Domesday Book Interpretations

Domesday Book - Interpretations

Having a database of Domesday is not really much help. Like all databases they are only as good as the information stored in them.

Sure the database can be queried but the results can be less than helpful if all that is going on is just a look-up of names that have possibly been mis-translated. In many cases there are multiple versions of spellings and assumptions made about the connections between the names.

Below is an entry in such a database, Anna Powell-Smith's opendomesday.org, for Belchamp Walter. The location of Belchamp Walter as popularly recorded for the village, the name Thunderlow is taken from original Domesday text.

Modern maps and Domesday

The problem with placing Domesday Locations on a mordern map is that often the exact location is not known. As seen below the location of Thunderlow from the PASE database is different to that of the opendomesday.org site.

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The Phillimore Translation

The Hull Domesday Project says about their Domesday Explorer:

This edition employs the unique numbering system of the Phillimore edition where each separate entry or block of text is numbered. This allows more precise retrieval than the customary referencing by folio numbers since there may be dozens of entries on any one folio. In general, references in the Phillimore system consist of two numbers separated by a comma: the first number is that of the fief of the tenant-in-chief, the second the number of an entry within that fief.

The Phillimore Domesday translation should not be confused with Philipot's Villare Cantianum,
or, Kent surveyed and illustrated

Doing things beside Domesday book - Carol Symes

Here Carol Symes discusses the "satellites" (other interprations of Domesday and other contemporary histories) of the Domesday book. Why there is a "special" edition, Little Domesday, for East Anglia and why waste tracts of the country were not even accounted in the main edition of Domesday, Great Domesday.

In her introduction to her paper she says:

Domesday Book is the collective name attached to two different bodies of text. Colloquially known as “Great” and “Little” Domesday, they represent successive documentary phases of the inquest undertaken by agents of William the Conqueror in 1086.1

The more famous (also known as “Exchequer Domesday”) is a condensed edition of the inquest’s results. The other is an earlier artifact (a “circuit survey” in the parlance of Domesday historiography) comprising more detailed information gathered from the East Anglian shires of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex.2

In the past decade or so, a growing body of scholarship has established that analogous surveys of England’s other regions were also prepared and eventually became the exemplars abbreviated and anthologized by Great Domesday’s chief scribe. Thereafter, however, only the surveys contained in Little Domesday were preserved, perhaps to make up for these specific counties’ absence from Great Domesday.3

I have the Phillimore Translation of what I think is Little Domesday. I must admiut that taking this as a basis for the formulation of a history of the country at the turn of the millenium is rather like taking a spreadsheet of a set of accounts and then coming up with the minutes of a meeting that occured at the time that the accounts were drawn up!

Taking stock, or attempting to, of who owned what before 1066 and who owned it after 1086 is problematic when the translators did not even agree on the spelling of the names of the rulers (Theins) and also the spelling of the realms that they held dominion.

Post 1086 and into the 11th Century much was going on in the country. When Henry II came to the throne in 1154 it had not been long since the "division of the spoils" from Conquest in 1066. The activities of the de Veres and the de Mandevilles and their place in the Anarchy are not explained by the General Survey. Or even the events that led up to that priod. The struggle between King Steven and the aspiraations of the Empress Matilda was brewing and the effects on the history of the country were profound.

What the "Interpreting Domesday" page on National Archives says:

Domesday Book is not a census and does not contain the names of everyone living in late 11th century England. Although Domesday contains many thousands of names very few families can, with any certainty, trace their lineage back in the male line to an Anglo-Saxon forebear mentioned in Domesday. Anglo-Norman ancestors who held large estates and are often given surnames in Domesday are easier to trace. But even here the problem remains that between 1086 and 1154, the date of the first continuous series of public, there is a significant gap in the archival record.

For more information consult A.J. Camp, They Came with the Conqueror (Society of Genealogists, 1990).

Background to this page

Having seen some of my history pages being found by those making an Internet search I have decided to add a bit more context on how the pages came about.

Domesday Book - Interpretations

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