The Domesday Book

• Domesday Book: A Complete Translation
  Edited by Ann Williams and
  G.H. Martin
  Penguin Books, 1436pp £30.
  ISBN 0-141-00523-8
• Domesday Explorer CD-Rom
  Phillimore   £350 for use on one machine; Local area licence £700; wide area licence £1,000. ISBN 1-86077-163-7

Fat cats, law breakers and property speculators, according to the compilers of this CD-Rom, are all to be found in Domesday Book, but until now historians have probably not seen that great record in those terms. There can surely be no doubt at all of its crucial importance, both at the time it was originally compiled and in our own time. Seen by suppressed Saxons at the time William the Conqueror ordered its creation as the shameful imposition of a deeply mistrusted government; used thereafter, and hence its name, as evidence in courts of law; and in the twenty-first century as an added attraction in a property sale. According to many estate agents the number of houses mentioned in the survey must be very large.