Domesday Book

Not one hide, not one yard of land, not an ox nor a cow nor a swine escaped it: so The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle complained, and it was close to true. Twenty years after Hastings, William's commissioners rode through the shires and put the same questions to men sworn on oath, and what came back was a country weighed and written down, the ploughs, the mills, the meadow measured in acres, the woodland reckoned by the pigs it could feed..