AT FIRST GLANCE the manuscript of Great Domesday (GDB) looks like a work of art, a presentation volume fit for a king. It is essentially laid out in ruled double columns, the work of a single scribe with a neat and legible hand, and furnished with red running heads and rubricated initial capitals, place-names and hundred or wapentake heads. The material seems presented in a standard way, and it is not difficult to find the information one seeks. One needs only to glance at the folios of Exeter Domesday Book (henceforth Exon), to see how superior are the presentation and accessibility of GDB. There is a palpable sense of clear vision and an almost breathless purpose, the presence of a guiding mind producing a work of beauty and utility.

To have been able to attain this degree of finish, clarity, and compression for the wealth of material that had accumulated during the Domesday inquiry suggests that GDB was the end of a long sequence of information-gathering, sorting, trialling and refinement. It is here argued that the language used, in particular the vocabulary, was subject to as intense a scrutiny as other elements and that the style of GDB, notable for its rapidity, its clarity, its attempted consistency, and its occupation of the middle ground between the vernacular and local on the one hand and the grand and embellished on the other is the result of conscious decisions and the application of stylistic norms.

A style is fundamentally the result of a whole series of conscious or unconscious choices: of words, of phrases, of the length and content of clauses and of the structure of sentences. When these choices all tend in a particular direction, say, towards brevity or force or beauty or linguistic purity or grandiosity or euphemism or euphuism, one can talk about a particular style.

Even an article with so narrow a focus involves taking a stance on three of Domesday's big and still controversial questions, yet there is not the space to engage in discussion of them. Firstly, it is taken as read that the ‘Domesday Process’ had something like seven phases, beginning with the decision to survey made at Gloucester in 1086 and that, by 1 August 1086 at Salisbury, King William had available to him documents which had achieved his objectives; probably in the form of ‘circuit volumes’ such as Exon.