Domesday Book

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy D Wilson. So back when we
talked about old and ancient roads, one of the pieces
that I read about the Ridgeway mentioned the Doomsday Book

(00:23):
as a reference for the age of the historical site there,
and I thought, have we ever talked in detail about
the Doomsday Book on the show? Like I knew it
had come up before, but I was like, I don't
know that we've ever actually discussed the whole thing and
why it existed. And then I kept finding myself just
looking things up about it as a curiosity, and I
was like, well, that's gonna have to happen. So here

(00:44):
we are to contextualize all of this and really explain
the scope of this thing. The BBC wrote of the
Doomsday Book project quote, it was an exercise unparalleled in
contemporary Europe and was not matched in its comprehensive coverage
of the cunt until the population censuses of the nineteenth century.
Although Doomsday itself is not a full population census and

(01:07):
the names that appear in it are mainly only those
of people who owned the land. So it's a big
old project, big old data gathering project. Yeah. So the
Doomsday Book, which looks like it should be pronounced Domesday
but is not. If you're like, what's the Doomsday Book,

(01:28):
it's a survey like a census and a property record,
much less ominous than the doomsday that its name might suggest.
It wasn't called the Doomsday Book by its originator. It
didn't really have a name at that point. It was
just called the Description of England, with some of the
documents prepared as part of its assembly each having their

(01:50):
own names, and the whole project was initiated by William
the First, also known as William the Conqueror and even
less flatteringly, William the Bastard. We're going to give you
the broad strokes on his rise to power because it
makes clear exactly why he wanted this survey completed. William
was born in Falaise, Normandy, most likely in ten twenty eight.

(02:12):
His father was Robert, the first Duke of Normandy, and
his mother was a woman named Erleva, she sometimes noted
as being called Arlette, and she was the king's concubine.
Thus his less than flattering nickname. William was Robert's only son,
and he was just seven when his father became ill
and died while traveling home from a trip to Jerusalem,

(02:34):
and at that point William, who Robert had named as
an heir, became William the Second of Normandy. William's life
after he inherited the title of Duke of Normandy was
marked by constant challenges, intrigues, and loss. His own family
was pretty apathetic about a situation because they were all
jockeying for power, and they knew if he died or

(02:58):
was murdered, they would stay to benefit from that. Because
he was just a child, a lot of people assumed
that they could really do whatever they wanted without any
real repercussions from authorities, and really they weren't wrong. Without
a strong leader, some people felt comfortable just laying claim
to their own power. They would build new castles with

(03:18):
which to defend their claims, and this led to a
lot of violent conflict. Yeah, theoretically, you were supposed to
get permission to build a new castle that was not happening,
and then to make matters worse, the adults who were
supposed to be supporting William and were were often attacked.
His personal tutor was murdered, as were three of his guardians,

(03:41):
and over the years, various historians have theorized that all
of this instability in his early years really catalyzed William's
later hardline positions regarding law and order. After being knighted
at the age of fifteen, William went hard trying to
prosecute and punish people who had overstepped and taken in
advantage of the chaos of his early years as duke,

(04:03):
and that led to more conflict. Most of the people
he was trying to reclaim land from had held it
for years at that point, so they felt it was
very much theirs, and they had no intention of paying
any back taxes levied on it. Numerous rebellions were mounted
because of all of this, and while there was mixed
success for William in terms of these conflicts, he did

(04:26):
learn a lot about battle and he developed his style
as a commander, which was direct and pragmatic. Also during
this time, William got a good bit of help from
King Henry the First of France, who took the throne
in ten thirty one. After things settled down for William
in Normandy, he supported Henry's efforts elsewhere, especially when it

(04:47):
came to expanding France's territory in the south. In ten
fifty three, William married Matilda of Flanders after negotiating for
her hand as part of an alliance with her father,
Baldwin the f fifth. This was actually a problematic marital
alliance in the eyes of the church. Pope Leo the
ninth had stated that because the two were third cousins

