After 1066: The Domesday Book

Matt Lewis and Levi Roach uncover the importance and intricacies of the Domesday Book, a monumental survey commissioned by William the Conqueror to consolidate his power following the 1066 Battle of Hastings, and the infamous Harrying of the North. The Domesday Book's astonishing level of detail is unpacked, revealing insights into landholding changes, taxation, and the bureaucratic prowess displayed by William's administration. Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:28Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 3:13Matt Lewis?

  1066, the Battle of Hastings. It's a turning point in English history that continues to capture the imagination nearly a thousand years on. If you've been watching the BBC's new epic drama, King and Conqueror, you'll know the story well: a clash of rivals, a brutal day of bloodshed, and an arrow in the eye that changed the fate of the kingdom forever. But of course, the story didn't end with Harold lying dead on the battlefield, arrow to the eye or not. In fact, that was only the beginning. This week on Gone Medieval, we've been delving into the aftermath of that fateful year to answer some of English history's most important questions.

• 3:57Matt Lewis?

  How did William take to his newly won crown and kingdom? What did the English have to say about it? And how did the Norman conquest reshape England in ways that can still be seen today?

• 4:10Matt Lewis?

  In Tuesday's episode, Eleanor looked at the years that followed William's victory, when resistance by English lords yet to bend the knee forced him into one of the most infamous campaigns of his reign: the Harrying of the North. A merciless act of devastation that showed just how precarious his grip on power remained.

• 4:30Matt Lewis?

  But today, we're looking forward to 1086, to one of the most extraordinary documents in medieval history, the Doomsday Book. Commissioned by William in the final years of his reign, it was a survey on a scale never attempted before, cataloguing land, wealth and resources across his realm. Why did William order it? How was it carried out so quickly? And what can it tell us about the transformation of England under Norman rule? To answer these questions, I'm again joined by Levi Roach, historian of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England, author of Empire of the Normans and friend of this show, to open up the pages of Doomsday and uncover what it reveals about conquest and control in the decades after

• 5:15Matt Lewis?

  Hastings.

• 5:31Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval again, Levi, twice in one week.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks for having me on, I'm becoming a regular.

• 5:36Matt Lewis?

  Keeping you busy and mining you for all of this valuable information. We're going to carry on a little bit after you left off with Eleanor in the last episode, so we're moving on kind of 15, 16, 17 years or so. So to start off with a slightly unfair question, can you sum up what's happened in that intervening sort of 15 or so years? Has there been any major challenges, successes, upsets for William and the Normans in England between the Harrying of the North and the Doomsday Book that we're going to come on to?

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Well, both a lot and actually very little has happened. So after the Harrying, there is relatively little armed resistance in England. The fact that England will be William's till his death is now pretty clear for everyone. And so in that respect, things have calmed down and we start returning to some kind of normalcy in terms of rule and, okay, he's an invading foreign monarch, but we've seen this in England before with Canute. So in a sense, new routines are established. The distinctive new feature is having a ruler who's otherwise based in Normandy and this imported elite that we'll doubtless be saying more about. And this has been partly in response to those rebellions that he's been starting to systematically dispossess the English aristocracy. So all of that is new and distinctive.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  But in terms of the mechanics of royal rule, for the most part, it's been business as usual. What's been perhaps new and different in terms of Norman rule of England is, on the one hand, the Norman barons who've been established, particularly in the West Midlands, have very rapidly sought to expand their power and control into Wales in a way that the late Anglo-Saxon aristocracy wasn't really trying to do. So we're starting to see these kinds of ambitions to rule over all of Britain in a way that we've not seen at least actively since maybe the early 10th century amongst Anglo-Saxon monarchs, and putting boots on the ground in a way that even then was relatively rare. So we're starting to see attempts to control significant parts of Wales. And so that is new and distinctive that comes with the Normans, but it's not really William

• 7:33Speaker 05

  driving it, it's his henchmen. So it's an interesting case of he's happy to let them go, but it's not something for him. He's got bigger fish to fry. He wanted England, England's a big prize. Beyond that, the threat that's stood in the wings for him, that we'll probably come back to as well, is that of the Danish monarchs. So they had been part of those rebellions, as I discussed with Eleanor, but there's always that sense that the Danish king might come back again. And they have a large fleet, they're mobile. The idea that the Viking Age ended at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, nobody told the Danish monarchs. So there are people in Scandinavia who are highly skilled warriors, who are chomping at the bit for another go at England. And that's what's probably keeping William awake late at night every now and then. Indeed, we know this from contemporary accounts, say that his greatest fear is the Danish monarchs.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  So that's the danger in the wings throughout all of this. But for the most part, things have calmed down. So in terms of that, it's been less eventful than those years immediately after 1066.

• 8:29Matt Lewis?

  William must have felt to some extent that he dodged a bullet or an arrow at Stamford Bridge, not having to face Harold Hardrada. You know, there is a world in which Harold Hardrada was this huge, famous warrior who might well have been the victor of 1066 between the three of them, but he never had to deal with Harold Hardrada, but he may well have to deal with the Danes at some point.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  Exactly, no, as you say, he's been very fortunate not to have to deal with them to date on that kind of scale. And he's also been very fortunate that they arrived first. So he's dealing with a herald post Harold Hardrada. So he's also getting to deal with the English second rather than arriving first. And in a hypothetical alternative world where the winds across the channel are different, perhaps William arrives first and actually is defeated and Harold is then overtaken by Harold Hardrada. But certainly that's played nicely into his hands, but he's well aware that the Danish monarchs continue to harbor ambitions and are a real force to be reckoned with.

• 9:23Matt Lewis?

  So we're mainly here to talk about the doomsday book. So could you give us kind of a headline summary of exactly what the doomsday book is before we get into the details of it?

