IN a recent article entitled ‘1066-1086; A Tenurial Revolution?’, Peter Sawyer outlined a provocative theory on the mechanism, by which English lands were divided after the Norman Conquest. He argues that many of the lands of minor English thegns and sokemen could be found in the hands of a particular Norman tenant-in-chief, not because they themselves were the antecessores of great Norman lords, but because they had been the men of such lords’ antecessors. Sawyer provides several dozen examples of this, and maintains that these scattered hints of continuity in lordship are typical of much post-Conquest land transference. Furthermore, Sawyer argues that evidence for tenurial continuity is limited simply because Domesday’s commissioners or its scribes ignored the bulk of information on Anglo-Saxon overlords. He concludes that although many Old English lordships are concealed by Domesday Book, it is along these pre-Conquest lines that the Norman tenurial pattern, emerged. Hence, he proposes that ‘such examples suggest that pre-Conquest England had fiefs very much like those of 1086’, and that ‘the changes in tenurial structure after the Norman Conquest were less than revolutionary’.