By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
I am delighted to announce that Making Domesday: Intelligent Power in Conquered England (OUP, 2025), co-authored by Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick and C. P. Lewis, has been awarded Devon History Society’s Devon Book of the Year!
The making of this extraordinary book was underpinned by probably the biggest project the Cathedral Library & Archives has undertaken on an item in its collection since its foundation in 1050. It brought together a team of historians, librarians, archivists and scientists, all of whom gave generously of their time and expertise in order to support each other’s research and fulfil the aims of the project. Making Domesday is a testament to the dedication and enthusiasm of a huge number of people who were keen to be involved in a once in a lifetime opportunity to consider in greater depth why and how William I commissioned the Domesday survey.
It all began in 2011 when Ann Barwood, Canon Librarian, persuaded the Dean and Chapter of Exeter to remove the binding of Exon Domesday to permit its digitisation and closer investigation. With a generous grant from the Friends of Exeter Cathedral, chaired by Conrad Donaldson, work began to dismantle the single bound volume into 103 separate fascicules. For the first time since 1816, when Exon Domesday was last given a new binding, experts were able to investigate in detail the manuscript’s codicology and palaeography.
This opportunity was made possible by a major AHRC-funded (Art and Humanities Research Council) collaborative project, ‘The Conqueror’s Commissioners: Unlocking the Domesday Survey of South-Western England’, spearheaded by Julia Crick, Stephen Baxter and Peter Stokes, with Francisco Álvarez López and Chris Lewis as Research Associates, Frank Thorn as Research Fellow, and Geoffroy Noël as Lead Developer. The project was based at King’s College London and at the University of Oxford – and, of course, here at the Cathedral Library. Its results have been shared across the UK and internationally, on the European Continent and in the USA, and more than 100,000 visitors viewed Exon Domesday when it was exhibited at the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition in 2018/2019.
We are especially fortunate that members of the project team have remained much-valued supporters of the Cathedral Library & Archives. Francisco Álvarez López has subsequently embarked on a project to identify and catalogue the Cathedral Library’s manuscript fragments and presented the Cathedral’s Annual Library Lecture in 2023. Julia Crick and Chris Lewis have remained friends of the Cathedral Library – indeed, Chris Lewis presented key findings from the Exon project in a packed Chapter House at the Annual Library Lecture in 2025. We are so grateful to the entire project team for bringing to light the importance of Exon Domesday as the oldest surviving manuscript of the Domesday survey – and we are excited to celebrate this fantastic award with them.
As it happened, the publication of Making Domesday in 2025 coincided with the opening of Exeter Cathedral’s Treasures Exhibition, which displays part of Exon Domesday alongside the Exeter Book and the Cathedral’s Foundation Charter. It’s also a timely contribution to planned celebrations in 2027 for the European Year of the Normans marking the 1,000th anniversary of the birth of William I – watch this space!