Source.—Richard, son of Nigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. Hughes, Crump, and Johnson, p. 107.

The book of which you ask is the inseparable companion of the royal seal in the treasury. The cause of this practice, as I have been told by Henry, sometime bishop of Winchester, is as follows.

When the famous conqueror of England, king William, a kinsman by blood of the same prelate, had subdued the further limits of the island to his sovereignty and cowed the hearts of rebels by terrible examples, he decreed that the subject race should submit to a written law and a written code, to prevent thereafter the existence of an easy means of error. The English laws, therefore, were laid before him, according to their threefold diversity, to wit, Mercian law, Dane law, and West Saxon law; some laws he denounced, others he approved, and added thereto the foreign laws of Neustria which he thought most effectual for the keeping of the peace of the realm. Finally, that nothing might be thought lacking, he brought the whole of his far-seeing measures to completion by despatching from his side his wisest men in circuit throughout the realm. The latter made a careful survey of the whole land, in woods and pastures and meadows, and arable lands also, which was reduced to a common phraseology and compiled into a book, that every man might be content with his own right and not encroach with impunity on that of another. The survey is made by counties, by hundreds and hides,5 the king’s name being set down at the head, and thereafter the names of the other lords appearing in turn according to the dignity of their rank, those, namely, who hold of the king in chief. Each name thus in the list is numbered in order, so that the section concerning them can easily be found in its place below in the book. This book is called “Domesday” by the natives, that is “the day of judgment” by a metaphor; for just as the award of that last stern and terrible trial cannot be evaded by any subtlety of pleading, so when a dispute has arisen in the realm touching the things there noted, once the book is referred to, its award cannot be derided or with impunity defied. Therefore we have named it the book of dooms, not because it makes awards on any matter in dispute, but because, like the last judgment, it allows no sort of evasion.