Making Domesday

Abstract This chapter integrates the main findings of the book and offers a new interpretation of how and why Domesday was made. It argues that the making of Domesday can be divided into five stages which generated distinct written records intended for specific purposes. During the first stage, the survey was launched and data were collected by royal officials and landholders; during the second, a geographically arranged survey—the hundredal recension—was drafted by laying out a framework extracted from existing tax records and populating it with manorial detail supplied by landholders; during the third, that draft was checked and supplemented with further details of disputed and dubious tenures in meetings of shire courts; during the fourth, the manorial descriptions were rearranged under the names of landholders who held directly from the king, creating circuit returns like Exon; and during the fifth, the two records together known as Domesday Book were written. The first four stages were structured around meetings of royal assemblies and were completed before 1 August 1086. Great Domesday Book was started shortly afterwards and finished in 1087. The survey was intended to maximize the king’s revenues by enhancing the administration of specific streams of royal income, and to achieve that it was necessary to collect and structure information in particular ways. Domesday empowered the king to exploit landholders’ agrarian wealth more intensively, but the survey could not have been carried out unless the barons cooperated; they did so because they received something precious in return.