There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one story that fell through the cracks each day, from December 25 through January 5. Today: a medievalist suggests we should rethink our assumptions about the Domesday Book.

At Christmas in 1085, William the Conqueror decided to commission a kingdom-wide survey of England, sending census takers into every shire to take stock both of the population and its resources: land, livestock, castles and abbeys, and so forth. The result was the Domesday Book, a tome that provided an unparalleled record of daily life in 11th-century England, long revered and studied by medieval historians. It got its moniker because the English complained that its decisions could not be appealed, just like on the Day of Judgement.

Traditionally, historians have pegged the date of completion for the Domesday Book as 1087. This puts it about one year after William decreed his survey but just before he sailed off to die (quite ignobly) in Normandy while defending his kingdom from the French. But a recent paper in the journal Speculum by Carol Symes, a historian at the University of Illinois, argues that the final book was actually completed years, maybe even decades, later than that.

“After the Magna Carta, the Domesday Book is the most fetishized document in English history.”

Symes' expertise is investigating how medieval manuscripts were made, and the Domesday Book is the most complicated medieval text there is. "After the Magna Carta, the Domesday Book is the most fetishized document in English history, and with good reason," she said. "It's one of the few medieval documents you can do data analysis with, because there's actual data in there."

There are really two of them: the Great Domesday Book (GDB) is the final condensed version of the survey's results. The Little Domesday Book likely was an earlier draft, containing detailed information gathered from the Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex regions, which for some reason were not included in the GDB. Then there are myriad "satellite documents:" textual fragments from various regions that would have contained raw survey data. The final codex was likely based on those, painstakingly copied into the GDB by scribes and then discarded. We don't have the original texts for most of those; they survive primarily in later copied manuscripts.

Several historians have been troubled by the very tight time frame (about eight months) in which the GDB was supposedly produced. That would be a difficult feat to accomplish even today with our modern technologies. David Roffe of the University of London suggested that perhaps the GDB was not completed until a couple of years after William's death in 1087. Symes thinks it took even longer. The Little Domesday Book was likely completed first, covering three shires along the English Channel that were particularly vulnerable to invasion by Danish forces. (The king of Denmark, Canute IV, was threatening to invade and recapture England for the Danish throne at the time.)

Satellite data

Symes' argument for a later completion date rests on her analysis of two satellite documents: the "Exeter Domesday" and the Staffordshire roll, the oldest surviving textual artifacts associated with the Domesday Book. These are originals, not data that was copied into later satellite manuscripts, so they provide a unique window into how the final GDB was assembled and how the various texts associated with it relate to one another. That assembly was a complex and messy process, with lots of erasures and additions that one can track in the surviving satellite documents.

"It certainly didn't happen in the neat and tightly packaged way that has always been envisaged by Domesday scholars," Symes said.

The Exeter Domesday is actually a set of 103 draft booklets (libelli), the remnants of what would have been thousands of such booklets for every region of the country, collating all the information gathered by the census takers. "What's remarkable about them is they shouldn't have survived," said Symes. Most likely a royal clerk named William de Warelwast, who worked for William the Conqueror's younger son, Henry, removed them from the Royal Chancery at the capital city of Winchester when his master became Bishop of Exeter around 1106. The information would have been a useful resource in that office.

The booklets gathered dust in the Exeter Cathedral treasury for centuries. At some point, historians at Exeter bound them into a single manuscript. When they were unbound a few years ago in preparation for being digitized, Symes had the rare opportunity to examine these precious pages firsthand. "This is what's so seductive about medieval manuscripts: they are literally handwritten objects touched by medieval people," she said. "It's like you're reaching out your hand across 1,000 years to touch somebody else's hand. It's a beautifully spooky tactile experience."

The Staffordshire satellite document is little more than a fragile piece of worn, rolled parchment from a Benedictine monastery in Burton-upon-Trent. There is also a related artifact in the form of the abbey's charter, originally drafted in 1004 but recopied onto a single parchment sometime between 1066 and 1086, with endorsements added after Nigel's arrival in 1094 and 1098. [corrected] Symes thinks that when a Benedictine monk named Nigel became abbot of this remote monastery in 1094, he went to the Royal Chancery archives in Winchester to look up any relevant information for the region and copied out the most useful bits. The monks would have shown him the abbey charter when he arrived, and he copied the information he had gathered from the survey onto the charter.

