Domesday Book reveals the rise of a Norman Abramovich after 1066

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Historian uses new database to support his claim England was ruled by super-rich Frenchmen 20 years after Battle of Hastings

Within 20 years of the Norman conquest, England was dominated by “a new class of super rich Frenchmen gorging on their success”. So said an academic who has used the Domesday Book to trace the rise and rise of William the Conqueror’s barons.

Stephen Baxter, a historian at King’s College London, is one of the authors of a database, which goes live tomorrow, making it possible to trawl through figures from the Domesday Book and map the landholdings of those for whom 1066 became a licence to coin money. To take one example, Earl Hugh’s estates, more than 300 scattered across 19 shires, generated an income of about £800 a year, over 1% of the nation’s entire wealth. “Hugh was an Abramovich-scale billionaire,” said Baxter, who presents a programme on Domesday tomorrow on BBC2 in the Normans series.

The new database is part of PASE, the snappily titled Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, a decade-long academic compilation of all the Anglo-Saxons for whom any records survive, which already includes almost 20,000 individuals, just under 1,000 of them women. The Domesday database can be used to show vividly what happened to many of those listed after the conquest: a map which Baxter worked on for three months demonstrates how Earl Harold’s estates were carved up after he died at the Battle of Hastings, with a diagonal red stripe across England, from the Essex coast to the Severn, showing the estates which William the Conqueror kept for himself.

Domesday has been digitised and is available in facsimile at its home in the National Archives, or on a pay-per-view basis online, and has already been pored by many academics. However, the new database makes it possible to cross-reference landholdings and names across England, which are separately listed by county in the volumes compiled for William in a few months in 1086.

Baxter thinks it has been misunderstood as a tax register: “Any tax official trying to use this information laid out in this way would have quickly lost the will to live,” he said. The tax rolls were separate documents generated from the same survey, he believes, and were so heavily used that they have disintegrated. To him, Domesday is an instrument of political repression, a record of the dispossession of the English and of the new “tenants in chief” who hold their land directly from King William. Of 500 listed, he says, only 13 names are identifiably English. The new aristocracy went along with it because they got an unequivocal statement, in writing, of their own title to the land.

“The only importance of the statements of who held the land in 1066 – which has no relevance for tax purposes – is to assert this seamless moment of transition to the new order. The whole of Domesday is one gigantic dodgy dossier.”

assert: zapewniać

carve up: dzielić na mniejsze części

diagonal: ukośny

dispossession: wywłaszczenie

dodgy: podejrzany, niepewny

facsimile: fax

gorge on: nasycić się (łupem)

pore: zgłębiać

snappily: modnie

trawl: przeszukiwać

unequivocal: niedwuznaczny

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