One of the outstanding facts about the landscape of eleventh-century England was its wooded aspect. The Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, it is true, had pierced the woodland, and broken it everywhere with their ‘dens’ and ‘leans’ and ‘skogrs’; but, even so, almost every page of Domesday Book shows that a great deal of wood still remained in 1086. One of the questions included in the preamble to the Ely Inquest was quantum silvae – ‘how much wood?’ Broadly speaking, the answers to this question fell into one of five categories. Sometimes they said that there was enough wood to support a given number of swine, for the swine fed upon acorns and beechmast. A variant of this was a statement not of total swine but of annual renders of swine in return for pannage. A third type of answer gave the length and breadth of wood in terms of leagues, furlongs and, sometimes, perches. A fourth type stated the size of a wood in terms of acres. The fifth category of answers was a miscellaneous one that included a number of variants and idiosyncrasies occasionally encountered in the text, e.g. wood for fuel or for the repair of houses.

Normally, each county was characterised by one of the four main types of entry, but this predominant type was accompanied by a number of miscellaneous entries.