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Updated: June 3, 2025
Wherever we find a mill specified in Domesday, there we generally find a mill now. At Arundel, for example, we see what rent was paid by a mill; and there still stands at Arundel an old mill whose foundations might have been laid before the Conquest. Salt works are repeatedly mentioned.
So in recording who held the land in King Edward's day and who in King William's, there is nothing to show that in so many cases the holder under Edward had been turned out to make room for the holder under William. In Domesday the word is most commonly an euphemism for "dispossessed Englishman."
The nobility became mainly Norman, and the same was true of the ecclesiastics and other great officers. All the land was held as a grant from the king. In 1085 the making of Domesday was decreed, which was a complete statistical survey of all the estates and property in England. The object was to furnish a basis for taxation.
In that famous council of Salisbury of 1086, which was summoned immediately after the making of the Domesday survey, we learn from the Chronicle that there came to the King "all his witan, and all the landholders of substance in England whose vassals soever they were, and they all submitted to him, and became his men and swore oaths of allegiance that they would be faithful to him against all others."
Many, even in the most privileged places, were attached to particular manors. The Domesday survey shows that in some towns there was an admixture of Norman and English burgesses; and it is clear that they were so settled after the Conquest, for a distinction is made between the old customary dues of the place and those the foreigner should pay.
A very attentive study of Domesday might bring out the fact that William was a foreign conqueror, and that the book itself was a record of the process by which he took the lands of the natives who had fought against him to reward the strangers who had fought for him. But nothing of this kind appears on the surface of the record. The great facts of the Conquest are put out of sight.
That the place was of some sort of importance would seem to be evident, for we find Edward the Confessor, granting the manor and churches of Steyning to the Benedictines of Fécamp, Harold taking it from them, and the Conqueror restoring it. Two churches at Steyning are spoken of in the Domesday Survey, and it has been thought that the second of these is really that at Warminghurst.
But it is certain from Domesday and the Chronicle that William did afforest a considerable tract of land in Hampshire; he set it apart for the purposes of hunting; he fenced it in by special and cruel laws stopping indeed short of death for the protection of his pleasures, and in this process some men lost their lands, and were driven from their homes.
It is mentioned in Domesday Boke as belonging to the bishop of Bayeux in Normandy, famous for the historic piece of tapestry. Wadard, a gentleman with a Saxon name, held it of him, probably for the quit rent of an annual eel-pie, although the consideration is not stated. The clergy were, by reason of their frequent meagre days and seasons, great consumers of fish.
Geoffrey would deserve a higher fame than he wins by the possession of endless manors in Domesday and by the suppression of the West-Saxon revolt at Montacute, if we could believe that, according to a legend which is even now hardly exploded, the existing church of Coutances is his work.
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