The Fief Summaries

Abstract This chapter assesses the handful of fief summaries present in Exon Domesday alongside the two dozen surviving elsewhere in the Domesday corpus (Great Domesday Book and Inquisitio Eliensis, a text from Ely abbey). They are a kind of executive summary of the fiefs (landed estates) of individual barons, and cover both lay and ecclesiastical estates. The summaries give totals of manors, hides, ploughteams, and current annual values, and sometimes other statistics. They were compiled first by individual shire, then by groups of shires. Their geographical spread suggests that they were compiled for every baronial fief. The chapter considers their form, content, arrangement, and accuracy. It argues that they had a purpose distinct from the rest of Exon. Calculating totals for all a baron’s manors required the manorial descriptions to have been rearranged by fief, as in Exon, and one telling detail shows that they were calculated from Exon and not from Great Domesday Book. The chapter also tests the arithmetic of the fief summaries against a modern spreadsheet calculation and finds it shockingly inaccurate. The copies as they survive in Exon Domesday and elsewhere are unlikely to be official treasury calculations designed to provide summary information about the value and potential of baronial estates, but either careless copies or an exercise in how to present the findings in a visually pleasing and accessible way.