I WAS SURPRISED by something I read recently in the new Cambridge Urban History of Britain. In his general survey of towns in Britain between 1300 and 1540 Professor Barrie Dobson made the point that ‘no late medieval British borough seems to have produced a comprehensive cartulary of its holdings of real property’. This caught my attention because the source I was working on at the time, the Norwich Domesday Book compiled around 1396, was exactly that: a late medieval urban cartulary. In the words of G.R.C. Davis ‘Cartularies are registers of muniments, that is to say of the title-deeds, charters of privilege and other documents which are kept by landowners as evidence of their personal or corporate rights.’ As a volume made up of copies of all the available deeds relating to property that belonged to the community of Norwich, the Norwich Domesday Book certainly fits this definition. My search for similar volumes for other urban areas has been so far unsuccessful and it appears that I have been working on possibly the only surviving British medieval urban source of this kind.

The comment in the Cambridge Urban History highlights the significant problem of the limitations of the available published material on late medieval Norwich. Studies, by Ben McCree (on peacemaking and guilds), Philippa Maddern (on social order), Carole Rawcliffe (on hospitals and health provision) andNorman Tanner (on the Church), for example, have shed much light on the period. But Norwich in the late Middle Ages has received relatively little attention, especially in terms of its social and economic history. Understandably, the lack of published material in recent years has led to the Norwich example being somewhat overlooked in the Cambridge Urban History. Fortunately, this situation is beginning to be rectified, with the recent volume of essays on the Medieval Norwich. My thesis, on the social and economic history of the late medieval city, 1350 to 1400, also aims to fill part of the void. One of the key sources for my research has been the late fourteenth-century NorwichDomesdayBookbecause, as well as recording the city's holdings of real property, it allows us to see the policies of the late fourteenth-century Norwich government. This paper discusses the source and explores what it can tell us about late medieval Norwich society and the activities of the ruling elite.