• 9:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so doomsday book comes from the doomsday survey. And here's where these terms can start getting a bit confusing. The doomsday book typically when we refer to it refers to great doomsday. There's actually two different ones. There's two books, little doomsday, covering most of East Anglia, and great doomsday for the rest of England, south of the Tees. And this is the consolidated information from the doomsday survey. So the survey is William sends everyone out to find out who are the landholders, what rights are owed to the monarch, what's the state of play throughout his kingdom. That generates a huge amount of paperwork and that is then produced into and funneled into great doomsday. And that's what we typically have in mind. But so if it's a bit of, I guess the analogy you might use in terms of modern politics

• 10:16Speaker 05

  is a public inquest. And indeed, in medieval terms, this is an inquest. So public inquests generate huge amounts of paperwork, interviews, and then you get the final documentation, which itself is pretty long, might be hundreds or even a thousand pages, but it's winnowed down out of hundreds of thousands. And this is a similar process, that he's had commissioners go out throughout the entire kingdom, at level shires, hundreds, local villages, asking local questions, getting information in all sorts of different forms that then has to be standardized. It's never completely so, but starts to be so on the basis of circuits and then is eventually consolidated into great doomsday for most of the kingdom. And that is a massive volume. We're talking 800 folios, that is two sides of parchment.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  So over 1,600 sides written upon, and that's excluding East Anglia. So huge, huge amounts of information and would have had many more times that of paperwork kind of lying behind this process. So doomsday book is the result of the doomsday survey or doomsday inquest.

• 11:20Matt Lewis?

  So this is almost like a whole load of monster spreadsheets being put into a database to try and organise it and make the information more digestible and more presentable.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Exactly. And so this is something that's gone through multiple phases. And we're very fortunate that we have an unusual case of some of the early evidence surviving from the area around Exeter, in fact, where I hail from. So we have what's called Exxon Doomsday, which is the kind of draft versions at an early stage towards what goes into Great Doomsday, but only for this part of the South West. And it allows some really unique insights, and there's been some excellent recent scholarship on this, into that process. Because without it, all we get is that end product. We don't have those working notes. And so this has also led to a lot of speculation and indeed uncertainty as to what the hell, frankly, this is for. I mean, it's hugely impressive. But it's definitely TMI in all sorts of senses. How usable it ever was, how

• 12:14Speaker 05

  much it was ever used, it was kept, it was authoritative, but how much it was a working document can certainly be questioned. And there have been a lot of questions, therefore, about the purpose behind it, precisely because the workings are hidden. We just see the result in the vast majority of cases and have to, on that basis, deduce the earlier processes behind it. And indeed, the final Great Doomsday, most impressively of all, is the product of just one scribe. So one chap sat down and wrote this entire thing. And indeed, a chap probably from Durham, from the circles of William of Saint Calais. So it is a huge task, but then it then ends up eventually in the hands of one man.

• 12:53Matt Lewis?

  Somebody who's getting a bit of writer's cramp, I think.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I hope he was paid well. That's one thing we don't really know at all for it. But it was a big, big job. Maybe he got to retire after that.

• 13:02Matt Lewis?

  And again, before we get into some of the meat of this, where does the name Doomsday come from? Why do we call it the Doomsday Book?

• 13:08Speaker 05

  So Doomsday is a later designation for this. And this comes from the medieval term of doom being the Old English term, dorm, for judgment. And so that's actually a term, so dormast in Old English can refer to laws, because laws often come from judgments of monarchs. So in earlier scholarship, you sometimes also read about the Anglo-Saxon dooms. So it comes from judgment and that being the book of the day of judgment. So it's actually deeply eschatological. Freighted with the kind of medieval thoughts about the afterlife. So the idea is that this is a final judgment on property and relations is where that comes from. The earlier term for it, that that seems to be a later evolution, actually. The earlier references we have are to the great book.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  And again, that makes sense because in scale, it is bigger than any books produced in England for centuries and only previous to this have Bibles been produced on this kind of scale. So those kinds of books and and then showy ones, not your standard, you know, sit at home Bibles, but the kinds of ones that were sent to Rome, these great pandeks. So so it's also a book that even in its scale, and it's it needs to be that big partly because of all the information, but you could have broken it into multiple books. You know, it's a decision to make this on a kind of a scale that previously was books of scripture that again, I think feeds into the sense of this being a book of judgment, that that the royal judgment, that this being an act on the one hand, deeply secular and and deeply bureaucratic, but that also has these undertones of God given kingship of

• 14:32Speaker 05

  judgment, of stately presentation on the scale of a Bible.

• 14:36Matt Lewis?

  So that there is a sense, at least a little bit later, that this is something apocalyptic almost.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  I think vaguely so. It's probably more to with judgment in the immediate sense and sense that the the doomsday will be the last judgment and this is the judgment for our kingdom. But that's always there in the background and there's always an awareness for, I think, certainly medieval theologians and those who could write would have some theological training at least, that monarchs are God given and have a specific God given role and that secular authority is expected to decay towards the end of time, but has this very specific, very important role to play before then. And it's not that they always get everything right, but it is that they are in some sense, although not, you know, infallible, that they are instruments of God.

• 15:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And when does William decide to undertake this project and how long does it take him to complete the survey or not him, obviously, he's not doing it himself? How long does it take the survey to be completed and the book to be produced?

