Every vill in Domesday Book, drawn as the survey recorded it: a house for each household, each mill on its stream, every plough team, flock, church and castle. Zoom from the kingdom to a single village.
In 1086 William the Conqueror's commissioners rode through England asking, of every vill, who held it, how many ploughs and people it had, its mills, meadow and woodland, its fisheries and salt-pans, and what it was worth. The answers became Domesday Book. This map draws those answers. Nothing on it is modern: every house stands for a household the survey counted, every water wheel for a mill it recorded, every ox team and flock for a plough or beasts it lists.
Zoom in anywhere south of the Tees and you are looking at a vill as the survey describes it. A hamlet of three households is three huts. A village of sixty households with a church and two mills is a cluster of sixty houses, a church at the centre and two wheels turning on the stream. York, Lincoln, Norwich and Oxford are towns of hundreds of houses, some of them roofless, because Domesday says so. Click anything for what the entry says.
Tap any house, mill, beast or name for what Domesday records there. The square button at the top right fills the screen; Layers turns each kind of drawing on and off and can lay modern names over the map.
Domesday names 14,334 places; Hull's project located 13,068 of them, and 11,318 have people to draw. Between them the survey counts 273,962 households: heads of household, not people, so a household is roughly a family. Each becomes one drawn dwelling, so the map carries 260,042 houses (the rest belong to places Hull could not locate). Close in, one house stands for one household; at zoom 11 one for every two, and further out each vill is a small glyph of a few huts sized to its households. Most vills were small: the median counts 16 households, and 31% of vills had fewer than ten. Only 257 are drawn with a hundred dwellings or more.
The towns were few and some were broken. Norwich is drawn with 1,145 houses, Lincoln with 760, Thetford with 720 and York with 540. Domesday counts burgesses and houses in its own way, so the 73 boroughs are drawn from the houses each borough entry counts, and the popup quotes the words: at Oxford "243 houses which pay tax" stand among "500 houses less 22 so derelict and destroyed that they cannot pay tax", drawn roofless. 3,191 such empty houses are drawn in all. Where a borough's Roman or medieval wall survives on today's map (London, York, Lincoln, Chester, Colchester, Canterbury, Winchester, Exeter and others, 12 in all), its line is drawn and the houses are packed along the streets inside it, densest at the centre.
Some places Domesday names give no usable figure for people: an entry with ploughs or a value but nobody counted, a vill called waste, and London and Winchester, which the survey left out. Rather than leave them blank, they get estimated dwellings, drawn pale with dotted outlines (pale and roofless in a waste vill), and the popup gives the method. The rule is cautious: the place's ploughs, ploughlands, value or hides times its county's usual households per unit, never more than the median vill of its hundred; London and Winchester from the low end of historians' estimates of their people around 1100 (10,000 and 5,000) at 4.5 a household, so 2,222 and 1,111 houses. In all 9,237 dwellings at 1,178 places are estimates, and none is counted in any total on this page. Lands the survey never covered get no estimate.
Around each vill lie its lands. 71,419 plough teams of eight oxen work the fields (Domesday counts 77,514). 5,408 water wheels turn on the nearest stream: Domesday records 6,073.75 mills at located places, counting halves and quarters, and a mill is drawn only where today's map has a stream or river within 1.5 km of the vill, so 271 are left undrawn. 2,784 vills have a church, 26% of those with people; 33% have a mill. Woods stand where Domesday measures woodland, about 4,378 square kilometres of them, with swine at pannage. Flocks, herds, goats, cobs, wild mares and bee skeps (27,154 drawings) graze where the entries count them, which is mostly in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk and the south-west: Little Domesday alone holds 49% of the 252,644 sheep the survey records.
Then there is the waste. 1,345 entries call land waste, 520 of them in Yorkshire, where the Harrying of the North of 1069 to 1070 left whole districts empty. 567 vills with no one counted are drawn as burnt, roofless huddles; switch on "Mark every vill Domesday calls waste" to see how far it reached. North of the Tees and the Ribble, and west of the Welsh March, the survey did not go: those lands are drawn in a paler wash and lettered by hand, not left empty of people.
The figures. Every number comes from the Hull Domesday Project's coded database of Domesday Book (Professor J.J.N. Palmer and the University of Hull), as packaged entry by entry in the realm-domesday repository: 22,571 entries, of which 20,438 describe a place. An entry's figures go to the places it describes, shared equally when it describes several, as in my Domesday Destiny study, so the totals here match it (273,962 households). For the drawing only, an entry that also names outlying members spreads its households and resources over the head and those members (the head taking a double share), so a manor of 300 households and twelve outliers is not drawn as one 300-house town.
The houses. One dwelling per household, rounded half up, set along both sides of today's village streets within 650 m of the vill (a stand-in for the old street; plots 80 m apart in a village, 55 m or less in a borough), filled from the centre out, or, where there are too few lanes, along a lane of its own or round a green (10,537 vills on streets, 1,620 on a lane, 338 round a green). Church and hall stand at the core; open fields in ridge and furrow lie round the village at 48 hectares a plough team, meadow by the stream at Domesday's acres, wood further out. The drawing of each house follows the classes Domesday counts there: villagers and freemen get longhouses; smallholders, cottagers and slaves get cottages; burgesses get town houses. A hall is drawn in a vill of three households or more where the manor has demesne ploughs or is worth £2 or more. Every house is kept off the water, tested on the water areas of OpenStreetMap at zoom 13.
Mills and water. Each mill (fractions rounded half up) is set on the nearest stream or river line within 1.5 km, 110 m apart along it, with the mill house on the village side of its wheel; fisheries go on the nearest stream or shore within 3 km, coastal salt-pans on the nearest shore within 6 km, the brine pits round the inland wiches. The wheels turn slowly when you are close in and the map is still.
The land. Plough teams (one per team), flocks (one per 20 sheep), pigs (one per 10), cattle (one per 5), goats (one per 10), cobs and horses (one per 3), wild mares (one per 5), beehives (one per 5) and swine at pannage (one per 50 of the woodland's pigs) are scattered over the vill's own lands (plough teams only in its own fields): the part of the country nearer to it than to any other vill, within 2.6 km, dry, and outside the houses. Woodland measured in pigs is drawn at one hectare a pig; woodland measured in leagues and furlongs at length times breadth times 0.7; acres at 0.4 hectares. These are drawing conventions, not reconstructions: Domesday's measures do not convert to areas. The marshes (the Fens, the Somerset Levels, the Humberhead Levels, Romney Marsh and the Pevensey Levels) are drawn where the ground lies low in each basin today, and the Wantsum Channel by hand. Roman roads come from Itiner-e; the four highways are lettered along approximate lines.
Nothing modern. The map is the Inked World engine with its modern layers taken out: roads, railways, buildings, modern names, modern woods and fields, airports, ponds and lakes (nearly all modern in lowland England), canals and drains, and inside the fens and levels every waterway but the old rivers by name, so the Nene's straight channel and the Bedford rivers are gone. Roman roads are single dashed tracks. Mountains, hills, coasts and rivers still come from today's elevation and OpenStreetMap: the land has changed less than the settlements, but rivers have moved and coasts have grown and shrunk since 1086.