The Norman Conquest (53 page)

Such was the conclusion of early Domesday scholars: the Conqueror’s survey was a tax inquiry, intended to remedy the manifold defects of the geld system. As the greatest of all these scholars, Frederick William Maitland, wrote in his
Domesday Book and Beyond
(1897): ‘Our record is no register of title, it is no feodary, it is no custumal, it is no rent-roll; it is a tax book, a geld book.’ Even today, more than a century after Maitland’s death, many experts would argue that fiscal reform was the primary purpose of the Domesday Survey.
³⁵

And yet it cannot have been the purpose of the Domesday
Book.
As anyone who has ever tried to do so will readily attest, it is all but impossible to use the book as a tool for assessing geld, because of the way its contents are organized. Geld was national, public tax, administered using public institutions: collectors moved from settlement to settlement within each hundred, and from hundred to hundred within each shire, in order to gather in the money. The Domesday commissioners, as we have seen, had used the same public institutions to gather information, summoning juries from hundreds and townships in order to check the written returns provided by individual landowners. But, crucially, when this information came to be compiled and written up for each of the survey’s seven circuits, it was not arranged by hundred and vill. Instead, it was laboriously rearranged – by landowner. Both the surviving circuit returns (Exon Domesday and Little Domesday) are arranged in this fashion, as is the final redaction of the data in Great Domesday. It is an arrangement that makes it fantastically difficult to calculate geld payments; to work out the liability of a particular landowner requires hours of calculations.
³⁶
In conclusion, therefore, there is no doubt that a geld inquiry was launched in 1086, and little doubt that a reform of the geld was high on the agenda. Some of the information collected by the Domesday commissioners may have been intended for such a reform. But the selection and arrangement of data in the
Domesday Book indicates that it must have been made for a different reason.

While the commissioners had been gathering their data, assembling jurors and landowners in their hundreds and thousands, King William had been travelling around his kingdom (or at least its southern part). At Easter (5 April), by which time the sessions of the shire courts must either have been well advanced or already over, he wore his crown at Winchester. By Whitsun (24 May), when he was at Westminster for the knighting of his youngest son, Henry, the king must have had a clear idea of when the survey would be completed. As John of Worcester explains, ‘shortly afterwards, he ordered his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, sheriffs and their knights to meet him on 1 August at Salisbury’. This was to be the last and greatest meeting of 1086 – an assembly for the whole kingdom, the culmination of the Domesday process.
³⁷

Salisbury was not in the same place in 1086 as it is today (the present city is a new foundation of the thirteenth century). In the Conqueror’s time it lay two miles to the north, on the site now known as Old Sarum. The Normans had been drawn to this location from an early date. William had established a castle there, probably before 1070, and the bishop of Sherborne had subsequently moved his cathedral to stand alongside it, thereby becoming the bishop of Salisbury. The site’s attraction in 1086 may have had more to do with its prehistoric past, for Old Sarum is one of the most impressive Iron Age hill forts – both castle and cathedral were planted in the centre of a massive enclosure, 400 metres across, surrounded by an earthen rampart that runs for over a kilometre. It was the exactly the right kind of location, in other words, for the sort of large-scale open-air assembly that the Conqueror had in mind.
³⁸

For the meeting at Salisbury was massive. ‘There his counsellors came to him,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and all the people occupying land who were of any account all over England.’ To give us some idea of what that might mean in terms of numbers, we can turn to Domesday. The book names around 1,000 individuals who held their land directly from the king – his tenants-in-chief. Their direct connection with the king, and (in most cases) their superior wealth and status meant that most if not all of them would have attended. Domesday also records a further 8,000 or so landowners at
the next stage down – i.e. the tenants of the tenants-in-chief, or the king’s subtenants. How many of these men might have come to Salisbury is open to debate. Some of them were as wealthy, or even wealthier, than the lesser tenants-in-chief, and so would correspond to the Chronicle’s notion of ‘people of account’. But many others were considerably less wealthy, with half of them owning land worth less than £1 a year, and so might be reckoned to lie outside of that description. Depending on how strictly the king’s summons was interpreted, therefore, we should imagine an attendance figure well into four figures, and just possibly nudging towards five.
³⁹

