Domesday Book through Nine Centuries

224 pp. With 79 illustrations and 14 maps. Domesday Book (/ˈduːmzdeɪ/) – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of William I, known as William the Conqueror.[1] Domesday has long been associated with the Latin phrase Domus Dei, meaning "House of God".[2] The manuscript is also known by the Latin name Liber de Wintonia, meaning "Book of Winchester".[3] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 1085 the king sent his agents to survey every shire in England, to list his holdings and calculate the dues owed to him.[4] Written in Medieval Latin, it was highly abbreviated and included some vernacular native terms without Latin equivalents.[5] The survey's main purpose was to determine what taxes had been owed during the reign of King Edward the Confessor, thereby allowing William to reassert the rights of the Crown and assess where power lay after a wholesale redistribution of land following the Norman Conquest. The assessors' reckoning of a man's holdings and their values, as recorded in Domesday Book, was dispositive and without appeal. The name "Domesday Book" came into use in the 12th century.[6] Richard FitzNeal wrote in the Dialogus de Scaccario (c. 1179) that the book was so called because its decisions were unalterable, like those of the Last Judgement, and its sentence could not be quashed.[7] The manuscript is held at The National Archives at Kew, London. The book was first published in full in 1783; and in 2011 the Open Domesday site made the manuscript available online.[8] The book is an invaluable primary source for modern historians and historical economists. No survey approaching the scope and extent of Domesday Book was attempted again in Britain until the 1873 Return of Owners of Land (sometimes termed the "Modern Domesday")[9] which presented the first complete, post-Domesday picture of the distribution of landed property in the land that made up the then United Kingdom.[10]--Wikipedia