Domesday Book is the main source for an understanding of late Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest. And yet, despite over two centuries of study, no consensus has emerged as to its purpose. David Roffe proposes a radically new interpretation of England's oldest and most precious public record. He argues that historians have signally failed to produce a satisfactory account of the source because they have conflated two essentially unrelated processes, the production of Domesday Book itself and the Domesday inquest from the records of which it was compiled. New dating evidence is adduced to demonstrate that Domesday Book cannot have been started much before 1088, and old sources are reassessed to suggest that it was compiled by Rannulf Flambard in the aftermath of the revolt against William Rufus in the same year. Domesday Book was a land register drawn up by one of the greatest (and most hated) medieval administrators for administrative purposes. The Domesday inquest, by contrast, was commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085 and was an enterprise of a different order. Following the threat of invasion from Denmark in that year it addressed the deficiencies in the national system of taxation and defence, and its findings formed the basis for a renegotiation of assessment to the geld and knight service. This study provides novel insights into the inquest as a principal vehicle of communication between the crown and the free communities over which it exercised sovereignty, and will challenge received notions of kingship in the eleventh century and beyond.

A scholarly feast... a milestone in the history and historiography of medieval England. Its essays are without exception authoritative and well-written and it indicates not only the progress made in Domesday studies in the last hundred years but also the continuing significance of the pioneer work of the great Domesday scholars such as Maitland and Galbraith.' PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY An enduring contribution to historical scholarship.' AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW name studies, palaeography and topography.

Domesday: Book of Judgement provides a unique study of the extraordinary eleventh-century survey, the Domesday Book. Sally Harvey depicts the Domesday Book as the written evidence of a potentially insecure conquest successfully transforming itself, by a combination of administrative insight and military might, into a permanent establishment. William I used the Domesday Inquiry to contain the new establishment and consolidate their landholding revolution within a strict fiscal and tenurial framework, with checks and balances to prevent the king's followers from taking more powers and assets than they had been allocated. In this way, the survey served as a conciliatory gesture between the conquerors and the conquered, as William I came to realize that, faced with the threat to his rule from the Danes, he needed England's native populations more than they needed him. Yes, the overlying theme of the Domesday Book is Judgment: every class of society had reason to regard the Survey's methodical and often pitiless proceedings as both a literal and a metaphorical day of account. In this volume, Sally Harvey considers the Anglo-Saxon background and the architects of the Survey: the bishops, royal clerks, sheriffs, jurors, and landholders who contributed to Domesday's content and scope. She also discusses at length the core information in the Survey: coinage, revenues from landholding, fiscal concessions, and taxation, as well as some central tenurial issues. She draws the conclusion that the record, whilst consolidating William's position as king of the English, also laid the foundations for the twelfth-century treasury and exchequer. The volume newly argues that the Domesday survey also became an inquest into individual sheriffs and officials, thereby laying a foundation for reinterpreting the size of towns in England.

New light is shed on the motives and objectives for the compiling of the still-mysterious Domesday Book, revolutionising our understanding of the period. 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. Inreturn, 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.

Essays into numerous aspects of the Domesday Book, shedding fresh light on its mysteries. Compiled from the records of a survey of the kingdom of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085, Domesday Book is a key source for the history of England. However, there has never been a critical edition of the textand so, despite over 200 years of intense academic study, its evidence has rarely been exploited to the full. The essays in this volume seek to realize the potential of Domesday Book by focussing on the manuscript itself. There are analyses of abbreviations, letter forms, and language; re-assessments of key sources, the role of tenants-in-chief in producing them, and the nature of the Norman settlement that their forms illuminate; a re-evaluation of the data and its referents; and finally, fresh examinations of the afterlife of the Domesday text and how it was subsequently perceived. In identifying new categories of evidence and revisiting old ones, these studies point to a better understanding of the text. There are surprising insights into its sources and developing programme and, intriguingly, a system of encoding hitherto unsuspected. In its turn the import of its data becomes clearer, thereby shedding new light on Anglo-Norman society and governance. It is in these terms that this volume offers a departure in Domesday studies and looks forward to the resolution of long-standing problems that have hitherto bedevilled the interpretation of an iconic text. David Roffe and K.S.B. Keats-Rohan are leading Domesday scholars who have published widely on Domesday Book and related matters. Contributors: Howard B. Clarke, Sally Harvey, K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, Andrew Lowerre, John Palmer, David Roffe, Ian Taylor, Pamela Taylor, Frank Thorn, Ann Williams.

The Domesday Book has long been used as a source of information about legal and economic matters, but its bearing upon the geography of medieval England has been comparatively neglected. The extraction of geographical information involves problems of interpretation, since it necessitates an analysis into elements and their subsequent reconstruction on a geographical basis. But when this has been done new materials for making a general picture of the relative prosperity of different areas are available, as well as data for the comparative study of varying geographic and economic factors. The whole work, The Domesday Geography of England, will be in six volumes. In them different experts are to be allotted large distinct districts under Professor Darby's editorship. He will himself draw together all the threads, and write the concluding chapters of each volume and the whole of the concluding volume. The book will be fully illustrated by many maps, all specially drawn under the general editor's supervision. The volumes will be separately available, though the first contains some general introductory matter relevant to the whole work.

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.

This book provides a new interpretation of the English economy between 1066 and 1086 by using methods not previously applied to Economic theory and statistical techniques to reappraise the information recorded in the Domesday book. It is the first major reinterpretation of the Domesday economy since the work of J.H. Round and F.W. Maitland almost one hundred years ago, and its publication in 1986 coincided with the 900th anniversary of Domesday.