Domesday Book Goes Online

Accommodate Students writes "The Domesday Book has gone online. As one of the earliest public records goes online, anyone with an internet connection will be able to access this important document. Amongst other interesting facts, the BBC is reporting that the Book can still be used today in court for property disputes. In an interesting development, the National Archives are making online searches free, but downloads of data will cost £3.50 (approx $6.50 US). Similar launches of historical websites in the past have struggled to keep up with server loads in their first days and weeks, so it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals."

Comments

cool

[rucs_hack]

I have property deeds from the 16th century in what is now oxfordshire, that I found years ago in a jumble sale of all places. I can track them back even further now.

Sounds like it, anyway.

Re:Cool!

[NanoWires]

Believe it or not it does come from doomsday!! Read the Introduction to the Domesday book http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/discov er-domesday/

The nickname 'Domesday' may refer to the Biblical Day of Judgement, or 'doomsday' when Christ will return to judge the living and the dead. Just as there will be no appeal on that day against his decisions, so Domesday Book has the final word - there is no appeal beyond it as evidence of legal title to land. For many centuries Domesday was regarded as the authoritative register regarding rightful possession and was used mainly for that purpose. It was called Domesday by 1180. Before that it was known as the Winchester Roll or King's Roll, and sometimes as the Book of the Treasury.

Old tech vs new

[Space cowboy]

Interesting that the original domesday book is still useful for territorial disputes almost a thousand years after it was written, but that the domesday project, a modern equivalent on laserdisk is no longer readable roughly 20 years after introduction.

Even though later on, an effort was made to port to the PC it reminds us just how ephemeral modern information is. If a year is a long time in politics, a decade is an eternity in computing tech.

Open standards (and not closed or proprietary document formats) are the only weapon we have against a "digital dark ages" descending on us. There are already files I have from my early computing days (written to an Exabyte tape in a non-standard dump-format) that I can't read. My PhD thesis is out-of-bounds in digital form, unless I get a used DECstation from ebay...

Just food for thought...

property

[denidoom]

I wonder who would gain from a property dispute? the Black Plague in the 14th century devestated the English population and as a result a lot of peasants became landowners themselves. They were able to negotiate these land deals because basically there weren't many laborers left to work the land and the lords were desperate, so they gave the peasants land in exchange for labor. In fact things were really rearranged quite a bit at that time (14th C) regarding property. I am unsure how anyone could prove a valid claim -they would have to do some serious researching into the following centuries proving the land wasn't legitimately sold or transferred.

pay ???

[madhippy]

what annoys me is that whenever the British government/local government or other British institutions put this sort of information online here in the UK - they expect to be able to charge for it (our taxes paid for the running of these institutions etc) ...

compare that to the way the US gov./institutions tends to free up information ... imagine paying to download nasa/hubble images !!

(tho sometimes US orgs tend to go a bit too far - eg Americas Army)