The Project Gutenberg eBook, Domesday Book and Beyond, by Frederic William Maitland
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Title: Domesday Book and Beyond
Three Essays in the Early History of England
Author: Frederic William Maitland
Release Date: July 19, 2013 [eBook #43255]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND***
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Transcriber’s Note
Marginal descriptions
The marginal paragraph descriptions are placed at the beginning of each paragraph, and will be shown as can be seen here. On occasion, there are more than one for a single paragraph.
The copious footnotes have been renumbered, consecutively, and gathered at the end of this text. Internal references to those notes in the original have been modified to refer to the new numbers, and all have been hyperlinked.
The page references in the Index have also been linked to the physical page on which the topic appears.
There are two detailed maps. A link to the full image size has been added to each caption for optional viewing.
Please refer to the Notes at the end of this text for additional detail.
DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND
IN THE
EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
C. F. CLAY, Manager.
London: FETTER LANE, E.C.
Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.
Leipzig: P. A. BROCKHAUS.
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN & CO. Ltd.
IN THE
EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLAND
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE,
OF LINCOLN’S INN, BARRISTER-AT-LAW.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1907
Reprinted 1907.
The greater part of what is in this book was written in order that it might be included in the History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. which was published by Sir Frederick Pollock and me in the year 1895. Divers reasons dictated a change of plan. Of one only need I speak. I knew that Mr Round was on the eve of giving to the world his Feudal England, and that thereby he would teach me and others many new lessons about the scheme and meaning of Domesday Book. That I was well advised in waiting will be evident to everyone who has studied his work. In its light I have suppressed, corrected, added much. The delay has also enabled me to profit by Dr Meitzen’s Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen[1], a book which will assuredly leave a deep mark upon all our theories of old English history.
The title under which I here collect my three Essays is chosen for the purpose of indicating that I have followed that retrogressive method ‘from the known to the unknown,’ of which Mr Seebohm is the apostle. Domesday Book appears to me, not indeed as the known, but as the knowable. The Beyond is still very dark: but the way to it lies through the Norman record. A result is given to us: the problem is to find cause and process. That in some sort I have been endeavouring to answer Mr Seebohm, I can not conceal from myself or from others. A hearty admiration of his English Village Community is one main source of this book. That the task of disputing his conclusions might have fallen to stronger hands than mine I well know. I had hoped that by this time Prof. Vinogradoff’s Villainage in England would have had a sequel. When that sequel comes (and may it come soon) my provisional answer can be forgotten. One who by a few strokes of his pen has deprived the English nation of its land, its folk-land, owes us some reparation. I have been trying to show how we can best bear the loss, and abandon as little as may be of what we learnt from Dr Konrad von Maurer and Dr Stubbs.
For my hastily compiled Domesday Statistics I have apologized in the proper place. Here I will only add that I had but one long vacation to give to a piece of work that would have been better performed had it been spread over many years. Mr Corbett, of King’s College, has already shown me how by a little more patience and ingenuity I might have obtained some rounder and therefore more significant figures. But of this it is for him to speak.
Among the friends whom I wish to thank for their advice and assistance I am more especially grateful to Mr Herbert Fisher, of New College, who has borne the tedious labour of reading all my sheets, and to Mr W. H. Stevenson, of Exeter College, whose unrivalled knowledge of English diplomatics has been generously placed at my service.
F. W. M.
20 January, 1897.