• 15:34Speaker 05

  So the most impressive thing of all is it seems to take place largely within a single year. There's been some debate about this, but it seems increasingly clear that it really is achieved within that span or just about. So. Doomsday book itself, the final book, dates itself to 1086. And that's the market also uses in terms of territorially, we'll perhaps get into this, but the thing it keeps talking about is who held the land, first of all, under Edward the Confessor and the times of Edward the Confessor, and then in the times of William. The times of William means 1086, that moment when the inquest happened. It's generated in the winter of 1085. So at midwinter, the king said to have held court at Gloucester, which is one of the major centres he regularly held court and wore his crown,

• 16:17Speaker 05

  these great ceremonial events, and requested that the inquest be sent throughout his kingdom. The important thing that preceded this, and this comes back to some things we've been talking about already, is there was a major threat of Danish invasion from King Canute of Denmark. And so he's raised his army in preparation for invasion this year. And partly because of that, it also means that large, his most important land owners are almost all in England. So some of his ones who have cross-channel lands have been required, in the vast majority of cases at least, to be around in England, available to fight. So it is a uniquely good moment that is probably spurred on in part by a desire or a felt need to have a better census of land and above all of the profits that can be generated by so-called geld, that is, the taxation you can generate on this land.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  That originated in the Anglo-Saxon period, in the so-called Dane geld, as it comes to be called in this period, that is, annual taxation to pay originally, actually, Scandinavian mercenaries, but that then becomes a feature of royal government. And in this context, it's obviously very important if you're facing a significant invasion to be able to generate cash as well as to raise troops. So that's not the only thing going on. It's not the only thing the conquerors trying to achieve by this by any stretch, but that's certainly one of the things that the survey is aiming to do. And one of the things the survey mentions whenever it discusses a local place is how much geld is owed. So it's always giving you a sense of how much that land is worth, because that's an approximation of that, but also how much it's paying. So what can the royal coffers expect?

• 17:46Matt Lewis?

  And it feels like a Herculean effort to do something like this inside a single year, beginning it in winter as well. When you think about the distances that need to be travelled and that all of this is having to be done manually with limited communication, it feels like a huge achievement to manage all of this within the space of a year, as far as we can tell.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  It absolutely does, and that almost certainly is why this is noted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not discuss day-to-day government bureaucracy. So we don't hear about Harold Godwinson sending off writs, or Edward the Confessor's concern about changing coinage, things like that, new issues of coinage or things like that. They're almost never discussed, these kinds of nuts and bolts of government. The issuing of charters, that just doesn't come up on the radar of the Chronicle. It's battles, big things. So the fact that day-to-day administration is breaking through into the narrative itself is telling us something, and that's because this is in fact not day-to-day administration. It's using those same channels, but it's doing something that it's never been asked to do before, on a scale it's never been asked to do. So we've had kind

• 18:50Speaker 05

  of more local inquest doubtless. It's using mechanisms that exist, Shire reeds, connections to Shires and hundreds, those kinds of things that have developed in government over the previous kind of century and a half. But it's using them on a scale and in a manner that's never been attempted previously.

• 19:07Matt Lewis?

  And I mean, that seems to show that for a relatively new monarch and a new dynasty, at least, ruling in a land that they're not used to, that William has managed to get to grips with the mechanics of England, that he's able to pull all of those levers, he's able to use that regional power and that regional administration to his advantage in the centre.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. William and of course those working with him. So his earls, his sheriffs, he's slowly replaced all of these levels. But the crucial thing for William is he's inherited the structures. And actually, structurally speaking, there isn't a lot of big change. So he weakens slightly the position of earls in favour of sheriffs, which is good news as a monarch, because he doesn't want these kind of overly powerful earls, as had troubled Edward the Confessor with Harold Godwinson. But for the most part, he inherits actually quite a centralised and consolidated kingdom. The very fact he's been able to conquer it outright tells you something. So if you compare Norman conquest of England, which William marches in, big battle, wins, he takes over. Okay, there are some major rebellions, as I discussed with Eleanor, and they are a real threat, but a few years of rebellions.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  But in essence, single battle, defeat the chap, become king, job done, and you can start ruling from day one. In Wales, the Normans have to fight tooth and nail every bit of the way. And the process takes hundreds of years to complete and is back and forth for a large period. And the reason, of course, is Wales is itself not centralized. There's no single person you can knock out. Geographically, it's very different. So a decentralized, in the sense weaker, in inverted commas, kingdom can also be much harder to conquer. A powerfully centralized kingdom works well when it works, but is also very vulnerable to conquest. And so the fact that William can conquer England that way itself tells us something about government and administration, particularly south of the Tees and especially south of the Humber, those kind of old heartlands of the kingdom.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  So he's inherited these structures. And although he replaces the personnel, the way those structures work continues. And partly it's because at the very lowest level, he doesn't replace that much personnel. It's upper level people. So the low level functionaries, a lot of them do remain in place, but also the transfer is not overnight. He's not trying to do it overnight. So it is still, although massive on scale, it is gradual. These people are able to learn the ropes. They shift from writing writs, for example, from Old English vernacular into Latin, so the Normans can understand them better. But the form remains the same. They're issued in the same way. The Latinate terms are very similar to the Old English. So it is a working, well-working, well-oiled machine, if you will, and William's interested in changing the drivers.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  And so that's what he's really doing in taking over England. It's a fleet of buses and he's changed the drivers, but the actual structure remains there and indeed is built upon. And so that's why they're able to draw upon it in this kind of way. I mean, William could not have done something like the Doomsday Inquest almost certainly in Normandy, certainly not in Maine or some of his other continental domains outside of his absolute heartlands, because he doesn't rule them that way. His writ does not run in the same way in mainland Europe as it does in England.

• 22:03Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. And just in terms of William's motivation for doing this now, you know, he's 20 years into his rule. We've mentioned there is that continuing threat from the Danes that is looming over him. But are there any other political reasons why this might be a good time? I mean, at this point, he's fallen out with his son, Robert Kurt Hose. It's not long after his wife, Matilda, has passed. Passed away, he's imprisoned his half brother Bishop Odo. There seems to be a fair bit going on that might have made William feel a little bit wobbly at this point.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  Yes, William's definitely getting to the tail end of his reign in life. He's an old monarch now. He was not a young man when he conquered England. Nobody in ten sixty-six would have been predicting him reigning for another twenty years. Prior monarchs of England had tended to die relatively young. Canute does not live to be particularly old. His two sons die actually quite young. Edward the Confessor lives into his sixties. That is more like William, but his own father had died in his fifties. Previous monarchs of that line had rarely lived beyond their thirties. So in that sense, the reign has already been longer than anyone expects. But everyone knows really it's likely to be pretty soon. I mean, there are some medieval monarchs who make it into their seventies and eighties. But that is the exception. Most are dying in their fifties or sixties.

