PART OF THE mystique of the two volumes of Domesday lies in the name: although neither book was given a title, an author, or an attribution, the name by which it came to be known rings of the Apocalypse and still resonates. Yet, we cannot date or document the long-surviving epithet given by the ‘native English’ with any certainty before c. 1179 when it was then explained, or rather explained away, as ‘metaphorical’, per metaphoram, by Richard fitzNigel in his treatise on the workings of the Exchequer.

In the text itself, Domesday is called a descriptio. But if someone had asked a friendly traveller to describe England in the eleventh century and been greeted with a reading of Domesday, he would not have been amused; the written work is so encyclopaedic as to elevate the Book into a class of its own. Yet it is because of the plenitude of data that Domesday Book contains – almost all of it eluding precise, undisputed, interpretation (providing all the fun of being a detective without the danger) – that many of us, under its spell, have entered William's service and, as Maitland predicted, ‘become that man's man’. But therein lies a danger; it was a very partial document.

Descriptio was, of course, a technical word in medieval usage. Literally ‘a writing down’, the term was adopted by the text itself for the occasion and process of recording information, and most notably in the colophon at the end of Little Domesday; it covered all the labour of compiling, ordering, and re-writing. The acts of recent conquerors, verbal opinions, and the returns from present holders of lands with vested interests thereby became a matter of record. The term echoed Carolingian records of revenues from royal lands and fiscal rights that, once written, were difficult to gainsay, ‘descriptions’ serving to define, maintain, and defend rights to property and wealth.

In earlier usage, descriptio might mean description, delineation, or a proper disposition, order, or arrangement. The term was variously associated with mansi, with customary dues, with rents, with tribute, and with heavy new impositions. A descriptio causarum was glossed as ‘an index or book in which judicial cases were arranged in order’.