Have you ever wondered what your town or village was like nine hundred years ago? If you live in England, there is a good chance you can find out, because in 1086 William the Conqueror sent his officials into almost every corner of the kingdom to write down who owned the land, who worked it, and what it was worth, right down to the number of plough teams and pigs. The result was the Domesday Book, and it is one of the most remarkable documents to survive from the Middle Ages anywhere in the world.
The Domesday Book: Quick Facts
- Ordered: Christmas 1085, at Gloucester
- Survey carried out: 1086
- Ordered by: King William I, the Conqueror
- Places recorded: more than 13,000
- Language: Latin, in heavily abbreviated form
- Volumes: two, known as Great Domesday and Little Domesday
- Where it is today: The National Archives at Kew, London
Why William Wanted a Survey
By 1085 William had been King of England for nearly twenty years. He had won the crown at the Battle of Hastings, crushed a series of English rebellions, and handed most of the land in the country to his Norman followers. But that year he faced a new threat. King Cnut IV of Denmark, a kinsman of the Danish kings who had ruled England earlier in the century, was preparing an invasion fleet. William brought a huge army of mercenaries over from Normandy to meet it, and billeted them on his barons around the country. The invasion never came, as Cnut was murdered by his own subjects the following year, but it left William with some pressing questions. How much was his kingdom worth? How much tax could it pay? And who, exactly, held what?
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us what happened next. At Christmas 1085, William held his court at Gloucester, and "had much thought and very deep discussion with his council about this country, how it was occupied and with what sort of people." The chronicler, who was clearly not a fan, went on to complain that the king had it investigated so closely that not one ox, cow or pig was left out of the record. He found this shameful, though it plainly seemed no shame to the king.
How the Survey Was Done
The scale of the operation is astonishing, especially when you remember that it was carried out on horseback, with quill pens, in a single year. The country was divided into around seven circuits, and a team of commissioners, usually a bishop and a few barons with their clerks, was sent to each. In every county they held sessions where juries of local men, both Norman and English, answered a set list of questions on oath. Among other things, the commissioners wanted to know:
- The name of the manor, and who held it in the time of King Edward the Confessor
- Who held it now
- How many hides (units of taxable land) it contained
- How many plough teams there were, on the lord's land and the tenants'
- How many villans, cottars, slaves and freemen lived there
- How much woodland, meadow and pasture it had, and how many mills and fishponds
- What it had been worth in 1066, and what it was worth now
The answers were checked against information the barons had already supplied, then sent to Winchester, where the royal treasury was kept. There a single scribe, whose handwriting historians can recognise throughout, condensed the whole of it into one great volume, with the help of a second scribe who checked and corrected his work. The counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk were never condensed, and survive in a separate, more detailed volume known as Little Domesday.
Not everywhere made it in. London and Winchester are missing, probably because they were too complicated to record in the same way, and so are most of the far north: Northumberland, Durham, and much of Cumberland and Westmorland, which were not yet firmly under Norman control.
Why Is It Called Domesday?
William never called it the Domesday Book. To him it was simply a description, or survey. The name came from the English, who, according to Richard FitzNigel, the king's treasurer, writing about a century later, compared it to the Last Judgement, or Doomsday, because its decisions could not be challenged. If there was a dispute about who owned a piece of land, the answer in the book was final, just as there would be no appeal from the judgement of God.
What the Domesday Book Tells Us
For historians, the Domesday Book is a goldmine. It gives us the first detailed picture of England's economy, its landscape and its society. It records around 268,000 people, but these were mostly heads of households, so historians estimate the real population at somewhere between one and a half and two and a quarter million. Around one in ten of the people recorded were slaves, a figure that surprises many readers. The book lists more than five thousand mills, which shows how far England's farming had already developed before the Normans arrived.
Perhaps most striking of all is what it tells us about the Norman Conquest. By comparing the landholders of 1066 with those of 1086, you can watch the English aristocracy disappear. Twenty years after Hastings, only a tiny fraction of the land in England was still held by Englishmen; almost all of it had passed to the king, the Church and around two hundred Norman barons. The book also records the destruction William caused. In Yorkshire, which he had laid waste in the "Harrying of the North" in 1069-70, entry after entry records a manor simply as "waste."
If you look up a place in the Domesday Book today, you are likely to find something like this: the name of the manor, the name of the Englishman who held it before 1066, the Norman who held it in 1086, the number of villagers and smallholders, a few ploughs, a mill, some woodland for so many pigs, and a value in pounds and shillings. It may not sound thrilling, but for most English villages it is the very first written record of their existence.
The Book After William
William the Conqueror never saw the finished book. In August 1086 he gathered all the major landholders of England at Salisbury and made them swear an oath of loyalty directly to him, and then he crossed to Normandy. He died there in September 1087 after being injured at the siege of Mantes, and his son William Rufus inherited the survey along with the crown.
The book stayed in the royal treasury, first at Winchester and later at Westminster, and royal officials went on using it for centuries to settle disputes about land and tax. Lawyers were still citing it in land cases in the twentieth century. Today both volumes are kept at The National Archives in Kew, and you can look up entries online.
There is a nice irony to finish with. In 1986, to mark the nine hundredth anniversary, the BBC created a "Domesday Project," a modern survey of Britain recorded by schoolchildren and stored on special laser discs. Within fifteen years, the technology needed to read it had become so obsolete that the data was in danger of being lost, and experts had to rescue it. The original Domesday Book, written on sheepskin, is still perfectly readable nine centuries later.
You can read more about the people who carried out the Conquest on our page on the Normans.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "The Domesday Book" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/domesday-book/, September 30, 2026