Domesday Book for Middlesex

In 1859, Colonel Henry James, Director of the Ordnance Survey, and his colleagues had developed a technique which he called "photo-zincography" for converting photographs to zinc printing plates, originally for prining copies of Ordnance Survey plans. William Ewart Gladstone, the future Prime Minister but then Chancellor of the Exchequer asked Col. James whether the technique could be used for copying ancient manuscripts, and James replied that they "could produce facsimiles of them at a very trifling cost". Col. James was then directed to copy that part of the Domesday Book relating to Cornwall. This publication was very successful and was followed, in 1862, by the volume for Middlesex, and eventually volumes for every county in the Domesday Book. Digitised images of the Middesex volume are online here.

A year later, a companion volume was published containing a translation of the original, together with transcripts of the original's Latin text. This volume is also now online so that you can view both the original pages and their translations, and jump from one to the other. The translation volume is structured so that each page of the translation corresponds to a column on a page of the original (which has two colums per page).

For more information on the facsimile volume see its Introduction, and on the translation volume see its Preface.

The translation volume also contains indexes to places and to persons mentioned in the original. These pages contain references to the relevant pages and columns in the facsimile and the translation. There are buttons on the index pages allowing you to jump to the relevant page of either the facsimile or the translation.

Additionally, there are images of two brochures used to promote sales of the facsimile and translation volumes. The original price of the facsimile volume for Middlesex was 8 shillings (£25 today), and for the translation 6 shillings (£19 today).


British Origins Library Collections