Domesday-to-Today Address Lookup

For each manor, the Domesday clerks recorded the lord, the under-tenants, the population (broken into villani, bordarii, cottarii and servi), the agricultural capacity in carucates and ploughs, the meadow in acres, the woodland in furlongs, the watermills and fisheries, the church if one stood, and the geld — the tax due to the Crown. Two great circuit-volumes were compiled — Great Domesday (covering most of England) and Little Domesday (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex) — and both survive complete in The National Archives at Kew.

The survey was commissioned at the Christmas court of 1085 at Gloucester. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle complains that William sent his men "so very narrowly to inquire that there was not one single hide nor a yard of land… that was not set down." The result, finished within twenty months, became the foundational document of English real-property law and remains admissible evidence in modern English land-disputes.

Modern UK postcodes (introduced 1959–1974) have no native correspondence to medieval manorial geography. The Brattleby Project bridges this gap by mapping each postcode-area's geographic centroid against the boundaries of the Domesday hundred or wapentake in which it falls, then returning the principal Domesday holder for that hundred. For postcodes within multiple historic manors, the largest manor by Domesday valuation is returned.

The chronology of subsequent holders is drawn from the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem (1216–1422), the Patent Rolls, the Land Tax assessments (1780–1832), the Tithe Apportionments (1836–1854), and modern Land Registry records (post-1862). Coverage is currently strongest for Lincolnshire (the Brattleby home county), Yorkshire, Norfolk and Devon; we expand monthly.

"To know which Norman knight held the field beneath your kitchen window in 1086 is not antiquarian whimsy. It is to recover a thread of continuity that nine centuries of revolution, dissolution, enclosure and modernisation have not severed. The land remembers its holders even when we do not."

Lady Nicoleta has used this database in court testimony (her 2023 evidence in the Lindsey boundary dispute), in academic publication (the 2024 Royal Historical Society lecture), and in private genealogical consultation. She invites enquiries from serious scholars at our office.

For completeness, the Domesday entry for Brattleby itself reads (in translation): "In Brateleby, Roger holds 12 carucates of land assessable for geld. Land for 8 ploughs. There is now in demesne 2 ploughs and 11 villani and 4 bordarii with 6 ploughs. There is a church and a priest and 1 mill rendering 8 shillings, and 60 acres of meadow. Woodland pasture 1 league long and half a league broad. T.R.E. and now worth £42."

The full text, in the original Latin of the scribes and the modern translation, is reproduced in our House History page under the year 1086.