https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book
If you conquer a
country, it might be a good plan to find out about the country you’ve
conquered. The Domesday book was commissioned in 1086 by William the Conquerer
(1028 – 1087) in order to assess taxes and landholdings in England and Wales.
It’s a massive ‘inventory’ which included details of landowners’ names,
resources, land value and estimates of population in specific locations.
It’s fascinating
from several points of view:
[1] The Domesday
book records over 13,400 places, and is not a beautifully written and
illuminated manuscript, but an example of a “working document” with the key
information that William required.
[2] That “working
document” is written in Latin and, once you’ve “cracked the code” of the
abbreviations (which is our next topic), it is reasonably easy to interpret
because it is quite repetitive.
[3] It gives
considerable historical insight into different parts of England and Wales; in
particular, what became major urban centres were little more than a handful of
households.
Image: the village
where I used to live (Carlby; Domesday: Carlebi) is listed: “It had a recorded
population of 40 households in 1086, putting it in the largest 20% of
settlements recorded in Domesday, and is listed under 3 owners in Domesday
Book.”
https://opendomesday.org/place/TF0513/carlby/
However, Carlby
has remained a village whereas other locations with far smaller numbers of
households in 1086 have hugely increased in population size. Despite the
obvious locations of Roman settlement nearby e.g. Little Casterton, the
-by ending in Carlby is Old Norse for ‘farm’ or ‘village’, which Carlby
still is.
[3] You can get as close as you possibly can to the people
who wrote it over 900 years ago. Of course, there is something more “human” in
reading handwriting than something beautifully “illuminated” in Word.
[4] Cracking that code can be challenging and time-consuming because the scribes don’t always do what you want them to, but it also rewarding when you finally work out what somebody is saying in 1086. And we will begin looking at that in the next post.
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