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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
What determined the value recorded for a manor in the Domesday Book? This is a controversial question among scholars engaged in Domesday studies, and various arguments have been adduced as solutions to this problem. It has been suggested that the Normans calculated manorial value by using the quantity of a manor's sheep, its annual income, the amount of its tax units, or the number of its plow lands; but no one has proved which of these factors were used by the Normans in 1086 to compute manorial value. Many of these proposed solutions overlook the importance of agrarian agriculture, which was the basis of Domesday economy. Some historians disregard the contemporary meaning of Domesday terminology to advance their new and, as yet, unacceptable interpretations of how to compute the value of a manor. This article uses the contemporary meaning of Domesday terminology combined with traditional historical method and statistical analysis to argue that the Normans used plow lands as the basis for determining manorial value in Domesday Essex county.
Before the arrival of modern computers, the vast amount of available information in the Domesday Book obscured this simple solution to the problem. There was just too much data to be assessed accurately by pen and pencil. The unique qualities of the Domesday survey make it particularly suitable for a computerized statistical analysis of its database. This is because the survey employed a predetermined set of questions that yield data appropriate for statistical analysis, and manorial value is one of those questions.
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