Writing Great Domesday Book

Abstract This chapter examines how Great Domesday Book (GDB) was written, by comparing it with Exon Domesday. It starts with the order of writing, placing Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall at the end of the whole work. The question whether the GDB scribe worked directly from Exon or from a fair copy (resembling Little Domesday Book) is answered, chiefly from the presence in Exon of the GDB scribe’s hand and of a repeated marginal annotation f alongside entries where he rearranged the order of manors within a handful of fiefs. (Appendix 10.2 deals with the marginal annotation E.) There was no fair copy. The chapter next attends to the design of GDB, covering the page layout (mise-en-page), how introductory material and chapter lists for each shire were compiled, and, most fully, the scribe’s reshaping of the manorial descriptions. It shows that the GDB scribe was an adroit and astute editor, and describes how he compressed, rearranged, and reworded the text. The chapter covers his techniques for drastic shortening with minimal loss of content, as well as his lexicon, his facility with figures, his treatment of English place-names, and finally his errors. The design of GDB made it both a practical working document and a presentation copy of symbolic importance. Appendix 10.1 assesses the long-established idea that the scribe of GDB was a monk of Durham cathedral priory, and the more recent suggestion that he was the cantor of Winchester cathedral priory under Bishop Walkelin (a point developed in Chapter 18).