Domesday in the Middle Ages: Usage and Abusage

The importance of William the Conqueror's survey was widely recognised in the years after his death, and although some of its information went rapidly out of date, its material about tenures and rights was to be of long lasting importance. However, for almost a century after Domesday's making there was considerable official uncertainty as to what to name it. Its compilers had called it a description in the 1090s it was known as the king's brevia (writings); and from 1100 it was variously described as a carta (document) or Iiber (book). Sometimes it was said to belong to the king or to the treasury; sometimes it was called the Winchester book or rotulus (roll). In many such instances the references were perhaps not even to Domesday Book but to its background records and source materials which were kept with it at Winchester. Only with liber (book) may we be on relatively firm ground: recent research suggests that Domesday Book was bound up in its two volumes soon after it was made. It was the native English rather than their Norman rulers who coined the name 'Domesday Book', as was explained by Richard Fitz Neal, King Henry II's treasurer, writing in about 1179: