What do you think?
Rate this book
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation
Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 at the behest of William the Conqueror, has been described as "the most valuable piece of antiquity possessed by any nation" (David Hume) and viewed by historians as the final act of the Norman conquest. Produced under the supervision of the most renowned Domesday scholars, this authoritative translation of the complete Domesday offers a remarkable portrait of England in the late eleventh century.
1456 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1086
12 people are currently reading
888 people want to read
About the author
Anonymous
791k books3,369 followersBooks can be attributed to "Anonymous" for several reasons:
* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.
See also: Anonymous
* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.
See also: Anonymous
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 31, 2010
I get a real thrill out of owning my own copy of the Domesday Book, even if one in modern English. It brings back memories of seeing it for the first time as an inky-fingered schoolchild and feeling a contact with the past that I never felt with castles, pots or even illuminated manuscripts.
Fortunately for finding your way around, the index lists places by their modern name, followed by the old spelling. Most of the entries list the value in pounds and rating in hides of each holding, including the amount of pasturage, woodland and ploughland, the number of pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and sometimes a mill, fishery or beehives. Most hundreds list at least one slave.
Sometimes people are mentioned by name, and other times only by status e.g. villan or thegn. (These words are in the glossary at the back.) If the landholder is a woman, it usually says that specifically.
I found it curious that the man named William had to be specified as an Englishman, presumably because William is a Norman name. Most of the local men have Saxon names like Æthelmær, Thorkil or Eadwulf. The county landholders by contrast often had Norman names like William or Robert.
There are some curiously personal entries, especially where there was a local dispute over who owned property or what it was worth. I can imagine the data collector not being allowed to leave Bradwell until he had promised the neighbours to make a note of Ansculf’s dishonesty.
Fortunately for finding your way around, the index lists places by their modern name, followed by the old spelling. Most of the entries list the value in pounds and rating in hides of each holding, including the amount of pasturage, woodland and ploughland, the number of pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and sometimes a mill, fishery or beehives. Most hundreds list at least one slave.
Sometimes people are mentioned by name, and other times only by status e.g. villan or thegn. (These words are in the glossary at the back.) If the landholder is a woman, it usually says that specifically.
Norwich, Norfolk. Altogether they had 80 acres of land and 20 ½ acres of pasture. And of these 1 was a woman, Stigand’s sister, with 32 acres of land.Occasionally, householders are listed by occupation. Norwich included Rabel the artificer, Mainard the watchman, Ralph the crossbowman, Hereberd the ditcher, William the Englishman, Hildebrand the lorimer, and Fulbert the priest. Not all the words are in the glossary. For example, I had to look up lorimer: a person who made bits, spurs, and other small metal objects.
I found it curious that the man named William had to be specified as an Englishman, presumably because William is a Norman name. Most of the local men have Saxon names like Æthelmær, Thorkil or Eadwulf. The county landholders by contrast often had Norman names like William or Robert.
There are some curiously personal entries, especially where there was a local dispute over who owned property or what it was worth. I can imagine the data collector not being allowed to leave Bradwell until he had promised the neighbours to make a note of Ansculf’s dishonesty.
Bradwell, Buckinghamshire. This land Alweard, a man of Goding, held and could sell. Of this land Ansculf, when he was sheriff, dispossessed William of Cholsey, unjustly, as the men of the hundred say, and without the livery officer of the king or anyone.At over 1,300 pages, this is going to furnish many happy evenings as I find the places I have lived or visited. I imagine it would be a goldmine to anybody researching their family history.
April 17, 2013
Penguin’s inclusion of the Domesday Book in its ‘Penguin Classics’ line is both natural and surprising. Natural, because it’s a foundational text in the history of the English speaking peoples. Surprising, because ultimately it’s a collection of land title records and usually the only people who study them voluntarily are lawyers who are paid handsomely to do so.
The Book’s historical importance needs no emphasis: compiled in the years after the Norman conquest, it particularizes a society forcibly transitioning between an Anglo-Saxon past and a Norman-Angevin future. This is nowhere so obvious as in the words it uses (sokeman, demesne) and in the names of people it records (Æthelstan, Robert).
As well as its obvious qualities for historical research, the Book illuminates some contemporary debates. One that has been on my mind lately relates to the nature of farming enterprises. There is substantial current discussion about the difficulties facing small-to-medium farms, and in particular family farms. In Australia, this particularly concerns the dairy industry, where many farmers struggle to remain in business in the face of low farm gate prices (http://www.standard.net.au/story/1438...). Similar concerns are found in the United States and elsewhere (http://www.uticaod.com/opinion/x84826...). With the Domesday Book in mind, I find myself wondering if these debates are looking at the question the wrong way around. That is, I have some doubt - I am open to correction on the point - whether the small-to-medium freeholder has ever been the accepted norm in agriculture save for the period of about 1860 to the present. Te landsmen who are recorded in Domesday (for example) tend to hold their land from another rather than owning it in freehold. I have no reason to suppose (but again, I’m open to correction) that the status of farmers elsewhere in Europe at that time was any higher: it might be indicative that among the three hundred-odd surviving letters of Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, written a century later, only one (that to “Mar and his wife”) was written to a non-noble, non-clerical person. A couple of centuries later, the seventeenth century proto-Communism of Gerrard Winstanley’s “Digger” movement would have made little rhetorical sense in a society not dominated by large landholders.
My hypothesis is that the basic structure of agriculture hinted at in Domesday stopped being the “natural order of things” only in and after 1860, with the coming of the Homestead Act in the United States and the ‘selector’ land holdings in the Australian colonies. Prophetically, the farmers taking up land even then found chiefly a life of only grinding labour and still more grinding poverty (1). Moving on, the formation of the specifically agrarian Country Party in Australia shortly after the First World War, and its decisions not to merge with the Nationalist, United Australia or Liberal Parties ever since, does not suggest a rural population especially secure in its lot.
What I am getting towards is that, even if the small-medium family farm was ever a viable means of farming (as to which I have a certain amount of doubt), there is no reason to think that it would be so forever, or at least outside of highly specific economic and climatic conditions. As callous as it sounds, perhaps the lot of smallholding farmers is inevitably economically precarious and ultimately unsustainable.
=======================
(1) For Australia, see the contemporaneous stories of Steele Rudd in On Our Selection. For the United States, see Brian Cannon, ‘Homesteading Remembered’, Agricultural History 87 (2013) 1-29, as well as Larry Schweikart’s comments on the Homesteading era in A Patriot’s History of the United States.
The Book’s historical importance needs no emphasis: compiled in the years after the Norman conquest, it particularizes a society forcibly transitioning between an Anglo-Saxon past and a Norman-Angevin future. This is nowhere so obvious as in the words it uses (sokeman, demesne) and in the names of people it records (Æthelstan, Robert).
As well as its obvious qualities for historical research, the Book illuminates some contemporary debates. One that has been on my mind lately relates to the nature of farming enterprises. There is substantial current discussion about the difficulties facing small-to-medium farms, and in particular family farms. In Australia, this particularly concerns the dairy industry, where many farmers struggle to remain in business in the face of low farm gate prices (http://www.standard.net.au/story/1438...). Similar concerns are found in the United States and elsewhere (http://www.uticaod.com/opinion/x84826...). With the Domesday Book in mind, I find myself wondering if these debates are looking at the question the wrong way around. That is, I have some doubt - I am open to correction on the point - whether the small-to-medium freeholder has ever been the accepted norm in agriculture save for the period of about 1860 to the present. Te landsmen who are recorded in Domesday (for example) tend to hold their land from another rather than owning it in freehold. I have no reason to suppose (but again, I’m open to correction) that the status of farmers elsewhere in Europe at that time was any higher: it might be indicative that among the three hundred-odd surviving letters of Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, written a century later, only one (that to “Mar and his wife”) was written to a non-noble, non-clerical person. A couple of centuries later, the seventeenth century proto-Communism of Gerrard Winstanley’s “Digger” movement would have made little rhetorical sense in a society not dominated by large landholders.
My hypothesis is that the basic structure of agriculture hinted at in Domesday stopped being the “natural order of things” only in and after 1860, with the coming of the Homestead Act in the United States and the ‘selector’ land holdings in the Australian colonies. Prophetically, the farmers taking up land even then found chiefly a life of only grinding labour and still more grinding poverty (1). Moving on, the formation of the specifically agrarian Country Party in Australia shortly after the First World War, and its decisions not to merge with the Nationalist, United Australia or Liberal Parties ever since, does not suggest a rural population especially secure in its lot.
What I am getting towards is that, even if the small-medium family farm was ever a viable means of farming (as to which I have a certain amount of doubt), there is no reason to think that it would be so forever, or at least outside of highly specific economic and climatic conditions. As callous as it sounds, perhaps the lot of smallholding farmers is inevitably economically precarious and ultimately unsustainable.
