1. William I was the Duke of Normandy. He was raised with his exiled cousin Edward the Confessor who had been removed from Britain away from dangerous Danes as an eight-year-old ascendant prince. Edward, a rampant francophile, hated the boorish English culture and when he returned to accept the throne in 1042 promised inheritance to fabulously francais cousin William. Was the excuse provided for a military incursion by the Norman usurper in 1066 with dark debate over lineage legitimacy – as yet unresolved.

  2. Edward Confessor, speaking the ‘beloved tongue’, awarded choice estates and offices to Norman companions so that French earls and abbots, dukes and bishops ruled half of England before the war, which helped to set a suitable stage and facilitate a fruitful Gallic succession.

  3. The Battle of Hastings was one of those pretend-to-be-running-away-then-attack-from-up-a-hill jobs; may, indeed, have been the very first one. With a genius barricade woven wall, or some such still disputed yarn.

  4. Domesday Book or the Great Inquest was a collection of lists of properties, inhabitants, liabilities and assets of the areas of England occupied by members of the French nobility in 1086. William wanted proof of taxable holdings to calculate prospective incoming funds to discourage a threatening Danish army. Or more likely, as bribes?

  5. The population of England in 1066 was 1.5 million. The language, law, social order and political system were a piecemeal mixture of Belgic, Roman, Saxon and Danish governance with pockets of Gaelic and Celtic cause. There were 1422 manors belonging to the Crown in 1086; 2,250,000 acres in virgate holdings of bonded villani; with 82,000 bordarii and 7,000 cottier tenants – to give five million acres under the plough. England had become a very productive land.

   6. The information was gathered by teams of crown commissioners who visited each hideal hundred district convening dooms to verify the rolls by a committee comprising six local worthies and six Norman officers to balance all bias and nullify fraud. The agreed details were recorded on site in literary Latin with headings in red and text in black. The master version of 900 pages was copied by a recognised single scribe then deposited at the Winchester Exchequer in the early twelfth century. Considering the known random variables and imagining all others this was a truly amazing enterprise, now rightly acclaimed as our greatest extant historical credential. Non pareil!

  7. An OUTLAW was a person declared as outside the protection of the law due to criminal or civil misbehaviour usually concerning tax avoidance. In pre-modern societies all legal protection was withdrawn from the criminal so anyone was empowered to persecute or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system. If you don’t pay taxes, you’re on your own!

  8. LEGERWITE, (lairwite or lecherwite – a fine for lying down) was a penalty apportioned to women convicted of fornication (pre-marital sex) in a civil or manorial court – ecclesiastical courts had other corporal punishments. This penance disappeared in the fourteenth century when The Black Death brought about a blanket revision of appropriate customary dues and services.

  9. WAPENTAC – ‘the taking up of weapons’ in Danish; so named as the area a community could readily defend with regular militia without assistance from the Crown. This became an administrative division of a county equivalent to a ‘hundred’, as an area containing 100 hides or land units each able to sustain a peasant family – a term still used in Scotland and Australia?

  10. And while Domesday Book provided evidence of sufficient funds for England’s military capability – enough to discourage those pesky Danes, William died in 1087 due to rupture caused by a saddle malfunction well before the information did him any good.