Appendix 21 - On the Writing of Domesday Geography

Summary

I became interested in Domesday Book while working on the medieval Fenland in the early 1930s. The Domesday entries for the fenland villages yielded a harvest of information about such items as fisheries, salt-pans, ploughteams and population. I soon realised, however, that the individuality of fenland economy could be appreciated only by contrasting this information with that for the upland around. And this led to an examination of the complete Domesday texts for the surrounding counties. The first paper (on ‘Domesday woodland in East Anglia’) appeared in 1934 and others followed in the next few years. In the meantime, some of my pupils at Cambridge became interested; they also began to compile Domesday maps on a county basis, and a number of these were likewise published in the 1930s. We were much concerned with the best way in which to present the information. Some of our early work was very unsophisticated as may be seen from a map of Wiltshire woodland which appeared in 1935 and which showed the formula ‘m leagues by n leagues’ as so many rectangles.

It was an exciting time, and the picture was changing from week to week. Much of the excitement arose from the fitting together of maps of adjacent counties and so seeing how the distributions carried over from one county to another.