Domesday Book: a VCH author’s guide1
Although a translation of Domesday Book for each county generally appears in VCH volume
II for each county and is now generally available on British History Online it should not be
used. This is because it has been superseded by more recent and, importantly, more
accurate versions. The best of these is the Alecto edition published on a county by county
basis but available as a single volume from Penguin.
For the sake of consistency of references and general accuracy, please use the single volume
version only.
Citation
The full reference should be given in the first instance:
A. Williams and G.H. Martin (eds.), Domesday Book: A Complete Translation (London, 2002)
In footnotes, subsequent references should be given in abbreviated form as follows:
Domesday, 00.
Note that the county by county volumes offer very full and useful introductions that
highlight the specific differences in the survey’s treatment of the estates in that county and
it is strongly recommended that you read these.
Style
In the text should be described as ‘Domesday’ or ‘Domesday Book’ with caps and does not
require a definite article although ‘the Domesday survey’, does.
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These notes have been compiled with the invaluable assistance of Dr Chris Lewis
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Introduction to Domesday Book
Domesday Book is a unique source and is, for most places in England, the beginning of their
local history. It was commissioned by William I at Christmas 1085 and delivered in 1086; a
remarkable testament to the effectiveness of the eleventh century English State. It is in two
parts, ‘Little’ and ‘Great’ Domesday. The former covers the eastern counties – Essex, Norfolk
and Suffolk – and provides more detailed information than for the rest of England. Great
Domesday. The reasons for this are unclear. It is possible that it represents an earlier part of
the compilation process as the other surviving version of Domesday, the so-called ‘Exon
Domesday’ which covers the south western counties (Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset
and Wiltshire)

England is described by manor rather than by parish; the two were not necessarily
co-terminus

The holder of the manor (as opposed to the parish) in 1066 (Tempus Regis Edwardi –
TRE) and in 1086.

The overlord in 1086

The amount paid in geld and the land-based assessment of this payment in Hides.

The amount of land available to plough and the number of plough teams

A partial assessment of population: the numbers of different types of people and
their relative freedom of action at a very basic level. At best, this indicates the
number of households.

The information comes from a variety of sources; assessments like hidage and geld
which were probably derived from written sources and other information which
came by word of mouth either from those who held land or their tenants.
Since the document is still part of the archives of the British State, it is housed and
conserved by The National Archives, Kew. TNA provides a useful research guide and some
suggested secondary reading:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/domesday.htm
The accompanying ‘Discover Domesday’ pages also give a useful overview:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/discover-domesday/
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Using Domesday
A warning from H.P.R. Finberg:
“The the Domesday passage; and there is no better way of unnerving the average
reader at the outset than to hurl a chunk of Domesday at him, without any
explanation of its terminology or so much a hint that scholars are not altogether
certain what some of the entries mean.”2
Although Finberg was writing in the 1960s, the warning is still valid. The terms used in the
survey must be approached with caution and used with care. There is much in this source
which can be helpful but its limitations must be recognised. Do not use all the information
Domesday provides in one paragraph. The Domesday manor, or manors, must be related,
using other evidence, to the extent of the later parish boundary. This information should be
addressed in the contextual paragraph.
The following is given according to the usual sections of VCH parish entries.
Introduction
The key information that Domesday provides relates to land ownership and land use. Each
entry records how much land was given over to arable (ploughlands), wood, waste, meadow
or pasture. When cited in the text, these amounts should not simply be given as figures; use
the terminology as it is given in the text.
As a rule of thumb a ploughland is typically 100—120 a., that is, an amount of land that
would require a single plough team to work. In some cases, it is possible to simply multiply
the ploughlands, add the additional land mentioned in the entry and end up with the known
size of the ancient parish but this is not the norm.
Land Ownership
There are some useful interpretative sources. The most ambitious and what will ultimately
be the most useful with regard to the pre-Conquest land holdings is provided by the
Prosopography of Anglo Saxon England (PASE) http://domesday.pase.ac.uk/
In Cheshire, Cornwall and Shropshire, there were concealed tenancies which researchers
should be aware of (details from specific Alecto editions)
Domesday is problematic in the way in which it records ecclesiastical estates; it sometimes
omits them entirely and is not interested in estates held by leasehold.
2
H.P.R. Finberg, ‘How not to write local history’ in Finberg, H.P.R. and Skipp, V.H.T (eds.) Local History:
Objective and Pursuit (Newton Abbot, 1967), 71-86
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Economic History
Do not place all the Domesday material in one paragraph unrelated to what comes later.
Domesday only gives an indication of the shape of agriculture as a whole and not the
specifics.
Land Use
Arable land was the backbone of the Domesday economy. Demesne farming – that is,
farming carried out by the lord on his own land – was complemented by farming by tenants
and non-agricultural activity.
Measures of land area – as noted above, use ploughlands rather than hides. A Hide was a
tax assessment and not related to a field or statute acre. In a VCH context, its only real value
is in providing context in terms of the relative value of tax liability on peasant and demesne
land. This could have an impact on factors such as 17th century assessments by yardlands
for copyhold (which applied to land holdings which had originally been part of manorial
demesne holdings of unfree tenants).
Woodland should be considered under land use, and treated as an economic asset. If
guidance is required for understanding the use of woodland as both a landscape feature and
an economic resource the work of Oliver Rackham outlines a sensible approach to woodland
in general and the treatment of Domesday woodland in particular.
O. Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (London, 1990)
O. Rackham, The Making of the English Countryside (London, 1986 and later editions)
The questions that the Domesday surveyors were given assumed that a ploughteam
consisted of eight oxen. As such, it is assumed that this is what is meant in the text.
The amounts of wood, meadow and pasture given in a Domesday entry refer to the
demesne land only. In other words, the amounts describe the lord’s land. There may well
have been other woodland, for example, which was in the hands of the tenants or held as
common.
Population
Inevitably, this is a matter of debate and this debate does not belong in a VCH parish entry.
Although attempts to extrapolate the figures given in Domesday by means of multipliers
(usually in the order of 4.5—5) to estimate the population in 1066 and 1086, these should
not generally be used for VCH purposes.
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Use only the figures given in the text. These give a relative indication of the number of
households and stand some comparison with records of later taxation (such as lay subsidies
or the poll taxes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). It is more useful to assess the
relative sizes of free and unfree population and the number of households.
Types of Peasant
The ‘Ely questionnaire’ – a document which records the questions that the commissioners
set out to answer – notes five categories:

