There can be no medievalist of any origin, language or interest who has not at least heard the name of Domesday Book, one of the most remarkable of the innumerable achievements of our medieval ancestors. It used to be said that it came into being as the result of a crisis which, in 1085, saw England threatened by another invasion, this time from Denmark. The king decided that in order to meet such a threat (which in fact never materialized) he needed at his disposal all possible information on what the country he had conquered was worth to him, in terms of taxes and of fighting men. In fact the Danish threat was only one element in the making of a survey which recorded the very considerable changes that had taken place over nearly twenty years from October 1066. What precisely the Book is about, or how it came into being, has been a matter of fierce debate for the past hundred years. Older views that it was either a ‘geld book’ or a ‘feodary’ have been challenged by HoIt's view that it went beyond both these concepts in being the product of a bargain struck between the king and his men at the Christmas council of 1085, by which the ‘barons’ agreed to the survey on the understanding that it would recognise their rights to their holdings at that time, for which, in turn, they would perform all necessary feudal dues and obligations to the king.

Recent clarification of the procedural questions by Dr David Roffe, however, suggests that Domesday Book is the result of a five-stage inquiry underpinned by two broad themes. One was a survey of the royal lands and revenues, the other, still linked to the question of royal revenue, was a seigneurial document concerned with tenure, as distinct from title to land. Roffe's emphasis on tenure is central to his argument, which puts royal concerns in place of the seigneurial approach favoured by Rolt. Appended to the various Domesday counties one often finds a list of claims to the lands recorded in it, many of which were still being pursued after the work was completed.