The publication of the _Domesday Inquest_ was begun in 1783 and completed in 1816 and in the whole range of English history there is no authority alike so crucial in importance and so difficult of interpretation. Of the value of this unique statistical record compiled from the returns of local jurors twenty years after the Norman Conquest there has never been any dispute. Long before the text was published it was the subject of antiquarian monographs and the established base of local histories and genealogical enquiries. Transcripts of parts of Domesday were scattered up and down the country in public and private collections, and its fame was spread by the testimony of John Selden, who pronounced that, so far as he knew, it was by several centuries the oldest official record extant in autograph in the whole Christian world. The enterprise of the Record Commission made the record accessible to the student, and a popular Introduction to Domesday, written by Sir Henry Ellis in 1833, provided a pleasant quarry for the general historian whose soul was not vexed by the fundamental problems of Anglo-Norman society and finance.
But the survey was not understood. Even Freeman, who devoted to it a whole chapter in the fifth volume of the _Norman Conquest_, did not attack the central difficulties. He was a political historian, and appreciated the political interest of the record; but this is not the main interest. The survey owes its chief importance to the fact that it exhibits the social, economic and legal condition of the English people twenty years after the shock of the Norman Conquest.
Light gradually broke in from the labours of the specialist, from Eyton and Hamilton and above all from Mr Horace Round, who, in two brilliant papers composed for the Domesday Commemoration of 1888, cleared up some of the crucial questions connected with Domesday measures and Domesday finance. But perhaps the most exciting contribution proceeded from a book which was neither the work of a professed specialist nor yet a Domesday monograph. Mr Seebohm's _English Village Community_ appeared in 1876 and gave English readers for the first time a luminous account of that system of medieval husbandry which the enclosures of the eighteenth century did not entirely avail to obliterate[24]. Alike in its methods and conclusions the _English Village Community_ was an epoch-making book. Reversing the ordinary chronological procedure and arguing from comparatively recent periods, where evidence is abundant, past the cartularies and extents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, past Domesday to the twilight of the Saxon land-books and the darker regions beyond, Mr Seebohm arrived at the conclusion that the English village community was the outgrowth of the Roman vill and that whatever might have been the case in other regions of national life there was no breach in the continuity of agrarian history. A bold challenge was flung against the tradition accepted by a line of distinguished scholars from Kemble and Von Maurer to Freeman and Stubbs. The English village community was the offspring, not of a community of Teuton freemen, but of a system moulded by the Latin genius and rooted in slavery. The influence of Roman Britain was not so insignificant after all, nor was the completeness of the Teutonic Conquest so complete. In the most fundamental part of her economic and social texture England was indebted not to Germany but to Rome. The battle between the Germanists and the Romanists brought into clearer relief the importance of Domesday studies. Questions of Domesday nomenclature--the meaning for instance of the Domesday hide--acquired a new relevance, and might turn the scale in grave issues. A large hide of a hundred and twenty acres would naturally imply an early society of free peasant proprietors, a small hide of thirty acres might, on the contrary, be fitted into the Romanist hypothesis. Domesday was the key to the position. Properly interpreted, it would not only explain the influence of the Conquest, but throw light upon the Anglo-Saxon land-system and the obscure problem of agrarian origins. Mr Round's further contributions to the understanding of the Record, which were published in _Feudal England_ in 1895, were recognised as having a bearing upon the largest problems of English history.