DOMESDAY SURVEY 



I 



Derbyshire portion of the Domesday Survey is short and 

 superficially uninteresting. It contains few of those references 

 to personal history or local customs which give peculiar 

 importance to the description of such counties as Berkshire 

 and Worcestershire, and, in fact, consists of little more than a series of 

 statistics, valuable as Domesday statistics always are, but containing little 

 specially to arrest the attention. .Derbyshire possesses no subsidiary 

 record comparable with the ' History ' of Abingdon Abbey or Heming's 

 CAartu/ary, for the county contained no religious house in 1086, and 

 the records of the abbey of Burton-on-Trent, which held land in Derby- 

 shire, while very valuable as a commentary on the Domesday text, 

 have reference only to a small portion of it. In point of bulk, the 

 Derbyshire Survey occupies fourteen folios of Domesday Book as against 

 ten folios given to Staffordshire and twenty-seven assigned to Notting- 

 hamshire, counties of somewhat similar area ; but in the case of Derby- 

 shire and of Nottinghamshire frequent blank spaces occur in the 

 manuscript which are not found in the account of Staffordshire. 



But the survey of our county has an importance much greater 

 than would be gathered from its extent or general character. It was the 

 westernmost of a group of four counties Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, 

 Leicestershire, and Derbyshire which, with Yorkshire to the north, 

 present features which distinguish them in a marked way from the neigh- 

 bouring shires to the south and west. These counties form the region 

 which is understood to have been settled by the Danes in the ninth 

 century, and there is no doubt that some of the striking characteristics 

 of this district are due to this Scandinavian influence. As Domesday 

 Book is pre-eminently a fiscal record, the most important of these features 

 is the fact that the unit of taxation in these counties was the ' carucate ' 

 of eight bovates as against the ' hide ' of four virgates, which is found in 

 the south and west, and that these carucates tend to be combined in 

 groups of six or twelve, whereas the hides of the rest of England arc 

 usually combined in groups of five or ten. 1 This duodecimal system of 

 reckoning is very characteristic of the ' Danish ' part of England, and 

 helps us to define its limits with an exactitude which would otherwise 

 be impossible, since local nomenclature, the simplest test of ' Danish ' settle- 

 ment, is often misleading. Derbyshire, for instance, has always been 

 reckoned as one of the ' Danish ' counties of England, and yet the 

 evidence from place names as to a Scandinavian settlement of the district 



1 See on the assessment of the Danelaw in general, feudal England, 69 et sqq. 



293 