The impression of an exceptionally large meeting is reinforced by the composition of William’s court. Sadly, we have no record from the day of the Salisbury assembly itself, but we do have a document issued at another location in Wiltshire, datable to the middle of 1086, with a witness-list that suggests it was drawn up at a time very close to the event. Alongside the Conqueror stand his two younger sons – the newly knighted Henry and his older brother, William Rufus. Then come the higher clergy: Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, Archbishop Thomas of York, and with them the bishops of Durham, Winchester, Lincoln, Chester, Hereford, Salisbury and London. The great lay magnates come next, a list of eighteen names. Odo, still confined to his cell in Rouen, is notably not among their number; but William’s other half-brother, Robert, is present, along with the king’s lifelong friend, Roger of Montgomery. Also among the throng of laymen we see Richard fitz Gilbert, lord of Tonbridge, the greatest landowner in south-eastern England; Henry de Ferrers, a great baron from northern England, and Robert of Rhuddlan, the conqueror of north Wales. Another name that leaps out from the list is Abbot Thurstan of Glastonbury, whose massacre of his own monks just three years earlier was evidently no bar to his attendance at court.
⁴⁰

It is an impressive roll call – one of the greatest we have seen since the coronation of Queen Matilda in May 1068. Yet what a change has been wrought in the intervening eighteen years. Royal charters issued at the time of Matilda’s coronation reveal a mix of English and French names, with the majority being English. But in 1086 the English are gone, and the list is exclusively Norman (or at least, in the case of the bishops, Continental). In 1068 ten of England’s
fifteen bishoprics had been held by Englishmen, three of the remaining five having been given to Germans by Edward the Confessor and only two recently filled by the Conqueror. But by the time of the Domesday Survey only one English bishop – the wily and venerable Wulfstan of Worcester – remained in office. As for the English aristocracy, the eclipse is total. The three native earls who witnessed in 1068 were all long gone by 1086: Eadwine murdered, Waltheof executed, and Morcar still languishing in prison. Also gone are the lesser English nobles present at the queen’s coronation – men with names like Æthelhead, Tovi, Dinni, Ælfgeard, Bondig, Wulfweard, Herding, Brixi and Brihtric. When we turn to the witnesses of 1086, there is not a single English name among them.
⁴¹

What is true of the court, moreover, is also true of the country. Of Domesday’s 1,000 tenants-in-chief, a mere thirteen are English; only four have lands worth more than £100 and the wealthiest, Edward of Salisbury, despite his English name, may well have been half-Norman. The king’s thegns – the ninety or so lords who had each owned more than forty hides of land – were all gone. Even when we descend to the next tenurial level, where we start to find natives in more significant numbers, they remain very much in the minority. Of the 8,000 or so subtenants recorded in the survey, only around ten per cent are English, and, as with the tenants-in-chief, the survivors are small fry – men like Æthelric of Marsh Gibbon, holding ‘in heaviness and misery’. England’s middling thegns, who had numbered around 4,000–5,000, have been swept clean away.
⁴²

Domesday therefore reveals cataclysmic change to the composition of England’s ruling class, with Normans replacing native lords in almost every village and hamlet. It also, moreover, reveals dramatic changes within that class in the distribution of material wealth. Put simply, there were more super-rich men in Domesday England than there had been twenty years earlier. Whereas in 1066 there had been several thousand middling English thegns, by 1086 half the land in England was held by just 200 Norman barons.
⁴³
Having in most cases obtained the estates of multiple English predecessors, these newcomers were many times more wealthy. In Edward the Confessor’s day, for example, only thirty-seven individuals had held lands with an annual value of more than £100; by the time of the Domesday survey the number of such men had more than doubled to eighty-one.
⁴⁴
At the very top, the spoils of Conquest had been
colossal. Half the country was in the hands of 200 barons, but half that half – i.e. a quarter of all the land in England – was held by just ten new magnates. Their names are by now a predictable roll call of William’s friends and family: Odo and Robert, Roger of Montgomery, Richard fitz Gilbert, Hugh of Chester … Orderic Vitalis had not exaggerated when he said that the Conqueror had raised his dependants to high rank and heaped great honours upon them. ‘He was a great lover of the world and of Worldly pomp,’ said Orderic of Earl Hugh, ‘lavish to the point of prodigality, a lover of games and luxuries, actors, horses and dogs.’ With 300 manors in Domesday valued at £800 a year, he could well afford to be.
⁴⁵

