Stephen Baxter, a gleaming medieval historian, bites his nails.
You can tell by looking at his magnified digits; they consume the screen while he traces along the vellum pages of the Domesday Book, pointing out things like names, numbers and places. His nails are neat, but to the quick. Why does Baxter bite his nails? Is he this worried about telling us, the gentle viewer, about why this Domesday Book was written?
Baxter led the programme along the lines of native English vs foreign Norman invaders. This was hard to conceptualise, as being Norman later became being English, and being English before the Normans meant speaking a language which wasn’t English and not actually calling yourself English. You would have been an Angle. Or a Saxon. Or even just a resident of the shire you had never left because you travel on foot, you don’t go on holiday and you reserve the pony for luxuries, like pulling a plough.
But still. The premise involved deciding the purpose of the Domesday Book, a massive, detailed audit of who owned what in 1086. We began with promising examples of conflicting academic arguments. I hoped in vain for Baxter to debate earnestly with another academic, perhaps beneath stained glass as sunshine streamed through it, but alas.
Instead it was Baxter solo, opening books, looking gleeful, finding out about parchment, telling the odd interesting anecdote (for example, a bishop called Wulstan made peasants give evidence of land ownership by plunging their hands into boiling water. If the wound healed well, they were telling the truth. If not, and they died a slow death of gangrene and septicaemia, they were lying little buggers), and missing a massive trick in the process.
The Domesday Book was clearly a thief’s charter. Rather than national lines, Baxter should have approached it along class lines. Some continental types who were better at building castles, who spoke more languages, were better administrators and had more capital, came to an island. The island certainly wasn’t underdeveloped, or in the dark ages, but it wasn’t very well organised. Knowledge wasn’t centralised.
William saw an opportunity to bewilder a nation with a quill, like waving a copy of the Financial Times in front of someone who has only ever read the Daily Sport, and telling them the scores are definitely in there, they just need to read a bit harder.
By the time the audit was finished, nothing mattered, anyway. England had been portioned and all land disputes were pointless in the face of the Domesday Book – only a single English landowner survived its publication, that nasty bishop who boiled peoples’ hands. While the Battle of Hastings was certainly a defeat, the Domesday Book was an embarrassing annihilation. Even more so, because ultimately, it’s just a really long list. Perhaps that’s why Baxter bites his nails ? he, too, understands the dark power of a national database, of the end of anonymity.
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Jason Smith says
Down to the quick of journalism, this. He bites his nails… Good grief.