Publication of Domesday Book

The Domesday Book is the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086, executed for William I of England. This article is about the various ways the Domesday Book was published, beginning in the eighteenth century. William the conqueror died before it was completed.

From antiquarian beginnings
The Domesday Book was an item of great interest to the antiquarian movement of the 18th century. This was the age of the county history, with many accounts of the English shires being published at this time, and Domesday Book, as a property record of early date that happened to be arranged by county, was a major source for the medieval history of all the counties encompassed by the survey.

The reconstituted Society of Antiquaries of London, founded in 1717 by Humfrey Wanley, John Bagford and John Talman, made it part of its mission to work towards the publication of a wide variety of ancient records, including Domesday. The Society struggled to achieve its aims, however, being afflicted by its members’ limited resources and sheer lack of enthusiasm.,

Nevertheless, after the purchase of a Royal Charter in 1751, the possibility of publishing Domesday became more realistic. In 1756 Philip Carteret Webb read a paper to the Society emphasising the great value of Domesday Book, and by implication the urgent need for a published edition: this paper was printed by the printing press of William Bowyer. The following year, in response to Webb’s request, members reported back to the Society regarding existing printed and MS transcripts from the Domesday Book, with the intention of compiling material that might be of assistance in the task of compiling an edition. This effort did not bear fruit.

In 1767, however, for reasons that may be connected to this renewal of interest in the Domesday Book, plans were set in motion for the publication of a complete, scholarly edition of Domesday: this coincided with a programme of publication of other public records, including the Parliament Rolls.

Abraham Farley’s edition (1783)
In March 1767 Charles Morton (1716–1799), a librarian at the British Museum, was put in charge of the scheme; a fact which caused resentment towards him from Abraham Farley, a deputy chamberlain of the Exchequer who for many years had controlled access to Domesday Book in its repository at the Chapter House, Westminster, and furthermore had been involved in the recent Parliament Rolls printing operation. In 1768 Farley complained to the Treasury that he, not Morton, should be in charge of the project, while Morton, for his part, complained that he was being obstructed in his work by the staff at the Chapter House.

The government, meanwhile, had become concerned at the spiralling cost estimates – Morton indicated in 1770 that to continue would cost £4,525 on top of the £2,810 he had already spent. At this point, Farley was remembered, and he became co-editor of the work. Farley and Morton's rivalry precluded an enduring, constructive relationship, and after 1774 Farley was effectively in sole charge.

Farley pursued the task with a single-minded devotion born of long involvement with the public records, and Domesday Book in particular. One of his closest associates during the project was the printer John Nichols, inheritor of William Bowyer's London printing press, who in 1773 had developed the typeface that was used in the published edition to represent as closely as possible the script in the Domesday Book itself. Ultimately, Farley's edition of Domesday was completed by 15 March 1783.

Although of a high standard, Farley's work lacked supplementary material and indices. The job was finally completed in 1800, when a Royal Commission looking into "better Preservation, Arrangement and more convenient Use of the Public Records" ordered the printing of indices to Farley's work, which were compiled and published under the direction of Sir Henry Ellis by 1816, together with an edition of four "satellite surveys" – the Exon Domesday, the Liber Winton, the Inquisito Eliensis and the Boldon Book.

The first complete publication of the Domesday Book was a major step. However, the circulation of Farley's edition was so limited that it could not be truly accounted a work that significantly increased public access to the Domesday Book. That was to take place only in 1861, with the production of the first photo-zincographic facsimile edition of Domesday.

The photozincographic edition
This process, which led to the publication in 1861, was the brainchild of Colonel Henry James, the Director General at the Ordnance Survey. The process involved the transferring of a photograph onto zinc or stone, which could then be used directly for printing or, alternatively, onto the waxed surface of a copper plate where the image formed a guide for engraving. It was a system that enabled facsimile reproduction en masse and thus, following a meeting with William Ewart Gladstone in 1859, in which James was allegedly asked by the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he "knew of any process by which some of our ancient manuscripts in the Record Office could be copied", James emphasised the superiority of this process over other reproductions, such as lithography, which used heavy and brittle stone blocks and claimed that the process would be ideal for making cheap facsimile copies of the Domesday Book.

In a letter to the assistant Secretary to the Treasury, George Hamilton in October 1860, James outlined the cost of a complete reproduction of the Domesday Book as an estimated £1575 for 500 copies or, alternatively, £3. 3s. per copy. James further outlined the cost of a single county to demonstrate the affordability of the process, using Cornwall as an example of one of the shorter entries in the volumes (eleven folio pages) and estimating the cost of 500 copies to be £11. 2s. 4d. On 14 January 1861, James was granted permission to photo-zincograph the Cornwall fragment of the Domesday Book as a Treasury-funded experiment to determine the success of the process and, consequently, by 1863 the Ordnance Survey had photozincographed the Domesday Book in its entirety, publishing it in thirty two county volumes.

