power, the density of the population in different districts, the ranks and grades of society, the methods of tillage and industry, and the condition of the urban centres. Information as to some of these, if not very clear, is comparatively ample; for in addition to the laws and charters and a fair amount of literary evidence, we can use as the groundwork for our picture the very detailed description of England in 1065, which is preserved in the Domesday Survey. Primarily of course this Norman survey is concerned with the condition of the country twenty years later; but the local jurors, who furnished the returns, were also required to state how matters had stood "on the day when King Edward was alive and dead," and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of their answers, even though some allowance has to be made for their recollection of the earlier period being somewhat blurred.
The most important feature which stands out in all the sources alike is that there was just as little uniformity in England at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period in social and economic matters as in political conditions. In spite of the fact that the country had been nominally a single kingdom for over a century, each province in 1065 still retained its own traditions and customs in social matters, and there were not only fundamental differences between the English and Danish districts, but also between the valley of the Thames and the valley of the Severn, between Kent and Wessex, between Wessex and Mercia and between the northern and the southern Danelaw. Any attempt, therefore, to give a picture of a typical village or a typical estate would be misleading, for everywhere there were startling variations (even within the limits of a single shire there were frequently several types of organisation) not to speak of differences in nomenclature and differences in land measures and monetary units. There are however some generalisations which can be accepted confidently, and to these we must chiefly confine ourselves.
The first most obvious economic feature is that the density of the population decreased as one passed from east to west. In 1065 Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were by far the most thickly populated shires. Were the population of these three counties left out of account, we should be leaving out of account not much less than one-sixth of the whole English nation. The least thickly populated districts south of the Humber and the Ribble were apparently Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cornwall[1], but men were also sparse in Devon and in all parts of the Severn valley. Another clear feature is that the land was much more valuable in the east than in the west, partly of course because of geological differences and the variation of soils, but largely because the denser population of the east facilitated a more intensive working of the land and the maintenance of a far greater head of cattle and sheep. Yet another great contrast between the east and the
- ↑ There is no evidence as to the districts north of the Humber. The Vale of York may have been well populated, but there cannot have been any large number of inhabitants in the great moorland areas.
