AS LONG AGO as 1832 Sir Francis Palgrave thought it ‘not improbable’ that the two volumes of Domesday Book represent different stages in the condensation of the inquest material and that volumes similar to Little Domesday once existed for other parts of the country. Whatever view we may take about the nature of the processes involved and their timing before or after the Conqueror's death, we all recognize that Great Domesday Book (GDB) is the result of a massive and indeed impressive exercise in condensing a much larger body of already redacted material into a single volume. The question to be considered here is whether, subsequently, this process was taken even further and, if so, when and why was this done. In other words, when was the document that appears to lie behind the breviate itself created as an abbreviation of the original condensation? In order to suggest some answers to these important questions, I propose to examine two of the early surveys preserved in the first cartulary of Evesham abbey, Worcestershire.

The breviate of Domesday has been discussed by previous scholars, especially V. H. Galbraith and in much greater detail by Elizabeth Hallam(-Smith) in her marvellous Domesday Book through Nine Centuries, but it can be argued that its real significance has been underestimated. This may partly be owing to the fact that the three surviving copies date from much later than GDB, the first being the Exchequer Abbreviatio belonging to the early 1240s. Back in 1974 Galbraith devoted a short chapter of Domesday Book: Its Place in Administrative History to the breviate. He pointed out that the abbreviation was carried out mechanically, boiling down the entries to the name of the tenant, sometimes the name of the hundred, the name of the vill and the number of taxation units (carucates, hides or sulungs). Attention was drawn to similarities between the breviate and a survey preserved in Hemming's cartulary of the lands of the church of Worcester, now known as Worcester B, on the one hand, and the much later Herefordshire Domesday on the other. Rannulf Flambard and Bishop Samson are brought into play and there is a brief mention of ‘a rather muddled story’ by Orderic Vitalis about a new Domesday survey.