The general public were excited about the invention of photo-zincography. Period newspapers such as the Photographic News reported on the events surrounding the invention and even supplied their readers with an example of a document which had undergone the process.

Publications of Domesday since 1900
The first two thirds of the 20th century saw little movement in the publications of the Domesday Book. However as the nine hundredth anniversary of the creation of Domesday came about interest was revived and major new editions began to emerge particularly the Alecto and Penguin editions. Later as the internet age began Domesday made the transition from paper to the web with commercial and academic projects like ‘Domesday Book Online and the Domesday Explorer’.

List of Domesday editions since 1900

•	The Phillimore Edition

•	The Alecto Editions

•	Domesday CD-Rom

•	The Penguin Edition

•	Domesday Online

The Phillimore Edition
The Phillimore Edition is a dual Latin and English text edition of the Greater Domesday Book, published in the 1970s by the local-history specialist publishers Phillimore & Co under the general editorship of John Morris. Each county occupies a separate volume. The Latin text, printed on the left-hand pages, is a facsimile of Farley's edition; the translation, on the right-hand pages, was prepared by a team of volunteers, who (to ensure uniformity) worked within standardised guidelines for syntax, punctuation and the rendering of proper names and technical terms. Each volume includes notes, tables of tenants' names and place-names, and a map. At the time of writing (July 2011) 29 volumes are still available.

The Alecto Editions


Published between 1985 and 1992 the Alecto Edition is the most complete facsimile of the Domesday Book to date. There are three types of Alecto edition, ‘The Penny Edition’, The Millennium Edition and the Domesday Book Studies edition. It has been called an ‘‘indecently exact facsimile’, according to Professor Geoffrey Martin, the then Keeper of Public Records and custodian of the original Domesday’. In order to produce this extremely high quality reproduction the original Domesday Book was unbound to allow each page to be photographed. The camera used for this process was the same size as a Ford Fiesta and for security reasons was only operated in a sealed cage.

The Penny Edition was printed on a specialist paper made from cotton from the American Deep South so that it had the same weight and feel as the parchment of the original, although without the cost this implies. These pages were then bound between sheets of fifteenth century oak set with a silver penny of William I and another 1986 Elizabeth II penny minted specially for the occasion. Because of the vast expense involved each copy of the Penny Edition cost £5750 and only 250 were produced.

The later Millennium Edition used the same high quality images and paper was bound into two volumes of calf skin in the style of the 12th century binding. This edition was accompanied by a volume of indices, a two volume English translation of the Latin and a box set of Ordnance Survey Maps with the Domesday sites overlaid on the modern maps. This edition was limited to 450 copies at a cost of £6750 for Greater Domesday and £5750 for Little Domesday.

The Library Version of Domesday once again used the same paper as the Penny and Millennium versions but was bound in a linen cover and boxed to provide durability over many years of use. This edition came with indices, translations and maps.

The Penguin Edition
The Penguin Edition is based on the Alecto Edition and because of this follows the format of the original Domesday Book. Published in 2002 in hardback then again in 2003 in paperback the Penguin is the first wholly English language edition of Domesday and also the first time Greater and Little Domesday have been bound together. As part of the Penguin Classics range the Domesday Book joined hundreds of other books viewed as important to critics and public alike. The paperback was originally priced at £25 and keeps in line with Penguin’s principles of being affordable to all. The book's introduction was written by Geoffrey Martin, a former Keeper of the Public Records.

Online editions of Domesday
Commercial copies

There are two main suppliers of commercial copies of Domesday, Domesday extracts.co.uk and The National Archives in London. Domesday extracts.co.uk provides six page extracts of the book for any town or village named. The National Archives will provide a PDF file of any page of the Domesday Book for a fee.  These copies on request have been likened to the previous work done by scribes in legal disputes in the Middle Ages.

The Domesday Explorer

The Domesday Explorer is made up of the entire Domesday Book in database form. It was built by Professor John Palmer and his son Matthew at the University of Hull using Microsoft Access as the platform between 1986 and 2008. The project was founded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council grant of £250 000 and is now available to the public free of charge from the University of Essex online data store.

The Explorer is a fully searchable data base and also includes stock charts of all the livestock in England in 1086 and statistics reports on each county of the survey. These were produced by Professor Palmer using the work of previous Domesday experts such as Ellis, Maitland and Finn.