Recent literature has tended to endorse a 'maximum view' of the late Anglo-Saxon government, stressing its power and sophistication before the conquest and its continuity into the early Norman period. This paper suggests that Anglo-Saxon government was in some ways too powerful for its own good, and contributed to the conquest's causation; and that although all the institutions of English government survived the conquest, most were affected by it, some profoundly. The paper concludes with a case study on the making and purposes of Domesday informed by recent work on Exon Domesday. Although the survey could not have been undertaken without some of the institutions of government bequeathed to the Normans by the English, it reveals a very different government at work, drawing on a wide range of precedents in innovative ways, driven by new priorities that a function of the tenurial transformation it records.
