as so many of you are not from this land here is some information of the domesday book~i hope you find it interesting.
the 1086 domesday book is a great land survey that was commissioned by William the Conqueror.
it was a way of assessing the extent of the land and resources in the country...
~records of landholders and tenants
~the amount of land they owned
~how many people occupied the land
~the amount of woodland, meadow, animals, fish and ploughs on the land, if any and other resources
~any buildings such as churches, castles, mills, salthouses etc
of course all of this would give him the the extent of the taxes he could raise!
The information collected was recorded by hand in two huge books~royal commissioners went around england collecting and recording the information from thousands of settlements with the country was split up into 7 regions.
the 1086 domesday book is a great land survey that was commissioned by William the Conqueror.
it was a way of assessing the extent of the land and resources in the country...
~records of landholders and tenants
~the amount of land they owned
~how many people occupied the land
~the amount of woodland, meadow, animals, fish and ploughs on the land, if any and other resources
~any buildings such as churches, castles, mills, salthouses etc
of course all of this would give him the the extent of the taxes he could raise!
The information collected was recorded by hand in two huge books~royal commissioners went around england collecting and recording the information from thousands of settlements with the country was split up into 7 regions.
national archivesin London the information was combined with earlier records, from before and after the norman conquest, and was then entered into the final Domesday Book. the final version was handwritten by one unnamed official scribe, and checked by one other.
all of the information, and the final domesday book itself, was written in Latin.
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it was not originally called the domeday book however, the name came about in the 12th century.
it was said that under the survey "there was no single hide nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox nor one cow nor one pig which was left out".
the massive scale of the Domesday survey and the irreversible nature of the information collected had people comparing it to the Last Judgement, or 'Doomsday', described in the Bible.
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the new forest had been created, or greatly enlarged, by william the conqueror to be used as his hunting lands and its been suggested that the name of my village derives from comes from a pre-norman conquest version, Brocenhyrst, meaning ‘broken wooded hill'~however in the domesday book it is known as Broceste with '6 smallholders and 4 slaves with 2½ ploughs; and woodland at 20 pigs'
the old church i visit regularly, St. Nicholas, was mentioned in the domesday book and it is the only new forest church recorded there. an earlier Saxon church was located on the same site~Saxon herring-bone work can be seen in the south wall of the old Nave~and not forgetting the ring ditch and 1000 plus year old yew standing there~
i am convinced that it was a sacred site long before the arrival of the saxons, especially given its place on a high hill