Mills in the Domesday Book 🌍

The Domesday Book was a (taxation) survey of most of England and Wales, completed in 1086. Amongst other items it listed the number of mills, with a total of over 6000 mentioned. These mills would have been watermills, or perhaps animal powered mills - the survey was completed before the introduction of windmills. Many places are listed as having a fractional number of mills, which presumably came about because the "mill" was shared, or somehow only taxable on part of it. It's likely that a mill referred to the machine, rather than the building itself - so a single building containing multiple sets of mill stones would have been recorded as several mills.

The data presented here is extracted from work done by John Palmer and his team at the University of Hull, whilst creating the Domesday Explorer CD-ROM. Their raw data is here used under a CC-BY-SA licence. Placenames are linked from this page through to the Open Domesday project which has a much fuller presentation of John Palmer's data.

Warning on the accuracy of these figures Domesday itself was an incomplete survey (so there are errors of omission in the raw data), which was later transcribed from the original returns into the combined record that is known as the Domesday Book. Some errors were likely made in that transcription, in particular some apparent duplication occured (which has been noted by John Palmer's team). Translating the data from its stylized Latin into a number of database tables was a very laborious job, with a high likelyhood of errors creeping in here, and the data has then been exported from the databases into a form that this website can process (and along the way a bug was found in the database program!) Thus, the numbers shown here are in many ways approximate, and may well differ from similar numbers which other researchers quote for the same statistics. Please don't place any reliance on these figures being accurate!

The same data can also be viewed as a map.