Domesday Book counted England's mills, slaves and households, and nobody could appeal it
The English called William the Conqueror's great survey Domesday because, like the Last Judgment, there was no appeal against it. In the Old English sense, doom simply meant a judgment. Nearly nine centuries passed before Britain attempted another land survey on anything like the same scale.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the king sent officials into every shire in 1085 to find out what he owned and was owed; the book's closing note says the work was finished in 1086, though the medievalist Carol Symes suggests the volume itself may date from as late as 1098 to 1114. Royal officers held public hearings, probably in the shire courts, and each hundred's return was sworn by 12 jurors, half English and half Norman. Its aim was to fix the yearly value of every estate to its lord, along with the land, workers and animals that produced it.
There are really two works. Little Domesday, physically smaller but more detailed, covers Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex and even counts livestock on lords' home farms. Great Domesday covers most of the rest, apparently written out by a single scribe on sheepskin parchment, whereas Little Domesday took about six. Spaces left for London and Winchester were never filled, and the far north was skipped because it paid no geld, the land tax whose lists framed the survey. Each county opens with the king's own lands, since in feudal law he alone truly owned the soil and even great barons merely held it from him.
Its tallies are remarkable: 268,984 heads of household, 13,418 places, 28,000 slaves and 5,624 mills, where a century earlier fewer than 100 had been recorded. Georges Duby read that as a mill per 46 peasant households and a shift from porridge to baked bread. H. C. Darby estimated England's population at between 1.2 and 1.6 million. Norman-trained scribes, used to French spelling, mostly avoided the letters k and w.
Richard FitzNeal explained the nickname around 1179, and custodians adopted it officially by 1221. Some later antiquaries wrongly derived it from Domus Dei, the house of God. First printed in full in 1783, the manuscript is kept at the National Archives in Kew and went online in 2011.
Source: Domesday Book