• 23:18Speaker 05

  William's reaching that point, as you say, his wife has died. His sons are tromping at the bit. He's got problems with Robert Curt-Hos. He's also trying to accommodate his other son, Sir William the Second, who he's allocated England as heir or seems to be lining him up as heir. He has, of course, a further son, Henry the First. So there is that sense of a kind of generational change starting to happen. And he's of that older generation. So I think it is an awkward moment there, a good moment to take stock. It's also at a point at which those processes of personnel replacement are pretty much complete in England. So the ruling aristocracy of England is now almost entirely Francophone, largely, but not exclusively Norman, but almost certainly from the continental mainland.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  And that has seen a huge tenurial change, the biggest change in England's ruling elite in its history before or since. There's never been a conquest like it. There's never been a replacement of the ruling elite in Wales or Scotland on this kind of scale. So it is a pretty unique event as well. And so I do think in terms of longer term impetus, that's another reason for taking stock. And so one of the old debates about doomsday is, is it about tax or is it about landholding? Well, you can't separate those two because tax is on landholding, but also it's trying to suggest that there's only one thing that William's trying to do, and also that the survey from the start only has one set of ambitions. And again, we've lost some of this paperwork, but more recent work points out that actually the process evolves as they're

• 24:40Speaker 05

  doing this. And so focuses change subtly. It doesn't mean that the earlier purpose has dropped, but it does mean that all of these things in a sense do have a part to play. It is also about landholding, certainly, even if more recent work kind of emphasizes that tax again a bit more strongly. It's not denying that a purpose of this is to create a lasting monument, to understand who holds this land, to understand the state of play in England. And one of the things Doomsday does is infrequently it mentions earlier disputes over land, because these lands have changed hands. And so it does become an important resource certainly later for those making claims, for those seeking to understand things, for those seeking to stake their claim as the rightful holders of this land now because of what's changed in the meantime, and so on.

• 25:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask kind of what we ought to think about Doomsday trying to achieve. And it sounds very much like there's no one thing that we can point to that it's set up and trying to do. There is that element of defining land ownership. But as you point out, it's also talking about previous disputes, which is an important legal resource for the future too. It talks about taxation. And I guess you can tie in with that military service. You know, if William is concerned about the threat from the Danes, he's going to want to know how many men he can raise from all of the estates of England as well. Is this just a really broad effort for William to understand his kingdom better rather than something really targeted and specific?

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Yes, or perhaps rather if it starts off as something targeted and specific, it becomes something more in the process. So as they're doing the survey, more stuff crops up that's going to be of interest and use. And there's a desire to collect this information, and then it has to be winnowed. And all of these processes are leading to an evolution and an understanding that that information beyond purely geld is also going to be necessary and useful and useful for different purposes. So I think the common denominator is royal interest and prerogatives. And that's why William launches it. That's what runs like a red line through the entire volume in terms of that. And so in some cases, that may be more tax in a region.

• 26:43Speaker 05

  In other cases, who's holding the land, settling any disputes, making it clear this present state of play. All of those things are, in a sense, ultimately in William's interest.

• 27:08Speaker 03

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• 29:03Matt Lewis?

  I love the idea that even almost 1000 years ago, there is so much huge mission creep in a government project like this.

• 29:10Speaker 05

  Exactly. Consider this, I don't know, Williams HS2. I'd love to know how much it cost them in terms of that. I doubt in that period, they had a projected one and an overspend or something like that. But you know, who knows? Maybe that's why, you know, Little Doomsday was never incorporated into Big Doomsday. They decided to cut off that extension of HS2. We've had too much. I should say, I'm joking here, that's almost sort of not the reason. But it certainly is something that I suspect when they embarked on it, they knew was going to be big, but didn't realise how big. And I think we've all had projects like that. We went into thinking this is going to be big, but still inevitably underestimated how big it was going to be. I think that is one of the cases. What is so impressive, as you mentioned, is that it managed to get done so quickly, actually, despite that, on such a scale, and to such a relative level of consistency.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  So the information they're gathering, it's having to be gathered initially at levels of villages and hundreds, then at shires. It's then consolidated in the so-called circuits. And there are some variations in how information's collected on those. But still, ultimately, reading a doomsday entry from one town to another, more often than not, it's going to say, have the same kinds of information. It's remarkably consistent. Indeed, dare I say remarkably monotonous in terms of this. That is the kind of book that your listeners will doubtless have heard of. But I wouldn't really recommend if they're interested in the Norman conquest, they go off and buy a copy and read cover to cover. I mean, maybe a reference copy. It's great to have one. I've got one here. But I don't sit down and read this book cover to cover. It's a kind of Insomniac's dream

• 30:35Speaker 05

  cure, really. It's just like the village listed, you know, who hoards from who, what the value of the land is, X many mills, X many teams of oxen. You know, hugely useful in all sorts of ways, but it's not something that's designed for reading to cover to cover. It's a huge consolidation of stuff. And one suspects that once it was accumulated, it was hugely impressive, but actually probably not used that much because within, you know, a matter of months, it would be out of date. And there's no effort to update it. So that's one of the other interesting things with it is... On the one hand, it's a testament to how advanced English government is, there's no doubt about it. But on the other hand, what it isn't is like what we get by some of the later Middle Ages,

• 31:18Speaker 05

  really constantly updated records of taxation or things like that. It's not that kind of amenable instrument, at least not yet. And probably isn't attempting to be. And again, it's got that kind of stately element to it. So on the one hand, it's hugely useful, but it's going to become pretty dated pretty fast. And then there's that more element of a final judgment and a statement about William's conquest. And so I think in some sense as well, it nicely ideologically caps off this one. It's centering William as England's new lord, leaving no one in doubt because they're going on inquiring, who you hold this land from ultimately. He's structured as the ultimate lord of everyone in England throughout the entire volume. And so it is a kind of a final chapter, if you will, on the conquest too, and a final statement there.

