reference

Index of names and titles in Domesday Book, and Index of places in Domesday Book, edited by John McNeal Dodgson and John J.N. Palmer (Chichester, 1992); Index of Subjects in Domesday Book, edited by J.D. Foy (Chichester, 1992), index the Phillimore edition, with corrections to the county indices.

Both the chapters on Domesday Book in the Victoria County History and in the Alecto edition provide identifications of persons and places; and the topographical sections of the Victoria County History, and those on religious houses, identify manors and abbeys and sometimes landowners and abbots. Medieval religious houses, edited by Hancock and Knowles (second edition, 1971), and Heads of religious houses in England and Wales, 904-1216, edited by Knowles, Brooke and London (1972), identify all monasteries and their abbots and provide a few items of biographical data. David Matthew, The Norman monasteries and their English possessions (1962), discusses those Norman abbeys endowed with Domesday manors.

For the lay aristocracy, the standard reference works are Complete peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant or dormant (1910-59), edited by G.E. Cokayne and others; English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086-1327 (1960), edited by I.J. Sanders; and Origins of some Anglo-Norman families, edited by L.C. Loyd and others (1951). All contain useful information on the landowners, their estates, and their continental background, thoroughly updated in Domesday people: a prosopography of persons occurring in English documents, 1066-1086, edited by K.S.B. Keats-Rohan (1999). In addition, the Dictionary of national biography provides biographies of the major figures of the period, and additional detail or corrections will be found in the major political studies of the period, notably D.C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (1964), and E.A. Freeman, A History of the Norman Conquest, vols. 4-5.

For places, The Domesday gazetteer, edited by G.R. Versey and H.C. Darby (1975), provides identifications, and the relevant volume of the English Place-Name Society additional information. Finally, Pre-Conquest personal names in Domesday Book, edited by O. von Feilitzen, and Old English Bynames, edited by Gustav Tengvik (1938), are the standard reference works on Anglo-Saxon personal names. F.A. Youngs, Guide to the administrative units of England, is a valuable compilation on its subject.