Domesday Book

Domesday Book is the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086 on the orders of William the Conqueror. It is the earliest comprehensive record of landholding in English history and the starting point for almost every manorial descent. Two volumes survive: Great Domesday, covering most of England, and Little Domesday, covering Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk in greater detail. Both are held at the National Archives at Kew.

The purpose of the survey

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that at Christmas 1085, William held his court at Gloucester and “had much thought and very deep discussion about this country, how it was occupied or with what sort of people.” The resulting survey was designed to establish three things: who held each piece of land, what it was worth, and what it had been worth in the time of Edward the Confessor (1066). This allowed the Crown to assess its tax base and to confirm the tenurial settlement that had followed the Conquest.

What was recorded

Each entry in Domesday Book records the name of the manor, the tenant-in-chief (who held from the king), the under-tenant (if any), the assessment in hides or carucates, the number of plough teams, the population by class, the extent of woodland, meadow, and pasture, and the value of the manor in both 1066 and 1086. Some entries include additional details: mills, fisheries, salthouses, churches, or the number of burgesses in a town.

The hide was not a fixed measure of area. It was a unit of tax assessment, notionally the amount of land needed to support one household. In practice, the number of hides assigned to a manor reflected its taxable capacity rather than its physical size. A manor assessed at 10 hides was not necessarily ten times the area of a manor assessed at one hide. It was ten times the tax burden.

How the survey was conducted

The survey was carried out by teams of commissioners who travelled to each county and held inquiries at the hundred courts. Evidence was given on oath by the sheriff, the barons of the county, the French and English men of each hundred, and the priest, reeve, and six villeins of each vill. The commissioners asked a standard set of questions about each holding, and the answers were compiled into the returns that became Domesday Book.

The process was completed in under a year. By August 1086, the survey was done. William died in September 1087 and never used the finished book. Its value to his successors was immediate and lasting. It remained the authoritative record of English landholding for centuries and was cited in legal disputes as late as the nineteenth century.

Domesday and the south coast

The Sussex and Hampshire folios of Domesday Book are particularly detailed. Sussex was organised into six rapes, each headed by a major castle. The Rape of Chichester, which covers the area documented by this platform, was held by Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury. Within his rape, the survey records the great manor of Bosham (assessed at 56 hides and valued at 60 pounds), the ecclesiastical holdings of the Bishop of Chichester and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and dozens of smaller manors along the harbour coast.

In Hampshire, the Portsdown hundred manors were recorded under their respective tenants-in-chief. Portchester, the hub of the castle serjeanty network, appears as a royal manor. The surrounding manors, which owed castle guard to Portchester, are listed with their holders and assessments.

Using Domesday today

The original manuscript can be viewed at the National Archives. The full text is available online through Open Domesday (opendomesday.org) and through the Phillimore edition published county by county from 1975. For manorial research, Domesday provides the baseline: the first named holder of almost every English manor, and the framework of tenure from which all subsequent descents flow.