Woolley appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as a small but stable settlement in the English countryside, assessed at 3.5 hides and valued at 3 shillings — precisely the same valuation it had held twenty years earlier in 1066. This consistency across the Conquest is itself a revealing detail, suggesting a community that weathered the turbulence of Norman rule without catastrophic disruption to its agricultural economy.
Woolley in Domesday: What the 1086 Survey Actually Records
The Domesday Book entry for Woolley is, like so many of its counterparts, deceptively compact. What survives is a snapshot of two separate manors recorded under the same settlement name, together painting a picture of a working agricultural community in the late eleventh century. The survey records 14 villagers (villani), no smallholders (bordarii), and no slaves (servi) — an unusual profile that places Woolley's population firmly in the middling tier of rural society, without the significant dependent or unfree labour that characterised many neighbouring settlements.
Seven ploughlands are noted. In Domesday terminology, a ploughland represents the theoretical amount of land that could be worked by a single eight-ox plough team in a year — typically somewhere between 100 and 120 acres in practice, though the figure was often used as an assessment benchmark rather than a precise measurement. Seven ploughlands therefore suggests a reasonably productive agricultural landscape capable of sustaining its recorded population of 14 households, representing perhaps 60 to 80 individuals when dependants are counted.
The geld assessment of 3.5 hides placed Woolley in the middling range of settlements for tax purposes. The hide was the standard unit of land assessment used to calculate each settlement's contribution to the geld — the national land tax that the Domesday survey was, in part, designed to rationalise. Half-hide fractions like this one are common enough in the survey and usually reflect either a division of earlier assessments between multiple manors or a local administrative adjustment made during the survey process itself.
The Lords of Woolley: Gode, Wulfric, and Eustace the Sheriff
The human story of Woolley in 1086 is told through three names recorded in the survey, and it is here that the entry becomes genuinely interesting to local historians.
In 1066, at the time of the Conquest, Woolley was held by two Anglo-Saxon lords: Gode, described as the mother of Wulfric, and her son Wulfric. This mother-and-son pairing holding land jointly is a relatively uncommon arrangement in the pre-Conquest evidence preserved within Domesday, and it suggests either a deliberate family strategy for retaining landholding rights across generations, or that both held distinct portions of what the survey treats as two separate manors. The names themselves are Old English in origin — Gode (occasionally a feminine given name derived from the word for "good") and Wulfric (a compound of wulf, wolf, and ric, powerful) — placing this family firmly within the Anglo-Saxon landed class that existed across England before 1066.
By 1086, the situation had changed in a crucial respect. Both Gode and Wulfric are still recorded — unusually, they appear to have retained their lands into the Norman period, at least in part. This survival of English landholders after the Conquest was not unheard of, particularly at the level of small manors, but it was far from guaranteed. Many Anglo-Saxon thegns lost everything. That Gode and Wulfric appear in both the 1066 and 1086 columns of the Domesday record is a detail worth pausing over.
However, a new figure now appears alongside them: Eustace the Sheriff. Eustace was a prominent Norman official — sheriffs in the post-Conquest period were powerful agents of royal administration, responsible for collecting revenues, enforcing royal justice, and managing crown lands within their counties. His appearance as lord and tenant-in-chief at Woolley suggests that by 1086 Norman oversight had been extended over the settlement, even if Gode and Wulfric remained as undertenant holders. This kind of layered landholding — a Norman magnate holding superiority over lands still occupied by their English predecessors — was one of the Conquest's characteristic administrative arrangements, and Woolley provides a neat local illustration of it.
What the Valuation Tells Us
The fact that Woolley's value remained at 3 shillings between 1066 and 1086 is significant. Across the Domesday survey as a whole, many settlements show a sharp decline in value between the two dates — the legacy of the Harrying of the North, military campaigns, and the general dislocation of the Conquest years. A stable valuation like Woolley's suggests the settlement was either spared these disruptions, or had recovered sufficiently by 1086 to return to its pre-Conquest productive capacity.
Three shillings was a modest figure, reflecting a small rural manor rather than a wealthy estate. By comparison, significant manorial centres in the same survey might be valued in pounds rather than shillings. But for a settlement of 14 recorded households working seven ploughlands, 3 shillings was a coherent and plausible assessment.
Researching Woolley's History Beyond Domesday
The Domesday entry is only the beginning of what can be uncovered about a settlement like Woolley. Understanding what happened to the manors after 1086 — how the land passed between lords, how the landscape changed through enclosure and agricultural improvement, how later medieval records connect to the eleventh-century evidence — requires searching across a wide range of historical record series. Medieval surveys, ecclesiastical records, estate papers, and later topographic sources all need to be cross-referenced carefully, and interpreting their relationship to the Domesday evidence requires both specialist knowledge and significant time.
This is precisely the kind of layered research that Aubrey Research was built to handle. Rather than navigating archives and record series manually, Aubrey Research automates the process of gathering, cross-referencing and presenting the historical evidence for a specific location — producing a structured research report that a local historian or metal detectorist can use immediately. You can see what this looks like in practice by reviewing a sample report.
Frequently Asked Questions
How was Woolley assessed in the Domesday Book? Woolley was assessed at 3.5 hides for geld purposes in 1086, with seven ploughlands recorded and a value of 3 shillings — unchanged from its 1066 valuation.
Who were the lords of Woolley in 1086? In 1086, Woolley was held by Eustace the Sheriff alongside the Anglo-Saxon holders Gode (mother of Wulfric) and Wulfric (son of Gode), who had also held the land in 1066.
How many people are recorded at Woolley in Domesday? The survey records 14 villagers at Woolley in 1086, with no smallholders and no slaves noted — suggesting a community composed primarily of middling agricultural tenants.
Why does Woolley appear as two manors in Domesday? The survey records two separate manors at Woolley, likely reflecting the fact that Gode and Wulfric held their lands as distinct units. Domesday frequently records multiple manors within a single settlement where landholding was divided between more than one lord.