(05:10):
once removed, the marriage was incestuous and should not happen.
But they got married anyway, and it seems to have
been a pretty good match. They had nine children that
lived to adulthood, and Matilda ruled Normandy when William was away.
Regarding their choice to ignore the pope, that was pretty serious.
It was also a little surprising because William was known

(05:31):
to be very religious. But six or seven years into
the marriage he reconciled with the church, and he made
amends by agreeing to build two monasteries at cont one
in his name and one in Matilda's. This penance enabled
the papacy to officially sanction their marriage, and that bolstered
William's position during another period of upheaval in Normandy. William

(05:54):
made a deal with Edward the Confessor, who was the
King of England and also William's cousin. Edward had no heir,
and William thought that he could be Edwards named Air
and this was likely something that was possible because he
had allied with Flanders through marriage, and as this agreement
seems to have happened even before the marriage took place,

(06:15):
but after William had made his deal with Baldwin the Fifth,
so he was in a good position to be like, hey,
I could handle this kind of power. That deal became
important because William had fallen out of favor with King Henry.
In the meantime, Henry and Jeffrey Martel also known as
Jeffrey the second Count of Anjous, had reconciled after their

(06:37):
own falling out, and they had joined forces to launch
an attack on William's Normandy, which happened as multiple rebellion
efforts were all happening within Normandy. William managed to regain
control of Normandy, and then, regarding his conflict with the
Crown and the Count of Anjous, he got lucky. King
Henry died on August fourth, ten sixty and his eight

(06:59):
years year old son, Philip the First took the throne,
with widowed Queen Anne of Kievs serving as regent. Just
a few months later, on November fourteenth, Jeffrey Martel also
died and his title went to his nephews. So William's
two strongest limiters to his success in expanding Norman lands
were no longer on the board, and their successors were

(07:22):
neither as strong nor as driven to stop him. Okay,
so now we have to go back to Edward the Confessor,
and we are reaching a point where there are two
different narratives of what happened next. According to the Norman version,
Edward sent Harold, Earl of Wessex from England to Normandy
to confirm the agreement that Edward would name William as

(07:44):
his heir. Harold was shipwrecked and he was captured by
one of William's vessels, Gui, the first of Ponthieu. William
intervened to free Harold, and Harold told William that yes,
Edward was ready to confirm their bequest agreement. This involved
the swearing of an oath on Harold's part. Again, that's
according to Norman sources. Some of those sources include the

(08:07):
bio tapestry, which features an image of Norman's swearing fealty
to William. The alternate version suggests that Harold's mission was
not about confirming that agreement, because Edward named Harold as
his heir while he was on his deathbed, so either
he sent Harold for a different reason or he changed
his mind. But when Edward died on January fifth, ten

(08:30):
sixty six, the throne went to Harold after the nobility
confirmed him. Unsurprisingly, this was not something that delighted William,
and it also brought conflict from other places, because William
wasn't the only person that thought he should inherit from Edward.
Before William could even get his affairs in order to
bolster his standing and get ready to attack England, Harold's

(08:53):
brother Tostig and Harold the second Hardrod of Norway invaded
England to wrest power from Harold. They were unsuccessful, but
left Harold weakened and low on troops. William was able
to take advantage of this, and was of course victorious
at the Battle of Hastings, during which King Harold was killed.
There's a particularly grizzly and famous account of that death

(09:17):
where he gets shot right in the eye, which sounds awful.
But William became William the First of England on December
twenty fifth, ten sixty six. Yeah, we have old episodes
about the Battle of Hastings and about the Tapestry all
hanging out there in the archive. With William finally on
the throne of England's we can finally start talking about

(09:38):
the Doomsday Book, and we will get into it after
we first pause for a sponsor break. Been to twenty
years after William became King of England, his leadership was
as tumultuous as it had been as Duke of Normandy

(09:59):
in France. He went home to Normandy in ten sixty seven,
but he had to return to England almost immediately to
deal with a series of rebellions, and he became rather
ruthless in putting such rebellions down over the next several years.
William is known for introducing a lot of Norman governing
structures to England. Some of these were literal structures, including

