This project has placed understanding of the making and purposes of Domesday on a whole new level, and this will make the entire Domesday corpus more comprehensible and accessible. Many of these findings will be presented in the forthcoming project monograph Making Domesday: The Conqueror's Survey in Context, some highlights of which include:

  • New discoveries about how the Domesday survey was conducted and how the book was made.
  • New data suggesting that Exon Domesday was completed within a matter of months of the commissioning of the survey in December 1086
  • New work on the scribal hands includes describing and mapping scribal stints including the work of the scribes as annotators, gaining further understanding of their background and training. This complicates earlier hypotheses about the origins and institutional environment of the  scribes and brings new insights into the dating of eleventh-century scribal hands and the activity of Norman clerics in England.

The material here on this website also includes important new findings:

  • The new Latin edition makes plain that the pre-existing edition, of 1816, was faulty.
  • The new English translation, the first ever of Exon Domesday, makes the text fully available to a general audience.
  • In addition, we have developed new software for the study and analysis of handwriting and texts, and in particular new ways of using computers to represent and analyse the physical structure of the book.

Other Uses of Project Findings

Our findings have already been used in numerous contexts beyond academia ncluding the local heritage industry, in secondary education, broadcasts on Radio 4 and local radio, and by talks given by members of the team to the general public.

Exon Domesday will also be exhibited by the British Library in their major forthcoming Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition in 2018/9 and the research of the team has been drawn on in the preparation of the exhibition catalogue.

The cathedral library team at Exeter are now involved in further digitization projects and have an ambitious scheme to make their manuscripts available to visitors in digital form and using augmented reality in partnership with Vista AR.