Decoding Domesday (review)

In this detailed work, David Roffe builds on and considerably expands the thesis of his earlier book Domesday: The Inquest and the Book (2000). That thesis distinguished between the inquest of 1086 and the official summary / "abbreviation" of the information gathered which survives as Great and Little Domesday Book (GDB, LDB) and which Roffe redated to 1088–90. Here, Roffe examines the nature and social context of the various categories of information gathered, the reasons for its collection, and the ways in which the scribes of the Domesday codices modified and re-presented it for a new purpose. Although amusing in places, it is not for the fainthearted and needs a considerable amount of prior knowledge of Domesday studies to appreciate fully. Several interesting insights have arisen from the author's previous work not only on county introductions to the Alecto facsimile edition but also on the thirteenth-century Hundred Rolls.

Emphasizing the collection of material rather than the final format of its codification, great weight is put upon two obligations of society in the England of 1066/1086. The first is taxation and the second service. Roffe revives the idea, denied by V.H. Galbraith but held by many other historians since Arthur Agarde in the sixteenth century to Maitland and Round in the nineteenth, that the desire of the royal administration to have an accurate record of liability to pay the geld was one of the chief reasons behind the Domesday Inquest. He also stresses the importance of soke not merely as a symbol of lordship but also as a financial benefit to the lord holding bookland; the manor is seen as a "tributary centre" (p. 178) and one which "articulated soke" (p. 177).

Roffe does not regard the production of a composite record like GDB as being the aim of the royal administration from the start, in contrast to what he terms "the recensionist theory" put forward by Galbraith in 1942. Rather it is thought that GDB was the idea of Rannulf Flambard in the reign of William Rufus and was only a by-product of the inquest itself. Galbraith's view is seen as too rigid given our lack of knowledge of the total corpus of texts produced by the inquest in the first place, an unknown number of which do not survive. While textual comparisons confirm Exon Domesday as an exemplar for GDB, Roffe rightly states that it need not have been typical in form of other "circuit returns." However, LDB (containing data for Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk) although here taken to be "indubitably the model for GDB" is said to have been possibly "originally compiled for other purposes" (p. 106), rather than being a circuit return whose text the GDB scribe never had time to edit. The absence of any writing or intervention by the GDB scribe in LDB (whose text was written by six scribes, with a seventh adding the colophon and running page-headings) is notable, but if Exon Domesday is accepted as one type of circuit return, why should not LDB be another? The varied nature of the hands in LDB suggests that scribes might have been gathered from more than one local scriptorium on an ad hoc basis, rather than belonging to a more permanent royal bureaucratic structure. Roffe suggests (p. 94) that the GDB text could have been composed directly from a text for each shire similar to the Inquisitio comitatus Cantabrigiensis (ICC), the surviving record of the public checking of inquest data in the shire court of Cambridgeshire, collated with geld records and the relevant breves of individual tenants-in-chief, without a need (except apparently in the south-western circuit represented by Exon Domesday) for an already partially-edited circuit exemplar. But, if his new timescale is accepted and work on GDB was not (as previously thought) ended on the death of William I in October 1087, why could a preliminary editorial process not still have taken place in each circuit, if there were groups of scribes available? It would have made...