Domesday: 1,000 Miles on Foot Through the England of the Norman Conquest

The Domesday Book describes the furniture of a culture and its economy – the legacy of Anglo-Saxon England. When King William I sent his agents to survey every shire in England, he asked them to list his holdings and calculate what was owed to him. The manuscript record of the resulting ‘Great Survey’ is not just a tax record, but a unique window onto the structure of English administration and economy before and immediately after the Norman Conquest: its shires and hundreds, acres, hides and townships.

In Domesday, Max Adams retreads the path taken in 1085 by King William I’s agents, taking us on foot through the very sites covered by one of the most iconic documents of English history. In this fascinating new history, Adams explores this unique portrait of a land and its people, bringing the past into intimate contact with the present. Adams brings us face to face with this legacy in his wanderings through Domesday’s landscape, evoking eleventh-century England through contemporary eyes with the original account as his guide.

Bringing together archaeology, contemporary chronicles and historical geography, Adams fleshes out the landscapes of a thousand years ago, peopling them with real actors: lords, thegns, villeins, cottars and slaves; with the millers, turners, priests and burgesses who yielded their taxes and labour to new, Norman lords. In meeting their modern counterparts – shopkeepers, farmers, craftspeople and local officials – Max casts reflective light on Englishness and the English landscape; on our ongoing relations with tax, law and authority; and with the past.