=======================
(1) For Australia, see the contemporaneous stories of Steele Rudd in On Our Selection. For the United States, see Brian Cannon, ‘Homesteading Remembered’, Agricultural History 87 (2013) 1-29, as well as Larry Schweikart’s comments on the Homesteading era in A Patriot’s History of the United States.
August 20, 2022
Domesday Book, the original record or summary of William I’s survey of England. By contemporaries the whole operation was known as “the description of England,” but the popular name Domesday—i.e., “doomsday,” when men face the record from which there is no appeal—was in general use by the mid-12th century. The survey, in the scope of its detail and the speed of its execution, was perhaps the most remarkable administrative accomplishment of the Middle Ages.
The survey was carried out, against great popular resentment, in 1086 by seven or eight panels of commissioners, each working in a separate group of counties, for which they compiled elaborate accounts of the estates of the king and of his tenants in chief (those who held their land by direct services to him). From these documents the king’s clerks compiled a summary, which is Domesday Book.
Domesday Book covers all of England except the northern areas. Though invariably called Domesday Book, in the singular, it in fact consists of two volumes quite different from each other. Volume I (Great Domesday) contains the final summarized record of all the counties surveyed except Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk. For these three counties the full, unabbreviated return sent in to Winchester by the commissioners is preserved in volume II (Little Domesday), which, for some reason, was never summarized and added to the larger volume.
Several related documents survive, one of which is the Exon Domesday, an early draft of the return for the circuit comprising the counties of Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Devon, and Cornwall.
From yet another related document, the Inquisitio comitatus Cantabrigiensis (“The Inquisition of the County of Cambridge”), a very early draft of the Cambridgeshire material, the actual procedure followed by the commissioners is revealed. Their method was that of the sworn inquest, by which answers were given to a long list of definite questions. Formal sessions were apparently held in the chief county town, and the facts were supplied by the sheriff, the barons, and their subtenants and by representatives from each hundred (or subsidiary division of the county) and from every village.
The procedure was thus strictly geographic, material being collected by shires, hundreds, and villages. But before being sent to the royal court at Winchester the material for each county was regrouped under the names of the king and his tenants in chief, thus recognizing the new Norman conception of a feudal society based on the honour or barony, a complex of estates that were treated as a unit even if not adjacent.
Volume I thus gives, under each county heading, a roll of the holders of land, from the king to the humblest tenant in chief. Their fiefs are described consecutively and consist of long lists of manors, with the names of their holders in 1066 and 1086, their dimensions and plowing capacity, the number of agricultural workers of various sorts, their mills, fishponds, and other amenities, and finally their values in pounds.
For most English villages and towns (but not, unfortunately, London and Winchester, for which no Domesday records survive), Domesday is the starting point of their history. For historians of Anglo-Norman England, the survey is of immeasurable importance.
The survey was carried out, against great popular resentment, in 1086 by seven or eight panels of commissioners, each working in a separate group of counties, for which they compiled elaborate accounts of the estates of the king and of his tenants in chief (those who held their land by direct services to him). From these documents the king’s clerks compiled a summary, which is Domesday Book.
Domesday Book covers all of England except the northern areas. Though invariably called Domesday Book, in the singular, it in fact consists of two volumes quite different from each other. Volume I (Great Domesday) contains the final summarized record of all the counties surveyed except Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk. For these three counties the full, unabbreviated return sent in to Winchester by the commissioners is preserved in volume II (Little Domesday), which, for some reason, was never summarized and added to the larger volume.
Several related documents survive, one of which is the Exon Domesday, an early draft of the return for the circuit comprising the counties of Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Devon, and Cornwall.
From yet another related document, the Inquisitio comitatus Cantabrigiensis (“The Inquisition of the County of Cambridge”), a very early draft of the Cambridgeshire material, the actual procedure followed by the commissioners is revealed. Their method was that of the sworn inquest, by which answers were given to a long list of definite questions. Formal sessions were apparently held in the chief county town, and the facts were supplied by the sheriff, the barons, and their subtenants and by representatives from each hundred (or subsidiary division of the county) and from every village.
The procedure was thus strictly geographic, material being collected by shires, hundreds, and villages. But before being sent to the royal court at Winchester the material for each county was regrouped under the names of the king and his tenants in chief, thus recognizing the new Norman conception of a feudal society based on the honour or barony, a complex of estates that were treated as a unit even if not adjacent.
