AHRC Project

Peer review assessment

The AHRC has awarded the completed project its highest possible grade (Outstanding). The comments of the Peer Review Panel include:

• "an exemplary set of data of outstanding importance", exceeding expectations

• "of outstanding importance ... of immense benefit to the study of everything for which Domesday Book is a crucial source"

• "among the most successful of all AHRC ventures in knowledge transfer"

• a data set which "specialists have been waiting for for a long time"

• "the definitive search tool for what is arguably the most important source in English medieval history"

• "will form the basis of all Domesday research in the next generation - and after"

• the data offers "massive possibilities" for further research

Although the AHRC project is complete, work continues on enlarging and enhancing the data. Updates will be announced through this website.

The AHRC Project Data

The AHRC Domesday data is available from the UK Data Archive as Study Number 5694. The data is also available to download from the University of Hull Hydra Digital Repository. Each item available to download is fully documented.

Goals

In 2004 the AHRC awarded £200,000 for the completion of an electronic Domesday Book. The grant funded three research assistants from October 2004 to October 2006, later extended to July 2007. The goals of the project were to:

• produce an electronic and fully encoded text of Little Domesday

• compile a database of major Domesday statistics for all people and places

• add a scholarly commentary on all matters of interest in the 25,000 Domesday entries.

Completion

The project was completed in July 2007, on time and within budget. Its data provides the most comprehensive array of social and economic data available for a pre-industrial society from anywhere in Europe, possibly anywhere on the planet. It consists of the following items:

• an electronic translation of Domesday Book

• databases of Names and Places

• databases of Statistics, Claims, Boroughs and the Yorkshire Summary, containing between them several million data items

• a scholarly commentary, amounting to some two million words, on all matters of interest or in need of elucidation in the text

• project documentation

Research Team: see AHRC Research Team.