William Rufus by Barlow Frank

Author:Barlow, Frank.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300082913
Publisher: Yale University Press

THE FARMS OF THE BISHOPRICS

(all figures are per annum)

Diocese Domesday Value Typical farm in Henry II's reign1 Suggested figure for William IIs' reign

Canterbury 1,3242 1,350 1,350

Chichester3 109 240 110

Durham — — 300

Hereford4 195 270 200

Lincoln5 325 900 400

Salisbury 436 410 440

Wells6 163 — 180

Winchester7 802 1,440 820

Worcester 313 300 320

1. Selected from Margaret Howell's tables, Regalian Right, 211 ff.

2. Sally Harvey, ‘Domesday Book and Anglo-Norman Governance’, 184–5, makes the tigure about £1,586.

3. The DB figures are unambiguous, but the disparity is awkward.

4. DB does not distinguish clearly between the lands of the bishop and those of the canons. Here the disparity is probably due to the devastated state of the lands in 1086.

5. Although there is a large gap, the twelve demesne manors of the bishop mentioned in DB, i, 190b, seem to be accounted for.

6. The next bishop added the city and abbey of Bath, so there are no comparable figures.

7. Another case of an inexplicable disparity.

1 Dialogus, 38.

2 DB, however, with its omission of the two largest cities, London and Winchester, and its general neglect of towns and the profits of trade and industry, is responsible for a distortion which must be borne in mind. In 1113 a mission from Laon cured at Winchester a usurer named Walter Kiburo, whom the citizens claimed had £3,000 in his treasury: Herman, ‘De miraculis S. Mariae Laudunensis’, Migne PL, clvi, 978.

3 Bad weather, famine or disease was recorded in the period 1066–1135 in the following years: 1082, 1086–7, 1089–90, 1095–9, 1105, 1109–12, 1115–19, 1124–5, 1131.

4 W. J. Corbett, ‘The development of the duchy of Normandy and the Norman Conquest of England’, Cambridge Medieval History, v (1926), 508.

5 General audits or a stocktaking of the contents of the Winchester treasury took place, however, in Henry I's reign. In 1128–9 his favourite kinsmen, his eldest bastard, Robert earl of Gloucester, and the Breton Brian fitzCount, both knights, had made such an audit: PR 31 H.I, 129–31. References to ‘an account of the whole receipt of the kingdom’ and ‘a general account of the treasury’ are in Dialogus, 24–5, 32.

6 R.L. Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century (1912), 75 ff., 82 ff. But laymen were perfectly able to engage in financial transactions, for example merchants and sheriffs; and see n. 5.

7 P. Grierson, ‘Sterling’, Anglo-Saxon Coins (Stenton Festschrift), ed. R.H.M. Dolley (1961), 266. The term first appears about 1078 and was probably connected with the introduction of a heavier penny of 22.5 grains.

8 Cf. above, 121 n. 99. PR 31 H.I provides other examples: cf. below, 259. Richard fitzNeal, Dialogus, 121–2, discusses only the proffer of hawks and falcons, ‘royal birds’.

9 Salley Harvey, ‘Royal Revenue and Domesday Terminology’, Ec. Hist. Review, 2nd ser., xx (1967), 221.

10 Poole, The Exchequer, 42 ff.; C.H. Haskins, ‘The abacus and the king's curia’, EHR, xxvii (1912), 101; Gillian R. Evans, ‘Schools and Scholars: the study of the abacus in English schools c. 980–c. 1150’, EHR, xciv (1979), 71.

11 See above, 148 ff., 199 ff.

12 V.H. Galbraith, The Making of Domesday Book (1961), Domesday Book (1974).

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