New Domesday database launched online

New Domesday database launched online

09 Aug 2010, PR 171/10

PASE Domesday, a database of Domesday Book linked to mapping resources, has been launched online today by a research team based at King’s College London and the University of Cambridge.

Domesday Book is the product of a great survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086. This new resource makes it possible to list, map and quantify the estates of the landholders named in the survey of conquered England more efficiently than ever before. It is the first database of Domesday Book linked to mapping resources to be made freely available online, and breaks new ground in humanities computing. It also has the potential to transform the study of Domesday Book and our understanding of English society before and after the Norman Conquest.

The launch coincides with, and will be featured in, a one-hour documentary on Domesday Book to be broadcast on BBC2 tomorrow evening (10 August, 20.00), which is written and presented Dr Stephen Baxter − a Reader in Medieval History at King’s, and one of the project’s co-directors.

PASE Domesday forms part of ‘The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England’ (PASE), a project which aims to capture information relating to all the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the late eleventh century in a freely-available online database. The project is based on a systematic examination of all the available written sources for the period, and is intended to serve a research tool suitable for a wide range of users with an interest in this period.

PASE is based in the Department of History and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, at King’s College London, and in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, at the University of Cambridge. The project was funded from 2000 to 2004 by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and from 2005 to 2008 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) www.ahrc.ac.uk.

Understanding a critical phase of history

PASE Domesday is designed to help answer one of the great unsolved questions of English medieval history: what was the structure of English landed society in 1066? It may seem astonishing that this question has not yet been comprehensively answered, since Domesday Book is the most complete survey of any medieval landed society, and it has been intensively studied. But until now the sheer logistical difficulty involved in assembling information in Domesday Book and other sources has prevented scholars from forming an overview of the aristocracy defeated by the Normans in 1066. By removing these logistical barriers, PASE Domesday opens up the prospect of a breakthrough in our understanding of a critical phase of English history. It will form the basis of a new two-year research project called ‘Profile of a Doomed Elite’, based at King’s and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, commencing in September 2010.

PASE Domesday is also designed to engage a wider audience, as Dr Baxter explains: ‘Ever wondered who owned your town or village at the time of the Norman conquest? It’s now possible to find out at the flick of a button. And having done so, you can create maps and tables of the estates held by the same lords elsewhere in England. Results are delivered quickly, and the scale of the dispossession of the English by Norman billionaire-like barons comes vividly to life.

‘As you can imagine, constructing this database has been quite an exercise, but it is a phenomenally useful research tool. Essentially, it’s now possible for anyone to do in a few seconds what it has taken scholars weeks to achieve in the past!’

Dr Baxter has written and presented the ‘Domesday’ special which will be broadcast on BBC2 on 10 August 2010. This programme forms part of Norman Season on BBC Two and BBC Four, a collection of programmes highlighting the effect that the Normans have had on our civilisation. In this programme, Dr Baxter reveals the human and political drama that lies within the parchment of England’s earliest surviving public record. He also seeks to uncover the real reason why William the Conqueror commissioned it. PASE Domesday is one of the research tools featured in the programme.