Domesday Book makes leap to the internet

The Domesday Book is available free online for the first time after the 900-year-old parchment papers were turned into a database that can be read on the internet.

The Domesday Book, the oldest and most famous public record in Britain, was based on the 1086 survey of England which covered 13,418 settlements south of the rivers Ribble and Tees.

	The Domesday Book, the oldest and most famous public record in Britain, is now available online

For the first time, people will be able to retrieve and analyse the material while searching the database.

Prof John Palmer, of Hull University who worked on the project for three years with his son, Matt, said: "My interest in Domesday began in about 1980 as a teaching project. My son was getting interested in computing at the same time. It developed into a research interest for the 900th anniversary in 1986, but computers weren't powerful enough then."

Prof Palmer added: "In the mid-1990s, the improvements in computers revived my interest and I managed to get some funding."

The Domesday Book is the starting point of history for most towns and villages. Entries include the number of oxen per settlement, property values and illegal activity.

The total value of property in England in 1086 was calculated at £75,000 - worth £1 trillion today. The dozen richest individuals had fortunes ranging from the equivalent of £56 billion to £104 billion today.

Prof Palmer said: "No English medieval historian can ignore the book because it's such an important source for social and economic medieval history. It is the best record of who owned what.

"Anyone who looks at it is stunned by the speed and coverage: it was completed within a year and Englishmen were generally in awe of it. It was used as the permanent record all through the Middle Ages - there were all sorts of appeals to it to resolve property disputes."

The Domesday Book is available online at www.esds.ac.uk/findingdata

The database can produce results displayed as maps, tables or text translated from the original Latin.