Making Domesday

Domesday is the most famous and important historical record in the nation's archives, the final product of a survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086. Making Domesday offers a fundamental reinterpretation of how and why it was made, exploring its conception, conduction, effectiveness, and impact.

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Making Domesday presents a fresh interpretation of William the Conqueror's survey of England, made possible by a major collaborative study and a new online edition of Exon Domesday, the earliest of the three original manuscripts to survive from the Domesday survey. The book addresses big questions about pre-modern government, written records, and the use of intelligence in both senses: the minds behind the planning and execution of Domesday, and the information about England that Domesday gathered. It characterizes Exon as the surviving part of the 'working papers' of one of the writing offices that over a period of ten weeks in summer 1086 dealt with all seven 'circuits' (regional groupings of shires) of the Domesday survey. The circuit offices had the task of recasting the manorial descriptions assembled in an earlier stage of the survey into an interim form intended for further redaction as Great Domesday Book by rearrangement, rewording, and abbreviation. A new deep understanding of the codicology and palaeography of Exon underpins every part of the analysis, and offers a model of documentary production for royal government at an exceptionally early period in western Europe. Part I describes and analyses each Exon text in unprecedented detail; Part II places Domesday in context and in broad comparative perspective, ranging across and beyond the Latin West. The dual approach provides a new interpretation of Domesday and a deeper understanding of both the Domesday survey and Domesday Book. It emerges that the survey was even more complex than we had dared to imagine, involving the production of different kinds of text intended to meet a range of fiscal and political needs. It is also clear that the survey was immediately effective, transforming the politics of land in a newly conquered society. Domesday has always been thought awesome, as its very name shows; Making Domesday contends that it was also a feat of intelligent government deployed by an aggressive and ambitious regime. As such it speaks to broader concerns with the colonial domination of conquered societies through the purposeful collection of systematic statistical information.