It isno doubt the iconic status of Domesday Book in the medieval period that has ensured the survival of a mass of documentation from the Domesday process. No fewer than thirty-three texts can be directly related to the enterprise. Of these the three largest are contemporary manuscripts. Exon is a composite document. The bulk of it is a series of accounts, fee by fee, of the lands of the king and his tenants-in-chief in Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall with a single Wiltshire entry. Interspersed are geld accounts, related to an inquisitio geldi, lists of terre occupate, that is lands that had been illegally seized, and summaries of fees detailing total geld assessments, ploughs, population for the demesne and enfeoffed lands, values, a ploughland total for the whole fee, and a figure for its increase in value since acquired. LDB and GDB, by contrast, are self-evidently compilations that follow a programme. LDB is confined to the three counties of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk which form the major divisions of the text. Within each county section the account proceeds by fees and concludes with a list of invasiones, illegal seizures of land. GDB exhibits much the same form. It covers the rest of England county by county and within each fee by fee. The only materials extraneous to the programme are intermittent accounts of boroughs and royal dues that precede these accounts in many counties, a series of claims relating to lands in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Huntingdonshire, and a summary list of vills and manors in Yorkshire.

The remaining documentation survives in later copies. Four texts are full Domesday-like compilations. ICC is the widest in scope, covering all the land in thirteen out of sixteen of the Cambridgeshire hundreds except for the demesne estates of the king. In marked contrast to the parallel account of the county in GDB, however, it is arranged by hundred and vill as opposed to fee. IE is a composite source. Surviving in three manuscripts, much of it is an account of the estates of Ely Abbey in the six counties in which it held land in a form that is very close to LDB and ICC.