IN THE NOVOCENTENARY of Domesday, in 1986, it would have been considered eccentric to claim that, in broad outline, any great mysteries hung over the relationship between the documents that made up the Domesday corpus. Although a revolution in Domesday studies had taken place some twenty years before, a new consensus had emerged. It was understood that the production of Great Domesday Book (GDB) had been the aim of the Domesday process from the very start and that all the documentation which came out of the process could be fitted into a tight schedule to that end. Any questions that remained were simply matters of detail, the overarching structure of the process was not affected. Today there is no such confidence and consensus is no more. A radical reassessment of the Domesday inquest, the documents that were produced from it and the relationship of the two, has argued that the inquest and the book were two entirely different enterprises. The result has been a recognition of the possibility, on the one hand, that inquest records do not necessarily speak of the concerns that initiated the inquiry in the first place, and, on the other, that subsequent abbreviations of the same records may have been produced for entirely different purposes. All the certainties of Domesday studies dissolve.

Debate continues on the purpose of the Domesday inquest and its relationship to Domesday Book. However, there is a growing recognition that all the Domesday texts do not have to be shoe-horned into a coherent taxonomy. This prompts a re-examination of the documents of the Domesday corpus. With GDB understood as the aim of the inquest, everything else became ‘satellites’; they were merely means to an end. In consequence, they have been studied largely in terms of how they pre-figured GDB. This is no more so than with Little Domesday (LDB), which is perhaps the least studied document to come out of the Domesday process and in many ways the most mysterious. Its forms are here examined anew in their own terms.

LDB, volume II of what is now called Domesday Book, contains an expansive description of the eastern counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk hastily written by a team of six scribes.