Inside Domesday

Page 5 of 5

• 1. The culmination of the Conquest
• 2. The Survey
• 3. The Danish threat
• 4. The content of the Domesday Book
• 5. Land transfer
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Land transfer

The Domesday Book also illustrates the various mechanisms of land-transfer in the Conquest:

• Antecession: all the lands of one person were given by the King to a Norman.
• Castleries: these and the rapes of the south were a cluster of lands granted around a central castle, which the holder was expected to build and maintain.
• Official forfeiture: a favourite of sheriffs. Any land under dispute could be expropriated into the 'official' patrimony of the local officer.
• Naked aggression: The lord fancies a piece of land and simply takes it. He does this in one of two ways. Way one is simply to pay the tax on it. This was mainly to do with rents in kind, which were therefore possible to take over - eg by telling the reeve to pay the rents to the lord rather than to the original landowner. The taxes would then be paid over by the lord and the land would devolve to him. There was supposed to be a three-day grace period between the paying of rent and the passing-over of the title.
• Way two was to send in the bully-boys, and kick the current owner off the land. This was probably very rare, as lords wanted land because they wanted the rents from it (and therefore needed someone on it to pay those rents).
• Marriage: Norman knights who gained title to lands by marrying the widow/daughter who owned them, often with the active blessing of the King.

The peasantry - the people who actually tilled the land - were basically divided into villani and bordars.

The villani were the aristocracy of the peasants. They could own a large chunk of land in the local area - up to a hide or more - in return for labour-service to the lord. It is important not to confuse them with the villeins that they eventually turned into during the Middle-Ages, because at the time of the Domesday Book, the villani were essentially free and paying Geld (the basic definition of 'freedom'), which the villeins were not doing by the end of the 12th century.

Bordars are a bit more problematic. Nobody's quite sure what their status was. They were either people 'assarting' (farming) peripheral land, or they were members of the lord's demesne, who farmed an area in return for wages, which include the right to food from the lord's table.

So the Domesday Book is a huge administrative document, which throws light on some of the more basic, nitty-gritty aspects of the takeover of England by its Norman conquerors. From it we can also glean a whole series of personal stories and experiences of life under the new régime.

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Published: 2001-07-01