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The Determinants of Manorial Income in Domesday England: Evidence from Essex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

John McDonald  and
G. D. Snooks
John McDonald
Affiliation:
John McDonald is Reader in Economics, and G. D. Snooks is Reader in Economic History, at the Flinders University of South Australia, Bedford Park, South Australia 5042, Australia.
G. D. Snooks
Affiliation:
John McDonald is Reader in Economics, and G. D. Snooks is Reader in Economic History, at the Flinders University of South Australia, Bedford Park, South Australia 5042, Australia.
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Abstract

Despite its wealth of economic data, Domesday Book, complied almost nine hundred years ago, has been surprisingly neglacted by quantitative economic historians. In analyzing one of the central issues in Domesday book—namely the relationship between manorial resurces and income—we here provide a first step in the attempt to redress the balance, by employing recently developed statistical techiniques. The result of the analysis constitutes strong grounds for rejecting the traditional interpretation of the relationship. It also suggests that the English economy of 1086 can be reconstructed more completely than previously thought possible.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 1985 , pp. 541 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

This article is part of a larger study of the economics of Domesday Book funded by the Australian Research Grants Scheme and Flinders University. Valuable research assistance, together with helpful suggestions, have been provided by Eva Aker and Beverley Vickers. Helpful comments were also made on an earlier version of this article by Gary Hawke, David Hendry, and Donald McCloskey in particular; by participants at the 1984 Quantitative Economic History Workshop at University College Oxford, and in seminars at The Australian National University, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Hinders University, London School of Economics, Nuffield College Oxford, University of Adelaide, University of Leeds, University of Southampton, and University of York; and by two anonymous referees.Google Scholar

1 For Example, Hollister, C. Warren, The Military Organisation of Norman England (Oxford, 1965); andGoogle ScholarStenton, F. M., The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166 (Oxford, 1932).Google Scholar

2 Lay manors only have been analyzed here, because they constitute the large majority of manors in Essex and because of the special characteristics of royal and ecclesiastical estates (such as the inclusion of revenue from boroughs and county courts). See Maitland, F. W., Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1921), p. 465. Of the 695 lay holdings, 12 do not have recorded valets, and therefore have been omitted from the analysis.Google Scholar

3 For an insistence upon the importance of values see Harvey, S. P. J., “Recent Demesday studies,” English Historical Review, 95 (01 1980), p. 129; andGoogle ScholarSawyer's, P. H. review of H. C. Darby in Economic History review, 16 (1963), p. 155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 SawyerEconomic History review, p.155.Google Scholar

5 Some manors, particularly those belonging to the king, also received income from the hundred courts.Google Scholar

6 Rents in Domesday Book are not as straightforward as might be assumed. In the first place the payment of rents was widespread and consisted of a mixture of money renders and renders in kind. Second, some of these leases may have concerned both land and stock: at any rate there is some evidence to this effect in the records of ecclesiastical estates in the twelfth century. Third, there is some evidence that rents varied often. Domesday book makes regular reference to rents that a short time before had been set at a level considerably higher than the recognized value of the estate. See Lennard, R., Rural England, 1086–1135 (Oxford, 1959), chap. 7; andGoogle ScholarPostan, M. M., The Medieval Economy and Society (London, 1972), chaps. 5,6.Google Scholar

7 Lennard, Rural England, chap. 7.Google Scholar

8 The relationship between tax assessment and resources has been analyzed by McDonald, John and Snooks, G. D. in “How Artificial were the tax Assessments in Domesday England?” Economic History Review, 38 (08 1985), pp.353–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 The most convincing explanation of this divergence is that when the hundred juries considered rents on leased properties to be excessive they recorded both the excessive reddit as well as the more usual valet. When the rent was not considered unduly high, or when the lord worked the estate himself, only the valet was recorded. (As there were only six cases of excessive rents in Essex this was not an important problem here.) For a discussion of excessive rents see Darby, H. C., Domesday England (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 211–14;Google ScholarLennard, Rural England, pp. 116–23; andGoogle ScholarRound, J. H., “Essex Survey” Victoria County History, Essex, vol. 1, pp.361, 364–65.Google Scholar