• 32:02Speaker 05

  And it is underpinned by this inexorable logic of landholding with it that's been commented on by a number of scholars in terms of framing it, in terms of who held under Edward and who holds now. And that's both showing the change of conquest, showing this huge securi of conquest and emphasizing and illustrating that there's this kind of huge change in terms of landholding within England. But at the same time, it's also claiming very clearly, and often not very subtly, that William is the rightful heir to Edward. And the person who's written out throughout the entire inquest is Harold. So across those 1600 sheets written, so 800 folio sides of Great Doomsday, twice and only twice is Harold's kingship ever acknowledged.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  And in both cases, he's called usurper. But the fact that even elsewhere he's not, he's referred to as Earl Harold. And there's a wonderful case where it's referring to the likely chancellor of William, possibly already the chancellor of Edward the Confessor, chap called Regenbold, who was a royal priest and someone clearly active around court. And it states that he holds these two estates that were joined together under Earl Harold and are now in his hands. And clearly, these are lands that Harold joined together and gave to him when Harold was monarch, not as Earl of West. But what it's doing is it's not acknowledging that Harold was ever a king because of course the key to William's claim from the start has been that he is Edward's rightful heir. And so Doomsday Book also is a nice illustration of it.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  So I don't think that's why it's issued as a war, but it's why it's framed that way is that it is also providing this sense of landholding under Edward, who is my immediate and rightful predecessor and under William, his rightful heir and writing out anything that's happened in between those two. So it's got all sorts of property disputes, but in the same time, it's very delicately not talking about a lot of things. And the elephant in the room throughout is Harold and Hastings. These things don't happen.

• 33:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yes, it's sort of making a quiet political point while it's being done. I think it's interesting that this seems not to have been something that was planned to be a regular occurrence. So, you know, we have censuses in the UK today on a regular basis. This seems like it was always meant to be a snapshot, unless perhaps William imagined that his successors might at one time do this again, having demonstrated that it was possible. If it was only ever meant to be done once, does it have more of the feel of kind of a conclusion for William to the conquest, a final kind of rubber stamp to say, this needs to be considered done now, those people who own that land don't own it anymore?

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Yes, I think so. So it's quite telling as you say that it's never repeated, although the capabilities absolutely are there. And of course, the fact that it's ever attempted is only because of the conquest. There's no need for this kind of thing, you know, for purely accounting reasons, purely for taxation, you don't need something nearly as consolidated, certainly not without the conquest. So I do think you're right there, that is, it is a final monument to this and it is monumental and intended to be. So it's something that certainly William wouldn't imagine is going to be attempted more than most once a generation. But I imagine that actually, no, he's seeing this as a unique, final, decisive, one-time-only act on that kind of scale, that is then capping this off, a final imprint of his royal authority throughout the kingdom. And what better way?

• 35:20Speaker 05

  I mean, not only is Doomsday hugely imposing, if you've ever seen it, it's absolutely massive. But also the greater effect isn't that most people aren't going to see this book. It's the inquisitors going throughout the kingdom. It's people coming to your village saying, who holds this land? By what right? Who held it under Edward? That's what's going to really stay with people and that's what clearly makes the impression on the chronicler. It's the fact that nobody just comes up, rocks up everywhere in England, all at once, suddenly asking this. That this is, again, on that kind of a scale, it's not been seen before. And it's reminding everyone that William has a right to ask these questions. I mean, it's not, doesn't seem to be the case that in the process of this, primarily, he's settling disputes. I'm sure there's some of that does happen, we can see in bits of it.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  But it's not so much that, it's not an act of tidying up, but it's more, I think, in terms of ideologically. It is that effect, a bit like kind of seeing castles in the countryside. This is a visual and interpersonal experience of royal authority that for most people would not be a daily experience, even in a relatively centralized kingdom like England. And so there is also, I think, in that sense, demonstrating a reach of royal authority. That would be almost every bit as much iconic as it is pragmatic.

• 36:31Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think that's interesting too, because, I mean, at a local level, as you say, we're talking about inquisitors turning up in villages, you know, gathering all of this information, which must have felt to a medieval community at this stage incredibly invasive. As you say, even in a centralized system like England had, you know, if we get to something like the peasants revolt a few hundred years later. Part of the reason that people get really upset is because tax inspectors are literally coming into your house and messing with your stuff when you feel like they shouldn't have the right to do that. There's a sense that, you know, Englishman's home is his castle kind of thing. So it must have been something new, shocking, disturbing perhaps, for all of these people to suddenly see these royal officials arriving and detailing every little bit of their lives.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Exactly, and I think it would have been. I mean, it doesn't quite have the edge of the later, like, Quo Veronto ones, where they were there really pushing and trying to push people if you have title deed. But there is an element of that, and I think in a sense, it also reinforces the effects of conquest. Although, on the one hand, it's predicated upon this seamless continuity. And that, that's the kind of core underlying artifice of the book, is that he's Edward's rightful heir. It also demonstrates this rapid change of landholding across the entire kingdom. So while on the one hand, claiming seamless continuity... It in practice is demonstrating stark change and indeed, dare I say, reminding people of these things. And I do think that probably for many of the Normans who came over for the conquest, they would have sympathized with the later Waren family, where famously in one of those quorantos where the royal agent rocks up and says,

• 38:00Speaker 05

  you know, where is your warrant for this land? And he said to have brought out a rusty old sword and said, this is the sword with which my ancestors came and conquered this land. And I think there's probably almost an element though to which actually, although it's it's asking these questions and documenting the responses, it's also emphasizing that England is this conquered land, that that these Norman landholders are here to stay. And this is not an opportunity for local English right for resurfacing or to claim that because you held it under Edward, you should have it now. Only in the case of perhaps certain churches is that kind of a logic going to play. So there is no attempt, although they want to know who had it under Edward, partly for, I think, ideological reasons for it, partly for accounting purposes.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  There's no sense to which that can become a basis for contesting who holds it now.

