The Profits of Royal Lordship

Abstract This chapter places Domesday in the context of the rapid intensification of royal lordship in conquered England. It begins by explaining why royal control over succession to land was profitable: it allowed the king to benefit from reliefs, wardships, marriages, and religious vacancies. The chapter then sketches the history of royal lordship, working backwards from Magna Carta to the time of Domesday; engages with the argument that the Conqueror claimed to be the source of all tenure in conquered England; shows why that constituted a marked expansion in the scope of royal lordship; examines how royal lordship is represented textually in Exon Domesday, the geld accounts, and Domesday Book; and explains why the specific format of Domesday Book enhanced the administration of royal lordship rights and revenues. The chapter advances two main arguments. First, Domesday Book was intended to make more workable in practice the idea that all land in England was held either by the king or from the king. Second, the very act of taking the Domesday survey caused partially-formed ideas about royal lordship to harden into a more concrete reality. It is surely no coincidence that evidence for the exploitation of royal lordship accumulates in the immediate aftermath of the survey. The making of Domesday Book was not merely a passive description of a landed society undergoing profound change in the wake of conquest, but an active element in that process.