Introduction

Summary

ACCORDING TO RICHARD fitzNigel, writing in the Dialogue of the Exchequer around about the year 1179, Domesday was accorded its name by the native English. Eight hundred and fifty or so years later the Book has a higher profile in the popular mind than it has ever had. A Google Alert with the search terms ‘Domesday Book’ regularly unearths tens of new pages on the internet each week; as fact, icon or myth, Domesday crops up in a bewildering number of contexts in England as around the world. Much of this is more of sociological or psychological interest than historical. Nevertheless, in parallel, if largely invisibly to a wider world, Domesday Book has also been the subject of intense academic study. In 1985 David Bates listed 1847 publications in A Bibliography of Domesday Book. There has been no up-date since, but a new edition would add perhaps thousands more to that total. The last thirty years has seen an exponential growth in Domesday studies. It comes as some surprise, then, to the informed outsider that there still remains no consensus on the purpose of the text, much less the inquest on which it was based. Major new studies have challenged the received wisdom of over 200 years of academic study. Compilation, date, data, purpose and even the very centrality of Domesday Book itself have now been brought into question.

Domesday studies are in turmoil. To take stock, a conference entitled Domesday Now was convened at The National Archives in Kew, UK, by the editors of this volume in September 2011. Leading scholars in the field were invited to assess developments since the last conference on Domesday in the year 2000 and suggest new ways forward. The papers here presented are the result. David Roffe opens with an overview of Domesday studies outlining the main themes that have emerged in the last few years. Much of the work has been of technical import. A notable achievement has been a general recognition of the importance of ‘diplomatic’, that is, the changing forms of the text. This approach has, for example, led to a broad agreement on the order of writing of Great Domesday Book (GDB), which has in its turn afforded a glimpse of the scribe's developing programme as he wrote, and a better understanding of the various forms of lordship. Differences on fundamentals remain.