10 Maitland, Demesday Book, p. 5.Google Scholar

11 p. 464 (our emphasis). Also see pp. (462–73).Google Scholar

12 p. 473.Google Scholar

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14 A precursor was Baring, F. H., “The Conqueror's Footprints in Domesday,” English Historical Review, 13 (01 1898), pp. 17–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Lemmon's, C. chapter in Whitelock, D. et al. , The Norman Conquest (London, 1966).Google Scholar

15 See, for example, Darby, H. C., Domesady Geograph of Eastern England (Cambridge, 1952), p. 220; andGoogle ScholarDarby, Domesday England, p. 10.Google Scholar

16 Darby, Eastern England, pp. 228–29.Google Scholar

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18 Sawyer, Economic History Review, pp. 155, 156.Google Scholar

19 Darby, Demesday England, p. 220.Google Scholar

20 p. 221.Google Scholar

21 p. 421.Google Scholar

22 Hollister, Military Organisation, p. 13.Google Scholar

23 It should be recalled that at this time in history the margin between life and death was slim, and could disappear entirely during adverse climatic periods. This would be incentive enough to husband one's resources as effectively as possible.Google Scholar

24 Darby, Domesday England, p. 223.Google Scholar

25 As Harvey, S. P. J. said: “Domesday values were useful guides to contemporaries in their transactions [example given] and so ought to be of use to us, rounded as they often are,” in “Recent Domesday Studies,” p. 131.Google Scholar

26 A minor issue is that some of Darby's statistical illustrations (discussed in Section I) are misleading in suggesting that a given value should always be associated with exactly the same combination of resources. Clearly, a given value can be associated with a wide variety of resource combinations. Perhaps, however, he had in mind that a manor with more of all resources should have a higher have a higher value.Google Scholar

27 See Box, G. E. P. and Cox, D. R., “An Analysis of Transformation,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, 26, no. 2 (1964), pp. 211–52.Google Scholar

28 Maitland, Domesday Book, pp. 3, 5.Google Scholar

29 Galbraith, V. H., “The Making of Domesday Book,” English Historical Review, 57 (04 1942). p. 177.Google Scholar He developed this interpretation in more detail in The Making of Domesday Book (Oxford, 1961), particularly chaps. 2, 3.Google Scholar

30 Harvey, S., “Domesday Book and its Predecessors,” English Historical Review, 86 (10 1971) particularly pp. 769–71 and 763–65.Google Scholar

31 Harvey, “Recent Domesday Studies,” p. 129.Google Scholar

32 Harvey, “Domesday Book and its Predecessors,” p. 755.Google Scholar

33 The evidence and sources are briefly discussed in Darby, Domesday England, p. 5–6.Google Scholar

34 Taken from Harvey, S., “Domesday Book and its Predecessors,” English Historical Review, 86 (10 1971), p. 4.Google Scholar

35 Harvey, “Domesday Book and its Predecessors,” p. 772; andGoogle ScholarFinn, R. W., The Norman Conquest and its Effects on the Economy (London, 1971), p. 12 (some differences).Google Scholar

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37 Round, J. H.Feudal England (London, 1895, 1964,) p. 30.Google ScholarFinn (Norman Conquest, p. 9) also notes the probability of clerical error.Google Scholar

38 Round, Feudal England, pp. 14, 245.Google Scholar

39 For example, Darby, Domedsday England, pp. 214–15, and Eastern England, pp. 26–28;Google ScholarDarby, H. C. and Finn, R. W., eds., The Domesday Geography of South West England (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 395–428;Google ScholarMaitland, Domesday Book, p. 473.Google Scholar

40 The source of our data is Round's Translation of the Essex Survey in Victoria Country History Essex, vol, 1.Google Scholar

