English Women Landholders and Conquest in Eastern England: c. 1050-c. 1090

Although theories of women’s power have progressed to more nuanced discussions of agency and strategy, the historiographical divide between Anglo-Saxon England and Anglo-Norman England has remained. This has resulted in a lacuna in the study of English women who lived through a pivotal moment in English history. An even more remarkable omission when one considers the availability of one of the most detailed sources. Domesday Book has not been used for English women, nor for their survival across the Norman Conquest. This thesis draws primarily on Domesday, adopting a more woman-aware approach to identify the English. A prosopographical database of all the English women in the six Domesday shires of East Anglia and the Fens suggests that there were many more English women in Domesday Book than has been previously thought. Using a combination of Domesday Book and other sources this thesis uses case studies to identify women survivors and contextualizisede their experiences of conquest.
The central chapter of this thesis is allocated to Eadgifu the Fair whose study exemplifies many of the problems encountered when using Domesday Book for the English, and more particularly for English women. Further case studies identify interesting, but ostensibly less important women; they contrast women whose backgrounds were firmly rooted in Anglo-Saxon England and who survived across conquest with ‘new’ women who thrived in the Anglo-Norman world. They reveal the existence of a surprising number of English urban women and compare their experience of conquest with those of rural women and they highlight four previously unnoticed English women who remarkably held as tenants-in-chief in 1086. By exploiting the obvious source, Domesday Book, and working through the problems inherent in using it, this thesis highlights English women who survived the Conquest, and outlines the mechanisms by which they did so.