This had nothing to do with the king's project, according to Symes. Nigel merely wanted to protect the property of his monastery and used the familiar tools he'd learned back in Winchester. "We know Nigel does not leave Winchester until 1094, and the information he brings with him does not come from the GDB," said Symes. It would have come from draft booklets like those at Exeter, or perhaps surveys like those in Little Domesday. This suggests that the GDB didn't exist in 1094; otherwise, that's what Nigel would have consulted. "That, to me, is as close as you're ever going to get to a smoking gun where you're talking about 11th-century documentation," she said.

The parchment scroll begins with recopying the same list of properties at Burton Abbey that Nigel took from the survey before leaving Winchester. It's possible the Great Domesday Book had been completed by then, but word simply had not reached the monastery. The monks used the roll for the next 16 years, amending it with additional data as it was collected, and then recopied and preserved it in the abbey cathedral.

Nigel died in 1114. (R.I.P. Nigel.) A new abbot then arrived named Geoffrey. Sometime between 1098 and 1114, a title was added to the top of the roll: "Writings Just as Contained in the King's Book" (aka the GDB).

So the GDB could not have been completed in 1094 when Nigel left for Burton Abbey, because otherwise he would have known about it. And news of its existence did not reach the remote abbey until between 1098 and 1114. That's why historians like Symes and Roffe believe the GDB was not the result of William the Conqueror's original survey but that of a later project that didn't start until after the king's death.

There is one final piece of evidence: some minor, hasty revisions to the GDB that Symes thinks relate to the succession of Henry I in 1100. Among the questions asked during the census was who owned property under William and who owned it when Edward the Confessor was king. Conspicuously absent was any mention of Edward's successor, Harold Godwinson, who was crowned in early 1066 before dying at the Battle of Hastings nine months later. Clearly, William wished to expunge historical records of the rightful king he had deposed—a king with noble blood, not a bastard like William himself. That omission carried over to the Little Domesday Book: he is referred to simply as Harold. Initially, this was true of the GDB as well, except at some point, scribes went back and added Harold's title above his name.

Symes speculates that this was Henry I's doing. His older brother William II succeeded their father and had an even more brutal approach to governing his English subjects. He died in a suspicious hunting "accident," and Henry promptly made his bid to be crowned the new king. But there was one other brother in Normandy, older than Henry, who also had a rightful claim. So Henry tried to ingratiate himself with his English subjects by marrying an Anglo-Saxon princess directly descended from Alfred the Great. And he promised to take a coronation oath and issue new laws making English people equal to the Normans. A small gesture like restoring Harold's title in the GDB would have also endeared him to the English.

The airing of grievances

Ultimately, for Symes, the satellite documents demonstrate that William the Conqueror's great survey wasn't just a vast bureaucratic enterprise. The king's English subjects used the survey as an opportunity to push back against his often brutal regime by airing their grievances—like Seinfeld's fictional holiday tradition, Festivus—such as leveling commoners' houses to build a fancy new castle. Some larger cities also used the survey as an opportunity to record their own laws and customs into the official record.

Even the Royal Chancery scribes who labored day after day, copying data from regional surveys into the GDB, may have found ways to vent their frustration. "It is finished," scribes often wrote when they finished a section, referencing Jesus' last words on the cross. [corrected] Another margin note quoting the biblical wedding feast at Cana appeared to be a subtle invitation to fellow scribes to meet for a drink after work. Symes surmises that the scribes were likely very young men in their teens or 20s, just starting their professional careers. "I kind of imagine it being the 11th-century version of The Office," she said.

Symes has a particular fondness for lesser-known people often ignored by historians. "I'm always interested in the silences of power: who gets to talk, who gets the privilege of being talked about by historians, and who doesn't," she said. "Any time a figure like William the Conqueror is taking up all the air in the room, it's my instinct to go in there and puncture that bubble. We can tell stories about kings and their doings all day long, because there is so much more evidence for them. But if we look at these records in a new way, other people become visible and audible in ways they had not been before."

DOI: Speculum, 2018. 10.1086/699010 (About DOIs).