41 Maitland, Domesday Book, pp. 43–45.Google Scholar

42 This is suggested by Round in “Domesday Survey,” pp. 361–62, and is also implicit or suggested in Maitland, Domesday Book, pp. 26–27; Lennard, Rural England, pp. 91, 241; and Darby, Domesday England, p. 72.Google Scholar

43 The System of weights was: cows, 30; swine,8; sheep, 5; and goats, 4. Sources for the underlying market prices include: Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 44;Google ScholarBallard, A., The Domesday Inquest (London, 1960), p. 27;Google ScholarRound, “Domesday Survey,” p. 367; andGoogle ScholarRaftis, J. A., The Estates of Ramsey Abbey (Toronto, 1957), p. 62.Google Scholar

44 Postan, Medieval Economy, p. 80;Google ScholarHallam, H. E., Rural England, 1066–1348 (Brighton, 1981), p. 54.Google Scholar Horses cost more to keep than oxen because of the cost of shoeing and the need to feed them oats in winter, whereas oxen could survive on hedge clippings. A more recent discussion of the relative costs of using horses and oxen can be found in Langdon, J., “The Economics of Horses and Oxen in Medieval England,” Agricultural History Review, 30 (03 1982), pp. 31–40.Google Scholar

45 Darby, Domesday England, pp. 277–78; Lennard, Rural England, pp. 368–76.Google Scholar

46 Darby, , Domesday England, p. 279; and Eastern England, p. 258.Google Scholar

47 Darby, Domesday England, p. 210 (who assumes mill renders are included); Finn, Norman Conquest, p. 11 (assumes they are excluded); and also private communication from H. E. Hallam dated 24 November 1983.Google Scholar

48 His third measure of values per ploughteam is not particularly illuminating, since it contains elements of both different yields and different economic structure between arable and pasture.Google Scholar

49 Darby, Domesday England, pp. 90–93.Google Scholar

50 The estimated model was in fact a generalization of the Box-Cox model allowing the variance of the disturbance, ∈t to depend on the size of the holding. The number of ploughteams on the holding was used as the indicator of holding size. It was assumed that ∈t = . et, where (Pl)t is the ploughteams variable and the et are a set of independent drawings from a normal distribution with mean zero and variance, σ2. This model is similar to that used by Lahiri, K. and Egy, D., “Joint Estimation and Testing for Functional form and Heteroskedasticity,” Journal of Econometrics, 15 (02 1981), pp. 299–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A maximum likelihood method was used to estimate the unknown parameters. For each regression the estimate of γ was zero, which corresponds to ∈t = et and hence the variance of the disturbance being constant over the sample. The estimated model appeared satisfactory when subjected to a series of diagnostic tests including tests if heteroskedasticity (described in Pagan, A. R. and Hall, A. D., “Diagnostic Tests as Residual Analysis,” Econometric Reviews, 2, no. 2 (1983), pp. 159–218);CrossRefGoogle Scholar normality (described in Huang, C. J. and Bolch, B. W., “On the Testing of Regression Disturbances for Normality,” Journal of the American Statistical association, 69 (06 1974), pp. 330–35);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the Reset test (see Ramsey, J. B., Tests for Specification Errors in “Classical Linear Least Squares Regression Analysis,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 31, no. 3 (1969), pp. 350–71). Details of the statistical analysis are contained in the Flinders University working Paper in Economic History 6 (April 1984), which is available on request.Google Scholar

51 A difficulty in estimating the Box-Cox extended model is that for some holdings the variables take on zero values and the logarithm of zero is not defined. One holding with a value of zero was omitted from the sample. To deal with the problem that the resource variable take on zero values for some holdings, we adopted the procedure of adding a small positive number (one-sixth) to all explanatory variable observations before transforming the data. Mosteller, F. and Tukey, J. W., Data Analysis and Regression (Reading, 1977), p. 112, call this procedure “starting the logs”.Google Scholar

52 Theil, H., Principles of Econometrics (Amsterdam, 1971), p. 181.Google Scholar