THE LAST THIRTY years or so have seen the publication of a remarkable series of eleventh- and twelfth-century sources. Exemplary editions of chronicles, charters, laws, saints lives, literary works, and much more have provided extraordinary new vistas into Anglo-Norman England. Careful analysis has shown that these often intractable sources can yield up insights into the political, social, economic, and spiritual life that were not just invisible to earlier generations but irrecoverable from the then available editions. The finely honed disciplines of codicology, palaeography, diplomatic, and textual criticism that underpin these insights have unlocked a new world. It is the more regrettable, then, that they have not been employed to produce a modern edition of Domesday Book. More than arguably any other source, Domesday exhibits a close interplay between presentation and expression, on the one hand, and our understanding of the society that it represents on the other. This is no more so than in Great Domesday Book (GDB). We now know that the scribe of the work was no mere abbreviator. He conceived of its format, in so far as it differed from what went before it, and had to struggle with his data to realize the programme that he had set for himself. Close attention to the layout and changing forms of his text reveals previously unidentified data on the status of land and individuals and uncovers many of the sources on which he drew. Any new edition of the text, it is here argued, must apply all the tools of modern textual scholarship to represent not only the text itself but also the ways in which it is presented.

Some thirty years ago both Henry Loyn and Sir James Holt drew attention to the utility of the manuscript in terms of its layout. GDB, arguably unlike its sources, was written for reference; it was designed as a database. As such it had state of the art finding devices and data retrieval systems, that is, it was sensibly set out. In the first place, it was divided into handy county divisions, reflecting the structure of local government, and an index was provided at the beginning of each to provide a guide to landholders. A two-column format was adopted at the outset.