William the Conqueror commissioned the Domesday Book, which recorded the first English census (Dec. 1085 to Aug. 1086). The grand and comprehensive scale on which the Domesday survey took place, and the irreversible nature of the information collected, led people to compare it to the Last Judgement, or 'Doomsday', described in the Bible. It was written by an observer of the survey that "there was no single hide nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox nor one cow nor one pig which was left out."
