Making Domesday

Stephen Baxter read History as an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, and, following a short career in strategy consulting and investment banking, returned to Oxford to read for his doctorate at Christ Church. He was elected a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then joined the History Department at King's College London as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Medieval History. He was appointed Clarendon Associate Professor and Barron Fellow in Medieval History at St Peter's College, Oxford, in 2014, and became Professor of Medieval History there in 2020. He has published widely on politics, government, and society in early medieval England.Julia Crick read Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic and History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, completing her doctorate in the same institution. She held a JRF and Official Fellowship at Caius before moving to the University of Exeter to take up a Lectureship in Medieval History, becoming Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor. In 2012 she was appointed Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies at King's College London. Between 2014 and 2017 she was Principal Investigator of the Exon Domesday research project (AHRC grant reference AH/L013975/1).C. P. Lewis read History and completed a DPhil at Merton College, Oxford. He joined the staff of the Victoria County History in 1982, working on Cambridgeshire, and later was county editor for Cheshire and then Sussex, taking early retirement in 2009. Since then he has been a research assistant on projects involving Domesday Book. He is a senior fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His research interests and publications are on English and Welsh history in the central Middle Ages, English local and regional history, the historiography of English local history, and onomastics.

Overall, this is a very important book, which offers new interpretations about how Domesday was made, and about what it meant. It is highly original in its emphasis on andinterpretation of Exon Domesday, and in its contextualization and evaluation of what the Domesday project meant as a whole. It is based on and engages with the extensive historiography from the nineteenth century, evaluating the many theories made about the Domesday project, but includes so much new analysis that it surpasses that historiography, and must surely change the terms of debate around Domesday... This book should be a stimulus to future study, and ensure continuing debate over the process and meaning of the Domesday project.

• Introduction Part I: Exon: The Earliest Manuscript of the Domesday Survey 1: The Anatomy of Exon 2: The Form and Shape of the Manuscript 3: The Exon Geld Accounts and the Great Geld of 1085-1086 4: Exon Fiefs I: The First Draft of Domesday 5: Exon Fiefs II: The Lists of Hundreds 6: Exon Fiefs III: The Sources of Information 7: Exon Fiefs IV: Compiling the Fiefs Booklets 8: Terrae Occupatae: Recording Unauthorized Tenures 9: The Fief Summaries 10: Writing Great Domesday Book 11: Inside the Exon Office: The Making of Domesday Imagined Part II: Placing Domesday 12: 1085 and the Invasion Threat 13: The Significance of King Henry I's Pipe Roll 14: Estate Management and Written Records in England and on the Continent Before Domesday 15: Domesday and the Geld 16: The Profits of Royal Lordship 17: Title to Property in the Age of the Great Confiscation 18: The Men Behind the Survey Part III: Conclusions 19: Making Domesday 20: Intelligent Power in Conquered England