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THREAD. This entry is typical of the Cambs. #Domesday Book (1086).
1st, it lists the major landowners after the Norman Conquest - here at Barton, Humphrey was Guy de Raimbeaucourt’s tenant in 1086.
2nd (& this is what I’m interested in) it lists the landowners *before* ...
1st, it lists the major landowners after the Norman Conquest - here at Barton, Humphrey was Guy de Raimbeaucourt’s tenant in 1086.
2nd (& this is what I’m interested in) it lists the landowners *before* ...
2. ... 1066. As you can see, there were 24 of them & they were all free men - they could grant and sell their land without permission from anyone else. They didn’t ‘belong’ to a manor, but farmed independently.
And DB tells us a number of other interesting things about them ...
And DB tells us a number of other interesting things about them ...
3. They were commended to the king for patronage and protection, & in return performed specific services for him - in this case they carted his goods, people, crops, etc.from one place to another, & they provided a mounted escort for the Sheriff when he undertook official duties.
THREAD. For years and years, everyone was sure that in 1086, at the time of the Domesday Survey, hardly anyone lived in the Cambridgeshire fenland. So here’s the story of what I found out when I tested that belief & the data it rested on...
2. Well, of course, people are inevitably influenced by what they expect to find - and everyone knew that the 8thC lives of saints, the earliest documentary sources, described ‘the manifold horrors of the wide wilderness’... the trouble with that was...
3. ... that the people who wrote those lives consciously modelled their biographies on those of other saints, & on the life of Christ who had spent 40 days in the wilderness. So, were the biographers of Æthelthryth & Guthlac describing actual or religious landscapes?
