Providing definitive proof of rights to land and obligations to tax and military service, its 913 pages and two million Latin words describe more than 13,000 places in England and parts of Wales. Nicknamed "Domesday" Book by the native English, after God's final Day of Judgement when every soul would be assessed and against which there could be no appeal, this title was adopted by its official custodians, now the Public Record Office. The official who wrote the Dialogue of the Exchequer in 1179 wrote that "just as the sentence of that strict and terrible Last Judgement cannot be evaded by any art or subterfuge, so, when a dispute arises in this realm concerning facts which are written down, and an appeal is made to the book itself, the evidence it gives cannot be set at nought or evaded with impunity". It was a landmark in the triumph of the centralised written record, once set down fixed forever, over evolving local oral traditions. Domesday was never a single volume but originally two books, Great Domesday and Little Domesday, a longer version covering the counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk that was never written up into the main volume. It is now five volumes, as shown here, having been re-bound in 1984 to improve its preservation for another millennium. Used for many centuries for administrative and legal purposes, Domesday Book is the starting point for most local historians researching the history of their area and there are several versions in print which should be available through good reference libraries. Despite its iconic significance, it has been subjected to increasingly detailed textual analysis by historians who warn us that not everything it says should be taken at face value.