Home » post » UK’s Domesday Book now online

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

UK’s Domesday Book now online

I know, we usually focus on US documents, but I thought this was pretty cool. The Domesday Book, the UK’s oldest surviving public record, has been made available online by the UK National Archives. The public can now search the 920-year old Book by name of town, city or village. In 2005 it was voted the nation’s finest treasure, yet a recent survey conducted in conjunction with today´s launch revealed that less than 1 per cent of the population have actually been to see the original in The National Archives’ museum.

At Christmas 1085 William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey to discover the resources and taxable values of all the boroughs and manors in England. He wanted to discover who owned what, how much it was worth, and how much was owed to him as King. It was a massive enterprise, and the record of that survey, Domesday Book, was a remarkable achievement.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


3 Comments

  1. Not a very clear website. As far as I can see, it is not online. There are links to books for sale and controlled amounts of extracts from the book. Please do correct me if I’m wrong as I do need access to what is supposed to be a national document, but after half an hour there seems to be no link to the book itself.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives