Domesday Book

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With the Domesday Book now online, local historian Maxwell Craven considers what this celebrated document can tell us about Derby in 1086.

The Derby extract from the Domesday Book

NATIONALLY, the consequences of the Norman Conquest of 1066 are well known if not so well understood. A vigorous, reforming, land-hungry Norman elite began to impose themselves and their system of government upon the English population, in Derbyshire a rich mixture of people of Saxon, Norman and even Celtic descent.

Thanks to the Domesday Book, the effects in Derby some 20 years later, can be, to some extent, gauged, although what the book does not mention is of equal significance to a study of the town’s history.

This celebrated work sets out to record everything that rendered income to the Crown in 1066 and in 1086. It is a popular misconception that it recorded everything in England as a sort of demographic snapshot in 1086.

There are also matters that do not appear. Even the Derby mint, although a royal franchise, fails to get a mention. Although six churches are mentioned, there clearly were two, possibly three or four others. There are also interesting things that can be inferred from Domesday.

For instance, there are a number of indications that make it clear that Derby was subordinate to near-neighbour Nottingham.

Nevertheless, it was still an important royal borough.

And while Nottingham was administratively, legally and militarily pre-eminent – a vestige of this was that the counties of Derby and Nottingham, formed c954, were governed under a single Sheriff right up until 1566 – Derby outshone Nottingham commercially.

Both towns had a mint issuing Royal coinage in the form of silver pennies, but it was the mint of Derby that issued the preponderance of late Saxon pennies, not Nottingham.

Derby even boasted a higher estimated population in 1066 although that had changed 20 years later.

Yet, not everything was plain sailing. Derby itself had, by 1086, suffered a serious setback. The most likely reasons for this are the Northern Rebellion of 1069-70 and the Stafford Rebellion of 1073. In this period too, the Earl of Chester lost out to Henry de Ferrers (whose descendants later became Earls of Derby) between 1070 and 1086. All this must have hit trade.

It is likely, too, that the importance locally of Hugh d’Avanches, Earl of Chester, extended to Derby but had become diminished by 1086. Indeed, the Earl’s “third penny” from the customary dues may well have been Earl Hugh’s in the 1070s and then have been transferred to Henry de Ferrers in a subsequent administrative shake-up.

Indeed, by 1086 Henry de Ferrers was lord of some 115 manorial estates in Derbyshire as against Earl Hugh, left with just Markeaton, Mackworth and Allestree.

Hugh, however, was still, in national terms, a much greater magnate then Henry de Ferrers. He succeeded in retaining portions of Derby as “urban fees” (town lands) legally tied to his country estate, some not even recorded in the Domesday Book, probably because their revenues were paid to Earl Hugh as Lord of Markeaton and only rendered to the Crown as part of that estate, which was sub-let to the Earl’s henchman, Jocelyn de Touchet.

When a chaotic civil war broke out in 1141 between the Conqueror’s grandchildren King Stephen and the Empress Matilda, it appears to have been Hugh’s own grandson, Randolph de Gernon, who, as Earl of Chester, hastily built a temporary castle or fortification – normally called an “adulterine” castle – somewhere between Cockpit Hill and Albion Street.

This was part of a chain of such castles – another was discovered at Repton by Professor Martin Biddle in the 1980s – intended to isolate the warring parties in southern England, thus giving the Earl a chance of establishing a separate principality in the north.

The chances are that this castle was built on land still held by the Earls of Chester in Derby.

In 1086, the number of burgesses, or free tradesmen, had dropped from 243 in 1066 to 140, with 103 houses with land and buildings attached standing empty, although the Crown’s “take” had gone up from £24 to £30 per annum.

Some 41 of the burgesses shared the town’s landholdings, which amounted to 12 carucates. A carucate was the amount of land that a team of eight oxen could plough in one year and is usually reckoned to be around 100-120 acres.

Thus the lands of the borough must have extended to at least 1,200-1,600 acres which approximately tallies with what we know from much later records, when it was all being gradually sold off. There was doubtless other land pertaining to the country estates (“manors”) of other local landowners apart from the Earl of Chester and de Ferrers, but again, these would not be recorded.

There were also fewer mills, four down from the 14 recorded for 1066.

In the section of the Domesday Book which deals with parts of the town not under the King’s control, we find a jumble of useful information which, unfortunately, still does not give us the whole picture.

