Domesday Book: Half-Norman Juries, 5,600 Mills and a 2019 Market Case

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In 2019 an 11th-century parchment entry helped settle a dispute over the right to run a town market. It came from the Domesday Book, the survey William the Conqueror ordered after the Norman Conquest to learn who held what land and who owed the geld, as the threat of a Danish invasion demanded money for mercenaries. Royal officers held inquiries in every shire, and in each hundred the returns were sworn by juries of half Englishmen and half Normans, who had every reason to expose each other. The colophon dates the work to 1086, but historian Carol Symes, studying the scribes' handwriting, argues the book may not have been compiled until 1098 or as late as 1114.

First called the Book of Winchester, it has two parts: Great Domesday, in abbreviated Latin covering most of England, and the more detailed Little Domesday for Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, an earlier draft that counts pigs and sheep. Treasurer Richard FitzNeal wrote that the public called it Domesday because its judgments could not be appealed. London and Winchester were left as blank spaces. H. C. Darby estimated 1.2 to 1.6 million people from about 268,000 heads of households, and the book records 28,000 enslaved people. It fled the Great Fire of 1666 to Nonsuch Palace, sheltered in Bodmin Jail in 1918 and Shepton Mallet Prison in the Second World War, and was digitized in 2006.

• Over 5,600 water mills are recorded, against fewer than 100 a century earlier, letting peasants eat bread instead of porridge.
• Treasury sums were worked out with counters on a checkered cloth, the origin of the word exchequer.
• Darby blamed errors on overworked clerks and wrote of the geography of Domesday Book rather than of England.
• In 1986 conservators split Great Domesday into two volumes and Little Domesday into three.
• Entries helped prove foreshore anchorage rights in 1960 and supported hunting rights claims in 2010.