Domesday settlement in Suffolk

• Published in: Landscape history 2003-01, Vol.25 (1), p.45-57
• Main Author: Hesse, Mary
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0143-3768; 2160-2506
• DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2003.10594549

In their 'Atlas of Rural Settlement in England', Roberts and Wrathmell have used nineteenth-century sources to map the distributions of nucleated and dispersed settlement across England. They argue that the resulting patterns reflect in general terms many earlier types of distribution, for example Roman villas, pagan burials, pre-Norman place-names, and Domesday woodland. In this article I consider whether relevant data can be derived from Suffolk Domesday Book about the distribution of dispersed settlement in the county in 1066, starting with the hypothesis that the exceptionally high proportion of freemen in the Suffolk population in 1066 may be correlated with the contemporary density of dispersed settlement. Calculations show that the numbers of freemen's ploughs per carucate, as reported in Domesday, are also exceptionally high, as would be expected if freemen were associated with small dispersed farmsteads and a consequent inefficient use of ploughs. The freemen distribution was calculated for each hundred, and compared with that of the Atlas dispersion map. The two distributions agree in the clayland centre of the county, but differ strikingly in some of the peripheral hundreds. It does not appear that these differences can be wholly explained in terms of the natural environment, and evidence is examined about pre-Conquest lordship and the occurrence of large estates. This factor helps to explain some of the discrepancies between the freemen distribution and the nineteenth-century dispersion patterns.