The Abbot of Burton had a mill and three plots of land, two of which were taxed. There is no mention of St Mary’s Church, however, although we know the Abbot held that, too, for, in 1066, it had been the King’s, but William I had donated Mickleover, Littleover and various holdings in Derby to the Abbey prior to 1086.

Four other churches are mentioned – the two held by Norman de Lincoln and Edric, son of Coln, seem to have had no manorial connections with the surrounding countryside and were probably those dedicated to St Helen and St James, both of which were in the hands of burgesses in the following century.

As to which was which, we have no means of telling. Both churches were given in the 1130s and 1140s to form the nuclei of monastic houses.

Another was probably St Peter’s, held by the Viking ancestors of Hugh de Derby, who was its 12th-century patron. The fourth was presumably St Michael’s, although, like St Peter’s it had connections to country landholdings, in this case Alvaston.

There is the possibility that other churches then existed, only to vanish at an early date. One may have been dedicated to St George. St Werburgh’s at this date may have lain outside the borough altogether, as the focus of a separate settlement called Wardwick, but which seems to have been absorbed by the expansion of Derby in the 12th century.

It would seem that it rendered nothing to the Crown, however, for reasons that are unclear. Possibly it was then part of the holdings of Burton Abbey and rendered via the Abbey.

Likewise, Litchurch is treated in the Domesday Book under Derby, but was clearly separate and consisted of three separate manorial estates, plus 200 acres belonging to the Crown.

No tenant is named either in 1066 or 1086, only that there was one free farmer and nine villagers with 12 acres of common field.

Possibly there was a church which did not render to the Crown and was, consequently, unmentioned, which is true of a few other villages in the county.

It may have ended up as part of the medieval Hospital of St Leonard, the only monastic house in the Litchurch part of Derby, and vanished at the Reformation like those of St Helen and St James in Derby itself.

Apart from the four lay owners of churches, two of whom were great landed proprietors in the county, the Earl of Chester is recorded as having two “residences” in the town (plus a fishery) and Henry de Ferrers three, not to mention eight belonging to the King.

These formerly belonged to AElfgar, Earl of Mercia, who died in 1065 leaving them to his son, Edwin, who had the misfortune to be the brother-in-law of defeated King Harold II and was thus dispossessed at the Conquest and killed in 1071.

These “urban fees” were the fore-runner of the town houses enjoyed by the county gentry in later centuries.

Others, unrecorded in the Domesday Book because they were taxed through their owners in the country, can be identified from later charter evidence.

“Of Stori, Walter of Aincurt’s predecessor”, the Derby entry ends, “they state that he could make himself a church on his land [in Derby] and in his jurisdiction, without anyone’s permission and dispose of his tithe where he would.”

This implies that Walter – who in 1086 held six manors west of Chesterfield – also held a church in Derby, which is completely unidentified.

Oddly, the Dane called Stori, Walter’s predecessor, did not hold any of Walter’s country holdings in 1066, which were mostly in the hands of a person, also of Norse descent, called “young Swein”.

Stori’s only other Domesday Book appearance is as Lord of Spondon in 1066, a title which he had lost to Henry de Ferrers by 1086.

Yet, he was plainly a man of considerable standing in the borough and elsewhere prior to 1066, perhaps a court favourite who lost the manors Walter later held by falling out of favour with Harold II.

He perhaps supported the claim of his fellow Dane Harold Hardraada whom King Harold defeated immediately prior to Hastings.

The Domesday Book, then, is a useful framework which helps us to understand much of the disposition of the kingdom but, as I have tried to show, does not give the whole picture.

There are a good many major elements missing and more smaller ones which, when fitted into the whole, add up to equally important elements.

Only other documents can help us flesh these missing pieces out but, all too often, these back-up documents do not even exist. Even those that do are sometimes hard to interpret.

In Derby, we have the excellent early charters of the Abbey of Darley, which help enormously, and a few other documents held in the public record office which can be combined with the inquisitions made into the property of the local magnates after their deaths.

These, along with archaeology, lucky topographical survivals and re-interpretations of place-name evidence, are the strands of supplementary evidence available to us to try to better understand what Domesday is telling us.

Having the original text now available on line is going to help local historians everywhere, but it is the correct interpretation of the evidence which is what will really test the researcher!

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