The Domesday book, surviving now in the National Archives in London, was the great land survey of 1086 instigated by William the Conqueror to enable him to tax the land correctly. It summarises in a largely formulaic format in Latin the holdings of each of the royal tenants and the population and property across most of the country. The huge work contains amazing detail about named individuals. Here short excerpts are also included from Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English and from the work called the Dialogue of the Exchequer which describes the DOmesday book and its inception.

‘[O]ur whole constitutional law seems at times to be but an appendix to the law of real property.’1 At no time in English history was this aphorism truer than in the aftermath of 1066; indeed, it became uniquely so as a consequence of the kingdom’s conquest. England’s legal tradition was already distinctive prior to that point. The circumstances of the Conquest, and the rapid substitution of a new aristocracy of foreign settlers, rendered it doubly so. The importance of the Conquest and its implementation in the development of English law, and especially the law of real property, can scarcely be overstated.

William I’s ‘Harrying of the North’ was a military expedition against local rebels and a Danish invasion force in the winter of 1069–70. It has been regarded since the 1870s as a uniquely savage treatment of the English inhabitants of northern England, wantonly destructive of life and the means of sustenance, and tantamount to genocide. Such views derive from the two fullest medieval accounts, by the early twelfth-century historians Symeon of Durham and Orderic Vitalis. However, neither was an eye-witness, both were at work two generations later, and both had their own agenda in describing the destruction of the North and William I’s cruelty. The Harrying should instead be seen as a routine military operation which took place, unusually, in the depths of winter, and so had unusually severe consequences. More strictly contemporary accounts from Evesham and Beverley reveal a regional but probably localized famine and a refugee crisis. Further, the record in Domesday Book (1086) of many Yorkshire villages as ‘waste’ should be read as referring not to physical destruction but to the absence of surplus values accruing to landlords, and not caused by the Harrying alone. The Harrying of the North was no genocide.

This chapter traces foundations for the organizing framework of the modern nation-state to post-Conquest England. Feudalism was essential, as institutionalized in the royal prerogative, administrative kingship, and covenantal social bonds. I focus on the historical factors that made England distinctive, in this period, both in the intensity of its feudal structures and in the strength of royal, prerogative powers. I argue that a unique combination of Anglo-Saxon legal legacies with the Norman Conquest's imposition of powerful rulership facilitated the coalescence of a regime involving new levels of social power. Roman law, canon law, and English common law each played vital roles in this coalescence, with new levels of economic growth fueled by new types of legal privileges. Development of new technologies, for example the windmill, was one result.

Domesday Book was linguistically speaking an Anglo-Norman record using Latinized versions of French, not English, terms. This chapter asks: did Norman Latin bring into England some Norman ideas about land and people? There was no Old English equivalent for manerium : ‘manor’ was a word which the Domesday enquiry itself made necessary. Domesday Book’s terms for the mass of people, such as villani , are also imports and reflect Norman views of peasants. Key terms in Domesday entries are those connected with holding land from another person: the debate about how we might interpret these is briefly visited before concluding that tenure itself was a Norman idea imported in Norman heads.