Domesday Book

The Domesday Book is the manuscript record of a great land survey of most of England and parts of Wales, commissioned by William the Conqueror at his Christmas court in 1085 and completed in 1086, twenty years after the Norman Conquest, so that the crown could assess the landholdings, resources and tax liability (the "geld") of its new kingdom in unprecedented detail. Royal commissioners fanned out across the country recording, manor by manor, who held each estate before and after the Conquest, its extent, its population of free men, villeins, cottagers and slaves, its livestock, ploughs, mills and woodland, and its value, compiled into two volumes (Great Domesday and Little Domesday, covering East Anglia in greater detail) by a small central team of scribes. The survey's name, first recorded in the twelfth century, likens its judgments to the biblical Last Judgment or "Domesday," since its assessments, once entered, were treated as final and not open to appeal. It remains the oldest and most complete public record of English landholding from the medieval period and a foundational source for English social and economic history.