Following the defeat of Saxon king Harold at the Battle of Hastings on 14th October 1066, William of Normandy consolidated his new kingdom and while at Gloucester during the winter of 1085, he summoned his councellors and ordered that a systematic record of his entire realm be prepared, so that every man "... should know his right and not usurp another's." The data was compiled from every shire in the kingdom and copied onto a master codicil that was once called Liber de Wintonia or 'The Book of Winchester' as it was originally kept there, but has since become known as The Domesday Book. This important historical document contains details of almost every town, village and hamlet in England, and provides a snapshot of the entire realm in the year 1086. The map link below shows every Domesday settlement in the area of the Chase (as defined by the Ordnance Survey Explorer™ Map #244 Cannock Chase and Chasewater), there being 81 such entries, and these are also listed in an alphabetic index.
The Saxons had previously divided the country into administrative districts known as scires or 'shires' (see Stafford), and these pre-existing administrative areas were retained by the Norman invaders, and with minor boundary alterations the names of the Saxon shires are still in use today. Each of these shires was divided into smaller sub-districts known as 'hundreds', which each contained a nominal one-hundred 'hides' for the purposes of taxation. Staffordshire was divided into five 'hundreds', each named after a prominent village or landmark within the area during the early Anglo-Saxon period, these were: Totmonslow near Upper Tean in the Staffordshire Moorlands to the north-east, Pirehill near Stone in the north-west, Cuttlestone near Penkridge in the west, Offlow between Lichfield and Tamworth in the east and south-east, and Seisdon near Wolverhampton in the south-west. The area of Cannock Chase fell within three of these administrative sub-districts, namely Pirehill, Cuttlestone and Offlow Hundreds.
The data contained within the Domesday entries for Staffordshire, as for the other Counties in England, generally follow a set format; after the name and landowner of the vill comes the tax-assessment expressed in 'hides'; the amount of plough-land in 'ploughs' or carucates; the number of plough-teams also recorded in 'ploughs'; the population of the village; also the village's tax worth. Some Domesday entries also record the amount of land owned and farmed by the Lord of the Manor, the available meadowland, whether a mill was present, also the amount of woodland attached to the village.
There are, however, certain exceptions to this general rule. Five prominent manors in Staffordshire have 'composite entries', containing a number of dependent vills whose data is combined into a single entry; Bradley, Eccleshall and Sugnall all lie to the west of Cannock Chase outside the scope of this work but the two remaining composite entries are included, namely Penkridge with its six dependencies and Lichfield with no less than sixteen dependent hamlets, some of which, however, lie outside the Cannock Chase area to the south and east. Other exceptions to the general format are the three Staffordshire 'boroughs' or fortified settlements which generally contain a lot more detail in their entries. Of these, however, only Stafford lies within the scope of this work, whereas the borough of Tutbury in the east, close to the border with Derbyshire, and the borough of Tamworth to the south-east, close to the borders with Leicestershire and Warwickshire are both not included.
As stated above, the area of land attributed to a vill is usually expressed in carucates or 'plough-lands', sometimes in virgates or 'quarters of a plough'; but what is a 'plough' in terms of actual area? In this case a 'plough' represents the area of land which may be cultivated effectively by a single plough-team of eight oxen over the course of a year, which is thought to equate to 120 acres; one carucate therefore equates to 120 acres, a virgate to 30 acres.
The number of 'plough-teams' attributed to a village determines how much of the available land was physically able to be cultivated, but confusingly, this value was also expressed in terms of 'ploughs' or carucates, sometimes in bovates. In this instance, however, the term is not a measure of land area but instead refers to the actual number of oxen possessed by the village's inhabitants; there were eight bovates or oxen in each carucate or 'plough-team'.
Quite often the number of 'plough-lands' and the number of 'plough-teams' does not match, in Staffordshire most often the first figure being larger than the second. This confusion can be explained by way of an example: the entry for Blithfield states that there was "Land for 4 ploughs.", in other words there were 480 (i.e. 4 x 120) acres of land cleared for cultivation; the entry goes on to state "[the inhabitants] have 2 ploughs.", in other words the population of the village could muster two plough-teams of oxen, amounting to a total of 16 animals, and could therefore manage to cultivate only half of the available plough-land, in this case 240 acres or two carucates, with the other 240 acres effectively going to waste.
The population of a village was expressed in terms of the number of villeins, bordars and serfs:
Besides these three main population classes the Domesday entries sometimes record other classes of inhabitants:
All taken into consideration, the total population of Domesday Staffordshire was 2,866 persons, an improbably low number which does not take into account these men's wives, children or dependents who were unable to work due to old-age or infirmity. It is thought, therefore, that this total should be multiplied by a factor of 4 or 5 to give the true population figure.
Meadowland is recorded in over half of the Domesday villages in Staffordshire where it is usually expressed in terms of acres. Meadowland usually occurs in villages sited next to water courses and was unsuitable for cultivation as it was prone to flooding, its main use being to provide grasses and hay for winter fodder and during the summer to provide the flowers necessary for beekeeping and the production of honey, the primary source of sweetener in Medieval Europe and much prized for its preservative properties, also used in the production of the alcoholic beverage known as 'mead', derived as it were from the meadow.
Of the 341 vills recorded in Domesday Staffordshire, 65 were provided with mills which were used to grind corn into flour. All of these mills were water-powered and so generally appeared in villages which were sited beside the major water-courses; the advent of wind-driven mills was not to occur until the later Medieval period, first appearing during the 14th and 15th centuries. These Domesday mills were often shared between several villages, and there were only 9 settlements in the County which possessed more than one.
About 50% of the Domesday villages had access to a tract of woodland, which was used to provide fodder for animals such as pigs in the form of Oak and Beech 'mast', the underwood also provided the villagers with wood for their fires, although the trees in these woods remained the property of the Lord of the Manor and could not be felled without his permission. The amount of woodland was most often expressed in terms of leuuae or 'leagues' and/or quarentenae or 'furlongs', where both the length and width of the wood is given; only occasionally is the amount of woodland expressed in acres, as at Salt where there were four acres of wood. A Domesday league is thought to have equated to 1½ miles in length, there being 8 furlongs in a mile, therefore 12 furlongs in a league; a furlong equates to 220 yards in length. A typical example of the notation of woodland occurs in the entry for Hamstall Ridware, were there was "woodland 1 league long and ½ wide.".
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The Domesday measurements for woodland represent the maximum length and width of the woodland in question and does not imply that Domesday woodland existed in rectangular blocks (see left/above). To compensate, this website uses the following formula to calculate a rough area for any given piece of Domesday woodland: width x breadth / 2, which effectively treats each block of woodland as a 'diamond' shape (see left/below). |
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The value of a village is expressed in librae, solidae and denarii, the Latin equivalents of pounds, shillings and pence, from which we derived the pre-decimal monetary acronym L.S.D. Two values are usually given for each entry, the first being the value of the village in Temporum Regis Edwardii (T.R.E.) or 'in the time of King Edward', that is, prior to the Norman invasion of 1066, the second is the value at the time the Domesday record was compiled some 20 years later in 1086; very occasionally there is a third entry giving the value of the village between these two times.
William of Normandy's book contains many words and phrases which are not in current use. For an explanation of the terms used in the Domesday extracts within the linked pages, please see the CCH Archaeological Glossary.