warfare

The record of wasted manors and declining manorial values in Domesday Book has been the subject of considerable debate since F.H. Baring first proposed that they could be used to plot the impact of contemporary warfare in his seminal article on 'The Conqueror's footprints in Domesday', English Historical Review, vol. 13 (1898), pages 17-25.

If Baring were correct, the Domesday record is the best available evidence for the effects of medieval warfare from the whole of Europe in the feudal ages. R. Welldon Finn, The Norman Conquest and its effects on the economy, 1066-1086 (1971), has surveyed Domesday data in great detail, on a county-by-county basis. More recently, D.M. Palliser, 'Domesday Book and the harrying of the north', Northern History, vol. 29 (1993), pages 1-23, and John J.N. Palmer, 'War and Domesday waste', in Armies, chivalry and warfare in medieval Britain and France, edited by Matthew Strickland (1998), pages 256-75, have argued alternatives cases for the significance of Domesday waste; and Palmer has re-assessed the Baring thesis on declining values: 'The Conqueror's footprints in Domesday Book', in The medieval military revolution, ed A.C. Ayton and J.L. Price (1995), pages 23-44.