Domesday People: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066 - 1166

by K.S.B. Keats-Rohan

Based on extensive and wide-ranging research, the two volumes contain over eight thousand entries on persons occurring in the principal English administrative sources for the post-Conquest period -- Domesday Book, the Pipe Rolls, and Cartae Baronum. Continental origin is a major focus of the entries, as well as the discussion of family and descent of fees which characterise the whole work; genealogical tables are included. An introduction discusses Domesday prosopography; an appendix gives the Latin texts of the Northamptonshire and Lindsey surveys. Post-Conquest genealogy and manorial history start with Domesday Book: genealogists will welcome this work. Dr KATHERINE KEATS-ROHAN was awarded the Prix Brant IV de Koskull 1998 by the Confederation Internationale de Genealogie et d'Heraldique for her work on Domesday People. She is Director of the Linacre Unit for Prosopographical Research.

572 pages, Hardcover

First published January 21, 1999

Reviews

[Michael Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prosopography is the study of pedigree, biography, and genealogy, including the study of family names, and focusing especially on the person, his environment and his social status — that is, the individual within the context of family and other social groups, the place or places in which he was active, and the function he performed within his society. Some thirty years ago, prosopography began to be used as a regular tool in the study of history, especially medieval European and Byzantine history. Concentration, naturally, has centered on the wealthy and powerful because that’s who created the surviving records. Keats-Rohan is director of the Unit for Prosopographical Research at Linacre College, Oxford, and this project is an heroic attempt to synthesize the genealogy of families in the first century following the Conquest and the histories of the manors which they either owned or labored on. For "only by determining the identities of persons concealed in a repetitious mass of names in the text of Domesday Book can we hope to understand what happened next, or who was who in subsequent records such as the Pipe Rolls." Domesday Book contains some 45,000 personal names, many of them duplications since tenants-in-chief held land in several counties. If you also leave out the churches (as tenants) and the surviving English tenants, fewer than 20,000 names remain, and about 8,000 of those are identified by forename alone. The author has analyzed 19,500 records of continental names into about 2,500 individual persons, including some 200 tenants-in-chief and about 600 Englishmen. Their entries, which make up the bulk of this large pair of volumes, range from a single sentence (Harduin was a "Domesday tenant of William fitz Nigel under earl Hugh in Chester") to several pages for those at the top. Citations to appearances in Domesday Book itself, as well as in later charters and other sources, are very complete. The descendants of the great men whom the new king made tenants-in-chief became the great barons of the English feudal system, and nearly all of them appear here. For instance, Eudo Dapifer, son of Hubert de Ryes, married Rohais, daughter of Richard de Clare. One of Eudo’s tenants in 1086 was Osbert, husband of his sister Muriel. Eudo also acquired the land previously held by his brother, Adam, who was a tenant of Bishop Odo. Farther down the social ladder were men like Herbrand de Sackville, tenant of Walter de Giffard, who had sons named Jordan, William, and Robert, and a daughter named Avice, who married Walter d’Auffay. The author also has included seventy-five pages of background history and prosopographical methodology, which make this work very accessible to the non-specialist. These two volumes were the first published installment (there are also now several online databases) of an extraordinary and fascinating enterprise which should open new avenues of research for those interested in medieval English genealogy.