Electronic Edition of Domesday Book: Translation, Databases and Scholarly Commentary, 1086; second edition

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The text of Domesday Book is notoriously ambiguous, its array of social and economic statistics hitherto inaccessible, and the majority of individuals and many places unidentified. This electronic edition aims to make Domesday Book both more accessible and more intelligible by presenting its contents in a variety of forms: a translation, databases of names, places and statistics, and a detailed scholarly commentary on all matters of interest or obscurity in the text. All forms of the data are cross-referenced, and all can be used with standard applications. The translation of Great Domesday was transcribed from the Phillimore edition (see data sources for this project) into an electronic format by typists working on a government employment scheme during the early 1980s, then enhanced by the addition of extensive coding under an ESRC-funded research project later in the decade. The comparable transcription and coding of Little Domesday was undertaken by Dr Natasha Hodgson for this project, while the Phillimore notes were scanned, edited, enlarged and enhanced by Dr and Mrs Thorn, also for this project. The databases of names and places were transcribed into electronic format from the original printed Phillimore indexes, then published as national indexes by Phillimore (1992). The statistics database is original to this project, though compiled over a long period. In the second edition, some errors have been corrected, improvements made to the consistency of the translation and the name-stock, and a substantial file (identifying_domesday_landowners.rtf) identifying landowners named only by their Christian names in Domesday Book has been added. For further information about the project and Domesday Book please refer to the project web site, where an alternative download possibility for the data is available.Main Topics:The Domesday Book (1086) contains the most comprehensive array of social and economic data for the pre-industrial world from anywhere in Europe, possibly from the planet. It is a major source for the disciplines of archaeology, geography, genealogy, law, linguistics, onomastics, palaeography, philology, prosopography, and topography; for several of these disciplines, it is the major source. The history of majority of towns and villages begins with Domesday Book, which includes a vast amount of data on names, places, individuals, taxation, land use, population groups, estate values, legal matters, and a wide variety of economic and agricultural resources: mills, meadow, woodland, pasture, salt-pans, fisheries, etc. Only a minute amount of such data has survived from the first six centuries of English history and little became available for another two centuries, and even then never as a comprehensive national survey.