By 1066 CHESTER was a prosperous town with a population of perhaps 2,500-3,000. Rendering a farm of £45 and three timber of marten pelts (i.e. 120 skins), together with an additional payment from the moneyers, it was assessed as a half hundred including the adjacent townships of Handbridge, Newton by Chester, 'Lee' (Overleigh and Netherleigh), and 'Redcliff', expressly said to be 'outside the city' but taxed with it. The city had its own laws and customs, administered by its hundredal court, over which presided 12 judges or doomsmen (iudices civitatis) drawn from the men of king, earl, and bishop, and liable to fines payable to the king and earl for failure to attend. The judges have been regarded as evidence of Scandinavian influence on the city's institutions and equated with the 'lawmen' (lagemen or iudices) of certain boroughs in the Danelaw. Indeed the laws of Chester, which were recorded in Domesday Book in exceptional detail, suggest that, as in other western towns dominated by a great local magnate, the status of its citizens was comparatively low. They were obliged to pay 10s. on taking up land in the city, and were also liable to heavy fines for failure to pay gavel or rent and for other misdemeanours.
Late Anglo-Saxon CHESTER was in the hands of three lords, king, earl, and bishop. The earl was particularly influential, a reflection of his very powerful position in Cheshire as a whole. In contrast with those towns where he was simply allocated the normal third share of a fixed farm, in Chester he was entitled to a variety of renders and was represented by an agent, a reeve (praepositus or minister) who seems to have had similar status to the king's representative: his peace was protected from infringement by the same fine of 40s. as that of the king's reeve. The earl's reeve took a third of the forfeitures for criminal offences, a third of the payments for evasions of the tolls, and a third of the tolls themselves. The earl also received a third of the farm and his due share of the various payments made by the city's seven moneyers. The 12 doomsmen who presided over the city court were drawn from his men as well as the king's. Apart from the king's larger share of the forfeitures, tolls, and renders, the only expression of royal superiority appears to have been his right of pre-emption of marten furs. The earl's reeve was apparently, then, a very important official in pre-Conquest Chester, similar perhaps to the representatives of the Norman earl who succeeded him. His only local rival was the bishop of Lichfield, whose extensive property in and near the city included 56 houses, the manor of 'Redcliff', and the 'bishop's borough' with its complex of ecclesiastical buildings focused on St. John's church, apparently quit of tax. The bishop also had important customary rights in the city, mainly fines payable for various transgressions of the laws regulating trade on Sundays and other holy days. His receipts from Chester were probably greater than in any other town in his diocese.
Of Chester's two minsters, the larger and richer in 1066 was St. Werburgh's, with 12 canons and a warden (custos), all owning houses in the city, and an endowment assessed at c. 30 hides, in Cheshire and Flintshire, except for the manors of Hanbury and Fauld in Staffordshire. Its precinct occupied part if not all of the north-eastern quarter of the Roman fortress, and it was the main ecclesiastical focus of the surrounding area, with a large extramural parish. The cult which it housed apparently enjoyed something of a resurgence in the mid 11th century. A late 12th-century account told of the canons twice parading St. Werburgh's shrine in defence of the city when it was besieged by a Welsh king called Griffin and by the rulers Harold of Denmark, Malcolm of Scotland, and the 'king of Goths and Galwedy'. Although ascribed to the reign of Edward the Elder (899-924), the first episode almost certainly alluded to Edward the Confessor and Harold Godwineson's conflict with Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, king of Gwynedd, in the 1050s and early 1060s. The second story is more puzzling, but may represent some confused memory also of the 1050s, when Gruffudd intrigued with Earl Ælfgar of Mercia, Magnus, son of King Harald Hardrada of Norway, and the men of the Isles. Other wonders attributed to the saint perhaps also date from the same period.
St. John's had a dean (matricularius) and seven canons, all with houses in the city, and a parish much smaller than St. Werburgh's. In 1086 it was recorded as holding only the adjacent small manor of 'Redcliff', perhaps because its holdings were merged with those of the bishop. A locally influential masons' workshop at the church used the soft red sandstone of 'Redcliff' to manufacture distinctive circle-headed grave crosses of a type found not only in Chester, but in Flintshire and Wirral.