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What’s the background to the Domesday Book?
In 1085, William the Conqueror faced the greatest crisis of his life and reign. This, of course, came two decades after his famous invasion and conquest of 1066. For the next 20 years he and his Norman followers colonised England – but then, in the 1080s, William’s position as king began to look vulnerable. His eldest son, Robert, was in rebellion and courting allies in northern France for an attack on Normandy, and King Cnut of Denmark was preparing to invade England in alliance with the count of Flanders.
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William’s response was characteristically vigorous. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he mobilised the largest “force of mounted men and infantry” ever seen in England, compelled his vassals “to provision the army each in proportion to his land,” and scorched the coastline to prevent his enemies from gaining a foothold − the kind of foothold that his own army had found in 1066