=Source.=--Richard, son of Nigel, _Dialogus de Scaccario_, ed. Hughes,
Crump, and Johnson, p. 107.
The book of which you ask is the inseparable companion of the royal
seal in the treasury. The cause of this practice, as I have been told
by Henry, sometime bishop of Winchester, is as follows.
When the famous conqueror of England, king William, a kinsman by blood
of the same prelate, had subdued the further limits of the island to
his sovereignty and cowed the hearts of rebels by terrible examples,
he decreed that the subject race should submit to a written law and a
written code, to prevent thereafter the existence of an easy means of
error. The English laws, therefore, were laid before him, according
to their threefold diversity, to wit, Mercian law, Dane law, and West
Saxon law; some laws he denounced, others he approved, and added
thereto the foreign laws of Neustria which he thought most effectual
for the keeping of the peace of the realm. Finally, that nothing might
be thought lacking, he brought the whole of his far-seeing measures
to completion by despatching from his side his wisest men in circuit
throughout the realm. The latter made a careful survey of the whole
land, in woods and pastures and meadows, and arable lands also, which
was reduced to a common phraseology and compiled into a book, that
every man might be content with his own right and not encroach with
impunity on that of another. The survey is made by counties, by
hundreds and hides,[5] the king’s name being set down at the head, and
thereafter the names of the other lords appearing in turn according
to the dignity of their rank, those, namely, who hold of the king in
chief. Each name thus in the list is numbered in order, so that the
section concerning them can easily be found in its place below in the
book. This book is called “Domesday” by the natives, that is “the day
of judgment” by a metaphor; for just as the award of that last stern
and terrible trial cannot be evaded by any subtlety of pleading, so
when a dispute has arisen in the realm touching the things there noted,
once the book is referred to, its award cannot be derided or with
impunity defied. Therefore we have named it the book of dooms, not
because it makes awards on any matter in dispute, but because, like the
last judgment, it allows no sort of evasion.