Domesday Book. 153 



the greedy eye of the king. These, then, were the causes 

 which brought into being that vast national terrier, the Domes- 

 day Book, which included a survey of the whole kingdom save 

 the four northern counties and part of Lancashire. It speci- 

 fied the names of proprietors, the nature of their tenures,^ the 

 quantity of their arable, meadow pasture, and woodlands ; in 

 many counties the number of their tenants, villains, cotarii, 

 and servi ; and, if we may credit the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle^ 

 there was not even an ox, cow, or pig that was not described in 

 its crabbed Latin manuscripts. It was a modern Ordnance 

 Survey and a census combined. It was more ; for it included 

 a schedule of the nation's assets in live stock and a land valua- 

 tion as careful and complete as that drawn up by any modern 

 agent called in to revalue farm rents for some landed proprie- 

 tor or rating authority. It was, too, a history ; for, even though 

 it doubled the difficulties of their task, the king's justiciaries 

 were ordered to compare every particular item of the survey 

 with its corresponding item in the preceding reign, whereby 

 was afforded an accurate record of the devastating consequences 

 of invasion. 



Ordered in 1085, it was finished the following year, an 

 incredibly short time when we compare its ten years' passage 

 through the press when reprinted in 1783, or the many j^ears 

 required for a modern Ordnance Survey. The rapidity of its 

 preparation, as well as its Anglo-Saxon cognomen, remind us 

 that earlier though less complete records were already in ex- 

 istence. First known as the Liber de Wintonia, it subsequently 

 passed under the names of Liber Regis, Liber Oensualis An- 

 glice, etc. In 1522 it was rewritten, and called the New 

 Domesday Book. It was formerly preserved by the side of 

 the Tally Court in the Exchequer, under three different locks 

 and keys, until in 1696 it was removed to the Chapter House 

 at Westminster. In 1861 a facsimile copy was commenced 



^ It did not, however, record the services due from the villeins, which, 

 nevertheless, we are able to get at in such works as the Liher Niger of 

 Peterborough, written about forty years after, and which corroborates 

 the lists of services in the liectitudines Singularum Personarum of the 

 Saxon era, Vide Ashley's Economic History and Theory^ Ek. I., p. 8. 



