Opening directly with the introduction as instructed:
Hawksworth in 1086 was recorded in the Domesday Book as two separate manors, assessed together at 1.74 hides and supporting a small but documented rural community in Nottinghamshire. This survey entry offers a rare and precise snapshot of the settlement just twenty years after the Norman Conquest — capturing the moment when Anglo-Saxon landholding gave way permanently to a new French-speaking aristocracy.
What the Domesday Book Says About Hawksworth
The Domesday survey of 1086, commissioned by William the Conqueror to establish the taxable value of his newly won kingdom, recorded Hawksworth as two distinct manors rather than a single unified settlement. This division is itself historically significant. It tells us that even in a small Nottinghamshire village, the post-Conquest redistribution of land was complex and layered — not a simple case of one lord replacing another, but a reshuffling of holdings that reflected the competing interests of powerful Norman magnates.
The total geld assessment for Hawksworth stood at 1.74 hides. The hide was the standard unit of tax assessment in late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England, roughly corresponding to the amount of land needed to support one household — though in practice the figures were often negotiated rather than precisely measured. An assessment of 1.74 hides suggests a modest but established agricultural settlement, neither prosperous enough to attract heavy taxation nor so marginal as to escape the survey entirely.
The recorded ploughlands stood at 3.25 — meaning the land was theoretically capable of supporting just over three plough teams' worth of cultivation. The gap between assessed hides and ploughlands is a common feature of Domesday entries and often reflects land that was underworked, recently cleared, or deliberately undervalued.
Who Lived in Hawksworth in 1086?
The recorded population of Hawksworth in 1086 was very small: just two smallholders, known in the Latin of the survey as bordarii. No villagers (villani) and no slaves (servi) were recorded. This gives Hawksworth one of the more minimal population entries in the Nottinghamshire folios.
Smallholders occupied the lower rungs of the rural hierarchy. They typically held small plots of land — usually between five and fifteen acres — in exchange for labour services on the lord's demesne. They were not free men, but neither were they slaves. Their presence without any recorded villagers suggests that Hawksworth's arable was perhaps still being developed in 1086, or that a significant portion of the workforce had not been recorded, or had been lost in the turbulence of the Conquest years.
It is worth remembering that Domesday records heads of household, not total population. The actual number of people living in and around Hawksworth in 1086 was almost certainly higher — wives, children and dependants simply do not appear in the survey. A reasonable multiplier suggests the true population may have been ten to fifteen people, perhaps more.
The Lords of Hawksworth: Before and After the Conquest
This is where the Hawksworth entry becomes particularly revealing for local historians and family history researchers.
In 1066 — the year of the Conquest, used throughout Domesday as the baseline for pre-Norman landholding — Hawksworth was held by two Anglo-Saxon lords: Thori, son of Roald, and Ulf, known as the Fenman. These names are unmistakably Scandinavian in character, reflecting the deep Norse and Danish settlement of the East Midlands that had shaped Nottinghamshire's population and place-names for centuries before the Normans arrived. The name Ulf is common in the Danelaw, and the epithet "Fenman" may indicate origins in the low-lying fenland districts to the east.
By 1086, both had been replaced entirely. The two manors were now held by:
- Walkelin of Aslockton, a tenant under Walter of Aincourt
- Robert of Armentières, a tenant under Gilbert of Ghent
Walter of Aincourt was one of the more significant Norman tenants-in-chief in Nottinghamshire, holding numerous manors across the county. Gilbert of Ghent was a Flemish-born magnate who came to England with the Conqueror and accumulated substantial holdings across the East Midlands and Lincolnshire. That Hawksworth fell within the spheres of both men underlines how thoroughly the old Anglo-Saxon and Danelaw aristocracy had been displaced.
Walkelin of Aslockton takes his name from the nearby Nottinghamshire village of Aslockton — a useful reminder of how Norman lords often adopted English place-names as they embedded themselves in local landscapes. Researching these overlapping lordships, tracking the connections between tenant and tenant-in-chief, and understanding what happened to holdings like Hawksworth in the decades after 1086 requires working across multiple record sets that are neither straightforward to locate nor easy to interpret without considerable historical background.
What This Tells Us About Norman Nottinghamshire
Hawksworth's Domesday entry is a microcosm of the broader Norman settlement of Nottinghamshire. The county had been devastated in parts by William's campaigns in the north during the late 1060s — the so-called Harrying of the North — and many Domesday entries across the region record land as wasta, or waste. Hawksworth does not carry that designation, suggesting it survived relatively intact, but the complete replacement of its pre-Conquest lords with Norman and Flemish tenants was total nonetheless.
For metal detectorists working fields around Hawksworth, this Domesday context is directly relevant. A settlement of this size and age — clearly established well before 1066 — would have been generating material culture for decades or centuries before the survey was made. The presence of two manors and multiple lords across a short period increases the likelihood of activity, movement and deposition across the landscape.
Researching Hawksworth Further
Taking a Domesday entry like Hawksworth's and building it into a full picture of a site's history requires cross-referencing it against medieval surveys, estate records, ecclesiastical documents, maps from multiple periods, and later historical sources. Understanding which family held which portion of the land, how those holdings changed through marriage, inheritance and forfeiture, and what agricultural and settlement patterns developed across the medieval period — this is genuinely complex, time-consuming work.
Aubrey Research automates exactly this process. Rather than spending hours navigating archives and cross-referencing sources manually, you can generate a detailed historical research report for any British location in minutes. You can see the kind of depth this produces in the sample report.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many manors was Hawksworth recorded as in the Domesday Book? Hawksworth was recorded as two separate manors in 1086, held by different Norman lords under two distinct tenants-in-chief.
Who held Hawksworth before the Norman Conquest? In 1066, Hawksworth was held by two Anglo-Saxon lords with Scandinavian names: Thori, son of Roald, and Ulf the Fenman — reflecting the area's strong Danelaw heritage.
What was the population of Hawksworth in 1086? The Domesday Book records just two smallholders (bordarii) in Hawksworth in 1086, with no villagers or slaves recorded. The actual population including dependants would have been considerably higher.
What does the hide assessment tell us about Hawksworth? Hawksworth's geld assessment of 1.74 hides indicates a modest, established settlement in 1086. With 3.25 ploughlands recorded against this, there was more agricultural potential than was being actively taxed — a common pattern in post-Conquest Nottinghamshire.