Domesday Book encompasses two independent works (originally in two physical volumes): "Little Domesday" (covering
Norfolk,
Suffolk, and
Essex), and "Great Domesday" (covering much of the remainder of England—except for lands in the north that later became
Westmorland,
Cumberland,
Northumberland, and the
County Palatine of Durham—and parts of Wales bordering and included within English counties). Space was left in Great Domesday for a record of the
City of London and
Winchester, but they were never written up. Other areas of modern London were then in
Middlesex,
Surrey,
Kent, and Essex and have their place in Domesday Book's treatment of those counties. Most of Cumberland, Westmorland, and the entirety of the County Palatine of Durham and Northumberland were omitted. They did not pay the national land tax called the
geld, and the framework for Domesday Book was geld assessment lists. "Little Domesday", so named because its format is physically smaller than its companion's, is more detailed than Great Domesday. In particular, it includes the numbers of livestock on the home farms (
demesnes) of lords, but not peasant livestock. It represents an earlier stage in processing the results of the Domesday Survey before the drastic abbreviation and rearrangement undertaken by the scribe of Great Domesday Book. " binding: a
wood-engraving of the 1860s Both volumes are organised into a series of chapters (literally "headings", from Latin
caput, "a head") listing the
manors held by each named
tenant-in-chief directly from the king. Tenants-in-chief included bishops,
abbots and abbesses, barons from
Normandy,
Brittany, and
Flanders, minor French
serjeants, and English
thegns. The richest
magnates held several hundred manors typically spread across England, though some large estates were highly concentrated. For example,
Baldwin the Sheriff had 176 manors in
Devon and four nearby in
Somerset and
Dorset. Tenants-in-chief held variable proportions of their manors in
demesne, and had
subinfeudated to others, whether their own knights (often tenants from Normandy), other tenants-in-chief of their own rank, or members of local English families. Manors were generally listed within each chapter by the
hundred or
wapentake (in eastern England), the second tier of local government under the counties, in which they lay. . Each name has its own chapter to follow. Each county's list opened with the king's demesne, which had possibly been the subject of separate inquiry. Under the feudal system, the king was the only true "owner" of land in England by virtue of his
allodial title. He was thus the ultimate overlord, and even the greatest magnate could do no more than "hold" land from him as a
tenant (from the Latin verb
tenere, "to hold") under one of the various contracts of
feudal land tenure. Holdings of bishops followed, then of
abbeys and
religious houses, then of
lay tenants-in-chief, and lastly the king's serjeants (
servientes) and thegns. In some counties, one or more principal boroughs formed the subject of a separate section. A few have separate lists of disputed titles to land called
clamores (claims). The equivalent sections in Little Domesday are called
Inuasiones (annexations). In total, 268,984 people are tallied in the Domesday Book, each of whom was the head of a household. Some households, such as urban dwellers, were excluded from the count, but the exact parameters remain a subject of historical debate. Sir
Michael Postan, for instance, contends that these may not represent all rural households, but only full peasant tenancies, thus excluding landless men and some subtenants (potentially a third of the country's population).
H. C. Darby, when factoring in the excluded households and using various different criteria for those excluded (as well as varying sizes for the average household), concludes that the 268,984 households listed most likely indicate a total English population between 1.2 and 1.6 million. Domesday names a total of 13,418 places. Apart from the wholly rural portions, which constitute its bulk, Domesday contains entries of interest concerning most towns, which were probably made because of their bearing on the fiscal rights of the crown therein. These include fragments of
custumals (older customary agreements), records of the
military service due, markets,
mints, and so forth. From the towns, from the counties as wholes, and from many of its ancient lordships, the crown was entitled to archaic dues in kind, such as
honey. The Domesday Book lists 5,624 mills in the country, which is considered a low estimate since the book is incomplete. For comparison, fewer than 100 mills were recorded in the country a century earlier.
Georges Duby indicates this means a mill for every 46 peasant households and implies a great increase in the consumption of baked
bread in place of boiled and unground
porridge. The book also lists 28,000
slaves, a smaller number than was enumerated in 1066. In the Domesday Book, scribes'
orthography was heavily geared towards French, most lacking k and w, regulated forms for sounds and and ending many hard consonant words with ⟨e⟩ as they were accustomed to do with most dialects of French at the time. ==Similar works==