Cayton appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, entered under the hundred of Dic in Yorkshire. The survey assessed Cayton at 5.2 carucates of taxable land.

At the time of the survey, Cayton supported a recorded population of 43 villagers, 23 smallholders, 24 slaves, working 20 ploughs between them.

The survey records Cayton’s value at 7.5 shillings in 1086. No pre-Conquest figure survives – not unusual in the North, where records were disrupted by the Harrying and by the patchy coverage of the survey.

The survey lists 2 manors at Cayton under different lords. Splitting a single settlement between multiple tenants was common across the North – Saxon estates broken up and handed to William’s followers after 1066.

Resources Recorded at Cayton (1086)

Cattle: 6
Sheep: 206
Meadow: 2 acres
Woodland: 10 None

Other Settlements in Dic

The Meaning of the Name

The name Cayton is of Anglo-Saxon origin. Its final element derives from the Old English word tūn, a farmstead or village. The first element is most likely a personal name or an early descriptive term, now difficult to recover with certainty. Taken together the name probably meant something close to ‘a farmstead’.

Remarkably, the name has changed little since 1086, when the Domesday scribes wrote it as Cayton.

Listed Buildings Near Cayton

Historic England records 7 listed buildings within about a mile of Cayton. Listing protects structures of special architectural or historic interest, graded I (exceptional), II* (particularly important) and II.

Grade I

Church of Saint John the Baptist - 0.15 km

Grade II

Cayton Today

Today Cayton lies within the administrative area of Scarborough, and the settlement recorded a population of 2,547 at the 2021 census. Nine and a half centuries separate that figure from the small rural community the Domesday survey recorded here in 1086.

Read more about modern Cayton on Wikipedia .