LIKE THE ‘NOW’ of the Domesday text itself, the title of this book presupposes a ‘then’. In February 2000 the Public Record Office, since re-branded as The National Archives or TNA for short, hosted a conference at its new headquarters in Kew entitled ‘Domesday Book: New Perspectives’. The aim of that conference was in large measure to take stock of developments in Domesday studies since the novocentenary of the Domesday inquest in 1986. There was much to celebrate. In the intervening fourteen years, the Alecto facsimile of the text had been published and a new standardized translation was produced by a team of scholars. New technologies were beginning to be brought to bear on the data with startling new perspectives and there had been many significant analyses of ‘the Making of Domesday Book’. It looked as if Domesday Book, for so long a hoary old mystery, was beginning to yield up its secrets. Despite the modification of detail and the odd rumbling from the wings, there was then generally consensus on the events of 1086. Domesday as geld book had been demolished by V. H. Galbraith in 1942 and more comprehensively so in 1961, and it was generally accepted that its production was the aim of the Domesday inquest. The purpose of the book remained contentious, but its centrality was undisputed. As the late Henry Loyn succinctly put it in 1986, if perhaps a little presumptuously: ‘We are all Galbraithians now.’ The unlocking of Domesday was in sight.

Consensus is no more and its dissolution can be conveniently dated to Domesday Book: New Perspectives. At that conference Frank and Caroline Thorn produced an account of the writing of Great Domesday Book (GDB) that laid bare the methods of the scribes and their various campaigns of correction in unprecedented detail. Their analysis convinced them of the fixed points in Galbraith's understanding of the Domesday process – the cohesion of the Domesday inquest and the centrality of Domesday Book – but they made important modifications to the model that streamlined the process and made it more credible. Stephen Baxter also developed the model. He analysed ‘the language of lordship’ and argued for the hard-headed manipulation of the process by tenants-in-chief who contrived ‘to cook the Book’.