Domesday Book
Learn how to explore Domesday Book, the earliest surviving public record and the foundation document of The National Archives. You can search Domesday by place or person and download colour images of Domesday folios, along with the acclaimed Editions Alecto translation.
What is Domesday Book?
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At Christmas 1085 William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey to discover the resources and taxable values of all the boroughs and manors in England. He wanted to discover who owned what, how much it was worth, and how much was owed to him as King.
There is still some debate about the exact purpose of Domesday Book. One theory suggests that Domesday might be the first written tax document. However there is no question that it was a massive enterprise, and that the record of that survey, Domesday Book, was a remarkable achievement.
Searching
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You can search by the names of places or people, or by folio reference.
Searching for places
Each Domesday entry contains a modern place name, a modern county and a Domesday place name, in other words, the place name as it would have been spelt in the 11th century.
- To search on the modern English form of a place name (for instance, East Carlton) type your keyword into the "Place name" box
- To search on the Domesday form of a place name (for instance, Carletun), type this into the "Other keywords" box
- If you would like to search for all entries listed in particular county (for instance, Herefordshire), type the county name into the "Place name" box
- The folio reference is given in the description for each entry, so you will be able to see if multiple entries fall on the same folio
A few points to note:
- The index uses pre-1974 county boundaries
- The Domesday settlement may not necessarily be located in exactly the place as the modern area
- The survey did not cover London, Winchester, Northumberland or County Durham; only parts of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire were surveyed; and the only parts of Wales included are certain border areas
- The Domesday settlement may no longer exist. Some place names are found only in Domesday Book; some places are no longer inhabited and survive as the name of a natural feature or the place name may have been recorded in a corrupt form.
- Try searching on the main part of the name only. So for example if you were having difficulty with a place name like "Great Dunmow", try entering only "Dunmow".
Searching for people
Each Domesday entry contains a list of the people mentioned on the folio. This includes people and ecclesiastical bodies because churches and abbeys were also landholders. There is a search box specifically for people.
- The index includes landholders who held land before the Norman Conquest in 1066 and in 1086, when the survey was carried out. It was usual for the Church to own specific lands from the reign of Edward through to William (and longer) but rare that a person would do so.
- Many of those mentioned were listed in the survey by first name only
- Anglo-Saxon names have been indexed, rather than the Scandinavian spelling variants which tend to occur in the North and the Midlands
- Domesday Book is not a census of the population; the names that do appear in it are only of land-holders. As it was primarily a land/taxation survey you are unlikely to uncover family names. There is no record of the names of everyone living in late 11th-century England but if you are looking for a Norman ancestor, read My Ancestors came with the Conqueror by AJ Camp (Society of Genealogists, 1990).
Searching for a particular folio
If you would like to see what places are listed on a particular folio, you can search for a folio reference in the "Other keywords" box.
A folio is like one side of a page. Whereas in a modern book, each side of a page will be numbered sequentially (1, 2, 3, etc), sides of pages in Domesday Book are numbered 1r , 1v, 2r, 2v. and so on, to signify whether an entry is "recto", on the front, or "verso", on the back. Some folios may be blank.
- To search for every entry on folio 154 verso of Great Domesday use the "Other keywords" box, and type "154v Great"
- To search for every entry on folio 112 recto of Little Domesday, use the "Other keywords" box, and type "112r Little"
What do the pages look like?
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Domesday Book survives as two volumes, Little Domesday and Great Domesday.
When you download the image(s) for an entry, you will receive at least two files: a colour scan of the Domesday folio on which the entry is found and the modern English translation of that folio.Although delivered together, each file has to be downloaded separately.
- If a single entry spans one folio to the next, you will receive images of both folios
- If there are a number of entries for the same place on different folios, they will be treated as separated entries
- Entries for different places can appear in the same folio, as you can see in the examples below
Click on these images to see sample pages (these are smaller than the images you can download from DocumentsOnline). You will notice that Little Domesday is more detailed.
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Little Domesday (Catalogue reference E 31/1) |
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Little Domesday (Catalogue reference E 31/1) |
You can see modern English translations of the list of Essex landowners
and the start of the Essex survey.
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Great Domesday (Catalogue reference E 31/2) |
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Great Domesday (Catalogue reference E 31/2) |
You can see modern English translations of these extracts from
Herefordshire and Yorkshire.
Further Research
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- You can access a variety of Domesday resources on our website.
- Domesday Book and Taxation. There is still some debate about the exact purpose of Domesday Book and one theory suggests that Domesday might be the first written tax document.
- The Domesday 1986 project. To mark the 900th anniversary of the Domesday book, in 1986 the BBC published the 'Domesday Project' as a record of British life in the 1980s. Over a million children and adults from over 14,000 schools and other groups surveyed their local areas.
- Domesday Explorer CD Rom. Professor John Palmer of the University of Hull has been leading a project to produce Domesday Book on CD-rom. The CD-rom features databases of names, places and statistics, and map searching.
- There is a Domesday glossary and bibliography. And you can try our Latin tutorials for beginner and advanced level.
