Domesday: Book of Judgement provides a unique study of the extraordinary eleventh-century survey, the Domesday Book. Sally Harvey depicts the Domesday Book as the written evidence of a potentially insecure conquest successfully transforming itself, by a combination of administrative insight and military might, into a permanent establishment.

William I used the Domesday Inquiry to contain the new establishment and consolidate their landholding revolution within a strict fiscal and tenurial framework, with checks and balances to prevent the king's followers from taking more powers...