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Columbia fönftwwtftp LIBRARY 0 ttt C 0fr ft Dil FOE, SHROPSHIRE. THE ORIGINAL TEXT EDITED AND TMNSLATED INTO ENGLISH. BY THOMAS WRIGHT, ESQ., M.A., F.S.A., fc. COEEESPONDINÖ MEMBEB OF THE INSTITUTE OF FKANCE, (ACADEMIE DES INSCEIPTIONS ET BELLES LETTRES.) SHEEWSBUEY : PEINTED AND PTJBLISHED BY J. 0. SANDFOED, 25, HIGH-STEEET. LONDON: LONGMAN, GEEEN, & CO., PATEENOSTEE EOW; AND VACHEE & SONS, 29, PAELIAMENT STEEET. 1865. PREFACE. THE word Domesday, or Doomsday, (in Anglo-Saxon domes-dwg,) means literally the day on which the king, or other judge in his place, sat to hear trials and give judgment. Criminal causes were, in general, easily decided, bufc civil actions presented greafcer obscurity, from the variety of tenures of property, and the difficulty of arriving at a correct knowledge of the facts connected with them. It thus became necessary to form some general and authentic body of the Information which the Court required ; and the Domesday-Book was a register of such facts upon the authority of which judgment was to be given on those questions then of paramount importance, the value, tenures, and Services of land. It is the record of a census made under the infhienee and in the interests of feudalism. Amon'g all people, at a certain period of their advance in social progress, some such general inquisition was found necessary for the establishment of social order. Such was the census among the Eomans, which was first carried into practise under the reign of Servius Tullius, in the year of Rome 187. Ic was no doubt partly also for civil purposes that the Jews were from time to time " numbered," as recorded in the Scrip- tures. This "numbering" appears to have been often considered and feit by the people as an act of tyranny, and David incurred God's anger on one occasion by wilfully subjecting the people of Israel to a new census. (2 Sam. xxiv. and 1 Chron. xxi.) Our forefathers in the time of William the Norman appear to have looked upon the census ordered by that king with much the same feelings. The writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1085, records with unmistakable sentiments of grief that in that year, " the king had a great Council, and very deep speech with his witan (or counsellors) about this land, how it was peopled, or by whafc men ; then he sent his men over all England, into every shire, and caused to be ascertained how many hundred hides were in the shire, or what land the king himself had, and cattle within the land, or what dues he ought to have, in twelve months, from the shire. Also he caused to be written how much land his archbishops had, and his suffragan bishops, and his abbots, and his earls ; and— though I may narrate somewhat prolixly—what or how much each man had who was a holder of land in England, in land, or in cattle, and how much money it might be worth. So very narrowly he caused it to be traced out, that there was not one Single hide, nor one virgate of land, nor even—it is shame to teil, though it seemed to him no shame to do—an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine, was left, that was not set down in this writ. And all the writings were brought to him afterwards." These writings, abridged and Condensed' into one body, formed that invaluable record we call the Domesday-Book, which was completed in the year following. It may be remarked that there are circumstances in the text of the Domesday-Book as we now have it, which seem to imply the existence of surveys of a similar character made in Anglo-Saxon times, at all events under Edward the Confessor, which furnished some of the Information contained in the later record. The object of the Domesday-Book was, as intimated above, to furnish in the king's court an authentic record of facts for reference, on the conflicting claims which arose continually out of the feudal tenures, especially at a period so soon after the redistribution of lands which followed the Norman Conquest. The manner in which the king's design was carried into effect was as follows :—Commissioners, under the title IV PREEACE. of the king's justiciaries, were sent into each county, with füll power to call before them the sheriffs, the lords of manors, the presbyters of churches, the reeves of hundreds, and the bailiffs, and six villans of each village, and to put them upon their oaths. They were examined as to the extent of the several manors, their hidage, their possessors at the time of the survey, and in the reign of Edward the Confessor, the proportion of arable land and pasture, the number of the various classes of tenants and dependents, whether free or servile, with circumstances of a more exceptional character, such as churches; mills, fish- ponds, woods, and haise, or enclosures for entrapping wild animals, and the rental of each manor, not only at the time of the survey, but also in the time of Edward the Confessor, and in most cases at an interme- diate period. Other circumstances are sometimes noted, and especially the condition in which the manor had been left by war, invasion, or neglect, and its capability of increased productiveness and value. An examination of the document itself leaves no doubt in our minds that the inquisition was conducted with great care and impartiality; yet there are reasons which exposed the Compilers of the reports to several classes of errors. The commissioners and their clerks or secretaries were no doubt Normans, and they had to deal with a population which was still almost entirely Anglo-Saxon. Thus, taking down Anglo-Saxon names of places by the sound, the Norman scribes were liable to fall into frequent blunders. The Jurors themselves, selected from the whole hundred, were sometimes imperfectly acquainted with some of the facts on which they were examined, and gave Information which was erroneous. However, such inaccu- racies are far less numerous than might be expected, and the slightest study of the Domesday-Book is sufficient to convince us of the marvellous care with which the survey was made and reduced into its present form. Our county historian, Mr. Eyton, has truly characterized this invaluable document as " the greatest territorial record which royal wisdom ever planned, official zeal ever executed, or clerkly skill ever engrossed."* The records of the proceedings of the commissioners in the various counties were returned into the king's court at Winchester at the Easter of the year 1086. From these, what is called Domesday-Book was compiled. In the course of compilatioh, the original documents were no doubt much abridged, and we have reasons for believing that these original returns contained a large quantity of Information which, coiisidered of minor utility at that time, was omitted altogether. There are two portions belonging to the Domesday survey, known as the Book of Exeter and the Book of Ely, which exist in a less abridged form, and contain many more details than the existing surveys of the other counties. It might be naturally supposed that facts obtained under the circumstances described above, by different sets of commissioners in different counties, and from classes of people differing probably in their conditions and notions, must have been far from uniform, and this want of uniformity may also be traced in the different parts of our great national record. Domesday-Book is the great record which forms as it were the source of our manorial history, and to which the historian of modern families seeks to trace as near as possible the succession of land-holders. Beyond it he comes upon a sort of chasm, which separates him from an earlier part, for Domesday-Book presents these lands to us as snatched from their former holders, and placed in the grasp of an entirely new aristocracy. But besides this, it throws, when carefully studied, great light on the condition of our country, immediately before and immediately after the Norman Conquest. In it we can compare the relative power and influence of the Saxon with those of the Norman aristocracy, and we can understand the exact position of the latter individually towards each other. We can form a tolerably exact notion of the extent to which the land was cultivated, and of its productiveness, as well as the effect which war and revolution, as well as * Eyton's Äntiquities of Shropshire, vol. vii. p. 130. PREFACE. T the feeling of insecurity which accompanied these, had had upon it. Thus, the numerous manors which in our county are reported as waste, especially as we approach the borders, speak unmistakably of the con- tinual inroads of Welsh plunderers to which it had been constantly exposed since the reign of Edward the Confessor. We trace here and there similar waste inland which speaks, though less clearly, of private feuds or of local insurrections against the oppressions of the new masters. We can see how in many cases one great noble husbanded his estates better than another, who, therefore, neglected or wasted his territorial resources. Thus the lands of Osbern fitz Eichard, whose father was the builder of Richards Castle, are many of them set down as entirely wasted, and he no doubt had been engaged in constant hostility with the Welsh. It was this insecurity, probably, which made the old Roman road from Shrewsbury to Hereford so insecure, that people who travelled in that direction wTere obliged to turn off into a new road through Ludlow.

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