Andy Graham 

When we think of the Doomsday Book it conjures up images of a single large dusty tome but in actual fact, it is two books not one. The largest of the books is called the Great Doomsday and the smaller one is called, not surprisingly, Little Doomsday. The two books combined contain over 800 folios made up of approximately two million words.

The survey itself is not unlike the census we get today, although there was definitely more emphasis on the value of land being held. The kind of questions the survey asked were:

• What’s the name of the manor?
• Who owns the manor now and who was the owner prior to the invasion in 1066 (i.e. in the days of Edward the Confessor)?
• What’s the value of the manor........