Domesday Book


Domesday Book is a manuscript record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of William the Conqueror. The manuscript was originally known by the Latin name Liber de Wintonia, meaning "Book of Winchester", where it was originally kept in the royal treasury. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 1085 the king sent his agents to survey every shire in England, to list his holdings and dues owed to him.
Written in Medieval Latin, it was highly abbreviated and included some vernacular native terms without Latin equivalents. The survey's main purpose was to record the annual value of every piece of landed property to its lord, and the resources in land, labour force, and livestock from which the value derived.
The name "Domesday Book" came into use in the 12th century. Richard FitzNeal wrote in the Dialogus de Scaccario that the book was so called because its decisions were unalterable, like those of the Last Judgment, and its sentence could not be quashed.
The manuscript is now held at the National Archives in Kew, London. Domesday was first printed in full in 1783, and in 2011 the Open Domesday website made the manuscript available on the Internet.
The book is an invaluable primary source for modern historians, especially economic historians. No survey approaching the scope and extent of Domesday Book was attempted again in Britain until the 1873 Return of Owners of Land which presented the first complete, post-Domesday picture of the distribution of landed property in the United Kingdom.

Name

The manuscripts do not carry a formal title. The work is referred to internally as a descriptio, and in other early administrative contexts as the king's brevia. From about 1100, references appear to the liber or carta of Winchester, its usual place of custody; and from the mid-12th to early 13th centuries to the Winchester or king's rotulus.
To the English, who held the book in awe, it became known as "Domesday Book", in allusion to the Last Judgment and in specific reference to the definitive character of the record. The word "doom" was the usual Old English term for a law or judgment; it did not carry the modern overtones of fatality or disaster. Richard FitzNeal, treasurer of England under King Henry II, explained the name's connotations in detail in the Dialogus de Scaccario :
The name "Domesday" was subsequently adopted by the book's custodians, being first found in an official document in 1221.
Either through false etymology or deliberate word play, the name also came to be associated with the Latin phrase Domus Dei. Such a reference is found as early as the late 13th century, in the writings of Adam of Damerham; and in the 16th and 17th centuries, antiquaries such as John Stow and Sir Richard Baker believed this was the name's origin, alluding to the church in Winchester in which the book had been kept. As a result, the alternative spelling "Domesdei" became popular for a while.
The usual modern scholarly convention is to call the work "Domesday Book", without a definite article, but the form "the Domesday Book" is also found in both academic and non-academic contexts.

