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What can a 900-year-old land survey reveal about England?

Domesday Book recorded land, resources, and values in eleventh-century England for royal administration. A translated entry for the village of Patcham gives a concrete example of what the survey counted. Explore what those categories reveal, and who remains hard to see in a record made for that purpose.

8–10 min

Questions you could explore

  • What would be lost by treating a surviving administrative record as a complete census?
  • How might the survey's administrative purpose affect what its entries emphasize?

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