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From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
The Domesday Book is the record of a great survey of much of England, carried out in 1086 on the orders of William the Conqueror.[1] It lists who held land, what it was worth and how many ploughs, mills, oxen and pigs were on it, making it the most thorough count of English pigs ever attempted until the next one.
The survey was ordered at Christmas 1085, at Gloucester, at a time of year when most people are content to count presents.
Royal commissioners travelled the country in circuits, asking the same set of questions in place after place. The answers were written down in Latin, in a heavily abbreviated form, and more than 13,000 places are recorded.[2]
Land was measured in units such as the hide, originally the amount of land needed to support a household. A hide was therefore exactly as big as it needed to be, a principle modern surveyors admire but are not permitted to use.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded, with evident disapproval, that the survey was so thorough that not a single ox, cow or pig was left out. The pigs were not asked for comment.
London and Winchester do not appear in the book, and nor does most of the far north of England. Historians have proposed several explanations, the least scholarly of which is that everyone was out when the commissioners called.
The people who made the book did not call it Domesday. The name, meaning the Day of Judgement, is recorded about a century later and was explained at the time by the fact that, as with the Last Judgement, there was no appeal against what it said. It is the only government record named after its own complaints procedure.[3]
It survives in two volumes. Great Domesday covers most of the counties; Little Domesday covers Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk in more detail and on more pages, a reversal of naming that has never been formally addressed. Both are kept at The National Archives in Kew.