the ties that bound peasant families in medieval england

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these texts provide material proof that the Conqueror’s motives for ordering the inquest, and the uses which he and his advisors envisioned for it, are not the only motives and uses that matter. But I go further, arguing that aspects of this evidence point to some further selective revision of Great Domesday at a still later stage, perhaps as late as the accession of Henry I in 1100. Third, evidence derived from all of these texts supports the hypothesis, advanced most notably by David Roffe, that Great Domesday was not the premeditated outcome of the inquest but a later project, possibly not initiated – and certainly not completed – until after the Conqueror’s death. Second, the Burton texts shed new light on the near-immediate reception of those documentary techniques at a remote abbey. First, the Exeter libelli are material witnesses to the flexible yet exacting mechanisms of data collection and transcription that made the royal inquest possible.

My analysis of these humble but invaluable artifacts makes several contributions to our knowledge of the textual scaffolding that undergirds Domesday Book. The second consists of two texts made at the Benedictine abbey of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire between 10: a fragmentary roll of parchment constituting a working draft survey of the abbey’s lands (Staffordshire Public Record Office D603/A/Add/1925) and an endorsed copy of its Anglo-Saxon foundation charter (Staffordshire PRO D603/A/Add/1), both of which preserve a list of manors that derived from an intermediary draft of the Domesday descriptio. The first, known as “Exeter Domesday” (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3500) is an extraordinary trove of the inquest’s raw data digested into 103 individual parchment libelli, probably produced by a team of scribes working at Winchester. However, two bodies of text do provide such information. Most so-called “Domesday satellites” survive only in later manuscript compilations which do not preserve evidence of their original material formats and uses.

This article -edited and published in SPECULUM 93/4 (2018): 1048-1101 - examines the oldest surviving textual artifacts associated with the inquest of William the Conqueror.

The ties that bound peasant families in medieval england