The Domesday Project Book

by Elizabeth Hallam

1986 Thomas Hudson softcover(oversize trade paperback), Elizabeth M Hallam (Capetian France, 987-1328). The history of DB by Elizabeth Hallam, assistant keeper at the PRO, tells general and scholarly audiences how the survey was made for William's administrative needs and used as a working record of English property-holding even into the last century. By then, however, DB had gained as well a long mythic history and played a continuing role in the English consciousness. - Library Journal

Genres: History

Paperback

First published February 1, 1986

Reviews

[Peter Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Domesday Book – Elizabeth Hallam and David Bates (Eds), 2001, 198 pgs

This is a series of essays on various aspects of Domesday Book itself. With a few exceptions, it's not about the contents of the book, but instead the what, why and how the book took the form that it ultimately did. When I bought it, years ago, I assumed that it was all about the contents of Domesday, finding patterns and oddities from within the returns, etc, but that was my mistake. For the Anglo-Saxonist, there's not a lot you'll find useful in here, barring a couple of essays, but for anyone who is a keen student of the Domesday Book itself, then this will be a valuable addition.

Domesday Studies 2000 – JC Holt

This is an account of the historiography from 1086 to 2000. It's quite comprehensive and comments on the various essays presented in this volume, but unless you're already well informed about this topic, or read the rest of the book first, it's not that illuminating in itself. There is quite a lot of overlap between this and the introduction.

Domesday the inquest and the book – D Roffe

This suffered from the introduction describing it as 'controversial' which is academic for, 'you've put a lot of thought into this, but you're on your own with it, sunshine' and the main points being fatally torpedoed by a few paragraphs in Holt's essay. With those as a background it was hard to approach with an open mind Roffe's notions that Domesday Book was a 2 stage process, with the survey being ordered by William I, but the book actually being due to William II and the aftermath of a rebellion to him, plus a renegotiation of knight service. I found this a tricky read and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't zone out a couple of times.


The writing of the Great Domesday Book – F and C Thorn

This essay goes into the palaeography of Domesday in 35 pages of painstaking work. The discrepancies in the various quires concerning prick marks left in the parchment and ruled lines are used to determine which counties were compiled at the same time and an order for the various circuits has been worked out. The number of scribes has been identified (one main one, a secondary one and a handful of small bit players) and comments made about corrections and omissions. This is a very detailed essay and contains all that you'll probably ever need to know about the clerical process of compiling the book.


The representation of lordship and land tenure in Domesday Book – S Baxter

This is an essay in two parts. The first part deals with patterns in the language of recording in Domesday and I'll confess that this felt way above my pay grade. I didn't take a lot of it in. This section may be one to return to from a position of strength when I understand more about the topic. The second part makes a convincing case that Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester was successful in manipulating the entries concerning holdings in which Worcester held an interest - in their favour.


Little Domesday and the English: the Hundred of Colneis in Suffolk – Ann Williams

This is a very engagingly written essay that concentrates on what can be learnt from the entries for the time of King Edward in one Suffolk Hundred. Unlike many academics, Williams manages to write well researched articles that are also enjoyable and even entertaining to read. Anyone that can use the phrase 'turning up on occasions when the lord felt the need to appear mob-handed' has a sense of fun. This was used in a discussion about commendation, which was a very useful passage in itself and contained a valuable observation about how people chose to commend to someone other than the lord of the soke.


Portrait of a people: Norman barons revisited – KSB Keats-Rohan

This looks into who did well out of the invasion, tracing the rise of certain families from Normandy and the surrounding entities. It demonstrates that who prospered was largely conditional upon their standing in pre-invasion Norman society.


Great Domesday on CD-ROM – JJN Palmer

A CD-ROM, how quaint this now sounds. One of the pitfalls of pre-electronic Domesday studies was the sheer amount of paperwork to be studied and this was a flexible record, rather than an electronic copy of the book itself. One of the downsides of this was that owing to the structure of the program used, it was reliant on the significance that the programmer attached to various aspects of the book.


The Alecto Domesday project – H Pearson

This is an account of the creation of a very high end facsimile copy of Domesday. The top end version does sound a joy to own, but as interesting as this essay is, you won't learn much beyond that.


Sir Henry Ellis and Domesday Book – Andrew Prescott

This essay concerns the contribution of Ellis, a Regency period bod to Domesday studies, with an account of his life and times. Unless you're particularly interested in him, there's not much to learn, even though it is well written.


Some current research trends and recent publications – E Hallan

This is basically a list of further reading. Useful, even if a bit dated by now.

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

For whatever reason, I’ve been a Domesday Book junkie for several decades; I read everything about it that I can lay hands on, and I have a shelf of Domesday-related publications in my library at home. The content of Domesday, much of which relates to the great tenants of the king in 1086, plays to my interest in peerage genealogy, but I’m also an archivist by training, with a parallel interest in the books themselves — what they look like, how they were written and bound, and so on. Dr. Hallam, Assistant Keeper at the Public Record Office for nearly thirty years, is probably the leading authority on Domesday in this generation and, as author or editor of a number of works of popular history, she has a demonstrated talent for describing and interpreting what she knows. The present volume was published as part of Domesday Book’s 900th birthday celebration and concerns itself not with the details of its contents (available in several excellent and recent editions) but with the history of its use as a resource down through the centuries — because Domesday still is a living document, not merely an historical artifact in a museum. While its status as a practical source of legal information has dwindled during the 20th century, it still qualifies as legal evidence in an English courtroom, especially in matters of dispute over "ancient rights."

The opening chapter, "The Making of Domesday Book," is altogether one of the best brief discussions I’ve seen of why the survey was undertaken (lots of motives there, probably including William’s simple curiosity about the country he had conquered twenty years before), how the project was undertaken (the marvel of it’s being completed in only a year or so depended on the previous, simpler tax rolls the Saxon kings had ordered compiled for the proper levying of the Danegeld), and how Great Domesday differs from Little Domesday, and why (the latter being a "final draft" for three shires, abandoned at the king’s death in 1087).

Throughout the medieval period, Domesday was carted about the country by its peripatetic kings, part of the treasury archive required to settle disputes among titled landholders. Many copies of the text were made of specific sections, for use by monasteries and other tenants, and it also spun off other, entirely new lists as a result of lawsuits and new taxes. As the royal demesne gradually declined in importance with the shrinkage in royal authority, fewer extracts were made of the data in Domesday, and the book began to take on the flavor of a revered relic, but a series of antiquarians in the 17th and 18th centuries — part of the new flowering of medieval scholarship that followed the Restoration — sparked a new interest in Domesday; this attitude is partly reflected in the ornate bindings and keeping-chests constructed for the two volumes during this period. Numerous tracings and transcriptions also were produced, which allowed researchers without ready access to the original to pursue independent studies.

In 1859, Domesday was removed to the newly-constructed Record Office in London from its damp storage place in Westminster Chapter House, and proper archival care began to be taken, together with a new photographic reproduction. Victorian scholarship had its own character and Domesday Book was even caught up in the vituperative conflict between the Tory views of Horace Round and the Liberal Edward Freeman. Hallam takes us through this long history with full footnotes and references, but also in a most enjoyable writing style, and she supplies a great many illustrations to accompany the discussion. Any student of William the Conqueror, or of British administrative history, or of medieval England, simply must read this book.