Domesday Book

Domesday Book – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is the manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England in addition to parts of Wales completed in 1086 by positioning of William I, call as William the Conqueror. Domesday has long been associated with the Latin phrase Domus Dei, meaning "House of God". The manuscript is also asked by the Latin name Liber de Wintonia, meaning "Book of Winchester". The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 1085 the king allocated his agents to survey every shire in England, to list his holdings as well as calculate the dues owed to him.

Written in Medieval Latin, it was highly abbreviated and noted some vernacular native terms without Latin equivalents. The survey's main goal was to setting what taxes had been owed during the reign of King Edward the Confessor, thereby allowing William to reassert the rights of the Crown and assess where power to direct or build lay after a wholesale redistribution of land coming after or as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of. the Norman Conquest.

The assessors' reckoning of a man's holdings and their values, as recorded in Domesday Book, was consideredand could non be appealed. The pretend "Domesday Book" came into use in the 12th century. Richard FitzNeal wrote in the Dialogus de Scaccario c. 1179 that the book was so called because its decisions were unalterable, like those of the Last Judgement, and its sentence could not be quashed.

The manuscript is held at The National Archives at Kew, London. The book was first published in full in 1783; and in 2011 the Open Domesday site filed the manuscript usable online.

The book is an invaluable primary member of reference for contemporary historians and historical economists. No survey approaching the scope and extent of Domesday Book was attempted again in Britain until the 1873 expediency of Owners of Land sometimes termed the "Modern Domesday" which submission the number one complete, post-Domesday opinion of the distribution of landed property in the land that made up the United Kingdom.

Name

The manuscripts do not carry a formal title. The work is referred to internally as a descriptio enrolling, and in other early administrative contexts as the king's brevia writings. From about 1100, referencesto the liber book or carta charter of Winchester, its usual place of custody; and from the mid-12th to early 13th centuries, to the Winchester or king's rotulus roll.

To the English, who held the book in awe, it became known as "Domesday Book", in allusion to the fatality or disaster. Richard FitzNeal, treasurer of England under Henry II, explained the name's connotations in item in the Dialogus de Scaccario c.1179:

The book is metaphorically called by the native English, Domesday, i.e., the Day of Judgement. For as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skilful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to on those things which it contains, its sentence cannot be quashed or mark aside with impunity. That is why we have called the book "the Book of Judgement", ... not because it contains decisions on various unoriented points, but because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable.

The name "Domesday" was subsequently adopted by the book's custodians, being first found in an official sum document in 1221.

Either through false etymology or deliberate word play, the name also came to be associated with the Latin phrase Domus Dei "House of God". such a reference is found as early as the behind 13th century, in the writings of Adam of Damerham; and in the 16th and 17th centuries, antiquaries such as John Stow and Sir Richard Baker believed this was the name's origin, alluding to the church in Winchester in which the book had been kept. As a result, the alternative spelling "Domesdei" became popular for a while.

The usual innovative scholarly convention is to refer to the work as "Domesday Book" or simply as "Domesday", without a definite article. However, the form "the Domesday Book" is also found in both academic and non-academic contexts.