In eleventh-century East Anglia lords who were associated with the regional aristocracy and the court nobility invested in seigneurial centres of lordship and in the land in ways which differed from the economic strategies of secular nobles during the tenth century. Such developments resemble the evolution of society in regions of France, as identified in studies of the feudal transformation, and thereby point to a real change in European society. This view argues against those who claim that the feudal transformation merely represents an appearance of change created by variations in the form and content of sources. The debate, though, is far from being closed, and further research on the boundary between history and linguistics may prove the sceptics’ case. Perhaps there was a shift across Europe in the linguistic fashions deployed by the clergy in describing the alleged torrent of aristocratic violence against the peasantry and the clergy, the horrors of which are minutely recorded in the new monastic cartularies and cartulary-chronicles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the meanwhile, though, these issues can be approached from another direction, namely an analysis of social mobility based upon quantitative and qualitative studies of Domesday Book. Analysis of social mobility provides a means of testing the likelihood of whether a society has the resources to engender its own economic and political transformation. In the present context such an analysis needs to be connected with discussion on the balance between the court nobility and the regional aristocracy. First, though, there is a brief discussion on social mobility in the eleventh century from a national perspective, and the criteria for defining the presence of a regional community with interests which differentiated it from the court nobility.

Social Mobility and Regional Communities

Historians and sociologists suggest that eleventh-century England was characterized by exceptional social mobility. Perhaps these perspectives are influenced by Bloch's view on the ‘rise of the knights’ acting as a fundamental force for change, overturning the pre-eminence of existing nobility. Yet in the case of England, this prodigious social mobility arises from the combination of indigenous evolution and the particular circumstances of the Norman Conquest.