Great Domesday Book

Great Domesday Book

“Then, at the midwinter [1085], was the king in Gloucester with his council ... . 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 sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning 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 dues he ought to have by the year from the shire’.”
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

This famous tome was completed in 1086 at the behest of King William the Conqueror (ca. 1028-1087) in order to record the findings of the “Great Survey” described above. This was used by William and his successors to determine what taxes and other dues they could expect, and the extent of royal land holdings. It is written in Latin, with some vernacular where Latin equivalents did not exist. An invaluable source on medieval England for modern historians and economists, no other survey approaching the scope and extent of the Domesday Book was made in Britain for nearly 800 years until the 1873 Return of Owners of Land, referred to as the “Modern Domesday”.

A Working Document

Neatly written in black ink with red flourishes, corrections were made by crossing the words out with red ink and replacing them with text written in red. Most villages and towns in England are listed – 13,418 place names in total – save for those cities with tax exempt status, like London, areas in the North not yet under royal control, or territories where the local bishop had the exclusive right to taxation. It originally consisted to two volumes that were later combined: the “Little Domesday” covering much of Southern England, physically smaller but more detailed, and the “Great Domesday” covering the rest of England with less detail but more systematically.

As Final as Judgment Day

The name commonly applied to the manuscript first appeared in 1221 and is an allusion to the Last Judgement, i.e. doomsday or “domesday” according to contemporary English. This was, according to Richard FitzNeal (ca. 1130-98), royal treasurer to William the Conqueror’s grandson King Henry II (1133-89) because:
“The book is metaphorically called by the native English, Domesday, i.e., the Day of Judgement. For as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skillful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to on those matters which it contains, its sentence cannot be quashed or set aside with impunity. That is why we have called the book "the Book of Judgement", ... not because it contains decisions on various difficult points, but because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable.”