Domesday Book

DOMESDAY BOOK

Who wrote Domesday Book and when it was made are still unclear after nine hundred years. It may be that it is not a product of William the Conqueror's reign after all. The Domesday survey (descriptio in Latin) was indeed undertaken in 1086 on William's orders, but the book came later. The survey names nearly 45,000 people and lists another 270,000 as well as more than 13,000 places of settlement, 6,000 mills, 2000 churches and 81,000 plough teams. There is no evidence that William conceived the end-product of the survey as a single volume - in fact, Domesday Book is not a single volume anyway; there is the Exeter Domesday, covering Somerset, Devon and Cornwall; Little Domesday concerns Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, while Great Domesday covers the rest.

The novocentenary of the Domesday survey in 1986 produced the hypothesis of Pierre Chaplais and Michael Gullick that most of Great Domesday (in one hand throughout) was written by a single scribe associated with Durham. Durham (with Northumberland) was not included in the Domesday survey and Chaplais argued that its bishop, William of St Calais (1081-96) was the ideal person to be made responsible for writing up Domesday Book because he had no personal interest in its findings. Other scholars prefer Ranulf Flambard, William II's minister who succeeded St Calais as Bishop of Durham. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis stated that Flambard incited William II to 'revise the descriptio of the whole of England' in order to raise more money.

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
DOMESDAY BOOK Who wrote Domesday Book and when it was made are still unclear after nine hundred years. It may be that it is not a product of William the Conqueror's reign after all. The Domesday survey (descriptio in Latin) was indeed undertaken in 1086 on William's orders, but the book came later. The survey names nearly 45,000 people and lists another 270,000 as well as more than 13,000 places of settlement, 6,000 mills, 2000 churches and 81,000 plough teams. There is no evidence that William conceived the end-product of the survey as a single volume - in fact, Domesday Book is not a single volume anyway; there is the Exeter Domesday, covering Somerset, Devon and Cornwall; Little Domesday concerns Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, while Great Domesday covers the rest. The novocentenary of the Domesday survey in 1986 produced the hypothesis of Pierre Chaplais and Michael Gullick that most of Great Domesday (in one hand throughout) was written by a single scribe associated with Durham. Durham (with Northumberland) was not included in the Domesday survey and Chaplais argued that its bishop, William of St Calais (1081-96) was the ideal person to be made responsible for writing up Domesday Book because he had no personal interest in its findings. Other scholars prefer Ranulf Flambard, William II's minister who succeeded St Calais as Bishop of Durham. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis stated that Flambard incited William II to 'revise the descriptio of the whole of England' in order to raise more money.
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