Bettany
What was the typical farm building at that time?

Dr Stephen Rippon
University of Exeter
It was what was called a long house. A long rectangular building where you'd have both the residential uses and also the live stock animals and the crops stored, all within the same building.

Bettany
And no farmyard?

Stephen
No. This sort of arrangement of agricultural buildings and residential buildings around a central yard is quite a late development.

Bettany
And so would the field layout have been similar?

Stephen
Well, certainly down here in the south west there was a very long tradition of having enclosed fields, and what we've got here, is a very traditional example of a DeBettanyn, a hedge bank. And although we can't say that is 11th century, the fields down here would have been enclosed by something very similar to that.

Bettany
But presumably Exon Domesday is useful for you to look at how patterns of land settlement have changed.

Stephen
Oh yes. It's enormously useful for reconstructing things on a regional scale, like the distribution of woodland and meadow and population and so on. And although we can't really use it to reconstruct the layout of an individual farm, what we can say is what was the ward pattern of settlement and here in DeBettanyn, for example, we can see there's sort of scatter of farmsteads. Very typical of western parts of Britain and also the south east corner of England. And Domesday just enables us to reconstruct regional patterns like that for the 11th century landscape.

Bettany
It was beginning to dawn on me that the great survey of Norman England that we associate with William the Conqueror is actually contained in books like Exon and not the Domesday Book, which is pretty amazing. Could David Roffe be right, that Domesday Book was compiled in 1089-90? That would put it in the reign of William the Conqueror's son, William Rufus. I wanted David to prove to me that it was written so much later than people think.

David
At the very beginning in Huntingdonshire, there is a reference to Earl William of Warren. It's very significant because we know that William of Warren was not made Earl until sometime between late 1087 and middle 1088. So we have a passage which cannot have been written before the end of 1087.

Bettany
And when did William the Conqueror die?

David
He died in 1087, in the middle of the year.

Bettany
So the bulk of the book has definitely, following your theory, been written after William's dead, which is completely different from what everybody's assumed.

David
We do have one reference in an early 12th century chronicler, called Aldric Fatales, who says that it happened in 1089.

Bettany
England, at that time, was in turmoil. William Rufus faced rebellion from his brother, Robert, and from almost all the Norman barons. They'd taken his lands and he wanted them back, so he needed to know exactly which estates he owned in order to reclaim them after the rebellion.

David
Here is the answer to what Domesday Book was for. It was there to provide a guide to settling the great rebellion of 1088.

Bettany
So, the Domesday Book I saw in the Public Record Office was an entirely new land register, quite separate from the inquest conducted by William the Conqueror. It was compiled from surveys like Exon, but the information was then abridged and then re-arranged to produce the Domesday Book we know today.

Philip Shirley has made the journey to Oxford and Linacre College. He's there to meet Katharine Keats-Rohan who, in addition to being the author of a Who's Who of Domesday Book, has created a database to cross-reference the 30,000 names mentioned in the survey.

Katharine
If we look at the Domesday records here, you'll see that there are seven holdings which are attributed to a man called Sasswallow. The holdings themselves, some of them have quite healthy values attached to them, £20, 100 shillings, with some of them quite large. And in fact I know that your family has asked itself the question of whether this man is an Englishman or not. I would say definitely not. This name is well evidenced in this part of the continent and for me, there is no doubt at all that he is Norman from the lordship of Ferian in Normandy.

Bettany
Katharine's database covers the existing government documents from Domesday up to 1166 including the Cartide Baronum, which records the military service owed to the king in terms of a number of knight's fees.

Katharine
So we see the importance of this family because the Carta entry actually begins with them.

Bettany
The family was determined to consolidate its wealth, so Henry, son of Sasswallow, agreed with his brother, Fulcher, that he would leave his own inheritance to Fulcher's son, another Sasswallow, making him a rich man who could offer the king the military service of nine knights.

Katharine
This shows how important this family was as a tenant family of the Earls Ferrer. And of course, Sasswallow who acquires the rights of the first born is even more distinguished because by the 17th century his family, the Shirley family, is actually acquiring the title of Earl Ferrers, which is saying that the family was very good at husbanding its resources and making the most of them.

Bettany
Meanwhile, I'm heading back to London, my head full of ideas about the Domesday Book and wondering what the affect of it must have been on the running of the country. As soon as you write people's names down and what they own, it's a major step towards controlling the population. People become accountable.

  < previous   next > Page 3 of 4

Content last updated: 29/03/2006

Comments