DOMESDAY SURVEY
LANCASHIRE as a county finds no place in Domesday Book; to obtain a view of it as a whole it is necessary to search for its component parts in the returns of two other counties. At the date of the survey the lands forming the southern half of the present county were taken with Cheshire,[1] under the title of 'The land between Ribble and Mersey,' of which the return occupies little more than a page and a half of the record (f. 269b). The lands comprised within the northern portion were included in Yorkshire, the details being found at the end of the return of the land held by the king (ff. 301b, 302),[2] except for seven manors which are entered in the return of the lands held by Roger of Poitou (f. 332)[3]; these two sets of entries together occupy only three-quarters of a page. That these items were thus disconnected was due not only to the fact that there was no such comital entity as 'the shire of Lancaster' at this time, but also to the circumstance that the lands originally granted in this district to Roger of Poitou, which embraced the greater part of these regions, were at the time of the survey almost entirely in the hands of the king.
These disconnected returns, when brought together and examined, yield but little satisfactory information as to the holders of lands in 1086, and but few details of the condition and value of these regions. Those for the land between Ribble and Mersey are the fullest, but possess the tantalizing characteristic, common to other great manors comprising many berewicks or dependent manors, of being a summary rather than a detailed survey. The returns for the district north of the Ribble are even less satisfactory, and consist of little more than lists of manors with their geldable areas, or rather assessments, after the manner of a geld-book.
The impression left upon the mind by a careful study of these returns is that a general picture of the state of these regions at the time of the conquest and immediately afterwards may be broadly sketched from the materials here provided, but that no detailed or precise description is possible. One important feature which presents itself at the outset of our examination of this record is that we have to deal with regions upon the borderland of the ancient kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria, and Cumbria, possessing all the unstable characteristics of debatable lands subject to conquest and colonization by the ruler of any one of these three principalities, followed by re-conquest and re-colonization, perhaps often repeated. This position of insecurity and instability was further accentuated by the opportunity for foreign invasion afforded by the long irregular coastline with its bays and estuaries, extending
- ↑ There is no evidence that the district was under the jurisdiction of the sheriff and shire-mote of Chester. There is reference to shire-mote and (shire-)reeve, but nothing to show what shire-mote and sheriff is meant.
- ↑ The facsimile edition of Domesday Book (1861) omits the return of half the manor of Burrow, and erroneously includes the Yorks manor of Oulston (f. 330).
- ↑ Roger's name is omitted in the list of tenants in chief (f. 298b).
