RECENT scholars have made little of Domesday Book’s primary function in the first generation of its life, as a record of facts about land-holding and custom. The subject was conspicuous by its absence from the early plans for the 1986 anniversary celebrations. The idea behind this paper was therefore to canvas in public the Domesday Inquest’s rather neglected adjudicative functions in order to assess their place in the development of English Law, aspects of Domesday that have undeniably received less than their fair share of recent attention, I set out, in a year when the Domesday desert swarmed with more experts than anthropologists at a Hopi rain ceremony, to reassemble some ancient propositions in the fresh context of recent work on the early Norman period (a good deal of it first presented in earlier volumes of these Studies). This was in the first instance much-needed self-education, for the book I am writing on Law and Society in Medieval England could not avoid some mention of Domesday. But there is always something to be gained by approaching old questions from a less trodden direction, and the arguments that emerge merit a hearing.

Domesday’s importance for legal history has been beyond argument since the great Maitland himself listed among the Domesday commissioners’ ‘minor purposes’ the unearthing of baronial invasions of the royal demesne and the appeasement, if necessary with royal help, of land disputes. He also declared that from Domesday Book ‘with some small help from’ the obvious legal sources, Leges and the like, ‘some future historian may be able to reconstruct the land-law which obtained in the conquered England of 1086, and … the unconquered England of 1065’. In the event, the author of Domesday Book and Beyond thereafter used Domesday strangely little. And legal history which Maitland ignored was seldom taken up by others in the scholarly generations that followed. Most subsequent scholars were content to accept Round’s word that Domesday was a geld book and, in Maitland’s own words, ‘no register of title’.

Yet no-one interested in the Law can afford to surrender Domesday. It gives Anglo-Norman legal custom a context unmatched elsewhere in Europe, There are many tantalysing references to crime and forfeiture, dower, dowry and other items claimed for the legal domain.