Little Domesday

Little Domesday is the first draft or ‘circuit summary’ covering the counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. Because the information from Little Domesday was never entered into Great Domesday, Little Domesday was kept as the final record for East Anglia.

Another related document, called Exon Domesday, survives at Exeter Cathedral. Most historians believe that this was the circuit summary for the south-west. The information from Exon Domesday did get written up into Great Domesday, unlike that in Little Domesday.

All the regional returns, or circuit summaries, were brought together, possibly at Winchester. They were probably all finished by 1 August when William met with the principal tenants of his great feudal magnates at Salisbury. A colophon at the end of Little Domesday gives us the date of 1086. Little Domesday took between nine and 12 weeks to write up and was the work of about six scribes. It consists of 475 leaves made of parchment (animal skin). The text is written across the page and not in two columns, as in Great Domesday. Each county begins with a numbered list of landholders in hierarchical order followed by a similar arrangement of entries to that of Great Domesday. The entries generally contain more detailed information than the entries in Great Domesday.

Colophon at the end of Little Domesday. Translated it reads: In the one thousand and eighty-sixth year from the incarnation of [our] lord [and] in the twentieth [year] of the reign of [King] William, this survey (descriptio) was made, not only through these three counties [Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex], but also through others. Catalogue reference: E 31/1/3 f.450

Pages from Little Domesday for Essex showing the lands of Odo Bishop of Bayeux, the half-brother of William I;
Catalogue reference: E 31/1/1 f.23v-24