Abstract

The year 1986 was the nine-hundredth birthday of Domesday Book if current theories about when it was made are correct, and a celebration was in order. Scholars honor their monuments by writing about them. Domesday Book, however, offered a considerable challenge. The study of Domesday is a rather technical field in which few scholars specialize, and the work of the three scholars who have dominated the subject since World War II — V. H. Galbraith, R. Welldon Finn, and H. C. Darby — was largely completed some years ago. Would the Domesday anniversary generate anything worth reading?