Open Domesday

An searchable database of the Domesday Book/Survey.

The Open Domesday interface features an interactive map of England that can be used to select regions, towns and villages included in the survey.

You can select locations using the map or by entering the text of the modern name for a location. i.e. Belchamp Walter comes up with "The Land of Aubrey de Vere" and shows that it was Thunderlow in the survey.

Thunderlow consisted of two settlements Ballingdon and Belchamp Walter - Ballingdon was "Land of Peter of Valognes" - this would indicate the lands straddling Belchamp Brook towards Bulmer.

In my research into the history of Belchamp Walter and the surrounding area of course I was aware of the Domesday connection.
Up to the time of writing this page I had not focused on some of the publications and research that many others have completed on the subject. I was a little dismissive of the "Belchamp Walter is/was mentioned in the Domesday book", as most of the UK can make that claim.

The Interactive Map

The map uses Mapbox and personally I don't find it easy to use.
The contrast is too low and you cannot make out the location very easily
The location selected is Belchamp Walter - Land of Aubrey de Vere

How Anna Powell-Smith describes the project:

The API

The opendomesday database can be queried and the data passed back in JSON format.

I like Anna's note about the fact that the API was included when she thought that APIs were important and I thank her for pointing me in the direction of RESTful (see link to Wikipedia below).

University of Hull -

A link on either the University of Hull or the opendomsday_org site is to a Borland Database Engine setup. I think that this shows the age of the venture as I have not seen a reference to Delphi or C++ for a while. There once was a time that I was a Turbo Pascal dabbler, but not for a while. I pretty much started out on the PC using dBase III and dBase 4, before Borland aquired them and came up with Delphi.

The interactve map