Tankers in trouble: Norwegian shipping and the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s – By Stig Tenold
Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: Roffe is a well-known Domesday scholar with many notable publications to his name, though his Domesday: the inquest and the book (2000) was hard going.Fortunately this latest book is far more readable.It starts with the premise, established in the previous book, that the production of the Domesday Book (DB) was not the aim of the Domesday inquest, which was 'a drive to maximize royal income' and 'a reassessment of the military service owed by the tenants' (p.ix), whilst the DB was 'an abstract of a survey of lords, lands and taxes ordered by William the Conqueror' (p. 1).For Roffe, 'the production of Domesday Book is not self-evidently the purpose of the Domesday inquest' (p.25), though the 'Domesday Book was clearly abbreviated from the documentation of the Domesday inquest, but it is another matter to claim that the inquest and book were conceived of as an integrated process' (p.62).Chapter 2 is an admirable, up-to-date survey of the Domesday texts and 'satellites' (which, Roffe argues rightly, is a misleading description), leading on to the inquest (1085-7), which was followed by the composition of the DB possibly 'after the rebellion against William Rufus in 1088' (p.27), reminding us of Orderic Vitalis's tale that Ranulf Flambard 'revised the survey of all England' perhaps in 1088-90 (pp.105-6).Chapter 4 on 'The Domesday Boroughs' does not explain adequately the omissions in the DB of Winchester, still the capital of England; of London, undoubtedly its largest and richest town; or of Bristol, a fast rising 'new town' of the eleventh century.Chapter 5 does away successfully with the frequently perceived dichotomy between the Anglo-Saxon freeman who rendered no service for his land, and the 'Norman' lord and knight holding by 'knight service'.It is becoming clear that king's thegns before the Conquest held their land by military service, though there is little link between the units of assessed service before and after 1066.Nevertheless, it is also clear that below the highest social level, the English survived en masse, as Ann Williams demonstrated in her masterly The English and the Norman conquest (1997), whilst 'feudal institutions were in the main only fully developed in the twelfth century'.The 'Normans' were a minority of about 2,500 men, and 'the Norman Conquest largely saw the replacement of one elite by another' (p.166).In general, however, 'the equation of barony with thegnage is remarkably precise' (p.170), though the quota of servitum debitum was in the main a twelfthcentury development.In chapters 6 and 7, Roffe considers taxation and economic resources, which have generally been viewed as 'real'.Hence Roffe observes, 'Disagreement has centred on statistical method.The assumption that Domesday is about real economies has not been questioned ' (p.211).Roffe in effect argues for, at least in some places, a degree of under-reporting of real as opposed to fiscal inhabitants.He may be right, but his assumption can be tested against a fair sample of early twelfth-century surveys which he dismisses: 'The twelfth-century surveys are here of little use as controls since they too are often concerned with the fiscal tenant' (p.232).These are the same surveys which, two pages earlier, he described as 'independent of the Domesday process and authoritative since the estate managers who drew them up were in a position to know the facts and had every incentive to record them in full' (p.230).Here, it seems, Roffe is trying to have his cake and eat it: perhaps
Source: The Economic History Review
Author: Graeme J Milne
Institution: University of Liverpool
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2023794816