ABSTRACT
Historians of medieval England are uniquely fortunate in the survival of the astonishing resource which is the Domesday Book. Whatever the difficulties of interpretation, which are significant, it is an enormous privilege to have so much social and economic evidence from so early a date. However, it is perhaps still true that historians sometimes underestimate the use of money in eleventh-century England, despite the fact that it is writ large on every page of Domesday Book. A hugely distinguished line of English historians from D.C. Douglas, to A.L. Poole, to M.M. Postan, to R. Lennard, to H.R. Loyn have all confirmed the extensive evidence for the use of coin in Anglo-Saxon England and in Domesday Book, alongside other methods of payment and social and economic organisation which might simplistically be grouped together as ‘feudal’. 2 In fact the monetary and the ‘feudal’ are by no means mutually exclusive, but are found in Domesday coexisting easily. Payments in kind, labour or other services are readily commuted to cash or back again. Supposedly self-sufficient peasants raised families on tiny plots but also had to pay taxes, tolls, fines and other dues in cash. The values or rents due from each manor are meticulously recorded in Domesday Book, and they receive confirmation from the contemporary schedule of the archbishop of Canterbury’s Kent estates, which shows that money rents were even more prevalent than Domesday Book suggests. Both in turn find further confirmation in surviving twelfth-century rentals from various church estates (for example St Pauls, St Benet of Holme, and the abbeys of Ramsey, Burton, Peterborough and Glastonbury) where Lennard found ‘money rents extremely common’. 3 The obligation to pay money rent implies the ability to acquire coin by selling labour or marketing produce, but what does Domesday Book tells us about markets?
