The Norman Conquest (52 page)

Part of the purpose of the Domesday Survey, therefore, was to sort out precisely this sort of tenurial confusion – the net result of twenty years of Norman colonization which had been at best opportunistic and at worst downright rapacious. Richard fitz Nigel, the twelfth-century official who first recorded the name ‘Domesday’, thought that the book had been made ‘so that each man, being content with his own rights, should not with impunity usurp the rights of another’, and there is much to be said for this. Every effort had been made to ensure that the final judgement was as fair as possible. Not only were the jurors summoned to provide a check on the landlords, the names of the jurors, where known, reveal a fifty–fifty split between Englishmen and Frenchmen (thus in Cambridgeshire, each eight-man hundred jury has four English and four French jurors apiece). This ethnic balance meant, of course, that neither nation could use Domesday as an opportunity to settle old scores, but it also implies that ways to ensure the fairness of the survey had been worked out at the very highest level. Similarly revealing is a short, contemporary description of the Domesday Survey by the bishop of Hereford, which states that a second set of commissioners was sent around the country to check the work of the first, and, if necessary, to denounce its authors as guilty to the king. The second team, we are told, were sent into regions where they themselves held no land – another obvious anti-corruption measure – and this, so far as we can judge, was true of their forerunners too.
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The question that inevitably arises, though, is why this problem could not have waited. Sorting out property disputes was unquestionably important, for left unresolved they might ultimately lead to violence between rival landlords; clearly, some degree of order
had to be imposed. But why did this take priority at a time when the country was threatened with invasion? After all, if the Danes were successful, any record of who owned what in England would be out of date almost before the ink had dried. That the threat of invasion still hung over England at the time of the inquest is implicit in William’s decision to retain some of his French mercenaries throughout the winter. Indeed, in one or two instances we seem to see these troops in the Domesday Book, garrisoned in towns such as Southampton and Bury St Edmunds.
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The mercenaries themselves provide a further clue as to the survey’s purpose. Soldiers of fortune, by their very nature, rarely come cheap. By dispersing his great army around the country in 1085, William had passed some of its cost on to his magnates, but not all. Many troops had also been quartered on royal estates and towns, and the same situation must have obtained into 1086, requiring the king to find large sums of money to retain the men who remained in his service.

Earlier English kings had obtained such large sums by taxing their subjects. The geld, as we’ve seen, had been collected since the late tenth century, first to buy off Danish invaders with tribute, and later to maintain a mercenary fleet in order to guard against future attacks. Edward the Confessor had ostentatiously done away with this fleet in 1051 and ceased to collect the money to pay for it, but it seems unlikely that he abolished the geld entirely. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s comment that the tax for the fleet ‘always came before other taxes’ implies that other forms of geld existed, and these almost certainly continued to be levied on an annual basis for the rest of the Confessor’s reign. The sudden reappearance of geld in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle within days of William’s coronation is thus to be explained by its heavy rate rather than its sudden revival.
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By 1066, however, the geld was no longer the great cash cow it had once been. This was partly because successive kings had run down the system of assessment. Geld was calculated on the basis of the number of hides a particular estate or community contained, so by reducing this number a king could show political favour. By the reign of Edward the Confessor many hundreds – which notionally ought to have contained one hundred hides – were assessed at considerably less. A surviving geld roll for Northamptonshire, drawn
up in the 1070s but recording the situation in Edward’s day, shows some hundreds containing eighty hides, others sixty-two hides, and in one case as few as forty. Thus in 1066 the total number of hides in Northamptonshire’s thirty-two hundreds was not 3,200, but 2,663. This erosion, moreover, had continued after the Conquest. Domesday reveals that by 1086 the hidation of Northamptonshire had fallen to just 1,250.
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Nor was that the limit of the problem, because only a fraction of the hides in this much-diminished rump actually paid geld. In every hundred in Northamptonshire, the same geld roll shows that large numbers of hides – in some cases up to half the total – had been written off as ‘waste’. This word, which also occurs over and over again in the Domesday Book, has been interpreted in recent times merely as a term of administrative convenience, used indiscriminately by royal officials to describe land which, for whatever reason, paid no geld. But most historians today would argue that waste
(vasta)
had a specific meaning, and indicated land that had been ruined – devastated – as a result of the Conquest. A thoroughgoing analysis of the word’s use in Domesday shows a quite precise correlation with those areas visited by the Conqueror’s armies in the years immediately after 1066. Thus we find high concentrations of waste in Sussex, particularly in the rape of Hastings, as well as in the counties along the Welsh border, harried in the period 1069–70. We see it in the coastal areas that William had strategically ravaged in 1085, and we also see it in cities. In Lincoln, Domesday records that there were 970 inhabited dwellings before the Conquest, but afterwards 240 of them were waste: 166 had been destroyed ‘on account of the castle’, the remainder ‘because of misfortune and poverty and the ravages of fire’. Similar accounts equating waste with the construction of castles are found for Norwich, Shrewsbury, Stamford, Wallingford and Warwick. When Earl Hugh received Chester, says Domesday, almost half its houses had been destroyed, and the city had lost a third of its value, ‘for it had been greatly wasted’.
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None of this, however, compares to the amount of waste recorded for Yorkshire, which accounts for over eighty per cent of Domesday’s total for the whole country. This goes a long way to substantiating the chronicle accounts of the Harrying of the North and the scale of the destruction caused by the Conqueror’s armies in the winter of
1069–70. According to Simeon of Durham, the region between Durham and York lay uncultivated for the next nine years, with every settlement uninhabited; William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, declared that the soil there was still bare in his own day. Shockingly, Domesday reveals that in 1086 the population of Yorkshire had dropped to just a quarter of what it had been in 1066, meaning that around 150,000 people had vanished from the record. For once, it seems, the six-figure numbers given by the chroniclers corresponded all too closely with reality.
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Some areas of the country, it is true, seem to have recovered in the twenty years between 1066 and 1086. Whereas, for example, the average value of manors in Yorkshire had plummeted by over sixty-five per cent, in Norfolk it had risen by an impressive thirty-eight per cent. It would be wrong, however, to read too rosy a picture into such rises, for the value of a Domesday manor was the value to its lord in rents, and there is ample evidence to indicate that new Norman lords had racked up rents to intolerably high levels. Domesday abounds with complaints about rents being oppressive, exceeding the actual value of the land (a famous entry records that Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire was held by its English farmer, Æthelric, ‘in heaviness and misery’). According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, such oppressive practices originated at the very top:

