The Cambridge Inquisition – ''Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis'' or ''ICC'' – is one of the most important of the satellite surveys relating to the
Domesday Book
Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...
of 1086.
It not only offers fuller information than the latter, but has also played an important and ongoing role in the debates over the making of the Domesday Book/Survey.
Layout
Though surviving only in a 12th century copy, the ''ICC'' is accepted to represent evidence of an early stage in the inquest process underlying the Domesday Book. It reports the results presented by jurors from the
hundreds and
vill
Vill is a term used in English history to describe the basic rural land unit, roughly comparable to that of a parish, manor, village or tithing.
Medieval developments
The vill was the smallest territorial and administrative unit—a geographical ...
s of the shire, geographically organised. The ''ICC'' contains details of more settlements than Domesday Book covers, gives ratings for both 1066 and 1086, and also provides jurors' names, English and French. It also records details of livestock - “shameful to record...not even one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig escaped notice in his survey”, complained the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - omitted in the Book itself.
Round/Galbraith/Roffe: the Domesday debate
J H Round at the close of the 19th century argued influentially that the geographical framework of the ''ICC'' was representative of the nationwide survey as a whole; and that it was only after all the returns were in, that they were arranged in feudal form to create Domesday Book itself. A half-century later,
V. H. Galbraith used the
Exon Domesday with its feudal returns as a central model of the survey, with the sworn evidence of the hundred jurors relegated to a subsidiary role.
The 21st century however has seen a renewed interest in the ''ICC'', however, and a reappraisal of its perhaps normative role in the Domesday process.
Cambridge Inquisition
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See also
Ely Inquiry
The Ely Inquiry or ''Inquisitio Eliensis'' 'IE''was a satellite of the 1086 Domesday survey. Its importance is both that it gives a more detailed account of the local area than Domesday Book itself, and that its prologue offers an account of th ...
References
{{Reflist, 2}
Further reading
''Victoria County History'', Cambridgeshire, vol. 1, pp. 400–437
External links
Inquest Procedure
12th-century documents
Domesday Book