• 38:48Matt Lewis?

  You mentioned that this is quite unusual in being documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a piece of effectively administration. Do we get any sense of how other people felt about this? Because presumably Norman lords are quite happy because this is is judgment in a legal sense in their favor. They now own all of that land. Do we get any sense of how dispossessed Anglo Saxons feel about it? About how ordinary people feel about this huge survey and this kind of enshrining of the loss of Anglo Saxon lands and the conquest of the Normans?

• 39:22Speaker 05

  It's very hard to get at that. I mean, one can surmise and one suspects that they're not well pleased by it in terms of at least your traditional English aristocrats. How the peasantry feels is actually a more interesting question. More recent work does suggest the Norman conquest sees an intensification of lordship. And so there's a truth to the old Victorian ideas of the Norman yoke, even if they're a bit overblown. At the same time, that is unlikely to be happening completely overnight. And late Anglo Saxon lords were not benevolent in all cases. Indeed, in most cases, they weren't. So I suspect for a large portion of your peasantry, given a completely free choice, they'd choose to turn back the clock. But frankly, they had bastards ruling them then and slightly worse bastards ruling them now.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  And, you know, it's kind of, you know, death by fire or, you know, hanging kind of choices. The people who of course really lost out were your Anglo-Saxon aristocrats, the ones who were better off, but your kind of top 10% maybe of the population. Much below that, change has happened, but probably hasn't been so stark. But for that 10%, they have died, been dispossessed, been pushed into the peasantry. They're the ones for whom I suspect there is a lot of frustration. And that's one of the reasons why we don't see many of them frankly, is there has been this kind of complex process of rebellion and then increasing imposition of Mormon rule that's led William, who in 1066 probably in the aftermath of the battle is not planning on replacing the whole ruling elite of England.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  But by 1069, 1070, it's quite clear that is increasingly his plan. And so that's happened piecemeal, but it means that any last vestiges aren't in much of a position to resist. So I suspect they're the ones who have real sour grapes. Your peasantry is probably fairly ambivalent, but maybe not thrilled by this. Some of your ecclesiastical establishments aren't super pleased either because although they've had Normans take them over, some of whom have run them quite well, they've also often lost lands in some of this upheaval. So they're the ones who are occasionally trying to use this more as a wedge to get what they want. And we do certainly see cases of churches either seemingly justifying their documents in the aftermath of conquest, perhaps with an eye to doomsday or already with tenurial uncertainty before then.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  So yes, lots of documentary forgery, including at places like Exeter happening. But we also certainly after doomsday see it in light of doomsday. So finding ways of claiming or providing evidence for title to land you now hold in doomsday, or perhaps once did hold. So that is where it does then seem to have a kind of pragmatic purpose. And of course, it does go on too famously and build up to things like the peasants revolt, have this kind of status as an original statement of tenurial rights in England that then later people do try to make a claim back to, not always successfully because there's been a lot of water under the bridge. But but there is a bit of that kind of knock on effect then too. So for some of the churches and things like that, it both can generate a need to produce

• 42:18Speaker 05

  documentation to justify what they have in doomsday, but also it can provide evidence for things they've lost and a reminder of that and lead to hopes of restitution.

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• 44:07Matt Lewis?

  And I guess, again, thinking about the timing, 20 years into his reign, this is a point at which William has sufficiently dispossessed and disempowered that 10% so that they're no longer in a position to particularly fight back, either in a legal sense or a military sense, against his assertion that Normans now own all of this land.

• 44:26Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Basically, after the first four or five years of conquest, rebellion is a dead letter. Other than rebellion by significant Norman factions, sons of William, they can rebel, but that's a very, very different kettle of fish. Royal sons rebelling against their fathers is a mainstay of the Middle Ages. But actual rebellions that are seeking to...

• 44:46Speaker 05

  Overturn Norman rule and the rule of the dynasty cease. And it's for the simple reason that William has won via overwhelming force. There have been multiple attempts. Some of them came perhaps quite close. Some of them were viable attempts, but they all lost. And each time they lose, they tend to lose slightly more ground. So there is that kind of sense that while there is the last guions of the English royal family up in Scotland, still kind of threatening and married into the Scottish royal line. That hasn't been united back to the English line and won't till William's youngest son, Henry I. But while that latent threat is there, realistically, everyone knows William and his line is going to continue, that you're odds on favorites.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  So if you are of relatively high office, your interests lie in getting on with William. And if you can't get on with him, getting on with one or more of his sons, because they are the future.

• 45:39Matt Lewis?

  And so you mentioned as well, we've got the two books. We've got Little Doomsday, which covers East Anglia. We've got Greater Doomsday, which covers the rest of England, south of the Humber. So two questions. How complete is it for England? Are there bits of England missing within that area, south of the Humber? And why is the north missing so much?

• 45:59Speaker 05

  So it's south of the Tees that it's complete.

• 46:01Matt Lewis?

  The Tees, sorry.

