For what was the purpose of the document? It may be pronounced without hesitation to be no other than a geld-roll, recording, it would seem, a levy of Danegeld hitherto unknown.[2] There are three features which it has in common with the rolls of 1084: it is drawn up hundred by hundred; it records the exemption of demesne; and it specifies those lands that had failed to pay their quota.[3]
Its salient feature is one that, at first sight, might seem to impugn its authenticity. This is the almost incredible amount of land lying 'waste'. If we confine our attention to the land liable to geld represented by the first and fourth columns in my analysis below, we see that by far the larger proportion of it is entered as 'waste': yet this witness to a terrible devastation is the best proof of its authenticity; for it sets before us the fruits of those ravages in the autumn of 1065, which are thus described by Mr Freeman, paraphrasing the English chronicle:
Morkere's Northern followers dealt with the country about Northampton as if it had been the country of an enemy. They slew men, burned corn and houses, carried off cattle, and at last led captive several hundred prisoners, seemingly as slaves. The blow was so severe that it was remembered even when one would have thought that that and all other lesser wrongs would have been forgotten in the general overthrow of England. Northamptonshire and the shires near to it were for many winters the worse.
Mr Freeman, had he read it, would have eagerly welcomed our record's striking testimony to the truth of the Chronicle's words.
The devastation that our roll records had been well repaired at the time of Domesday; but we obtain a glimpse of it in the Rockingham entry: 'Wasta erat quando rex W. jussit ibi castellum fieri. Modo valet xxvi. sol.' (i. 220).
But it is not only that the entries of 'waste' on our roll are thus explained: they further prove it to be, as I have urged, a 'Danegeld' roll. For, when we compare it with the Pipe-Roll of 2 Henry II (1156), we find the latter similarly allowing for the non-receipt of geld from land 'in waste'; and it is specially noteworthy that the portion thus 'waste' is in every case, as on our roll, entered after the others. The fact that the geld was remitted on land that had been made 'waste' is now established by collation of these two records.