Domesday "population"

The difficulties of using Great and Little Domesday as a source of population data was elegantly summarised by Michael Postan almost forty years ago (Postan, 1973). The data, courtesy of ESDS, SN 5694 -Electronic Edition of Domesday Book: Translation, Databases and Scholarly Commentary, 1086; second edition, has been placed in GIS and mapped here using a standard multiplier purely by way of illustration. The GIS platform does hold out the prospecty of comparison between the Domesday data and the more robust estimates of later periods. The worst case scenario is that such an exercise will further underscore the weakness of Domesday for population estimates.

Max Satchell