DOMESDAY BOOK is not only a record of those who held land in England in King William's day but also of those who occupied the same estates before the Conquest. Various strategies have been developed to identify these pre-Conquest holders, who constitute (collectively) the Snark of this paper's title. One aspect which has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserves, is status – the Boojum. Indications of status are not rare in Domesday Book, but they are rarely unambiguous. The distinction between personal and tenurial dependency is not always clear, and even when tenurial dependency is plain, it is not always obvious what kind of dependency is intended. Yet status is not only important in helping to attach names to individuals, it also tells us something about the wider society to which those individuals belong. This in turn not only illuminates the structure of English landed society in the reign of Edward the Confessor, but also the process of social and tenurial change after the Norman conquest and settlement.

I shall discuss the problem of status, personal and tenurial, with reference to a particular vill, namely Abington Pigotts, in the hundred of Armingford, in southwest Cambridgeshire. It is not a random selection, for Abington Pigotts has been used as an example of ‘the disintegration of pre-Conquest patterns’ of tenure and lordship in which ‘every component of this Cambridgeshire vill was either broken down after the Conquest or used to form a new composite lordship’. This paper will propose a rather different conclusion.

The format of Domesday Book does little to encourage the study of English vills. Within each shire, the account of non-royal and non-burghal land is arranged by the fiefs of those who held directly of the king, and within each fief, by the individual tenements of those lords and their subordinates, albeit organized either explicitly or implicitly by the hundred within which the tenement lay. Given an index, it is a simple, if laborious, task to reconstruct the vills, but for Cambridgeshire, the work has already been done, in the Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis, the Cambridgeshire Inquest, known to Domesday scholars as the ICC. Though preserved only in a twelfth-century copy, it is earlier than Domesday Book, and bears witness to the survey of 1086 on which Domesday Book is based.