The Domesday book, surviving now in the National Archives in London, was the great land survey of 1086 instigated by William the Conqueror to enable him to tax the land correctly. It summarises in a largely formulaic format in Latin the holdings of each of the royal tenants and the population and property across most of the country. The huge work contains amazing detail about named individuals. Here short excerpts are also included from Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English and from the work called the Dialogue of the Exchequer which describes the DOmesday book and its inception.

Two short writs granting land to the Church show how in the early years of William the Conqueror’s reign the use of Latin was gradually adopted where Old English had been used in pre-Conquest times for royal writs, though Latin was used for charters.

In the section on the Battle of Hastings of 1066, the first event in the Norman Conquest of Britain, an excerpt is given of the Latin text accompanying the embroidered pictures on the Bayeux tapestry. Then excerpts are given from the early twelfth-century accounts by William of Malmesbury of the Battle itself, and by Orderic Vitalis of the aftermath of the battle, in the following years of violence against the population in the rest of the country, including Northumbria and Cumbria.

William I’s ‘Harrying of the North’ was a military expedition against local rebels and a Danish invasion force in the winter of 1069–70. It has been regarded since the 1870s as a uniquely savage treatment of the English inhabitants of northern England, wantonly destructive of life and the means of sustenance, and tantamount to genocide. Such views derive from the two fullest medieval accounts, by the early twelfth-century historians Symeon of Durham and Orderic Vitalis. However, neither was an eye-witness, both were at work two generations later, and both had their own agenda in describing the destruction of the North and William I’s cruelty. The Harrying should instead be seen as a routine military operation which took place, unusually, in the depths of winter, and so had unusually severe consequences. More strictly contemporary accounts from Evesham and Beverley reveal a regional but probably localized famine and a refugee crisis. Further, the record in Domesday Book (1086) of many Yorkshire villages as ‘waste’ should be read as referring not to physical destruction but to the absence of surplus values accruing to landlords, and not caused by the Harrying alone. The Harrying of the North was no genocide.

This epilogue concludes the volume with an investigation of the legacy of William the Conqueror and his age in public culture, international politics, media, and social memory.