(10:21):
the Tower of London and other castles, that were intended
to give Norman lords central strongholds from which they could
control the surrounding lands. Those Norman lords had replaced members
of England's aristocracy as part of William's restructuring, and he
had instituted a landholding policy that required promises of military

(10:43):
service to the lords that oversaw them. William traveled between
Normandy and England throughout his reign, sometimes returning to his
original home for years before something like a rebellion would
bring him back to England to assert his authority. And
as he faced both within and without his kingdom, that
system of landholding that he established became more and more

(11:06):
important to him. William the First wanted to make sure
that he understood completely who owned what and thus who
owed him military service as well as money, and so
he decided at the end of ten eighty five that
he needed a survey assessing who was on what land
and details of any estates. This survey would ultimately yield

(11:28):
what became known as Doomsday Book. Doomsday Book is sometimes
described as the way William the First assessed his new kingdom,
but it was almost twenty years before he initiated the project,
so obviously that is not accurate. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle,
which is a history that was started in the late
ninth century and was updated in fits and starts until

(11:51):
eleven fourteen. That mentions the moment that William made his
decision to have the survey done, describing it this way quote.
After this had the King a large meeting and very
deep consultation with his council about this land, how it
was occupied, and by what sort of men. Then he
sent his men all over England into each shire, commissioning

(12:15):
them to find out how many hundreds of hides were
in the shire, what land the King himself had, and
what stock upon the land, or what dews he ought
to have by the year from the shire. Also he
commissioned them to record in writing how much land his
archbishops had, and his diocesan bishops, and his abbots, and

(12:36):
his earls, And though I may be prolix and tedious,
what or how much each man had who was an
occupier of land in England, either in land or in stock,
and how much money it were worth. So very narrowly, indeed,
did he commission them to trace it out that there
was not one single hide, nor a yard of land

(12:56):
name or over. It is shameful to tell, though he
thought it no shame to do it, Not even an
ox or nora, a cow, nor a swine was there
left that was not set down in his writ and
all the recorded particulars were afterwards brought to him. Incidentally,
hides here is not referencing animal hides. It is a

(13:19):
measurement of land. So Doomsday Book was actually two books,
and it still exists, but not quite in that form,
and we're going to talk about that later. The first
volume is called Great Doomsday and the second is called
Little Doomsday. There are also additional supporting pieces of writing,
many of which were summarized in Great Doomsday. Great Doomsday

(13:41):
is written in an abbreviated form of Latin on parchment
that's made of sheepskin. Most of the ink in it
is black, although red ink was used for page headers, corrections,
and addendums. This total's four hundred and thirteen pages. Great
Doomsday includes most of the records collected about all of
the county surveyed, with the exception of Norfolk, Essex, and Suffolk.

(14:05):
Those are included in Little Doomsday, but not as summaries.
It seems like these should have been incorporated into the
larger first volume at some point, but for reasons unknown
that did not happen. This whole thing also did not
include the northern areas of England. London, Winchester and Bristol
are also excluded, as are Northumberland and Durham. There may

(14:27):
have been, and probably were, plans to get to all
of that, but those areas and some other small towns
and villages that we know existed but weren't included, either
never got their data collected or we do not have
the records. Little Doomsday is actually a more detailed work
than Great Doomsday, and though its cover size is smaller,

(14:48):
it has more pages at four hundred and seventy five.
It appears that the larger book made use of records
similar to those than Little Doomsday and condensed and abbreviated them.
In Great Doomsday appears to have been written by a
single person, it appears that a second scribe checked the
work and made some notes. In contrast, Little Doomsday appears

(15:10):
to have had several different people recording information in it.
Those supporting documents that we mentioned earlier offer their own
unique insights into this whole project. For example, the document
known as Inquisition of the County of Cambridge, which has
a much longer Latin name that I thought I should
not attempt, includes information on process and procedure for capturing

