The trial of Penenden Heath occurred in the decade after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, probably in 1076, and involved a dispute between Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, half-brother of William the Conqueror and Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury and others.
[1] Odo de Bayeux was previously Earl of Kent and the primary landowner of the region subsequent to his half-brother William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066.
[2] It has subsequently been argued that: "most of the lands had been lost not to Odo, but to Earl Godwine and his family during Edward's reign and perhaps even earlier..." and that "Odo had simply succeeded to these encroachments and the conflict between archbishop and earl was to a large extent a reprise of that between Robert of Jumièges and Godwine in 1051-2,"[3] the suggestion being that Lanfranc, despite being the Prior of a Norman monastery (and born in Pavia, Lombardy), was attempting to restore the pre-conquest landholdings for the Church of Canterbury.
The older is a condensed version whilst the second, slightly later document, contains exaggerated assessments concluding with an overly-detailed description of the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury over offences committed on the King's highways.
Analysis of the relationship between these two documents by historians suggests that the later transcript was composed after the monks of Christ Church Priory, Canterbury failed to have their claims to the trial's established privileges recorded in the Domesday Survey.