Decoding Domesday David Roffe Decoding Domesday proposes a re-assessment of Domesday Book which has profound implications for an understanding of the society and economy of medieval England. Hitherto all modern accounts of the period have assumed that the Domesday inquest was a comprehensive survey of lords and their lands, and that it thus reveals the economic underpinning of power in the late eleventh century. David Roffe rejects that assumption, believing that in 1086 matters of taxation and service were at issue, and that the survey was undertaken to illuminate these concerns. The various items of Domesday data are re-examined in these terms, and fresh light is cast on longstanding Domesday conundrums. Domesday Book emerges from this examination as less about a real economy and those who sustained it than a tributary one, omitting much of the wealth of England – and thus not the accurate survey social and economic historians have understood it to be. Controversial as it may be, David Roffe's analysis offers a stimulating new perspective on late eleventh-century England. David Roffe is an honorary research fellow at Sheffield University. He has written widely on Domesday Book and edited five volumes of the Alecto County Edition of the text.