Domesday Now

This volume includes papers given at a 2011 conference on Domesday Book at The National Archives, and others specially commissioned, including an appreciation of the life and scholarly contribution of the late Caroline Thorn by her husband, Frank. The introduction by David Roffe offers an overview of recent Domesday research, a field in which he has himself been a major figure. One trend in recent work has been the renewed emphasis on what is usually called ‘antecessorial succession’, where Norman successors succeeded to the lands of named Englishmen. The papers by Ann Williams and Katherine Keats-Rohan provide case-studies here. Computer-based studies have come a long way over the last three decades. John Palmer reviews some of the issues surrounding a digital Latin Domesday, and Andrew Lowerre explores the application of GIS modelling as the basis for more sophisticated maps of Domesday. The study of scribal hands, the devices and abbreviations they used, and their choice of words, have shed new light especially on Great Domesday, and also on Little Domesday and Exon Domesday. In the flurry of publications that followed the nine-hundredth anniversary in 1986, it became clear that one scribe was responsible for most of Volume One with a second, ‘correcting’ scribe, at work. The order in which the main scribe wrote up the regional returns has been established, and in Roffe’s paper in this volume, ‘McLuhan meets the Master’, he turns his attention to scribal devices, arguing that the main scribe had available a range of sources, and was working out how to present them as he went along. Forms and formatting mattered, and Roffe hopes that new editions of all the texts will record variations in the hands, letter forms, rubrication and marginal marks which previous printed editions have tended to treat inconsistently or to ignore. Attention has also been paid to the scribe’s choice of terms. Frank Thorn argues here that a relatively small number of terms were chosen with the aim of uniformity and consistency, and he warns translators to be very conscious of possible different meanings of the same Latin term, and of translating different Latin terms by the same word

Archaeology · Inquest · Order (exchange · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History