Around 1085 in England, William the Conqueror got interested in what, exactly, he had conquered. To find out, he dispatched people all around England to find out “how many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.” When they finished, in 1086, they’d compiled a thick volume of information that they bound in leather and called the “Domesday Book.”
Actually the people who created it didn’t call it the Domesday Book; that name came about a century later. “Domesday” was the Middle English version of what we would call “doomsday” — but in those days “doom” didn’t mean what it does today.
“Doom” is a very old word that originated in Old English, from Germanic roots. It didn’t have anything to do with one’s fate, as in “uh oh, a dragon just showed up; we’re doomed!” A “doom” — or “dom” — was a law. Because “dom” goes back so far, the oldest quotations are in Old English, which looks like this: “Bioð afirred domas ðine from onsiene his.” But the word persevered, Old English eventually became Middle and then Modern English, so by 1553 things began to make more sense to modern readers: “The domes and law pronuncis…”
The reason the volume of information about England came to be called the Domesday Book is because of the way it was used. Once the information was recorded, there was nothing you could do to change it; whatever was in the book about what land your family might own was the final word. It was “the law,” which in those days was the dome.
Eventually “dome” was used not just to mean a law, but also the judgement made on the basis of it. Not just a legal decision — any judgement. It was used that way in The Faerie Queen in 1596: “Then was that golden belt by dome of all graunted to her.”
By the end of the 1600s, the spelling of “dome” — spelling was always inconsistent back then — was more often “doom”, and the meaning had evolved to what we think of today; one’s fate or destiny: And Age, and Death’s Inexorable Doom (1697). That’s where today’s “doomsday” comes from. But the Domesday Book, even today, still goes by its old name instead of having been updated to Doomsday Book.
It must have seemed like the Domesday Book really was going to last until doomsday; it was eight hundred years before anybody attempted another survey of England. That happened in 1873 in the act of Parliament called Return of Owners of Land. They voted to make the new survey because they were worried about the effects of Karl Marx’s 1867 publication of Das Kapital, which people were getting quite interested in around that time.
There has only ever been one copy of the original Domesday Book, but the 1873 volumes — sometimes called the “modern Domesday” — were published so that anyone could buy it. It cost 10s 6d (s for shillings; d for pennies); I think that was fairly expensive at the time. But if you bought a copy, you could spend an enjoyable evening just reading the title: “England and Wales (Exclusive of the Metropolis): Return of Owners of Land, 1873; Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty; London, printed by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode. Printers to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty. For her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1875. Seems like a title that goes on until doomsday.
