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Updated: June 3, 2025
But in the greater part of the kingdom it was impossible, in no part was it prudent, to carry out this doctrine in its fulness. A passage in Domesday, compared with a passage in the English Chronicles, shows that, soon after William's coronation, the English as a body, within the lands already conquered, redeemed their lands.
It tells us that "villeins and holders of land in villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their lords, having attached themselves to other persons who maintained and abetted them, and who under colour of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or other course of justice to be taken against them; the villeins aiding their maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to life and limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each other."
Whatever was the motive, there were devastation and misery. Domesday shows that in the district of the New Forest certain manors were afforested after the Conquest; cultivated portions, in which the Sabbath bell was heard.
As he glanced through the leaves across green sunlit spaces to the ivy-clad ruins of Domesday Abbey, which seemed itself a growth of the very soil, he murmured to himself: "Things had been made mighty comfortable for folks here, you bet!"
The frieze consists of a series of wreaths upholding shields charged with the armorial bearings of many county families, together with the royal arms and those of the city. Farther up the street is the church of St. Stephen, mentioned in Domesday. The original church was destroyed by the Commonwealth in 1658, and rebuilt in 1664.
The wording of the Domesday survey does not imply that in this respect the new military service differed from the old; the land is marked out, not into knights' fees, but into hides, and the number of knights to be furnished by a particular feudatory would be ascertained by inquiring the number of hides that he held, without apportioning the particular acres that were to support the particular knight.
Domesday is before all things a record of the great confiscation, a record of that gradual change by which, in less than twenty years, the greater part of the land of England had been transferred from native to foreign owners. And nothing shows like Domesday in what a formally legal fashion that transfer was carried out. What were the principles on which it was carried out, we have already seen.
This conclusion is irresistible in view of the fact that the Domesday Survey shows that about four-fifths of the adult male population in the year 1085 were below the rank of freemen. The Great Charter was, it is true, an important step in the direction of constitutional government, but it contained no element of democracy.
A brisk walk brought him to the station in time to catch a stopping train, and in half an hour he was speeding miles away from Domesday Park and his half-forgotten episode. Meantime the two ladies continued on their way to the abbey. "I don't see why I mayn't sketch things I see about me," said the young lady impatiently.
What battle was fought there, if any, or how the Normans got it, we do not know, but it is presumed that it suffered in the fighting because the number and value of its houses is given in the subsequent Survey as having fallen very largely indeed. It is always well, whenever one comes across the Domesday Survey in history, to remember that the whole record is very imperfectly understood.
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