The king gave his land as dearly for rent as he possibly could; then came another man and offered more than the first, and the king let it go to the man who had offered more; then came a third and offered still more, and the king gave it up to the man who had offered most of all. And he did not care at all how very wrongfully the reeves got it from poor men, nor how many illegal acts they did.

The Normans appear to have been uniformly rapacious in pursuit of profit: elsewhere the Chronicle laments that ‘the king and his leading men were fond, yea, too fond, of avarice: they coveted gold and silver, and did not care how sinfully it was obtained’. The final question of the Domesday commissioners, as preserved in the Ely Inquest, was whether more could be taken from an estate than was currently being taken.
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For this reason, where the Domesday Book shows a fall in
manorial values in areas
not
associated with widespread ravaging, we can be fairly certain that this was not due to leniency on the part of the landlords. In certain counties it has been shown that the sharpest falls in value coincide quite precisely with brand-new Norman lordships – the kind carved out from scratch, with no reference to previous landholding patterns. One view is that this reorganization process was so disruptive that it caused a drop in economic output. A more likely reason is that new manors had been constructed on a new model, more favourable to the lords and more oppressive for the peasantry. For it is also in these counties that we witness dramatic falls in the number of free peasants. In Cambridgeshire, for example, the number of freemen plummeted from 900 to 177; in Bedfordshire from 700 to 90, and in Hertfordshire from 240 to 43. At the same time, we discover that the number of servile peasants has rocketed. Frequently in Domesday we find the phrase ‘he is now a villein’.
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Values were only lower in these areas, it seems, because the before – and-after figures record different realities. Those for the pre-Conquest period had been calculated by combining the incomes of all the various English freeholders on a particular estate; the figures for 1086, by contrast, simply represented the income the new Norman lord derived in rent, having forced these former freemen into financial servitude. This was a bad bargain for the small landowners, but after the Conquest their bargaining power was not strong. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says at one point that the Normans ‘imposed unjust tolls and did many injustices which are hard to reckon up’. The tenurial revolution, in short, had prompted a social revolution. English society, in certain areas at least, was a lot less free after the Conquest than it had been before.
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Yet even as lords were driving up profits, they were paying less and less money to the king. At some stage, probably during the reign of the Conqueror himself, land held in demesne had been made exempt from paying geld. We see this, for instance, in the Northamptonshire geld roll, where hides held in demesne, like those listed as waste, are treated separately from those that actually paid. As the reign continued, the concessions appear to have increased, so much so that by the 1080s some tenants-in-chief were paying almost no tax at all. Indeed, in some cases, they may even have collected the geld from their demesnes and kept it for themselves.
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Small wonder, then, that revenue from the geld was not all it had once been. Concessions to individuals and communities had led to a massive reduction in the number of hides, and many more had been written off as waste as a result of war and destruction; the Conqueror himself had exempted the demesne land of his tenants-in-chief, and established a further tax-free zone in the form of the Forest. All of these factors had punched great holes in the money-getting system created by England’s pre-Conquest kings. Added to this there was also outright refusal to pay:‘From 6½ hides at Norton,’ records the Northamptonshire geld roll, ‘not a penny has been received – Osmund the king’s secretary owns that estate.’
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An obvious way to compensate for the system’s shortcomings was to try to get more geld from hides which were still liable. In 1084, William had ordered a geld at three times the normal rate (six shillings per hide rather than the usual two), probably intending to use the money it raised to finance his ongoing war in Maine. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded this hike with horror, describing the tax as ‘heavy and severe’, and no doubt it was for the limited number of people who had to pay it. At the same time, we have no way of knowing how lucrative it was. Given the manifold inadequacies of the system by this date, and coming hard on the heels of the 1082 famine, the yield may have been disappointing, even though the rate was exceedingly harsh.
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The final straw may have come in the autumn of 1085, with the decision to break up the massive mercenary army and billet it around the kingdom. ‘The king had the host dispersed all over the country among his vassals’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and they provisioned the army each in proportion to his land.’ If the government used the geld lists to try to arrive at this proportional distribution – and it is hard to see how they could have used anything else – then the billeting arrangements would have been no more equitable than a levy of the geld. By the time of the Christmas court, therefore, there may have been many voices being raised in protest, and a realization on William’s part that the system needed to be fixed, in order that future gelds brought in more money, and that any future billeting would be fairer. And part of the Domesday process
was
an inquiry into the workings of the geld – we can see as much from the circuit return for the south-western shires known as Exon Domesday. An overhaul of the geld system would explain why the
survey was so interested in lordly resources: the king was trying to discover precisely where the profits of lordship were going, perhaps with a view to reversing the exemption of demesne. Lastly, a fiscal motive for Domesday would also explain why William felt it was necessary to establish exactly who owned what, for – as those responsible for its administration must surely have attested – it is difficult to collect a land tax when landholding itself is in dispute.
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