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	Bettany We then went a mile down the road to Ettington Park, the Shirley's Warwickshire seat. A Victorian gothic pile built over a much older building. It's leased out as a hotel nowadays, but Philip showed me around.

	Bettany I suppose this is the ancestral home, there's plenty of concrete evidence. Philip Fairly concrete evidence, that's our motto there and that's our coat of arms.

	Bettany It's incredibly grand as a hotel, never mind a house and Philip told me it wasn't always their main family home. Out in the grounds we found the remains of the parish church which struck me as more of a Shirley museum.

		Bettany So how many centuries worth of ancestors are commemorated here? Philip Well, I think that the earliest ancestor is Sir Rape Shirley, died in 1327.

	Bettany We'll be hearing more about the Shirley family later. The oldest references we have to Domesday Book call it the Book of Winchester. So I'm off there to continue my research into how the Domesday Book was compiled.

	The initial Domesday survey took a little over seven months to complete. Without a car or computer, most of the country's land was set down in writing, along with a list of who lived where, and what animals they had. When it first arrived, it must have struck everyone what an extraordinary feat of organisation it was. This was a country with primitive roads, with poor literacy, and with Saxon landlords who were still rebellious. The Normans had only just arrived. So how did they pull it off?

	In the grounds of the cathedral, I met up with another expert on the Domesday Book, Ann Williams. Ann thinks that huge achievement though Domesday was, the Normans took advantage of a sophisticated Saxon system of administration that was already in place. The Shire Courts.

	Bettany How did William's officers get all the information that they needed? Dr Ann Williams University of East Anglia Well, they divided the country into seven circuits, we're in circuit one here, Hampshire, and each circuit had four commissioners, and then the commissioners held special sessions of the shire courts within their circuits and collected evidence from the juries of the shire and the hundreds, which are the sub-sections of the shire, and even the village juries were summoned as well. Bettany And where were those meetings held? Ann The shire courts were normally held in the open air, simply because of the number of people involved.

	Bettany As well as being England's capital, Winchester was an important religious centre, as it is today. You can still see where the old Saxon Minster stood from this ground plan. The Normans took it down and built a new cathedral on a more accurate east-west alignment. I wondered whether this kind of destruction of a Saxon shrine was typical of the Normans.

	Ann All the great churches, without exception, were re-built. The whole lot. And on the whole, when they were re-built they were re-built bigger. One of the reasons why this cathedral is the size it is, is because the original was itself a very large building and so this one, the Norman cathedral, is built deliberately twice the size.

	Bettany I think I'm getting a fuller picture of the Normans now. They clearly wanted to put their stamp on the whole country and the Domesday Book must have played a vital part in doing just that.

	Apparently there's a document in Exeter Cathedral called Exon, which is an important part of the Domesday jigsaw. Now I don't know much about it, but I'm hoping that it'll help me understand what the Normans did with the data they collected and, above all, what the fundamental purpose of the Domesday survey was.

	In fact, I've a second reason for coming down here and that's to meet a man with a new theory. Dr David Roffe has dedicated 20 years of his life to the Domesday survey. He believes it came out of a crisis when, in 1985, England was threatened with another Danish invasion. King William needed to know whom he could rely on and for what. Exon Domesday, the book of Exeter, turns out to be one of many surveys done for what's called the Domesday inquest. It was a list of questions designed to find out who owned what in south west England.

		Dr David Roffe Historians have confused two completely different events. The Domesday inquest, which took place in 1086, produced documents like this. And then the production of Domesday Book itself was later.
	It occurs five years later in fact in 1089 or 1090 and the circumstances of that are completely different from what produced this. And the whole point of the Domesday inquest is to find out what is happening in the country. And find to what limits the king can press his demands for money and for services.

	Bettany When the inquest was completed in the summer of 1086, William summoned his lords to Winchester and demanded their loyalty. The inquest had settled his relationship with these barons. They would now agree on how much tax should be paid to the king and what sort of military service he was owed. It was the beginning of the feudal order.

	I've yet to find out from David how Domesday Book itself came about but I thought I'd take a break from the library to follow up one of the entries in Exon. I'd been told Exon mentions a farm in Dunsden that still exists. I knew the buildings couldn't be the same but I drove over there with landscape archaeologist, Steve Rippon, to see what, if anything, remained.

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