(15:34):
all of this data. And it's from this document that
we know that the whole thing was carried out as
a series of sworn inquests. So it's believed that major
landowners initially sent in information who their tenants were, what
manners were part of their land, et cetera, and then
that information was compared to existing records. Then came the

(15:55):
part where William sent his men all over England, as
described in the quote that Tracy read earlier, to hold
these inquests and get confirmation and additional details about land holdings.
The commissioners conducted the proceedings at assigned circuits, each of
which was divided into counties and then subdivided into Feif's hundreds, vills, manners,

(16:17):
and sub manners, with some circuits subdividing even further. There
were seven circuits in total, with three to four commissioners
assigned to each, and the juries that were assembled for
these inquests were made up of Norman and Anglo Saxon
members to avoid bias, and then witnesses were called to
verify the information that the landowners, which were literal landlords,

(16:39):
had provided. The questions asked at the inquests also appeared
in the supplemental documents. There are eighteen of them. What
the manner was called? Who held it at the time
of King Edward? Who holds it now? How many hides
there are? How many plows held by the lord, and
how many belonging to the peasants? How many villains those

(17:01):
were wealthy sort of in quotation marks indentured peasants. They
would not have been wealthy at all. It was relatively
more prosperous. How many cotters those are indentured peasants, who
owned land totaling less than five acres? How many slaves?
How many freemen? How many soakmen? Those were freemen who

(17:22):
owed dues to their lord? How much woodland? How much meadow?
How much pasture? How many mills, how many fisheries? How
much had been added or taken away from the estate?
What it used to be worth altogether? And what it
is worth now? These questions were posed in triplicate. One

(17:43):
set of answers was given for the time of Edward
the Confessor before ten sixty six. One set was to
capture the situation in the aftermath of William the first
redistribution of property that was right after he took the throne,
and then the third set was to reflect the situation
at the time the survey was perfer formed, and the
answers to all of these questions were then compiled and

(18:04):
used to create first one set of documents and then
the summaries that appear in the Great Doomsday. Landowners' names
and they were generally all Normans with a few exceptions
were recorded and some of their Anglo Saxon under tenants.
Once all of these inquests were complete, the commissioners then
assembled together so that all of their collected data could

(18:25):
be amassed. So what does all that data show. More
than thirteen thousand places are mentioned in the Doomsday Book,
most of them are still around today, although in some
cases the names have changed. Sprinkled throughout all those places
are thirty thousand recorded manners. The total value of all

(18:45):
the properties listed in the book is estimated at seventy
three thousand pounds calculated by size. Thirty five percent of
the land was deemed arable, twenty five percent was pasture
or meadow land, with meadow being the dominant, the two
fifteen percent was woodland, and the remaining twenty five percent
was listed as other. This clearly shows too, the way

(19:09):
that William consolidated wealth and power among his followers. Whereas
two thousand Anglo Saxons had owned the majority of the
surveyed land in the time of Edward the Confessor, by
ten eighty six, just two hundred people did, all of
them Normans. Seventeen percent of all of the land in
England was owned by the king and his family, and

(19:30):
then the church, bishops and abbots owned twenty six percent,
Tenants in chief owned fifty four percent, and those two
thousand Anglo Saxons had largely become under tenants to those
two hundred Norman landholders. And it showed that ninety percent
of the population lived outside of cities, and that three
quarters of them were serfs, and it estimated that about

(19:51):
sixteen thousand troops could be called up from the existing population.
What you can't get from Doomsday Book is a reliable
population count, because, as we mentioned in the intro and
then again just a little while ago, it listed only
the names of landholders, so they would say who was
under them, but not by names, so you can't really
reconcile that with accuracy, and Doomsday is the work that's

(20:14):
still being researched and reinterpreted. In twenty twenty one, a
paper in English Historical Review shared new insights into the work.
We talked about this and unearthed that year, but we
don't expect anybody to remember that. The study that resulted
in the paper was a collaboration between University of Oxford

