Domesday Now

Essays into numerous aspects of the Domesday Book, shedding fresh light on its mysteries.

A fundamental part of English heritage, the Domesday Book is unique in medieval history, recording an entire country and its inhabitants town by town, with over 12,500 entries. In this lavishly illustrated book, Elizabeth Hallam and Thomas Hinde examine the background to the nine-hundred-year-old document, setting the events of 1086 into the context of the medieval world. It is a remarkable tribute to English continuity that almost all of the Domesday settlements still exist in some form or another.

Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. “A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.

The Domesday Book is one of our major sources for a crucial period of English history; yet it remains difficult to interpret. This provocative new book proposes a complete re-assessment, with profound implications for our understanding of the society and economy of medieval England. In particular, it overturns the general assumption that the Domesday inquest was a comprehensive survey of lords and their lands, and so tells us about the economic underpinning of power in the late eleventh century; rather, it suggests that in 1086 matters of taxation and service were at issue and data were collected to illuminate these concerns. What emerges from this is that Domesday Book tells us less about a real economy and those who sustained it than a tributary one, with much of the wealth of England being omitted. The source, then, is not the transparent datum that social and economic historians would like it to be. In return, however, the book offers a richer understanding of late eleventh-century England in its own terms; and elucidates many long-standing conundrums of the Domesday Book itself. DAVID ROFFE is an honorary research fellow at Sheffield University. He has written widely on Domesday Book and edited five volumes of the Alecto County Edition of the text.

The 1279-80 hundred rolls are one of the most important sources for later thirteenth century England, yet this is the first comprehensive study of the inquiry which brought them into being. A Second Domesday will be an indispensable working tool for historians and is based on the latest knowledge of the returns. More of these are being discovered all the time and one of the aims of this book is to stimulate the recognition of other surviving texts. The book places the inquiry in its historical context, continental as well as English. This is followed by an examination of its purpose and whether or not it was conceived deliberately as a second Domesday Book. Central to the study is a consideration of the geographical range of the inquiry, how it was conducted and the way in which the returns were compiled. The way in which the inquiry was used, by historians as well as contemporaries, along with the introductory chapters will be particularly helpful to students. The book concludes with a description of all known returns, which, together with the appendices, are designed to assist future users.

Concentrates on the twelfth century and takes in the rule of William Rufus at the beginning and of John at the end.