Saxons and Vikings

Middle Ages

Tudors

Stuarts and Civil War

Georgian

Victorian

20th Century

The Domesday Book

In 1086 King William commanded that a book should be made showing who owned all the land in England, and how much the land was worth. The Domesday Book shows that Reading, one of only two boroughs in Berkshire, was surrounded by farmland, some tilled by ploughs, some water meadows where in summer cattle grazed before the winter floods changed the landscape into a marshy mere. In the woods pigs grazed, while the river had several fisheries. Mills were working on the river. The town itself had one church, probably on the site of the present St Mary's church.