William the Conqueror following the Battle of Hastings and the suppression of many rebellions divided the lands of England into "Honours" for his magnates, which were further subdivided into manors, and further into fiefs [knight's fees] each supporting a knight.
In the winter of 1085 King William ordered the collection of data on all the land holdings in his kingdom. Geld records already in the treasury was the basis of the survey. Its main purpose was to assess the wealth of England to provide information for the royal system of taxation.Circuits of visitation by surveyors were arranged on a shire by shire basis. Every vill in the land was visited. The name of every major landholder [tenant-in-chief] was collected, and named; how many knights fees were on his lands; all the vills, towns and fortifications on his lands; all the farms and their size and value; the number of freemen, sokemen, villans, cottars and slaves [unfree serfs] on their holdings listed; quantity of livestock and type; and the "common burdens" of military service, fortress work, and bridge repair that each landholder owed listed.
Much of the survey was compiled and completed by August 1st 1186 [Lammas day] in time for the Oath of Salisbury. The documents were stored in the treasury at Winchester.
Essentially the Domesday Book provided the kings of England with the written, documented and sworn evidence unequivocally to exploit their rights and the principal sources of revenue from across the whole of the land in the country. In addition it gave the magnates and prelates almost a written title to the land assigned to them. An incredibly important document it decided the distribution of land and wealth in England shire by shire to whom and how much, and the taxes leviable on those lands.
The Domesday Book allowed the king to know all his personal estates in the country, and the extent of all the estates of his tenants-in-chief. After the Conquest the barons had helped themselves to much of the land in England. The Domesday Book was a formal written record. The king knew precisely what he could take from his barons after a forfeiture for treason or following the death of any of his tenants, and exploit ecclesiastical and secular vacancies.
Writ on every page was the fundamental principle or axiom of feudalism
Nulle terre sans seigneur.
No land without a lord.
or
No property [land] without a liege.
The only allodial owner of land in the country was the monarch. All other land was held of the king by "knights' service", either directly to the king as suzerain or overlord or by infeudation or subinfeudation to a mesne lord.
Henry I re-inforced this principle in his coronation charter
"Milites qui per loricam terras sues deserviunt."
This was the fief du haubert found in Normandy.
References
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt9qdjtq
Land recorded as belonging to Archbishop of Canterbury in Domesday Book 1086
Online Help Manual Contents: http://www.domesdaybook.net/helpfiles/hs10.htm
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE)
Palmer, J., Electronic Edition of Domesday Book: Translation, Databases and Scholarly Commentary, 1086; second edition SN: 5694,
F. W. Maitland. (1897) Domesday Book And Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England. ISBN 978-1-4179-7128-2.
'How Land Was Held Before and After the Norman Conquest', in Domesday Book Studies, ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine, London 1986, 37-8.
J. C. Holt; James Clarke Holt (1987). Domesday Studies: Papers Read at the Novocentenary Conference of the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of British Geographers, Winchester, 1986. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 1–. ISBN 978-0-85115-263-9.
Conquered England. Kingship, succession, and tenure, 1066–1166. By George Garnett. Oxford University Press, 2007.
http://archive.org/details/domesdaystudies02dovegoog
Philip Carteret Webb (1756). A Short Account of Danegeld: With Some Further Particulars Relating to Will. the Conqueror's Survey.
Sir Frederick Pollock, Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols. [1898]
The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, vol. 2
John Horace Round. Feudal England: Historical Studies on the XIth and XIIth Centuries. Cambridge University Press. pp. 225–. ISBN 978-1-108-01449-6.
http://archive.org/stream/feudalenglandhi00roungoog#page/n245/mode/1up
A. H. Inman . Domesday and Feudal Statistics, with a Chapter on Agricultural Statistics. BiblioBazaar. ISBN 978-1-355-84119-7. http://bit.ly/2HQZliN
https://archive.org/details/domesdayfeudalst00inmaiala/page/n6
http://archive.org/stream/feudalenglandhi00roungoog#page/n245/mode/1up
A. H. Inman . Domesday and Feudal Statistics, with a Chapter on Agricultural Statistics. BiblioBazaar. ISBN 978-1-355-84119-7. http://bit.ly/2HQZliN
https://archive.org/details/domesdayfeudalst00inmaiala/page/n6
The history of landholding in England
by Fisher, Joseph, F.R.H.S (1876)
Book of Fees
Book of Fees - Wikipedia
Cartae Baronum 1166
Lists of knight's fees in Kent : 1166 : Certificates submitted by
the king's tenants in chief
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