(20:34):
and King's College London, led by doctor Stephen Baxter, Professor
of Medieval History at Oxford. Their work looked specifically at
one of the supporting documents, the Exon Doomsday. Its Latin
name is Liber Exoniensis, and Exon Doomsday is the oldest
of the manuscripts associated with the project. This particular part

(20:57):
of the work is not with the rest of the
two main sections. It's at the Exeter Cathedral Library, cataloged
as MS thirty five hundred. Yeah. I should point out too,
I didn't include it in this outline that this also
was published as a book by Baxter's team. But Baxter's
team carefully analyzed Exon Doomsday to determine which of the

(21:19):
numerous scribes two dozen who worked on it wrote which sections,
and then tracked what documents each of them had worked
from to do so, and it showed a really impressive
level of organization and efficiency. Doctor Baxter was quoted in
the press as saying of doomsday quote. This research shows
the compilation of Doomsday to be one of the most

(21:41):
remarkable feats of government in the recorded history of Britain.
The survey was brilliantly conceived to generate and structure information
that would enable the conqueror's regime to maximize his revenue
from different income streams. The conqueror's regime effectively compiled and
manipulated a dapt base of England's landed wealth in less

(22:02):
than nine months, using technologies no more complex than parchment,
pen and ink and human interaction. Perhaps most mind blowing
is the research team's determination that the first draft of
this whole project was done in the course of just
one hundred days, starting on Christmas Day ten eighty five,
when William first ordered the survey, and ending on Easter

(22:25):
ten eighty six, which was April fifth. The work notes
that taxes were collected at the same time the first
pass of the survey was done, and that the inquest portion,
which was more of a fact check, took place in
the following fifty days, being completed on May twenty fifth.
From that point to August. First, the information was all
parsed and reorganized into statistical summaries that would lead to

(22:49):
the production of the Great Doomsday. It's important to point
out that while this effort was unprecedented in its scope,
it wasn't as though William the Conqueror conjured the idea
of the land survey like this out of thin air.
Quite a few of the counties that were surveyed for
the Norman King had been surveyed before. Some of that

(23:09):
documentation was used to model the structure of Doomsday Book,
and Doomsday Book didn't supplant all those other records either.
Historian Sally Harvey, who studied the Doomsday Book throughout her career,
rote in nineteen seventy four, quote, we may emphasize the
background documentation and treasury practice that enabled the Doomsday survey

(23:31):
to be taken so quickly. Nevertheless, the enterprise was prodigious
and indicates that existing documentation was deemed inadequate. Yeah, there
are also some surveys similar to this that had already
happened in other parts of Europe. So again, not a
completely new concept coming up. We're going to talk about

(23:52):
how all of this information was used, but first, we
will hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed
in history class going. So you may be wondering what
did William the First do with all of this information

(24:13):
that he had commanded to be collected, Well, he actually
died before he could do a whole lot with it.
It wasn't quite completed when he died in September of
ten eighty seven. As we noted, some of the major
cities were not entered in the book, and information in
Little Doomsday and the additional documents was likely intended to
be incorporated into one main volume, but that seems to

(24:35):
have fallen to the wayside with William's death. But it
was still used to make decisions about governance and to
settle disputes long after William the First was gone, as
evidence of how important the project was. It wasn't until
almost one hundred years after the record was compiled that
it got its ominous sounding name the eleven seventy nine

(24:58):
Dialogue of the Exchequers, where it got the name Doomsday,
as that writing includes the note quote just as the
sentence of that strict and terrible last judgment cannot be
evaded by any art or subterfuge. So when a dispute
arises in this realm concerning facts which are written down,
and an appeal is made to the book itself, the

(25:19):
evidence it gives cannot be set at naught or evaded
with impunity. The name stuck. Even the Public Record Office,
which was tasked with caring for the book, started to
call it Doomsday, and it's been known that way since
the twelfth century. Incidentally, the Public Record Office is now
the National Archives. According to John MacDonald and gd Snooks,