Volume I thus gives, under each county heading, a roll of the holders of land, from the king to the humblest tenant in chief. Their fiefs are described consecutively and consist of long lists of manors, with the names of their holders in 1066 and 1086, their dimensions and plowing capacity, the number of agricultural workers of various sorts, their mills, fishponds, and other amenities, and finally their values in pounds.
For most English villages and towns (but not, unfortunately, London and Winchester, for which no Domesday records survive), Domesday is the starting point of their history. For historians of Anglo-Norman England, the survey is of immeasurable importance.
November 29, 2014
It takes a particular sort of reader to rejoice at the prospect of an all-new translation of a 900-year-old government-sponsored economic and agricultural census. I’m well acquainted with the Phillimore 35-volume edition published in the 1970s, and I own Finn’s guide to it, but this new effort is a lovely piece of work -- and it’s portable enough to actually carry around with you. The Alecto translation was itself based on the Victoria History of the Counties of England version, but much improved and updated. This volume also omits the marginalia, which is too bad, but it does interpolate a great many bracketed words to fill the original scribe’s frequent elisions. There’s also an extremely thorough Index of Places -- but not one of persons, a glaring omission, since so many larger landholders possessed estates throughout a county, or even in numerous counties. Nevertheless, an excellent publication, and at a very reasonable price.
Read
February 22, 2013Probably I'll always be 'currently reading' it; it's not the sort of thing you can just sit down and read through.
This book is a continual source for people writing about the period--and adjacent times. Full of fascinating details like the number of eels produced or the joint ownership of plows, it's useful for scene-setting, geography, etc. Now if it only had an index, maps, etc...
Warning--read this book with a dictionary to hand, unless you already know what 'in alod' means. On poking around, I found a glossary--but while it's useful for definitions that aren't in the 'unabridged' dictionary (for example, how much is an 'amber' of salt?), it's not comprehensive, so you still have to look up words like 'dene' in other sources.
Half done! Taking it a few pages at a time is slow, but it's more likely to be comprehensible. I'm developing a feel for patterns, and getting an idea (shadowy, to be sure) of the people involved. And the names! Not just the 'Turstin's and the 'Wulfgifu's. I kinda expected those. But how about 'Fredegis', which really is somebody's name?
In most sections there are fewer plows than the chroniclers recommend--but in Nottinhamshire there are many more than are needed. Getting to Yorkshire resolves this somewhat. So many holdings in Yorkshire are described as 'waste' that I looked up historical information to see if I could find out why. Turns out that people in the West Riding of Yorkshire rose in rebellion against the Normans several years after the Battle of Hastings. The Normans responded with a sort of
'scorched-earth' policy that apparently has had repercussions right up to the present. There was a question in Parliament this very year about 'devolution' in Yorkshire, that hinted that there are still seperatist elements there, even now. But some of the chattels that were supposedly destroyed may have been relocated--though it's not clear who initiated this movement. Hence the 'missing' plows in Yorkshire, and the 'extra' ones in Nottinghamshire? Maybe.
Also in the Yorkshire section is a section called 'clamores'. I can't find this in any dictionary, but from the entries, I gather that it's a series of reports of a sort of lawsuit in which people made claims to ownership of land, and were judged by a jury of local notables. It's not clear what the criteria were. A typical entry: "They (ie 'the whole shire' referenced above) say that the soke of 2 bovates in "Ianulfestorp" [in Dunnington, near York], which William de Percy has, ought to belong to the archbishop." This 'clamores' section was also in the Lincolnshire section. The likelihood is that the Court was kept very busy for years after the 'Conquest', reassigning lands, sending out writs (of ownership), finding out who'd held the lands in the past, etc, and that this was particularly tangled in the North.
After these 'clamores', the rest of the catalog of Yorkshire gets awfully brief and rushed, as if much of the information given elsewhere didn't get gathered, perhaps because of all the time taken up in researching the 'clamores'. In the Lincolnshire section, they're at the end, and not clearly marked off.
After Linconshire, we leave the 'Great Domesday' and end up in the 'Little Domesday'. The editors complain about the lengthy entries in the 'Little Domesday', but though they're a bit confusing (it's easy to lose track of details), I find them a lot more interesting historically. I'd like to know what 'cattle plague' they're talking about, for one.
