The Domesday Book: England's Heritage Then and Now

by Thomas Hinde (Editor), Elizabeth Hallam

pp. 351, "The great Norman administrative document is used as the basis for an enquiry into the changes undergone by the English countryside over the past 1000 years. A time chart setting "Domesday" in its medieval context leads onto a short essay on daily life in Norman England. The central text is a series of…

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Reference, Medieval History, Medieval

351 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, 3rd Baronet better known by his pen name Thomas Hinde, was a British novelist. He wrote under the name Hinde to avoid upsetting his father with his much acclaimed first novel.

His first novel, Mr Nicholas, was published in 1953. His second, Happy As Larry, the story of a disaffected, unemployable, aspiring writer with a failed marriage, led critics to associate him with the Angry Young Men movement. An excerpt from Happy As Larry appeared in the popular paperback anthology, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.

Hinde published thirteen further novels before turning to non-fiction. After 1980, he also published books on English stately homes and gardens, English court life, and the forests of Britain, as well as histories of English schools.

Reviews

[Jason Koivu · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you hear something called "The Doomsday Book" you expect the mother of all of dystopia novels. However, when you see the actual title and learn that the book is essentially a summary list of the towns and villages in 1086 England, well The Domesday Book maybe doesn't seem quite so kick-ass.

YOU ARE WRONG!

Okay, maybe some of you are right. But those of you that dig history, oh man, you're going to get giddy in your pants!

Twenty years after conquering England, the aptly named Norman bastard William the Conqueror wanted a survey made of his newly acquired country, mainly for tax purposes, and the result is this book. It's a shire by shire, town by town reckoning of assets. Each entry included the town name, who its local lord was, and any important structures it had or industry or agriculture it could provide. This edition, as edited by Thomas Hinde, also includes the town's current name as well as anything of post-1086 historical importance or interest. Here's an example (the part that's in italics is the original text):

Bedford Bedeford: Bishop of Lincoln. Church. Prosperous county town. John Bunyan was imprisoned here for 12 years. Bedford Museum is on the site of the Norman castle. Cecil Higgins Art Gallery.

The original data for many of the other towns often mentions a mill or two. Cattle, pigs and eels are noted frequently. Occasionally how many "man-at-arms" (essentially meaning knights) a place can produce is listed. However, the key seemed to be to make sure the surveyors recorded the rank and/or the names of land owners, which would be the person responsible for forking over the taxes.

Hinde's edition also includes plenty of photographs showing the places and things of interest mentioned in the original text. There are some simple maps and valuable background information that really helps to clarify and illuminate the account. Though the book may have had finite intentions of practical use for the day, its overall value in understanding a place from a time that is near on 1000 years old is almost infinite.

[Hilary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up in a little free library. I was vaguely interested in the domesday survey, I was expecting to find out a bit more about it but this was more of a village by village account of some of the statistics recorded. A friend who is really into history said she thought a lot has been left out.

This could be a really handy book to have if you need to find out how many goats and pigs hung out in your village in the late 11th century, if not I’d give this one a miss.

[Michael Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Domesday Book (often misspelled “Doomsday”) has fascinated me for a long time, both as an historian with a particular interest in the early medieval period, and as an archivist with a love of old documents. There is simply nothing else like it in existence, in any Western country. The original book itself is very difficult to read since it’s an inventory, not a narrative, and the Latin is extremely abbreviated and compressed, to save space. Nor does it cover the whole of England; the city of London is missing, as is Winchester. Westmorland, Cumberland, and Northumberland were not surveyed because they were still in the process of being conquered by the Normans, and Durham was omitted because the Bishop had sole rights to collect taxes there -- and Domesday is, first and foremost, a database for recording the collection of the royal revenues. But this book is not actually a study of Domesday, though it has a good, rather brief introduction on the purpose, process, and subsequent history of the survey. Rather, it’s a selective gazetteer of the 13,000 locations Domesday covered, organized by county, each section being handled by a specialist in local history. Each chapter provides detailed coverage of a few towns and smaller communities, selected to show the area’s geographical and social diversity, followed by an alphabetical list (under modern place names, fortunately), noting major landholders and industrial/agricultural descriptions taken from Domesday. (All of this is based on the 35-volume Phillimore translation.) Maps for each county show how settlements were dispersed, and there are a large number of high-quality photos. The result is a very interesting, though highly selective, overview of England as it was in the late 11th century. I know where most of my own 17th century immigrants to New England came from, and nearly all those towns are included in Domesday. In that connection, it’s interesting to see that the tiny farm village of Winestead, in the East Riding, belonged to the Archbishop of York, while Birdsall (also in Yorkshire) was still largely in the possession of Ulchil, the pre-Conquest holder of the land. But the index covers only the main text and the major entries, of course, not the brief gazetteer listings, so if you want to track every manor owned by Hugh de Montfort or William de Warenne, you’re out of luck. If you want a proper history of Domesday, I recommend Elizabeth Hallam’s Domesday Book Through Nine Centuries, but this is a useful volume in which to browse.

[Fred Provoncha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book and subject, this is what Doomsday looked like a thousand years ago, and what it could look like tomorrow...fvp

[Cecilia Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had exactly what I was looking for. Good resource for casual research.

[Kelly Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book even if it is a large coffee table book. Some parts were meant for serious study but over all interesting.