• 46:01Speaker 05

  Rather than south of the Humber. But that is a very important one. So what we have is traditionally in England, already before the Norman conquest, but this continues thereafter, royal power is centered on the south. And the Norman conquest doesn't do much to change that. The only thing it kind of innovates with is it makes Kent and Dover suddenly really important for a cross-channel kingdom, whereas before they were kind of a bit more peripheral. But realistically, the rulers of England before then had come from Wessex, so south of the Thames, with attritional base in Winchester, by the later years increasingly based in London. But those are the kind of two big, big centers. The north, and particularly north of the Humber, is very different. But there's also a distinct history within the north of north of the Humber versus north of the Tees. Because what there had been was a previous kingdom called Northumbria.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  But that had always come from two constituent parts. Bernicia, north of the Tees and Deir Eira in the south. And there have been regular conflicts between those two and they regularly divide. And so, for example, when Scandinavians settle, they settle York, the southern part of that, what had been Deir Eira, and Bernicia continues on seemingly as a largely independent kind of principality under English rule. So, within North Humbur, it's always had a quite stark division. And what we can kind of see in terms of royal power and authority is, the moment you get north of the Humber, it's weaker. The moment you get north of the Tees, it's weaker still. So it's kind of a shading out, if you will. So, the royal writ runs south of the Humber most fully. It runs partially between the Humber and the Tees.

• 47:28Speaker 05

  And north of the Tees, relations with local magnates tend to be more like relations with the Welsh and Scottish monarchs. So, relations almost more of overlordship than kingship. And so, what the Doomsday Survey actually reveals, which I think is really telling and interesting, is that for the Inquisitors, England, in the sense of the act of domains ruled directly by William, rather than whereas overlordship stretches to, goes to the Tees. It doesn't go all the way to the Scottish kingdom. And that is, I think, really interesting, because that does end up eventually changing. But, in this period, there is that sense that, as of 1086, England actually, effectively, real England stops at the Tees.

• 48:13Matt Lewis?

  And it's interesting that that's still the case, kind of 15 or so years after the harrying of the North, that William still can't quite reach those farthest parts of his northern kingdom.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think the harrying was designed to cow with the region. And Doomsday Book does show us some of the real damage on the ground it did for those areas between the Humber and Tees. But it's not designed to make it a royal heartland. He's upset and angry that they've been rebelling with him. He doesn't particularly want to spend time there. If anything, he wants to spend less time there and wants to have less to do with the North. He's been forced to go there more than he wants to. So, there is that sense to which he's, I think, in terms of that, at least for the time being, he's happy to treat those regions a bit like the emerging Welsh marches, which have been produced under the lordship of his local barons. There are some bits of information are included as to Wales in Doomsday Book, but again, it's not treated fully as part of England in the same way.

• 49:08Speaker 05

  So I think there's that sense of there are their outlying domains that are perhaps under... Royal overlordship, but not under direct royal control. And that seems to perhaps be what it's getting at there. The royal writ doesn't run in quite the same way.

• 49:25Matt Lewis?

  And you mentioned there that doomsday can be quite helpful in assessing the damage that was done during the Harrying of the North. What kind of things is it useful in telling us for a medieval historian studying this kind of period? What kind of useful information can you glean from it? And perhaps from reading between the lines of it too?

• 49:43Speaker 05

  So there's a huge amount we can do with it. We could probably have a whole episode just on differing uses of doomsday. But it is the most complete survey of any pre-industrial society anywhere in the world. So you can do things with England pre-doomsday or at the time of the doomsday survey that you can't do anywhere else in Europe in this period. And it makes it quite difficult to handle in some senses because to some extent it is unique and different because of the circumstance of its production. On the other hand, it does this is showing us stuff we'd see elsewhere if we could see it. So it allows us to say, for example, personnel change with a conquest in a way that you can't study for any other conquest in European or world history up to the modern era.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  So unique insights into conquest and colonization of England. It allows us to look at things like the Harrying of the North. So wasteland is recorded regularly in terms of the survey in the North. That is clearly the effects of that. What that means is open to debate. All of these things have a lot of discussion around them. None of them are simple, but certainly it provides good evidence for that. We can look at the values of that land are assessed at before the conquest and after. And where those values have stayed stable or increased, it suggests that things have been more or less all right. I mean, there may have been some blips, but nothing too major. But we do have places where it decreases notably, including a number of those northern lands where you can just see that the geld now owed isn't what it once was because this

• 51:12Speaker 05

  land isn't as productive anymore. And we can see in other kinds of cases, sometimes it's more complicated than that. Sometimes where geld assessments change, we suspect there has been beneficial. Called beneficial hydration, a very complex sounding term. But in other words, basically a tax break. Either that before the conquest, they were on to a good thing. And after the conquest, somebody got on to them as raised the tax owed. Or the reverse, that somebody struck a good deal. So not in every case can you read it simplistically. Every piece of land whose value or geld value has gone down doesn't necessarily mean that that land has become less valuable. In some cases, if the holder is, for example, a good mate of Williams. One might speculate that in that case, actually, he's struck a deal. So a lot of kind of complicated stuff can lie behind these changes.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  But the fact that we can chase them at all, it's extraordinary. We don't know geld valuation changes in the pre conquest period. They would have happened because geld has been first raised systematically in ten twelve. So it's nothing new. It's been raised on an annual basis, probably since then, certainly in most years since then. It's happening. So under Ethelred the Unready, under Canute, under Edward the Confessor. It must be changing. But all the documents generated by that, all the evidence for it, literally all of it's gone. So we do get this unique sudden moment where where we can have a shine a light on this and see the kinds of processes that must have been going on elsewhere. We can also study it for disputes over land. So not all of those are recorded, but a large number are recorded in doomsday books.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  So there's a great book by Robin Fleming using it as a source for legal history and understanding how law is working, understanding how Shire courts are working. So all of these kinds of things, although many of them were not the purpose of the survey, can still be used for it. It can be used to estimate numbers of mills, for example, it records. It can be used to estimate agrarian capacities. It can provide a rough estimate of population. That's much weaker because it's not interested in a census. In that sense, it's households that it's after, but it provides a very accurate list of those. Probably not completely comprehensive, but yeah, I think it's two hundred and sixty eight and something thousand, but but still in terms of that, pretty, pretty bloody good. And in total, it's over two million words. So in terms of just simple volume.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  That gives you a sense of what you can potentially do with it. So it's an absolute gift to local historians, to economic historians, agrarian historians, but also political and legal historians of all elks.

