Domesday Book

Domesday Book, sometimes called just Domesday, written record of a statistical survey of England ordered by William the Conqueror, and the most important single record in the history of early medieval Britain. The survey, made in 1086, was designed to register the landed wealth of the country in a systematic fashion, and determine the revenues due to the king. It was carried out on a scale unparalleled in medieval Europe. The previous system of taxation was of ancient origin and had become obsolete. By listing all feudal estates, both lay and ecclesiastical, the Domesday Book also enabled William to strengthen his authority by exacting oaths of allegiance from all tenants on the land, as well as from the nobles and churchmen on whose land the tenants lived. The survey was executed by groups of officers called legati, who visited each county and conducted a public inquiry. The set of questions that these officers asked of the town and county representatives constituted the Inquisitio Eliensis; the answers supplied the information from which the Domesday Book was compiled. The Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis, a surviving copy of the recorded questions and answers for Cambridgeshire, illustrates the process. “Domesday” is a corruption of “Doomsday” (the day of the final judgement); the work was so named because its judgements in terms of levies and assessments were irrevocable.

The original manuscript was in two volumes. The first and larger one, Great Domesday, included information on all England, with the exception of three eastern counties (Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk), several northern counties, London (for which no record survives), and some other towns; no Domesday records of the counties north of the River Tees (Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, and northern Lancashire) were ever made. The surveys of the three eastern counties made up the second volume, which was known as Little Domesday. These documents were frequently used in medieval law courts, and in their published form they are occasionally used today in cases involving questions of topography or genealogy. The two volumes were first published in 1783; an index was published in a separate volume in 1811; and an additional volume, containing the Inquisitio Eliensis with surveys of the lands of Ely, was published in 1816.