(25:42):
writing in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in
nineteen eighty five, quote, during the first few centuries after
ten eighty six, dB was in constant use in the Exchequer,
where it held pride of place amongst Treasury documents, and
was even seriously consulted as late as fifteen seventy three
by Elizabeth I. As we look at this project and

(26:03):
its extraordinary collection of information, it's easy to see why
it has fascinated historians and researchers and has been a
topic of debate for centuries. Once again quoting Sally Harvey, quote,
Doomsday Book's own monumentality is one of its greatest hazards,
though it bulks largest as a source of information for

(26:24):
eleventh century England. It is by no means the sole
survivor of late Anglo Saxon and of Anglo Norman administration.
Many of the near contemporary texts have suffered because all
have been turned into Doomsday satellites, even texts which are
known to contain figures and arrangements which are not those
of Doomsday Book. On the other hand, the effort to

(26:47):
avoid the magnetism of Doomsday has caused a few historians
of administration to evade its ambit. Altogether, the Doomsday Survey
had motives and objectives, its findings were acted upon instantly,
and it remained a reference work for years to come.
We gain insight into the administration which produced the survey
and understand how Doomsday's existence affected the character of subsequent

(27:11):
administrative policy, particularly in the following reign. Harvey notes in
that writing, which was part of the published transactions of
the Royal Historical Society, that in some cases the scholarly
approach to the book kind of distances researchers from its
very necessity, because it's easy to lose sight of its
functional need and purpose. But some of the problem lies

(27:33):
in the fact that different researchers have perceived the function
and purpose of the work differently. While some have focused
on it as a financial tool for William the First,
others have suggested that its primary purpose was more about
the legal establishment of a new feudalism. Obviously, both of
these things can be true at once, but as historians

(27:55):
over the centuries have sought to analyze this work and
its true purpose, sometimes one or the other and even
other motivations have gotten lost. We don't actually know the
exact reason or reasons that William called for this extensive survey,
and it seems most likely there were multiple factors, like,
for example, we don't have any document where he says

(28:16):
to determine the nature of my lands, like we don't
have anything like that. It absolutely may have been about
just taxes or establishing Norman style feudalism, but William may
have also been influenced by the fact that he was
facing a likely invasion by Denmark and Norway at the time,
and he wanted to know everything he could about the
country for potential military strategizing, in part to see how

(28:40):
many of those people could be called up, but also
just what the country had and looked like if someone invaded,
and of course additional tax revenue that could be collected
would also help war efforts. There was also a growing
issue that was just bickering. The various people under William
who had been given land had started to argue about

(29:01):
whether that distribution had been handled fairly. It kind of
vibes like petulant kids to me. But I have the
distance of history, so it's easy to say that. But
with documentation of specifics about all of these lands, such
arguments could easily be put to rest. Doomsday is an
important document for all the reasons mentioned in the Sally

(29:21):
Harvey quote we read earlier, but also because it serves
as the beginning of written history for a lot of
towns and villages. It's become a foundational reference for historians,
though its interpretation has shifted and been questioned over the years.
In nineteen eighty six, to mark the nine hundredth anniversary
of William the First Survey, there was a project mounted

(29:43):
by the BBC to create a new version of the
Doomsday Book called Doomsday Reloaded, and this was intended to
create a new digital snapshot of the UK for future generations.
More than a million people participated in this project, submitting
their own digital document mentory accounts of ordinary life. Per
the BBC website that documented the project, Quote, schools and

(30:06):
community groups surveyed over one hundred eight thousand square kilometers
of the UK and submitted more than one hundred forty
seven thousand, eight hundred nineteen pages of text articles and
twenty three thousand, two hundred twenty five amateur photos cataloging
what it was like to live, work and play in
their community. The major fault in this project was the

(30:28):
storage media used for all that information, because remember this
was the eighties, this used layser discs. They could only
be read by some computers. That particular style of disc
technology really got left behind as the digital age advanced.
There were efforts to access and share the community disc Archive,