Now past page 1111, and into the home stretch. One thing--either the Normans brought a lot of goats with them, or the goats already in Britain were moved about quite a bit, because the accountings keep adding goats to the livestock on various properties. I don't know why this should be, but I note it for further consideration. But now, I need to go back to the question of the career of Archbishop Stigand, who seems to be a major player in all this.
Found a book about Stigand, which I've reviewed. But now, having (FINALLY!) finished, I can recommend this book as a reference source for historians, novelists, and others interested in the early medieval period--but it's not very readable. And it takes for granted a lot of things that really need to be explained to modern readers. For example, though there is a little discussion of 'moneyers' (people who made and distributed metal coins), there's hardly any mention of mines. Or smithies. Or plowwrights. But these things MUST have existed.
Or for another example, did you know that 'St AEthelthryth' was also called 'St Audrey', and that it's from the shoddy quality of merchandise at her fair that we get the word 'tawdry' (A corruption of 'St Audrey's')?
I'll keep this to hand for reference. But when using it for reference purposes, I recommend reading the Glossary FIRST. It's not sufficient. There aren't enough words in it, and the ones that aren't there are somewhat confusingly arranged (it's almost impossible to work out the value of a shilling from the glossary, for example). Also, if using the Index of Place Names from the end (in order to find out, for example, how many eels were normally caught at Stratford-upon-Avon), the headnote at the beginning is a must-read. Otherwise, you won't be able to figure out why some names are in parentheses, but others are in quotes.
I personally think there are a few errors in transcription that weren't caught in the editing, as well. I don't mean where the original text is essentially illegible. That's usually fairly well indicated. But some of the paragraphs contain puzzling non sequiturs that evidently weren't caught, and there are some cases where somebody apparently missed an incongruity (an uncalled-for plural, for example). In those cases, it's not always clear where the problem was. In some cases somebody (presumably the creators of the current edition) has added the requisite (sic), in others errors are not noted. Not surprising, I suppose, in a book that (with indices and glossary) comes to nearly 1500 pages of small print. But someone who's reading through does notice them now and then.
This book is a continual source for people writing about the period--and adjacent times. Full of fascinating details like the number of eels produced or the joint ownership of plows, it's useful for scene-setting, geography, etc. Now if it only had an index, maps, etc...
Warning--read this book with a dictionary to hand, unless you already know what 'in alod' means. On poking around, I found a glossary--but while it's useful for definitions that aren't in the 'unabridged' dictionary (for example, how much is an 'amber' of salt?), it's not comprehensive, so you still have to look up words like 'dene' in other sources.
Half done! Taking it a few pages at a time is slow, but it's more likely to be comprehensible. I'm developing a feel for patterns, and getting an idea (shadowy, to be sure) of the people involved. And the names! Not just the 'Turstin's and the 'Wulfgifu's. I kinda expected those. But how about 'Fredegis', which really is somebody's name?
In most sections there are fewer plows than the chroniclers recommend--but in Nottinhamshire there are many more than are needed. Getting to Yorkshire resolves this somewhat. So many holdings in Yorkshire are described as 'waste' that I looked up historical information to see if I could find out why. Turns out that people in the West Riding of Yorkshire rose in rebellion against the Normans several years after the Battle of Hastings. The Normans responded with a sort of
'scorched-earth' policy that apparently has had repercussions right up to the present. There was a question in Parliament this very year about 'devolution' in Yorkshire, that hinted that there are still seperatist elements there, even now. But some of the chattels that were supposedly destroyed may have been relocated--though it's not clear who initiated this movement. Hence the 'missing' plows in Yorkshire, and the 'extra' ones in Nottinghamshire? Maybe.
Also in the Yorkshire section is a section called 'clamores'. I can't find this in any dictionary, but from the entries, I gather that it's a series of reports of a sort of lawsuit in which people made claims to ownership of land, and were judged by a jury of local notables. It's not clear what the criteria were. A typical entry: "They (ie 'the whole shire' referenced above) say that the soke of 2 bovates in "Ianulfestorp" [in Dunnington, near York], which William de Percy has, ought to belong to the archbishop." This 'clamores' section was also in the Lincolnshire section. The likelihood is that the Court was kept very busy for years after the 'Conquest', reassigning lands, sending out writs (of ownership), finding out who'd held the lands in the past, etc, and that this was particularly tangled in the North.
