Domesday Book: A Scribe's Tale

Great Domesday Book

Domesday Book is more than just a dry collection of records.  These days we have data input clerks who tap information into a computer which the computer promptly loses.  In 1086 it was all done by hand.  In the case of Domesday Book, one hand.  Such details thus make this great tome a living, breathing thing, as it was created by one.

The scribe would have been the person closest to the survey physically and mentally.  He would have lived and breathed it for months and I like to think that either it was a labour of love and duty or that he hated the sight of it by the end!  So who was he, this scribe, whose life was taken over by this survey and what can he tell us about his work?

It is unlikely that he was a royal scribe.  It is not certain how many scribes King William had but only one is entirely possible since it appears Rufus increased the number to two.  There is only one scribe referred to as royal scribe for this period of the reign of William I and that was Osmund who was called 'king's writere' in the Northamptonshire geld roll.  As royal scribe Osmund would have been in Normandy with King William on king's business and too necessary to the king to be spared in England.

Other indications suggest that the scribe was English.  He used the English horned 'e' and had a knowledge of English place names, which excludes Samson the king's chaplain and future bishop of Worcester who has been put forward as a possibility: he was Norman.  He can also be excluded on other grounds - the Domesday scribe corrected the entry for Templecombe in Somerset held by Odo of Bayeux but sub-let to Samson.  It seems quite possible for Samson to notice a mistake in the entry of his own holdings but the same scribe went on to make a mistake in the final text concerning the same lands, Turnie which was amalgamated with Templecombe.  In the Exon Domesday text, a survivor of the intermediate stage of the record collecting, the value of Turnie is recorded as 14s but in the final text it is recorded as 13s.  The Domesday scribe made mistakes but surely not with his own lands.

From Domesday Book, the two different
letter 'd's can be discerned (see line 3)

So if not the king's chaplain, who was he?  Scribes, for all they followed a set formula of writing, appeared to have developed 'house styles'.  The Domesday scribe had a very identifiable script.  He used an unusual suspension sign to abbreviate '-us' after a letter 'b' in words such as 'omnibus'.  He also used two styles for the letter 'd'.  One was half uncial with a vertical ascender and the other was an uncial with a serif at right-angles to the ascender.  His script has been discovered in three other manuscripts, all with connections to the Durham scriptorium. 

The first is a manuscript in four parts, the fourth part being a sermon attributed to St Augustine. The second manuscript contains a life of St Katherine of Alexandria which was written by the Domesday scribe.  A copy of the life of St Katherine was known to have been in the Durham cathedral library.  The third manuscript contains a contents list written by the same scribe in a similar style to the lists in Domesday book.  This manuscript is thought to have come from Durham.  Another nine manuscripts originating from the Durham scriptorium contain examples of the Domesday book script.  There appears to be a characteristic Durham 'house' script.

A key example of such a Durham script appears in Exon Domsday, notably the addition to the estates of the bishop of Winchester, of Taunton granted at Salisbury in 1086.  It is the only entry by this particular scribe.  The question 'why should a scribe from Durham be at Salisbury?' has to be explored in relation to his master.  A Durham scribe could only be in Salisbury with someone from Durham who needed a scribe.  Such a person was William of St Calais, the bishop of Durham.  We know he was at Salisbury since it is recorded that it was he who was instructed to enter the addition of Taunton.

William of St Calais' role would explain why it was his scribe who wrote the single addition in Exon and why one of his scribes, probably his favourite and most trusted, wrote Great Domesday.  To have been asked to add a grand of land to Exon suggests his role exceeded that of a member of the group of legati, the group of magnates who went to each area to double check the veracity of the returns.  He witnessed a writ issued "post descriptionem totius Angliae" (after the survey of all England) instructing action concerning lands held by Westminster Abbey in Surrey.  By the form of the date, mentioning the survey, the writ was connected to the survey.  This writ was written by a Durham scribe.  Whether this scribe was the same one who added the grant of land does not appear to have been investigated.  The writ must have been issued whilst the king was at Salisbury and we know William was with him.

William of St Calais from the sermon
of St Augustine 

VH Galbraith hypothesised that there must have been a man behind the survey other than the king to keep up momentum after the king left England.  William of St Calais could easily fit this position.  He was involved in the survey in two separate areas or circuits.  He was asked specifically to add to the finished returns for the West Country; he witnessed a writ connected with the survey.  From 1091 to his death in 1096 he witnessed every writ concerning Domesday Book issued by William Rufus.  No wonder then that it was William's scribe, a Durham scribe, who wrote up Great Domesday.

Where this scribe wrote up the returns is not documented.  It is assumed that since Great Domesday was kept at Winchester that it was written there.  But it is not impossible for the scribe to have been itinerant and if he were, it would explain much.  The returns were written into a series of booklets which would have been convenient for an itinerant scribe.  It has been calculated that it would have taken one man 240 days to write Great Domesday assuming he wrote it in just one location.  An itinerant scribe would take much longer to travel from location to location.  But the notes in the margin against blank entries asking "how many?" would be more easily answered on location, and each section could be sent back to Winchester or wherever, once completed.

This explanation of who wrote Domesday Book, for whom, where and how also answers the great question - why does Little Domesday Book exist?  Little Domesday Book is the returns for East Anglia, written in full and unabbreviated, and not included in Great Domesday Book but standing alongside it.  Why these records were not incorporated into the great tome is a question that has never been fully answered.  However, when William of St Calais was exiled in 1088 he may well have taken his favourite scribe with him, and we would not be stepping outside the boundaries to assume that this was the Domesday scribe.  The relative lateness of this event, so long after the 'completion' of Domesday book in 1086, could fit in with the longer period of time necessary for an itinerant scribe to travel around the country to write up the returns.  But had the Domesday scribe left the country with his master it would have left the survey machinery without its two most important components.  Assuming that East Anglia had yet to be visited by William and his 'writere' (it was a more complex area with confusing patterns of land holding and may well have taken longer to survey), the officials left behind could well have assumed that their records would never be seen by William and did the only thing they could do under the circumstances - copy the document neatly and hand it over to be rubricated following the pattern of the other records already sent to Winchester.

This also tells us that although the information was complete by 1086 and King William's visit to Salisbury, Great Domesday Book was not written up into the document as we know it at that point, but was a far longer, on-going process that stretched into 1088 and the reign of William Rufus, who also had the desire to see it finished.  Only the absence of its single director who knew it better than anyone, and his single scribe who knew how to write it up, prevented its full completion.

So by simply looking at the scribe we can deduce a great deal of information about Domesday Book and the survey in general.  We know who kept the survey on track, we know why parts were omitted from the main survey, and we can gain insight into the mechanics behind the survey.  We can also say that it was incredibly important to King William for him to appoint such a high ranking official to oversee it, and for that official to trust only the one single scribe to complete it to ensure continuity throughout.  It is such a pity that this scribe's name is lost to us even though his greatest work still survives after nearly a thousand years.  Much better than a floppy disc.