(30:49):
which included updates over the years, but in June of
twenty eighteen, the project was finally closed for good. The
website created for it is now part of the National Archive,
UK government web archive. Today, the physical volumes of Doomsday
Book are kept in the National Archives. And remember how
earlier we said there were two volumes, Now there are

(31:11):
technically five because the book was rebound in nineteen eighty four.
That was part of a long term preservation plan because
people still want to look at it, they are not
readily accessible to most people in their physical form. They
kind of held back for very specific requests of like
scholarship and legal needs. However, there is a complete digitized

(31:34):
version online that anyone can access. It is completely free.
That is thanks to the work of public interest technologist
Anna Powell Smith, who with permission, used digitized Doomsday data
compiled by jj N Palmer of the University of Hull
and his team. They compiled that data in the nineteen
nineties and she used it to make an interactive website

(31:55):
called opendoomsday. It is at opendoomsday dot org. Again, does
is spelled domes and you can click around a map
to see what data was collected there in William's survey.
It's a pretty cool project and massive and according to
the BBC, Doomsday is still valid as evidence to title
of land. It remained the most detailed account of England

(32:19):
and its landholdings for more than seven hundred years until
a national census was taken in eighteen oh one, and
people still love it and spend their entire careers researching it.
Which I kind of love. I have a very, very,
I think hilarious email. This is from our listener Kristen

(32:43):
and it is about divorce ranches. And she writes, Dear
Holly and Tracy, I've been meaning to write you about
your episode on divorce ranches in Nevada, as my family
has had a personal experience with a divorce ranch. One
summer in the mid nineteen sixties, my parents packed the
four of us kids into the station wagon and drove
from our home in northern California just across the state

(33:05):
line into Nevada to a dude ranch in Verding, Nevada
that's about ten miles west of Reno. My parents took
us there based on reports that the ranch was family friendly.
There's horse riding, swimming pool, playground games, lots of kids
to play with, et cetera. And when we arrived, the
place appeared to live up to their expectations. However, after

(33:26):
a time we did begin to notice a strange demographic
to the ranch. My father was the only man there
who wasn't part of the staff. People kept asking us,
is your mom staying here? Yes, where's your dad also
staying here? She then has in quotes question marks and
exclamation plays. Despite that, we did have a good time there.

(33:47):
I still remember horseback riding and meals served family style
on long tables and benches. The attached picture shows me,
my three brothers, and my mom absorbing the atmisphere at
the ranch. My dad was behind the camp for pet
tax I'm attaching a picture of our late great kitty,
Harry Potter cat. We adopted Harry Potter, who was a
homeless street kitten living on the island of Elba. He

(34:10):
was named by my daughter, who, at third grade, had
just discovered the magic of the Harry Potter books. Harry
was a very well traveled cat. He lived with us
in Milan, Washington, d c. And Beijing before retiring with
us to North Carolina. Harry was very loving and was
always available to help me with my costuming projects, as
shown here assisting with my ursula Seawitch bell a poc

(34:31):
cosplay construction. He was a wonderful kitty and we miss
him every day. I just want to thank you for
all you do to bring history to life and into
my home. I have an ma in history, but still
learn something new from you in nearly every podcast. My daughter,
a teacher has also become an addict after I introduced
her to you. I get a real kick out of
your delivery style and feel like you guys are two

(34:51):
of my besties that I haven't yet had the opportunity
to meet. Keep up the amazing work, Kristin. This is
so sweet and I love it and I'm scary following
you on Instagram, Kristen, I just love the idea of
somebody going to a divorce ranch for a family vacation
and kind of befuddling everyone. Where's your dad right there?

(35:14):
I do love it, but also I love that you
had a great time. That pictures gold. I hope you
keep it forever and ever and ever. Is so wonderful,
and Harry sounds like a wonderful cat. Thank you for
giving him a home and giving him a life that
many people would envy. It sounds like. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you'd like to

(35:36):
subscribe to the show and you haven't done that yet,
you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(35:56):
you listen to your favorite shows.

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