After these 'clamores', the rest of the catalog of Yorkshire gets awfully brief and rushed, as if much of the information given elsewhere didn't get gathered, perhaps because of all the time taken up in researching the 'clamores'. In the Lincolnshire section, they're at the end, and not clearly marked off.
After Linconshire, we leave the 'Great Domesday' and end up in the 'Little Domesday'. The editors complain about the lengthy entries in the 'Little Domesday', but though they're a bit confusing (it's easy to lose track of details), I find them a lot more interesting historically. I'd like to know what 'cattle plague' they're talking about, for one.
Now past page 1111, and into the home stretch. One thing--either the Normans brought a lot of goats with them, or the goats already in Britain were moved about quite a bit, because the accountings keep adding goats to the livestock on various properties. I don't know why this should be, but I note it for further consideration. But now, I need to go back to the question of the career of Archbishop Stigand, who seems to be a major player in all this.
Found a book about Stigand, which I've reviewed. But now, having (FINALLY!) finished, I can recommend this book as a reference source for historians, novelists, and others interested in the early medieval period--but it's not very readable. And it takes for granted a lot of things that really need to be explained to modern readers. For example, though there is a little discussion of 'moneyers' (people who made and distributed metal coins), there's hardly any mention of mines. Or smithies. Or plowwrights. But these things MUST have existed.
Or for another example, did you know that 'St AEthelthryth' was also called 'St Audrey', and that it's from the shoddy quality of merchandise at her fair that we get the word 'tawdry' (A corruption of 'St Audrey's')?
I'll keep this to hand for reference. But when using it for reference purposes, I recommend reading the Glossary FIRST. It's not sufficient. There aren't enough words in it, and the ones that aren't there are somewhat confusingly arranged (it's almost impossible to work out the value of a shilling from the glossary, for example). Also, if using the Index of Place Names from the end (in order to find out, for example, how many eels were normally caught at Stratford-upon-Avon), the headnote at the beginning is a must-read. Otherwise, you won't be able to figure out why some names are in parentheses, but others are in quotes.
I personally think there are a few errors in transcription that weren't caught in the editing, as well. I don't mean where the original text is essentially illegible. That's usually fairly well indicated. But some of the paragraphs contain puzzling non sequiturs that evidently weren't caught, and there are some cases where somebody apparently missed an incongruity (an uncalled-for plural, for example). In those cases, it's not always clear where the problem was. In some cases somebody (presumably the creators of the current edition) has added the requisite (sic), in others errors are not noted. Not surprising, I suppose, in a book that (with indices and glossary) comes to nearly 1500 pages of small print. But someone who's reading through does notice them now and then.
May 8, 2023
Oh this is an amazing book, a massive almost 1,500 pages of amazement! I bought this in quite a good condition from a charity shop sometime last year and it's taken me so long to go through it as I've lived in around 7-8 different places, so lot's to look up there!! I found a teeny village my mother's just left and in 1086, when domesday was compiled, it was a massive manor with quite a few people, different livestock, two mills (windmill, too far from a river, unless there's a dried up one somewhere around, probably built over!), and rather a lot of people for the time too. This all disappeared over the centuries and became a small village with a shop and church and still surrounded by a huge amount of working farmland. The previous village she lived in also gets a mention in domesday but they had a river, so more mills! They had a couple of tiny humpbacked bridges and a church and an inn. I just found the book so riveting, there is so much to discover, and uncover!
December 25, 2023
It’s a good read if you’re interested in really long entries about how many shillings a village is worth. It’s clearly not something you should sit down and read but with that said, it has left an indelible mark on history, and it gives us a glimpse of what England was like after the Norman invasion and the blending of Anglo Saxon culture with French culture.
October 30, 2024
Doesn’t record any counties in England above Yorkshire
February 1, 2009
If you are into history, and most especially, if you are into English history, then you should have this book on your shelf. Penguin Books deserve a big pat on the back for making this massive door stopper book available at such a reasonable price. Anyone can own The Domesday Book now. It is, as the title states, the complete translation and includes The Little Domesday as well.
Read
March 4, 2017I personally reccomend the black unabridged text with DOMESDAY in gold on the spine. The next step is to set it next to you in public after you've virtually memorized the contents, having at last brought your facial hair to resemble Engels's. If you're incapable of growing facial hair you can at least use the book as a weapon. As for me I've got a Domesday trick or two up my sleeve.
December 10, 2009
I found this to be a surprisingly interesting read. Great for lovers Anglo-Norman history, and early (11th Century) English land-holdings of various types.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews