Our Blog - August 2025 - The Domesday Book

Over the next few blogs, I will reference the Domesday Book (or Doomsday Book, depending on which spelling you see) several times. So I thought I would add a little bit of reference information for anyone who is interested.

The book dates back to 1086 and is a medieval survey of England, requested by William the Conquerer. In 1066, William the Conquerer came from Normandy, France to Southern England to fight Harold Godwinson for the English crown. The former King, Edward the Confessor, has supposedly promised the throne to William, Duke of Normandy (his first cousin once removed). But on his deathbed in January 1066, Edward gave the crown to a powerful English Earl named Harold Godwinson. William amassed a fleet and army, crossed the English Channel, and killed Harold at the Battle of Hastings in October (this was documented in the Bayeux Tapestry).

In 1085-1086, he ordered the compilation of the Domesday Book, a survey listing all of the land-holdings in England along with their owners both current and those prior to 1066. Under the feudal system, the king was the only true "owner" of land in England, and he had lords, bishops, and other tenants who lived and worked on the land. And it really was more of a survey of land related to towns, manors, farms, factories and mills, and other things that a king would be interested in. While the English population would have been between 1.2 and 1.6 million, less than 270,000 people are listed in the book, most of the head of a household. Urban households were not listed, nor did it say how many people were actually IN the household. The primary purpose of the survey was to ascertain and record the fiscal rights of the king ... that is ... what money should the people pay to the king in the form of land-tax and miscellaneous dues.

There was already a hierarchical structure, so the request went down to the bottom layer, who provided the information, and it was then sent back up to be documented into the book. William died before the book was done and his successor, killed the project off, so it really was never finished. There was a 2nd "little" volume that included Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex as that information was collected but not made available to the scribe before the project was cancelled. The City of London and Winchester were never written up although space was left for it. There were other parts (Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland) that were omitted because they did not pay the national land tax like the rest of the country and the reason for the book was to list these tax assessments. The "little" book was smaller but had more detail than the larger book. For example, it includes the number of livestock on manors with Lords, but doesn't list peasant livestock.

Over 13,000 "places" are listed in the book, and you'll see in some of my write-ups that a town was "listed in the Domesday Book". Really the only significance to this statement is that the town existed in 1086, even if the town ALSO existed back in the 500's or in Roman times.

In August 2006, the contents of Domesday went online, with an English translation of the book's Latin. Visitors to the website are able to look up a place name and see the index entry made for the manor, town, city or village. They can also, for a fee, download the relevant page. The best site for me is http://opendomesday.org/ where you can search by place or person. We had a Sunday roast outside of the village of Pluckley which is in the book with 16 villager households, 7 smallholders households, and 8 slaves. They did an annual value to the lord "Annual value to lord: 15 pounds in 1086; 8 pounds when acquired by the 1086 owner; 12 pounds in 1066.".

I happen to follow a podcast that, ironically, had a new episode on The Domesday Book while I was on vacation. You can play that episode here if you are interested.