Decoding Domesday

David Roffe's previous book (rev. ante, cxvi [2001], 408–9) proposed a radical reappraisal of the purpose of Domesday Book. The present volume reviews the subsequent debate, and considers in greater detail the implications for the uses to which the social and economic data in Domesday may be put. Many scholars would now accept one of his principal arguments: that we cannot deduce the purpose of Domesday Book from the documentation produced by the Domesday Inquest. Previous generations had assumed that ‘if we knew how it was made, we would know why it was made’, and believed that the ‘how’ could be recovered from the structure of Inquest documents. Round deduced an overriding fiscal purpose from the geographically-structured Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis, and Galbraith a feudal purpose from the feudally-organised Liber Exoniensis. Dr Roffe argues that both were wrong, and that the Domesday commissioners drew simultaneously on material in a variety of formats, none of them therefore a sure guide to ultimate purposes. H.B. Clarke's suggestion that the Domesday clerks may have used ‘conversion tables’ to convert geographically-structured data into a tenurially-ordered format, and vice versa, points to the same conclusion. A second strand of Roffe's argument was that the Inquest materials cannot tell us about the purpose of Domesday Book because the Book was not the intended outcome of the Inquest but the product of a separate project with different objectives, launched after the Conqueror's death. This thesis was received with some scepticism, and the review of the arguments and counter-arguments here contains nothing sufficiently new to produce a change of mind

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