The Conqueror's commissioners: unlocking the Domesday survey of south-western England

《末日审判书》（DB）是英国最重要的历史文献之一，可以说是这个国家最重要的记录。1086年，威廉一世的专员们开始记录新获得王国的应税资产，逐个定居点，逐个县。如果没有DB保存的调查记录，我们对11世纪英格兰乡村的社会结构、景观、资源及其货币价值几乎一无所知；我们无法绘制出世俗和教会主权的地图，也无法估计统治精英可利用的资源规模。DB本身就是中央政府影响力的显著证明。然而，DB是1086年《末日审判》调查产生的其他记录的删节版本，这些记录是它的来源。只有一个这样的记录集是现存的：Exon Domesday (EDB)，它以其原始形式保存下来，包含了与调查进行和记录方式有关的重要证据。这项计划的目的是首次公布教育局的内容，并解开书中所包含的证据，以便在地方和中央层面进行调查。2011年，手稿1816年的装帧被拆除，允许摄影和详细的技术检查。该项目将创建一系列可供学术界和公众免费使用的电子资源，包括文本、翻译和数字传真或“虚拟抄本”。最后一个项目将开创数字法典学的创新，允许用户重新排列卷的单位，从而以不同的顺序重建其内容：与其他DB文本不同，EDB的真正顺序仍然是一个有争议的问题。对这本书的组成的详细检查以及它的创作和历史的重建将以印刷形式出版，作为该项目的永久记录。

Domesday Book (DB) is one of England's most important historical documents: arguably the nation's single most significant record. In 1086 William I's commissioners set out to record the taxable assets of the newly acquired kingdom, settlement by settlement and county by county. Without the account of the survey preserved in DB we would know almost nothing of the social fabric of rural England in the eleventh century, of its landscape and resources and their monetary value; we could not map secular and ecclesiastical lordship, and neither could we estimate the scale of resources available to the ruling elite. DB in itself it constitutes remarkable testimony to the reach of central government. However DB is a much truncated version of other records generated by the Domesday survey of 1086 which served as its source. Only one collection of such records is extant: Exon Domesday (EDB), which survives in its original form, and contains vital evidence relating to the way the survey was conducted and recorded. The aim of this project is to publish the contents of EDB for the first time and to unlock the evidence which the book contains for the conduct of the survey at both local and central level. In 2011 the manuscript's 1816 binding was removed, permitting photography and detailed technical examination. The project will create a series of freely available electronic resources for the use of the scholarly community and the general public, including text, translation and a digital facsimile or `virtual codex'. This last item will pioneer an innovation in digital codicology which will allow users to rearrange the units of the volume and so to reconstitute its contents in different orders: unlike other DB texts the true order of EDB remains a matter of controversy. A detailed examination of the composition of the book and a reconstruction of its creation and history will be published in printed form as a permanent record of the project.