Estate Management and Written Records in England and on the Continent before Domesday

Abstract This chapter sets the Domesday survey in its European context as an exercise in gathering written information about landed estates. The royal demesne had doubled in size between 1066 and 1086, and William I’s regime was operating on the assumption that every baronial estate (honor) would eventually fall temporarily under royal control, creating further opportunities for generating income. To administer such revenues, the regime needed comprehensive lists of the estates of the king and other landholders, with descriptions of their productive assets in land, people, and livestock. The Domesday survey delivered that information, in what amounted to a pancarte. This chapter considers where the idea for the survey originated. It shows that the use of written records for managing landed wealth was well known in Carolingian Francia, and that several religious houses in north-west Europe continued to possess, copy, and augment their estate records (polyptychs) during the tenth and eleventh centuries. It then assembles the plentiful evidence that written records were used to direct agriculture and manage landed wealth in both England and Normandy before 1086. The chapter explores the many parallels, precedents, and connections between such records and the Domesday survey. Two appendices offer a substantial list of addenda to R. H. C. Davis’s pioneering ‘List of Continental Surveys, 751–1086’, and a list of written records connected with the management of landed wealth in England before Domesday.