In 1085 King William I sent his agents to survey every shire in England, to list his holdings and calculate what was owed to him. The manuscript record of the resulting ‘Great Survey’ – completed in 1086 and known as ‘Domesday Book’ to reflect the absolute finality of its authority – is one of the iconic documents of English history; not just a tax record, but a portrait of a land and its people, and a unique window onto the structure of English administration and economy before and immediately after the Norman Conquest: its shires and hundreds, acres, hides and townships. Domesday's woods, livestock, mills, fisheries, churches, ploughs and salt pans are the furniture of a culture and its economy – the legacy of Anglo-Saxon England.
 
In Domesday Max Adams will travel in the footprints of William I's inquisitors through ten of the Domesday counties of England, visiting many of the places listed in the survey. His aim will be to evoke the England of 1086 through contemporary eyes but with the original account as his guide. He will draw on archaeology, contemporary chronicles and historical geography to flesh out the landscapes of a thousand years ago, peopling them with real actors: lords, thegns, villeins, cottars and slaves; with the millers, turners, priests and burgesses who must yield up their taxes and labour to new, Norman lords. In meeting their modern counterparts – shopkeepers, farmers, craftspeople and local officials – Max hopes to cast reflective light on Englishness and the English landscape; on our ongoing relations with tax, law and authority… and with the past.