THE NORTHAMPTONSHIRE SURVEY (i2TH CENTURY) THE darkest and the most difficult period for topographical and for family history is that which succeeds the Domesday Survey and extends throughout the greater part of the 1 2th century. The absence of records for this period is more especially to be regretted because of the great changes that it witnessed in the holding of land. Within less than a hundred years of the Conquest, fiefs great and small, some of them indeed colossal, had, from sundry causes, escheated to the Crown, placing at its disposal ample means of rewarding not only the supporters of the king who had secured possession, but also the new ministerial body, which, under the Norman administration, was rising rapidly to power. For Northamptonshire, happily, we possess a manuscript which enables us, to a certain extent, to bridge the gulf I have described.' It was till recently supposed that the adjoining county of Lincolnshire possessed, in a survey of Lindsey made under Henry I., ' the sole record of its kind, and that no similar return of the landowners of any other county is known to exist. '^ But, in Feudal England, I was able to pro- duce a Leicestershire Survey of the same kind, and to deal with part of that Northamptonshire Survey of which a full and annotated translation will be found below. We have thus, for three adjoining counties, sur- veys which, although distinct, resemble one another in character ; for they are all drawn up, not by fiefs, as is the record in Domesday Book, but by Hundreds or by Wapentakes, as were the surveys from which, by rearrangement, Domesday Book was compiled. Moreover, the object of all three was the ascertainment and recording of those changes in the tenure of land which threw the liability for its Danegeld on another set of holders than those entered in Domesday. While, by their system of arrangement, they enable us to recon- struct the Hundreds and the ' vills ' which were torn asunder for Domesday Book, these surveys enable us further to detect frequently readjustment of assessed values, that is of the liability to the ' geld,' as ' Cott. MS. Vesp. E. XXII., fos. 94 et uq.
- See Mr. Chester Waters' edition of that Survey, p. 2.
357