And yet, obscenely rich as Hugh and his ilk had become, their wealth and power paled in comparison with that of the English earls before the Conquest. At the start of Edward the Confessor’s reign, Godwine of Wessex, Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria had towered above the rest of the English nobility: collectively the land held by these three men and their families was equal in value to that of the king himself.
⁴⁶
Towards the end of the Confessor’s reign, of course, the Godwinesons had expanded their power at the expense of the others, obtaining a monopoly of earldoms that made them quite unassailable. But even the house of Leofric, marginalized as they became, had remained immensely rich and powerful. Earl Ælfgar had been able to defy the king successfully on two separate occasions during the 1050s, fighting his way back from exile by raising mercenary fleets.

England’s post-Conquest earls were not nearly so mighty. Even the richest of them – say, for the sake of argument, Odo of Bayeux – could not hold a candle to the likes of Earl Ælfgar. And Odo, of course, had fallen, in part because he was perceived by his half-brother to be too tall a poppy. So too had Roger of Hereford and Ralph of East Anglia, whose rebellion seems to have been provoked by the perceived diminution of their power. By 1086 there were only two earls left in England – Roger of Montgomery and Hugh of Chester – and they, despite their gigantic wealth, were pygmies compared to their English predecessors. After the Conquest, no coalition of magnates, however large, could match the resources of the king. Even if we take the top ten magnates of Domesday England and combine their incomes, the total falls far short of
William’s own – a staggering £12,600 – for the king had twice as much land as all of them put together.
⁴⁷

Supremely powerful as he was, the assembly at Salisbury was set to make the king more powerful still. William had summoned England’s landholding class to participate in a great ceremony. ‘They all submitted to him,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and became his men, and swore oaths of allegiance to him, that they would be loyal to him against all other men.’ This, it has been persuasively argued, was the climactic moment of the Domesday process, intimately connected with the true purpose of the book.

When the Chronicle says that the landowners became William’s men, it is describing an act of homage – a personal submission to a lord, in return for which the lord usually recognized the man’s right to hold particular lands. Many of William’s men, of course, had already been bound to him in this way for decades. But the security they received would have been for their ancestral estates in Normandy, not their acquisitions in England. Plenty of land in England, as we’ve seen, had been obtained by royal grant, but much had also been obtained by intimidation, encroachment and violence. Because the process of acquisition had been so protracted, chaotic and in places illegal, few if any Norman lords at the start of the Domesday process could have produced written evidence of title to all their estates.

But Domesday, once complete, provided precisely that written evidence. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle rounds off its famous description of the survey by saying ‘all the writings were subsequently brought to him’, and this is almost certainly its laconic way of describing the presentation to William of each of the seven circuit returns at the Salisbury assembly (one of the returns, Exon Domesday, contains an entry that was emended as a result of a decision taken during the course of the king’s visit). The landowners, therefore – or at least the tenants-in-chief – did homage to William at Salisbury, and he, in return, was able to present them with Domesday’s circuit returns as a written record of their landholdings. That the twelfth-century chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, translating this passage of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle into Latin, chose to render the word ‘writings’ as ‘charters’ is entirely apt. Together these documents were a kind of giant charter of confirmation, giving the Norman
newcomers the security of title they needed to guarantee their personal conquests.
⁴⁸