News

# Snapshot of Tudor England in Henry VIII’s ‘Domesday’

The National Archives is helping make accessible a financial survey of the
Church ordered by Henry VIII after his break with Rome.

Published 6 October 2025

Henry VIII's inspectors counted 8,000 parish churches, 650 monasteries, 22
cathedrals and numerous chapels, chantries, colleges, schools, hospitals and
poor houses as they travelled the length and breadth of England and Wales in
1535.

The resulting survey is known as Valor Ecclesiasticus*.*

Many of the men and women who lived and worked in these church-run communities
were also counted, along with meadows and orchards, moorland and woods,
waterways and a wide variety of working environments from market stalls to
open-cast coal mines.

This extraordinary snapshot of Tudor England is being made available to the
public thanks to almost £1.5m from UK Research & Innovation’s Arts and
Humanities Research Council.

The work will be done by the University of Exeter, The National Archives, the
University of Nottingham, the University of Reading, the National Trust and
community groups.

A digital team in the University of Exeter’s Department of Classics, Ancient
History, Religion and Theology, will transform the 500-year old Latin
manuscripts into modern, searchable records. The National Archives holds the
original returns for the survey.

The original record on rolls of parchment was printed once by Parliament’s
Record Commission nearly 200 years ago, in an abbreviated Latin transcript so
clumsy and difficult to read that generations of historians have steered clear.

Rediscovering the Tudor Domesday will see the survey translated, analysed and
each location linked to current maps on a free access website. The National
Archives will create archive and education resources about individual religious
houses.

> Valor Ecclesiasticus is second only to Domesday Book as a snapshot of the realm,
> even surpassing it in the impression it gives of England’s landscape and the
> lives and occupations of local society.

Prof James Clark, Project lead, Department of Archaeology and History,
University of Exeter

> This survey is an incredible resource for local history yet has been
> inaccessible to all but the most experienced of researchers for years. We are
> opening it to a new generation of historians, archivists, heritage professionals
> and anyone who wants to uncover their neighbourhood’s past.

Dr Euan Roger, Principal Medieval Records Specialist at The National Archives

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