Content and organisation

Domesday Book encompasses two independent works : "Little Domesday", and "Great Domesday". Space was left in Great Domesday for a record of the City of London and Winchester, but they were never written up. Other areas of modern London were then in Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, and Essex and have their place in Domesday Book's treatment of those counties. Most of Cumberland, Westmorland, and the entirety of the County Palatine of Durham and Northumberland were omitted. They did not pay the national land tax called the geld, and the framework for Domesday Book was geld assessment lists.
"Little Domesday", so named because its format is physically smaller than its companion's, is more detailed than Great Domesday. In particular, it includes the numbers of livestock on the home farms of lords, but not peasant livestock. It represents an earlier stage in processing the results of the Domesday Survey before the drastic abbreviation and rearrangement undertaken by the scribe of Great Domesday Book.
File:Domesday binding.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.07|Great Domesday in its "Tudor" binding: a wood-engraving of the 1860s
Both volumes are organised into a series of chapters listing the manors held by each named tenant-in-chief directly from the king. Tenants-in-chief included bishops, abbots and abbesses, barons from Normandy, Brittany, and Flanders, minor French serjeants, and English thegns. The richest magnates held several hundred manors typically spread across England, though some large estates were highly concentrated. For example, Baldwin the Sheriff had 176 manors in Devon and four nearby in Somerset and Dorset. Tenants-in-chief held variable proportions of their manors in demesne, and had subinfeudated to others, whether their own knights, other tenants-in-chief of their own rank, or members of local English families. Manors were generally listed within each chapter by the hundred or wapentake, the second tier of local government under the counties, in which they lay.
Each county's list opened with the king's demesne, which had possibly been the subject of separate inquiry. Under the feudal system, the king was the only true "owner" of land in England by virtue of his allodial title. He was thus the ultimate overlord, and even the greatest magnate could do no more than "hold" land from him as a tenant under one of the various contracts of feudal land tenure. Holdings of bishops followed, then of abbeys and religious houses, then of lay tenants-in-chief, and lastly the king's serjeants and thegns.
In some counties, one or more principal boroughs formed the subject of a separate section. A few have separate lists of disputed titles to land called clamores. The equivalent sections in Little Domesday are called Inuasiones.
In total, 268,984 people are tallied in the Domesday Book, each of whom was the head of a household. Some households, such as urban dwellers, were excluded from the count, but the exact parameters remain a subject of historical debate. Sir Michael Postan, for instance, contends that these may not represent all rural households, but only full peasant tenancies, thus excluding landless men and some subtenants. H. C. Darby, when factoring in the excluded households and using various different criteria for those excluded, concludes that the 268,984 households listed most likely indicate a total English population between 1.2 and 1.6 million.
Domesday names a total of 13,418 places. Apart from the wholly rural portions, which constitute its bulk, Domesday contains entries of interest concerning most towns, which were probably made because of their bearing on the fiscal rights of the crown therein. These include fragments of custumals, records of the military service due, markets, mints, and so forth. From the towns, from the counties as wholes, and from many of its ancient lordships, the crown was entitled to archaic dues in kind, such as honey.
The Domesday Book lists 5,624 mills in the country, which is considered a low estimate since the book is incomplete. For comparison, fewer than 100 mills were recorded in the country a century earlier. Georges Duby indicates this means a mill for every 46 peasant households and implies a great increase in the consumption of baked bread in place of boiled and unground porridge. The book also lists 28,000 slaves, a smaller number than was enumerated in 1066.
In the Domesday Book, scribes' orthography was heavily geared towards French, most lacking k and w, regulated forms for sounds and and ending many hard consonant words with ⟨e⟩ as they were accustomed to do with most dialects of French at the time.

Similar works

In a parallel development, around 1100, the Normans in southern Italy completed their Catalogus Baronum based on Domesday Book. The original manuscript was destroyed in the Second World War, but the text survives in printed editions.

Survey

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that planning for the survey was conducted in 1085, and the book's colophon states the survey was completed in 1086. It is not known when exactly Domesday Book was compiled, but the entire copy of Great Domesday appears to have been copied out by one person on parchment, while six scribes seem to have been used for Little Domesday. Writing in 2000, David Roffe argued that the inquest and the construction of the book were two distinct exercises. He believes the latter was completed, if not started, by William II following his accession to the English throne; William II quashed a rebellion that followed and was based on, though not consequence of, the findings of the inquest.
Most shires were visited by a group of royal officers who held a public inquiry, probably in the great assembly known as the shire court. These were attended by representatives of every township as well as of the local lords. The unit of inquiry was the hundred. The return for each hundred was sworn to by 12 local jurors, half of them English and half of them Norman.
What is believed to be a full transcript of these original returns is preserved for several of the Cambridgeshire Hundreds – the Cambridge Inquisition – and is of great illustrative importance. The Inquisitio Eliensis is a record of the lands of Ely Abbey. The Exon Domesday covers Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and one manor of Wiltshire. Parts of Devon, Dorset, and Somerset are also missing. Otherwise, this contains the full details supplied by the original returns.
Through comparison of what details are recorded in which counties, six Great Domesday "circuits" can be determined.
  1. Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey, Sussex
  2. Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire
  3. Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex
  4. Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire
  5. Cheshire, the land Inter Ripam et Mersham, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire – the Marches
  6. Derbyshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland, Yorkshire