DOMESDAY SURVEY 



I. The procedure of the Domesday survey — the Exchequer text and the Exon. Domesday — the Domesday 

 commissioners and the hearing of claims — assessment of the shire for geld — teamlands and ploughs — 

 land-values, 1066 and 1086 — -the peasants — manorial adjuncts, meadow, pasture, woodland, and others — the 

 Dorset boroughs, pp. 00-00. II. The land of the king, 1086 and 1066 — the pre-Conquest landowners of 

 Dorset — the survival of the English — the lands of the religious houses, in 1086 and before the Conquest, 

 pp. 00-00. III. The lay tenants in 1086 — the king's thegns and the king's Serjeants — the later history of the 

 fiefs, pp. 00-00. 



I 



DORSET, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, the five counties covered 

 by the Exon. Domesday, probably comprised one of the circuits into which 

 England was divided for the making of the Domesday survey.- Each 

 circuit was assigned its own bodies of commissioners^ and, from a passage 

 in the account of Somerset, it has been assumed that William, Bishop of Durham, 

 headed the group of commissioners for the south-west, but the passage could be 

 otherwise construed.** The commissioners seem to have held special sessions of the 

 shire court, at which the juries of the shire and the hundreds gave sworn evidence, but 

 there is little in the accounts of the south-western shires to illustrate this process. There 

 are several references to the testimony of the English and the thegns of the shire, ^ none 

 of which occurs in the Dorset section, and in Devon there is a single reference to the 

 men of the hundred.*^ In Dorset there are four references to oral testimony, but the 

 hundred juries are not mentioned. ^^ It is noticeable that in Domesday there are no 

 hundred rubrics for any of the five south-western shires, although the rest of the 

 English counties were so rubricated. Two hundreds in Dorset are mentioned inci- 

 dentally, Buckland hundred, where there were 3I virgates attached to the manor of 

 Bingham's Melcombe (no. 30), and Purbeck hundred, where William of Briouze held 7 

 hides less | virgate (no. 296). It is possible partially to reconstruct the Dorset hundreds 

 by collating the Dorset section of the Domesday survey with the Dorset Geld Rolls. ^ It 

 then emerges that the manors of each tenant-in-chief in Domesday are arranged in a 

 fairly consistent order of hundreds, or rather groups of hundreds. ^ Whether this order 

 indicates that the records of the court proceedings were originally arranged hundred 

 by hundred, as in the Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis, is conjectural. It is possible 

 that when the original returns were sent to Winchester, they were already in feudal 

 order. The arguments for this view largely turn on the relationship between the 

 Exchequer Domesday and the Exon. Domesday, preserved in Exeter cathedral library. 

 Exon. Domesday in its original form must have covered all five south-western 

 counties, but the Wiltshire section, with the exception of one manor, and four-fifths 



' The author wishes to thank Professor R. R. Darlington ■• Dom. Bk. (Rec. Com.), i, f. 87b; see R. W. Eyton, 



for his invaluable assistance in preparing this article, the Domesday Studies: Somerset, i. 12-13; V. H. Galbraith, 



ensuing translation, and the text of the Geld Rolls. Making of Dom. Bk. 87, 94, 207 ; V.C.H. Wilts, ii. 42, n. 2. 



^ Eyton distinguished 9 circuits in all, which A. Ballard ^ p_ w. Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 11, n. i; 



(Domesday Inquest (igo6), 12-13) reduced to seven; see Galbraith, op. cit. 70 sqq. For the Wilts, evidence on this 



Domesday Re-Bound (H.M.S.O., 1954), App. II. matter, see V.C.H. Wills, ii. 43. 



' Robert, Bp. of Hereford, in his contemporary i" Dom. 5/t. (Rec. Com.), i, f. 107; iv. 277. 



account of the survey, says that there were 2 sets of ' See nos. 263, 308, 369, 378 and ex. 



commissioners, one sent to check on the other: W. H. * See p. 115 sqq. 



Stevenson, 'A Contemporary Description of the Domesday ' R. Welldon Finn, 'The Making of the Dorset 



Survey', E.H.R. xxii. 74, translated in Eng. Hist. Doc. ii. Domesday', Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist, and Arch. Soc. bcxxi. 



851. 150-1. 



DO. in I A 



