DOMESDAY SURVEY 



IT would not be easy to name any portion of the Domesday Survey 

 which presents more formidable difficulties in regard to terminology 

 and subject-matter than those which arise in the course of the descrip- 

 tion of Leicestershire. Quite apart from the normal problems of 

 Domesday interpretation, the student is confronted, in the case of this 

 county, with questions which have no parallel elsewhere in the great record ; 

 and his difficulties are increased by the fact that their solution has to be 

 attempted with but scanty assistance from external sources of information. 

 It is not easy to trace the fiscal and economic condition of Leicestershire 

 back to its origin in the Anglo-Saxon period, for the county is almost unre- 

 presented in the Codex Diplomatics * and there is a lack of documentary 

 evidence for its history during the Conqueror's reign which continues with 

 little alleviation for at least thirty years after his death. On the other hand, 

 at some date between 1124 and 1129 the financial officials of Henry I pro- 

 duced a record, the ' Leicestershire Survey,' discovered by Mr. Round and 

 printed by him in Feudal England? which, while incidentally raising not a 

 few questions of its own, is of the greatest value for purposes of comparison 

 with Domesday Book, and in some respects makes the fiscal history of 

 Leicestershire clearer than that of the neighbouring counties of Derby 

 and Nottingham. This record is translated at length in its own place, and 

 for the present we may use its evidence to check the statements of Domesday 

 Book in regard to those financial matters which form the essential subject- 

 matter of both documents alike. 



For Domesday Book is above all things a fiscal record ; its purpose was 

 to register the exact distribution of the king's ' geld,' the Danegeld, which, 

 originally raised as an emergency tax in the troubled times of Ethelred the 

 Unready, was sporadically levied by the Conqueror and became a matter of 

 yearly exaction in the course of the next century. Fiscal questions, therefore, 

 deserve priority of treatment in the discussion of any portion of the great 

 survey, and the geographical position and early history of Leicestershire give 

 peculiar importance to the details of its assessment to the geld as they are 

 recorded in Domesday Book. Leicestershire and the adjoining counties of 

 Lincoln, Rutland, Nottingham, and Derby present certain features of historical 

 interest which distinguish this district very clearly from the rest of England 

 with the exception of Yorkshire, and may be assigned to the great Scandi- 

 navian settlement of this group of shires which took place in the second half 



1 The Cartularium Saxonlcum only includes one document (No. 1096) primarily relating to Leicestershire. 

 As this is merely a grant of woodland at Claybrook near Watling Street, it gives no help with regard to early 

 arable units in the county. ' Feud. Engl. 196214.. 



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