5 - Episcopal Wealth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2023
Summary
ALTHOUGH property has rightly dominated discussions of early medieval wealth and power, surprisingly few historians have shown any real interest in the wealth of the Anglo-Saxon episcopate. For a variety of reasons, the wealth of the monastic Church in pre-Conquest England has drawn the most attention, as well as the effects of the Norman Conquest on the Church's overall interests. As a result, we know very little about the magnitude and composition of the wealth of Anglo-Saxon bishops, despite the fact that the participation of bishops in the witan reflected their large stake in the kingdom's resources as well as their spiritual superiority. Once again, the nature of the evidence partly accounts for this lacuna, for to compile even the most impressionistic sense of episcopal wealth before the Conquest means diving head-first into the deep and murky waters of Domesday Book, the great land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086. In recent years, warnings against using the survey's numbers in a rigidly quantitative fashion have increased, based partly on its legendary inconsistencies, but also on the possibility that only a portion of land was actually valued in the survey. Such warnings are worth heeding, as these and other problems obviously render precise figures unattainable. I present the following statistics, however flawed they may be, because they provide the only means of saying anything about the relative value of episcopal patrimonies on the eve of the Conquest. In short, the weight of recent scholarship suggests it is possible to produce an approximate picture of the size, value and location of episcopal estates on the eve of the Norman Conquest on the basis of the Domesday survey and its satellites, particularly when they are used in conjunction with other administrative sources, such as charters, wills, writs and miscellaneous memoranda. These sources also have their shortcomings, particularly in terms of their distribution over time and across counties, which is uneven at best. And they often survive, as previously noted, only in post-Conquest cartularies. But together they enable us to sketch a useful, though necessarily incomplete, picture of late Anglo-Saxon episcopal landholding.
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- Episcopal Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England , pp. 124 - 155Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007