Domesday

Domesday Book 1086

Appreciation of the information provided about Wold Newton in the Doomsday survey is perhaps aided by some understanding of its purpose and the context of the village.  A translation of the Wold Newton entries is given below but what immediately follows is an attempt at analysing it, relying heavily upon the work of Geoffrey Bryant for the Waltham WEA.

Doomsday is not a complete picture of property and people and was not intended to be.  Its purpose was to assess the extent to which taxes could be extracted, by the king himself and the lords to whom he had given estates.  Adopting the administrative framework of shires, wapentakes and vills in place before the conquest, it records only property having the potential to taxation, during the time of King Edward the Confessor, at the time of the Norman conquest and at the time of the survey, 1087.  It also records any issues of disagreement (Clamores) with regard to land ownership or dues and how they were subsequently resolved.

Land ownership was not as we understand it today.  People at every level of society occupied land or had rights to carry out certain activities on it but at a personal or financial price paid to someone higher up the social scale.  They might in some instances be able to sell their rights but they would not be able to pass on their obligations.

Wold Newton came within the wapentake of Haverstoe. The wapentake was a subset of the shire.  In the case of Lincolnshire there were also intermediate divisions; the three Parts of Lindsey, Holland and Kesteven with Lindsey being further divided into three Ridings, North, South and West. (Wapentakes were divided into Hundreds of which there were 7½ in Haverstoe!  Their identities are unknown save for the Hundred of Fenby.)

Haversoe wapentake was made up of the ‘vills’ of Ashby, Autby, Barnoldby, Beelsby, Beesby, Brigsley, Cabourne, Cadeby, Cuxwold, Fenby, Fulstow, Grainsby, Gunnerby, Hatcliffe, Hawerby, Ravendale, Rothwell, Swinhope, Thoresby, Waithe, Waltham and Wold Newton.  (It has left a shadow in the Church of England’s deanery of Haverstoe which covers a similar but not identical area.)  All of these place names are either Old English/Anglo Saxon or Old Norse/Scandinavian.  (That is not to say that the people who lived there were all descendants of the peoples from whom those language groups came or that the area was not also inhabited by earlier populations, e.g. British/Celtic, Roman.)  The vills more or less correspond to our current villages and parishes but in all likelihood the population was more dispersed than in our modern concept of a nuclear village.  They were defined so as to facilitate the administration of taxation rather than as a reflection of social organisation. 

We are told that Wold Newton had 8 manors, an unusually large number for a vill, presumably reflecting a fairly fractured ‘ownership’.  As with most terms used in Doomsday, the meaning of the word ‘manor’ does not correspond with our present day understanding of it.  A manor was simply an estate held by a lord.  A minor lord might occupy only one or a few manors.  The top tier of lords, tenants in chief, typically held a large number of scattered manors.

So turning specifically to Wold Newton:

The Bishop of Durham held two manors in Wold Newton.  They were occupied by Grinchel, the sitting pre-conquest Anglo Saxon thane, and by Walbert, a subtenant put in place by the bishop, who seems to have occupied it in conjunction with a holding of the bishop at Thorganby.  The pre-conquest annual value was 100s; post-conquest 30s.

Count/Earl Alan of Brittany (‘Red Alan’) held some land through his sub-tenant Wimund and four manors occupied by another pre-conquest thane, Ingemund with his three unidentified brothers.  Presumably Ingemund answered for the four of them.

Sortibrand, and a number of unidentified thanes, held one manor between them which seems not to have been allocated to a Norman lord but is described as ‘waste’, i.e. uncultivated land, but was probably used for informal grazing and foraging.   Pre-conquest the value was only 5s 4d.  Presumably it was peripheral land not thought to be likely to yield a great deal of tax.

Beneath the lords the (taxable) population was split into sokemen, boarders and villains (in diminishing order of status), numbering 26 in Wold Newton.  We can speculate that if, for example, each of these was representative of a family of, say, 5 we have a population of about 130.  The number of households is similar to today and the estimated population comparable to that which prevailed for a good deal of the subsequent centuries until the advent of mechanised farming.

Wold Newton is recorded as having a church, only one of three in the wapentake, the others being at Waltham and Rothwell.  That is not to say that other ‘field churches’ did not exist within the wapentake; the churches recorded were those which had to contribute to the exchequer.  Nevertheless, the fact that Wold Newton had a church which is one of the few mentioned is perhaps indicative of its relative status in the locality.

The land holdings of the various lords and thanes are defined in units of carucates and bovates.  Both of these terms described quantities of land but in the context of Doomsday had more to do with an assessment of what could be extracted as tax and are not therefore a reliable measure of land under cultivation; in modern terms similar to rateable value as against actual market value.  Overall there were 18½ carucates and 17½ bovates.  As units of land (rather than taxation) a carucate was between 120 and 160 acres and a bovate about 15 acres.  The current parish of Wold Newton amounts to about 2000 acres, about 500 acres less than the most conservative Doomsday assessment, suggesting that the vill of Wold Newton was either larger than the current parish or, more likely, that the land was considered for tax purposes to be particularly fecund.  It would also suggest that most of the parish was productively occupied despite Sortibrand’s manor being described as ‘waste’.

A dispute with regard to the lordship of the manor held by Grinchel, recorded as being of the Bishop of Durham, is resolved in favour of Count Alan.  The result appears to be that he ends up as tenant in chief of 6 of the 8 manors.