Domesday Book Background
The Domesday Book is Englands first - and arguably most remarkable - public record. Although written more than nine centuries ago it is still legally admissible evidence on title to land. It is at once the foundation document of our national archival heritage, a matchless historical source and an icon linking Englands past with her present and future Dr Elizabeth Hallam, Public Record Office
With the exception of a few scattered Anglo-Saxon charters, all English local history begins with Domesday. At Christmas in 1085 when William the Conqueror commanded his civil servants to survey the 34 Counties that then constituted England, it was the most complete guide to a country ever undertaken. It included classifying and valuing mills, plough lands, ox teams, saltpans, fish ponds, vineyards, castles, agriculture and trade.
With a population of around one and a half million people, the king needed to know who his tenants were, what title they had to their land and what it was worth for taxation purposes. But the survey also covers local customs and disputes thereby providing a picture of life in nearly every village and town almost ten centuries ago. It has also been consulted for legal precedent and was last cited in 1982, a mere 896 years after it was first written!
Of the 13,418 places named, almost all are still occupied but not as they were. Birmingham, for example, was merely a village, and Hampstead was valued at 5 shillings. We can still relate to, and trace, not only the place names but also those of people. Contrary to myth, not all of the country was forested – indeed, as much was under cultivation as in the 19th Century.
So detailed was its coverage and so invasive was the process of the survey that the native English nicknamed it Domesday Book, after the Day of Judgement against which there could be no appeal. Within a century this name had officially superseded its original names, the Winchester Roll or the King’s Roll.
In 1984 the Public Record Office at Kew took the historic decision to unbind the original Domesday manuscripts and invited Alecto Historical Editions to undertake the publication of a facsimile. Reproducing this in various different formats (see below) as the first and only “brilliant forgery” or “indecently exact facsimile”, to quote Professor Geoffrey Martin, the then Keeper of Public Records and custodian of the original Domesday, has taken many years. Not only was each double page carefully laid flat and photographed actual size using a plate camera the size of a modest family car, but it was then printed using a continuous-tone lithographic process, making so exact a copy of the original that the “hair” side of the old sheepskin folios can be distinguished from the “flesh” of the reverse. It is highly unlikely that Domesday will be reproduced again in the next few centuries, due to the near perfect facsimile copies achieved by Alecto.
Alecto has now broken new frontiers in Domesday research with the creation of the first, authorised digital version of the complete Domesday Book. The project, including the publication of a perfect facsimile of the manuscript, took 16 years to complete and cost several million pounds.
The release of Digital Domesday heralds a new era in Domesday scholarship and research. Now, for the first time, fact-finding can happen in a single mouse click, saving months of painstaking research and allowing previously inconceivable searches.
If the Winchester scribe had a dream, it might have been of a heaven in which any line of his masterwork could be recalled in an instant, with no need to comb through 766 pages of densely written parchment... He would have been dreaming not of heaven but of the CD ROM.
Domesday can been obtained in a number of different formats:
The Millennium Edition, the complete text of the Domesday survey of William the Conqueror’s kingdom in a limited edition of 450 perfect facsimile copies. Very few copies remain
The County Edition,the complete text for your county together with translation, maps and indexes in a three volume boxed set.
Digital Domesday in a Scholars Edition on 4 CD ROMS containing the complete manuscript at high resolution together with all text from the Alecto facsimile editions and
The General Edition a single CD ROM containing medium resolution images of the complete manuscript together with all text from the Alecto facsimile editions and a special offer from XXXX.
For more information go to www.alectoeditions.com.
