlets. Much more remains to be done before we shall be able to construe the testimony of our fields and walls and hedges, but at least two types of vill must be in our eyes when we are reading Domesday Book[46].