Slaves

Villeins

Cottars (which for our purposes, are the same as Bordars and Cotsets)

Freemen

Sokemen
Personal Names
For other Old English names that occur in Domesday Book follow the spelling given in the
headword in O. von Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book (1937),
appending the Domesday form in brackets where it is markedly different from Feilitzen’s
standard form. Old Scandinavian names are nearly always better in the Old Danish or Old
Swedish spellings than in the Old Norse used by Feilitzen as the headword, or they can be
given an English equivalent, e.g. <Raven> for Feilitzen’s ‘Hrafn’.
Animals and Livestock
Like so much else, Domesday is not consistent in its treatment of these. The counties
covered by Little Domesday and those found in the Exon Domesday – Cornwall, Devon,
Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire contain references to the amount of livestock on the
demesne of each manor, but Great Domesday does not. Since the Alecto edition is based on
Great and Little Domesday rather than the Exon Domesday details relating to livestock are
omitted.
Churches
While some counties include relatively complete records of churches others omit them
entirely. This is largely because Domesday was concerned with taxable property and
churches were not taxed. If a priest is mentioned among the inhabitants, this is a good
indication that a church was also present, whether it is recorded or not. All Saints, Brixworth
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(Northants.), for example, is one of the country’s finest Saxon churches; it is not recorded in
Domesday.
The simplest and clearest explanation of the treatment of churches in the Domesday survey
remains William Page’s article of 1915.
W. Page, ‘Remarks on the churches of the Domesday Survey’ Archaeologia 66 (1915)
This can be downloaded from Archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/archaeologiaormi66sociuoft
Glossary
Note that only select terms are given in this glossary. These are the most useful for the
purposes of writing a VCH parish entry or are terms likely to give rise to confusion. A full
glossary can be found on pages 1431-1436 of the Alecto Domesday.
BORDAR – A cottager: a peasant of lower economic status that a villein.
COTTAR – A cottager: a peasant of lower economic status that a villein.
GELD – The English (and therefore pre-Conquest) land-tax based on the HIDE.
HIDE – Notionally this was the amount of land which would support a household: divided
into four VIRGATES. Note: the hide was a unit of assessment for the payment of geld which
was only notionally related to the amount of land on a manor. It should NOT, therefore be
used to describe an amount of land but be thought of in the same way as GELD.
PLOUGHLAND is to be preferred; it is, generally, more accurate and more useful for VCH
purposes.
PLOUGHLAND – The number of ploughlands may (1) estimate the arable capacity of an
estate in terms of the number of eight-ox plough-teams needed to work it (c. 100 a.–c. 120
a.); or (2)record an assessment of dues required from an estate.
SLAVE – called serfs in earlier translations of Domesday, slave is a more accurate assessment
of the status of servi and less ambiguous for the reader.
VIRGATE – One-quarter of a HIDE: the equivalent of the English YARDLAND.
YARDLAND – see VIRGATE
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