Domesday Survey, 1086

At Christmas 1085, William the Conqueror ordered a major inquiry into landholding and resources across England. Royal commissioners travelled through groups of counties in 1086, questioning local juries about estates, tenants, values, livestock and changes since the reign of Edward the Confessor.

The returns were reorganised into the volumes now called Great Domesday and Little Domesday. The survey gave the crown an unusually detailed account of taxable wealth and feudal obligation, but its evidence also preserved disputes created by conquest, confiscation and competing claims.

Edward Marston’s Domesday mysteries imagine Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret as commissioners whose administrative inquiries expose murder and fraud. The series uses the survey’s local testimony and contested records as a framework for regional investigations.