Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England

Thus begins the entry for the tiny village in which I live, small even in 1066. Few villages in England were missed out of William the Conqueror's great survey of 1087. Though primarily intended as a tax document, the information recorded in Domesday, is a record of England itself. So argues Michael Wood, in his search for the social, economic, political and racial roots of the country of 1086. With his usual depth, and eye for detail Michael Wood makes some surprising revelations when presenting evidence for the principle events of Britain's past. The roots of the feudal system, long believed to have been developed by the Normans, were actually laid down by the Saxons, on a Roman foundation. That the Normans relied upon the administrative and governmental system of the English, surprisingly effective for it's time, is just one of many examples on continuity in English society. So each succesive group of invaders made use of what already existed, whether this was the workforce, economy, or towns and farmland. This book is much more than a summary of domesday, and it's legacy. It is in fact an examination of the English spirit, and the ordinary men and women who made helped to create the land for which William of Normandy has such little regard.

Michael Wood writes for the rest of us who are curious, general readers who are not trained historians with access to original source material or current professional activity. Many of his books have been tie-ins for BBC documentaries but they all stand on their own. DOMESDAY was published in 1986 as a tie-in for a series commemorating the 900th anniversary of the creation of that extraordinary document. Twenty years after storming England, William the Conqueror needed to boost his revenues. He sent agents out into the countryside to assess every community, from its leaders down to its peasants and slaves, even their livestock, with an eye on levying taxes. All of this was recorded in the Domesday Book, a document that offers a very rare glimpse into the structure and daily life of an agrarian culture in the Dark Ages, its title referencing the Biblical image of Doomsday as an act of judgment flowing from authority. In the Domesday Book, Wood finds evidence of the contemporary racial, social and political structure of the culture, but also looks through it back to its antecedents in Celtic and Roman Britain. Wood does not offer a study of the Domesday Book itself so much as uses it as a prism, to look backward and then forward. Though the Celt and Roman population was essentially removed and replaced by the Anglo Saxon invasion which brought the origins of the language and racial profile with which England is associated today, Wood finds evidence of continuity with Celtic social structure and land-use foundations in the Domesday survey. Looking past Domesday, he traces the survival of the social structure to the plague years of the 14th century, which reordered everything, and the dominating agrarian lifestyle up to the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Wood may be accused of overlaying fact after fact as he builds his case, but his method clarifies a tangle of kings and place names. His prose is clean and swift enough. His illustrations are modest but very interesting, with many aerial shots. For me, the book solidified the historical timeline and I feel enriched by Wood's effort. He succeeds in bringing individuals, whether peasants or kings, to life. The Dark Ages are a little brighter and more visible for his efforts.

Domesday Book, undertaken in 1086 by William the Conqueror, was a census of remarkable scope and detail. It served two major purposes. As William was constantly in need of revenue to finance the defense of his realm, it categorically presented the maximum taxation he could extract from England. Secondly, it solidified the Norman conquest by adjudicating property disputes remaining from the invasion twenty years prior. At the conclusion of this survey, William had comprehensively determined his sources of income and seen his Norman lords permanently and unquestionably entrenched within, or more accurately, *as* the English aristocracy. Michael Wood offers us not a synopsis of Domesday Book, but rather uses the voluminous material as a teleological platform to peer deeper into English history. Working a premise that presumes a steadfast and abiding foundation of previous influences, Wood successfully shows that the Norman political apparatus did not reinvent England, but rather built upon Celtic, Roman, and Viking customs and infrastructure in place for centuries. Fascinating although, at times, a bit tedious, his effort is a brief (212 pgs), but worthy analysis of medieval England and the dynamics which shaped it. Domesday (doomsday) Book was likened by those, whose subject it was, to Judgement Day for it's finality of purpose in establishing the net effect of Norman conquest. Michael Wood employs it wisely and wonderfully to add yet another perspective to the annals of epic history.

I stumbled across this book as I was perusing the European History shelf. As a high school French Teacher, I look for ways to introduce my students to French history. I also try to instill an awareness of the nature of language, and the etymology of English. In this process, I have become aware of the Latin, French, and German and Scandinavian roots of our own language. Until I read this book, I did not understand how the English that we speak evolved from so many seemingly disparate cultures. Michael Wood did a masterful job of clarifying this for me, while drawing me into a fascinating account of English history. Wood opens with the purpose and content of the Domesday document, which in and of itself would be dry and dusty. Because the Norman Conquest was such a pivotal point in the history of England, many British historians have built on the premise that post-Conquest civilization was actually created and defined by the incoming French ruling class. Wood challenges this position, tracing the roots and institutions of English medieval society back to influences which pre-date the Norman Conquest by more than a thousand years. As an anthropologist, Wood uses a number of tools to reconstruct the development of this social fabric. Any one of these tools - tax records, geographical analyses, lists of village names - if considered in isolation, would be as opaque as Domesday itself. But with the insight and skill of a master storyteller, Wood uses clues provided by their data to sketch the evolution of a people, and then to paint an engaging portrait of the common man in 1086. Along the way, he introduces us to the native, colonizing, mercenary, and migratory populations alike: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Celts, Romans, Danes, French. We watch as the dynamics of domination, subjugation and assimilation characterize their interactions with one another. And we conclude with him that the Conquest was not the beginning of civilization, as some would have it, but the interruption and re-routing of the history of a very old, already well-defined society. Further, it is a testimony to the strength of that society that it survived and thrived in the wake of the devastation of the Conquest, maintaining the essential fabric of long-held beliefs and institutions. I find that many of my students share my fascination with the historical background behind the etymology of our modern-day languages. While I do not use this book directly in the foreign language classroom (it is an expository text), I have found it very helpful to give me a solid foundation for understanding the curiosities I try to share with my students. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the link between history and the development of language.