Domesday Survey

The Domesday Survey is presented as a major early record of Banfield, placing the village’s documented history in 1085. Its significance here is local as well as historical: the account uses it to anchor Banfield’s past in an official record and to distinguish that early reference from the settlement’s older, prehistoric beginnings.

Date and Purpose

The account dates the survey to 1085 and explains that William wanted to know the value of his kingdoms and who lived in them. It does not give further details about the survey’s contents or method; its emphasis is on the record’s role in documenting the places and people within William’s realm.

Banfield in the Record

Banfield’s second-earliest official mention is identified as appearing in the Domesday Survey. The account places this reference after its description of prehistoric tracks crossing the county and a settlement that may have begun as a forest clearing. The distinction is between the settlement’s inferred early origins and its later appearance in an official record.

The Domesday reference also serves as a chronological starting point for the account’s brief outline of Banfield’s later history. It is followed by mentions of activity around the Reformation and Civil War, the deaths of sixty-two villagers during the seventeenth-century plague, and the village’s later development as a turnpike staging post and railway stop. The survey itself is not credited with causing those changes; it marks the early documentary point from which the local chronology proceeds.