Domesday Book
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | Date: 2008
Domesday Book , record of a general census of England made (1085-86) by order of William I (William the Conqueror). The survey ascertained the economic resources of most of the country for purposes of more accurate taxation. Royal agents took the evidence of local men in each hundred (county subdivision), the latter acting as inquest jurors. Descriptions of each piece of land, its present and former holders, the holding itself, and the population on it were among the facts recorded. For the thoroughness and speed with which it was taken, the Domesday survey as an administrative measure is unsurpassed in medieval history. Written from the data thus gathered, the Domesday Book is an invaluable historical source. It furnished the material for F. W. Maitland's masterly survey, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), which deals with social and economic conditions in Anglo-Saxon and Conquest times. Many of the Domesday records have been printed by counties in the Victoria County Histories, and several portions have been independently published. The name domesday is a variant of doomsday, meaning day of judgment.
Bibliography: See V. H. Galbraith, The Making of Domesday Book (1961, repr. 1981); R. W. Finn, The Domesday Inquest and the Making of Domesday Book (1961) and Introduction to Domesday Book (1963); J. C. Holt, Domesday Studies (1987).
Author not available, DOMESDAY BOOK.,
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2008
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press
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Decoding domesday: David Roffe asks why exactly Domesday Book, the oldest and most precious of the English public records, was compiled--and for whom.
History Today; 6/1/2007; Roffe, David; 787 words
; DOMESDAY BOOK must have always impressed. It is in fact not one book but two. Volume One, known as Great Domesday, is a large folio of almost 800 pages. In it, shire by shire and lord by lord, is contained an account of thirty of the thirty-three counties of late eleventh-century England. Volume
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Domesday Book put on disc for first time in Yorkshire project
Yorkshire Post; 2/2/2008; 420 words
; WHEN it was compiled on the orders of William the Conqueror in 1086, the Domesday Book provided a record of who owned every pig, goat and sheep in England. But for almost a thousand years its vast contents have been inaccessible to the general public and difficult to understand. Now a Yorkshire
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Domesday Book goes online as dream is fulfilled
Yorkshire Post; 8/5/2006; 393 words
; Grace Hammond The pages of the "nation's finest treasure" - the Domesday Book - can now be explored on the Internet. The original 11th-century document, which is stored at the National Archives in Kew, west London, has been seen by less than one per cent of the population, research has shown. From
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Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England.(Review)
Canadian Journal of History; 4/1/1999; Neville, Cynthia J.; 787 words
; Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England, by Robin Fleming. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998. xix, 548 pp. $95.00. King William's great inquest of 108e and the enormous Domesday Book that it produced have probably generated more enduring scholarly
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Domesday Book can now be explored online.(News)
The Birmingham Post (England); 8/5/2006; 542 words
; Midland historians have been given the chance to explore the nation's finest treasure - the Domesday Book - online. The original document is the country's most famous and earliest surviving public record, featuring a survey and valuation of land. It was commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085
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