The settlement of Duggleby is recorded in William I’s Domesday survey of 1086, entered under the hundred of Scard in Yorkshire. The survey assessed Duggleby at 4 carucates of taxable land.

At the time of the survey, Duggleby supported a recorded population of 10 villagers, 1 smallholder, 5 slaves, working 5 ploughs between them.

The survey records Duggleby’s value at 2.25 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.

Resources Recorded at Duggleby (1086)

Woodland: 1 * 0.5 leagues

Other Settlements in Scard

The Meaning of the Name

The name Duggleby is of Scandinavian origin. Its final element derives from the Old Norse word bý, 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’.

Names of this type are a fingerprint of Scandinavian settlement: they cluster across the old Danelaw, where Norse-speaking settlers renamed or founded villages from the late 9th century onward.

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