The Domesday Murders is a historical novel about the making of the Domesday Book. Set in the first few months of the year 1086, it continues the story of Aefled, heroine of my previous novel, Aefled & Eleanor  (pub.2012). Having invented a set of characters in the first book, I wanted to carry on telling their individual stories, the small stories through which a larger Anglo-Norman story is pictured – and one of the great events of the larger story is the production of the Domesday Book.

The Domesday theme

Today we view the Domesday Book as authoritative, an unimpeachable Scripture of the post conquest period, full of revelatory facts. I wanted to investigate the way in which those facts were gathered. I imagined that, just like today, people would resent prying bureaucrats poking into their daily lives and asking questions. They might have tried to hide or misrepresent the ‘facts’ about their localities.

As well as this,  I wanted to suggest something about how the dry, reductive language of the text is obscuring massive injustices and painful instances of dispossession.

The Domesday Book figures powerfully in our culture and historical imagination. Still today, nine hundred years later, communities vie to associate themselves with it, putting quotes up on tourist websites or information boards.

Some years ago, on a walk at a place called Arger Fen, near Wormingford, Essex, I saw an information board proudly claiming that ten pigs (I think it was ten) were kept there in 1086  and the only possible justification for that claim is by reference to the Domesday Book. When you think about it, that degree of detail is amazing. But on my last visit, the information board had gone. In fact Arger Fen is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, although Wormingford is – and is recorded as possessing 100 pigs.

The idea of the Domesday Book as a kind of authoritative Scripture was appealing. It struck me as significant that the whole project was carried out in only seven months, from the time that William the Conqueror ordered its making at the Christmas Court at Gloucester in 1085 to the presentation of the completed record at Sarum on August  1st 1086.

The country was divided into seven circuits around which commissioners, or assessors, travelled to gather the information.

The number seven is a symbolic religious number: Seven Acts of Mercy, Seven Days of Creation, Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Seven Deadly Sins, and so on. It is the Biblical number of completion and the Domesday Survey was completed in seven months. I liked the scriptural symbolism here.  It put me in mind of the verse from the Book of Proverbs ‘It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: it is the honour of kings to search out a matter.’ The Domesday Book is the king’s way of searching out matters in his kingdom: how the land is occupied, by what kinds of people, how many ploughs, cattle, oxen and sheep in every place, down to the last pig in the woods at Wormingford. No wonder that this vast collection of statistics and data, where all the concealments of God are searched out and exposed, was viewed as an omen of Domesday – judgement day-  by the people of those times.

SOME DOMESDAY FACTS

• Most people tend to think about the Domesday book as one book, the Great Domesday, (the book seen today at the National Archives in Kew) but the Domesday Survey produced many satellite documents, those of Ely and Cambridgeshire, and the Little Domesday. The Little Domesday is the first draft or ‘circuit summary’ covering the counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. Because the information from Little Domesday was never entered into Great Domesday, Little Domesday was kept as the final record for East Anglia. It is in the Little Domesday that you find the detailed references to animals, livestock, cattle, sheep, pigs etc. Perhaps because these were the richest livestock counties. In the Great Domesday there is no reference to animals and there are other differences in the layout of the text. Another circuit summary exists for the south west: the Exon Domesday. This is now in Exeter Cathedral. Exon Domesday is a composite land and tax register associated with the Domesday Survey of 1086, but never entered into Great Domesday. It covers much of Southwest England; the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. The sole surviving copy is in the Exeter Cathedral Library.
• The country was divided into seven circuits and two commissioners or assessors were appointed to each half circuit to travel around doing the survey. It was the rule that the appointed commissioners were landowners but did not hold land in the regions they were surveying –  for obvious reasons. Historians speculate on who these commissioners were but their names are not recorded. Nor do we know the names of those who wrote it.
• No names of the clerks who wrote the circuit summaries or the regional surveys have survived. Scholars think there was only one single scribe of the Great Domesday, a clerk of the Bishop of Durham – but we don’t have the name.
• It is thought that all the regional returns, or circuit summaries, were brought together at Winchester. They were all finished by 1 August when William met with the principal tenants of his great magnates at Salisbury/Sarum. There at a special oath-taking ceremony he received the seven regional books – it took probably another year to integrate the regional returns into the Great Domesday.
• The Great Domesday is kept today at the National Archives at Kew. It consists of 888 leaves crammed with column after column of facts about eleventh-century England. Originally it was kept in the King’s Treasury at Winchester but was later moved to Westminster where it was stored in a great old chest which still survives.
• The Great Domesday is “the greatest single source for early English social history” (Michael Wood) even though it doesn’t include all the Survey registers. But in the modern editions all the documents are brought together, making the integral text the size of a Bible.
• The Domesday Book is unique in its scale and thoroughness. No other country possesses such a detailed record from so far back in time.