COEL Database: Continental Origins of English Landholders, 1066-1166

The aim of the research project was to determine the continental origins of those who held land or other benefits of the king in England after the Norman Conquest, in order to understand the phenomenon of the Conquest as a continental alliance, and, by tracing the descent of those holdings thereafter, to understand the nature of any continuity or discontinuity. Tracing origins was largely done by research in French archives. The subjects of the inquiry are all evidenced in the surviving English administrative records of the period under study, 1066 to 1166, many of them abbreviated or otherwise elliptical fiscal records. Many of them were obscure persons who had attracted little, if any, attention from historians. This research identified the different persons in these lists and tried to place them in the larger groups, familial and tenurial, to which they belonged. The work is thus a prosopography providing a key to the vast mass of name records in the surviving administrative texts, often based on numerous private charters and chronicles surviving from the period.<br>