Domesday Book: William I's survey of England

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that at Christmas 1085, at Gloucester, the king had "very deep consultation with his council, about this land; how it was occupied, and by what sort of men", and then sent his men into every shire to find out what land and livestock the king and his tenants held and what it was worth — so thoroughly, the chronicler complains, that not even an ox, a cow or a pig was left out. The commissioners held public inquiries, probably at the shire courts, where the returns for each hundred were sworn to by juries of Englishmen and Normans. The returns give the value of each estate at three moments — in the time of King Edward, when its new lord received it, and at the time of the survey — and list its ploughs, mills, woods, fisheries and peasants of different ranks. The work was largely finished by the summer of 1086.

The results survive in two volumes: Little Domesday, covering Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk in fuller detail, and Great Domesday for most of the rest of England; London, Winchester and the far north were left out. Together they name about 13,400 places and count some 269,000 heads of household, from which historians estimate a population of roughly 1.2–1.6 million. Both the purpose of the survey — a record of royal rights and tax liabilities, a register of the estates that had passed to the Normans, or both — and the date of the book are debated: David Roffe argues that the inquest and the book were separate undertakings and that the book was completed under William II. The name, meaning "day of judgement", came into use in the 12th century because, as Richard FitzNeal explained around 1179, there was no appeal from its verdicts. The book is now kept in The National Archives at Kew.