• 53:35Matt Lewis?

  And I guess it speaks to the depth of that document that, you know, we very much positioned it as a cure for insomnia if you wanted to sit and read it cover to cover or try to. But it speaks to the depth of the information that's in there that almost 1,000 years later, people are still finding new ways to cut that information, to study it, new ways to improve our understanding of 11th century England using this nearly 1,000 year old document that hasn't changed in that time, but we can still find new ways to use it.

• 54:02Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you were to name the single most important source for the Norman conquest or early Norman England, it would have to be Doomsday Book. Indeed, even for late Anglo Saxon England, it would have to be Doomsday Book. It, as a single source, outweighs anything else in terms of scale, in terms of detail. And it's precisely because of that, that there is always frankly, something new to be done with it. Each generation finds new and exciting ways at it. And the most recent work, as I say, has been generated off of looking at that Exxon Doomsday, so those early draft versions, has completely changed our understanding, has gone back to emphasising the importance of Geld, has made us appreciate how it changes in the process of the inquest. So there's a huge amount going on this moment.

• 54:47Speaker 05

  A 900 page book has literally just come off the shelves with OUP on Doomsday Book. It won't be the last. It's a game changer. It's great, but there will be another one in 20 or 30 or 40 years' time of a similar scale and significance because the material is simply so rich.

• 55:02Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, so if we're going to position Doomsday as the most important source for medieval England perhaps, can we say it's the most important document? I'm thinking something like Magna Carta, where does it sit in comparison to something like that?

• 55:16Speaker 05

  That's a very good question. So I think in terms of the information it tells us, it is many times more important than Magna Carta. So it depends on how you're measuring significance. Without Magna Carta, frankly, or at least 1215 Magna Carta, we'd have 1225 Magna Carta. We have so many reissues of Magna Carta. You know, get rid of 1215, we could have no copies of it, not know the original text of it, have to reconstruct it from later ones, and we'd get pretty close. And we have the chronological accounts. So we'd know what was going on late on in John's reign. We know he's a bit of a rotter. We know they're upset. There might be a few of the finest details of the rebel baron's concerns we might miss out on, but we'd get 90% of what we want or need. Without Doomsday Book, we would lose a huge amount of what we want and need to understand

• 55:58Speaker 05

  the Norman conquest, and indeed even pre-conquest England before then, because of all those records for Edward's reign. So in terms of that, it is many, many times more important on a completely different scale. On the other hand, if you're measuring significance by the significance in terms of the impact of that document after its production, Magna Carta almost certainly wins that battle in the sense that Doomsday Book is used later, is absolutely of significance, but has this monumental quality, is also not used in lots of times where it could, is not constantly being referred to. So in terms of its lived existence, what did this document itself generate as an agent, Magna Carta is way more important. It's generating important developments in terms of parliamentary practice, in terms of principles of kings

• 56:41Speaker 05

  standing underneath the law. So I think that one, we don't necessarily have to pit, I don't know, me against David Carpenter and Nicholas Vincent on Magna Carta, or something like that. We can each have our cake and eat it there. Their significance is of a very different nature. You can do things with Doomsday Book you can't do with Magna Carta. Magna Carta, however, is a document that had an impact in a way that Doomsday's impact was more muffled.

• 57:05Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. That's a neatly balanced answer. I like it. And it sounds like, you know, we ought to be excited about what might come next from Doomsday if it's a resource that had been constantly studied and new books are being written about it. It's interesting to wonder what we might know more about in 20 years' time that we simply don't know now.

• 57:26Speaker 05

  Absolutely. So since I've been a professional historian, since I started my PhD, there's already been a huge revolution. So we've had systematic investigation of landholding change, you know, on a scale we didn't have before, that's provided far more fine-grained insight, largely confirmed what we thought before, but on a scale and a level of detail we couldn't have imagined. So that alone is already a bit of a game changer. Just now, as I say, new book off the shelves with OUP focusing on the Exxon Doomsday, that early version towards it, but that completely overhauls our understanding of the process behind it and changes almost every element of the way you want to approach it. So in the last kind of, you know, 15 years, realistically, since I've been doing this job seriously,

• 58:08Speaker 05

  there has been a huge, huge sea change in what we can do with it and how we understand it. And while these things will have ebbs and flows, I think it'll take some time to digest the most recent work first before we get the newest one thereafter. There absolutely will be things like that that we can continue doing because it is such a rich and detailed document, because there are so many different ways to read it. And certainly I know people who are using it for pre-conquest history as well as the conquest itself, exciting in new ways as well. That sits alongside this work, but is also kind of doing its own thing. So there is still going to be some really exciting stuff to come. And who knows? Yes, it could be you, could be one of your listeners who could be the next revolutionary when it comes to understanding Doomsday book.

• 58:48Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. For something that we've talked about as being kind of monumental and very much frozen in time, it still feels like a very rich and enigmatic document that could tell us things we simply don't know it's going to tell us yet.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  Exactly. And because we don't have the full workings behind it, because our understanding of it has to rest in part on hypothesis, there always will be new ways of explaining it, new ways of interrogating. And because simply of the level of detail, there are things that people have not chosen to look at and they are not wanted to yet, that will turn out to be of interest and significance.

• 59:21Matt Lewis?

  This has been absolutely fascinating. It feels like we've only scratched the surface of Doomsday, really. As you say, we could probably have done far more just on how historians use it today. But it's been absolutely fascinating to try to get to the bottom of why it happened and what its purpose might have been and what it can tell historians today as well. So thank you very much for joining us, Levi.

• 59:38Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me on.

• 59:41Matt Lewis?

  If you haven't caught it yet, you can go back and listen to our last episode with Levi and Eleanor all about the harrying of the North to set the scene a little bit further for this episode. And there are plenty of other episodes in our back catalogue about the Norman invasion and its aftermath, too.

• 59:58Matt Lewis?

  There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit now to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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