DOMESDAY SURVEY 



Account of the Exeter Book — The commissioners and their decisions on questions of title — The 

 hundreds — Booklands and manors — Low level of assessment — Domesday measures — Lands of 

 the king — Lands of churches and clerical tenants — The lesser lay tenants — Tenants in 

 serjeanty — English tenants — Exeter — Other boroughs — The forest — Mills — Salterns and 

 fisheries. 



DEVONSHIRE is one of the five western shires, the Domesday Survey 

 of which is epitomized not only in the Exchequer Book but 

 also in another volume known as the Exeter Book. The latter 

 contains, besides a fuller abstract of the returns made by the 

 undred juries, also a copy of the returns made by the commissioners appointed 

 to collect the land-tax in 1084.^ Neither of these books in describing the 

 Devonshire estates mentions the hundreds to which they belong. In such 

 circumstances identification becomes difficult. In some cases it would prob- 

 ably be impossible were it not for the Exeter Book, which, placing together 

 all the estates held by the same owner in each hundred and adopting a regular 

 rotation in the entries of the hundreds, and further grouping together the 

 military squires and each of the three classes of the king's officials and treating 

 their estates in a similar manner, supplies a clue to the hundred in which 

 each should be sought. The importance of the Exeter Book therefore for 

 purposes of identification cannot be overrated. 



It is for this reason that the editors of the Victoria History resolved to 

 make the text of the Exeter Book the groundwork for their translation in the 

 case of the county of Devon, only supplementing it by the Exchequer where 

 the pages have been lost and in places where there are important variants of 

 phraseology or nomenclature. The Devonshire Association, it is true, pub- 

 lished the Exeter version along with the Exchequer in its reprint of Domes- 

 day, which is now out of print ; but this was only done after cutting it up 

 into paragraphs to make the entries correspond with the Exchequer entries, 

 whereby its value for purposes of identification was in great measure lost. 

 Hitherto the Exeter Book has been only available in the Record Commis- 

 sioners' folio reprint, vol. iv, Additamenta, 1 8 1 6. 



The book itself, which is preserved in the Chapter Library at Exeter, is 

 a quarto volume of 532 pages, made up of 103 separate booklets of various 

 sizes, no one of them containing more than eight leaves, besides a number of 

 single and a few double leaves.' These booklets were originally unbound, 

 one booklet or more being used for each of the larger tenants and a new 

 page for each of the lesser ones. For a long time these booklets con- 

 tinued separate and were kept together with copies of the returns of the 

 land-tax collectors of 1084, and of portions of the Exchequer Domesday 

 referring to Wiltshire and Dorsetshire ; but about the beginning of the 

 fifteenth century they, or at least such of them as had escaped loss, were 

 bound up in two volumes and paged. So carelessly, however, was the work 



' Freeman, Norman Conquest, iv, 683. 



' On this subject see Mr, Whale's article in Trans. Devon Assoc, xxxvii, 246 seq. (1905). 



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