The Domesday Book, freely available online for the first time. You can search by place, name or simply browse the book.

Project creator Anna Powell-Smith wrote for the Open Knowledge Foundation blog:

Domesday Book might be one of the most famous government datasets ever created. Which makes it all the stranger that it’s not freely available online – at the National Archives, you have to pay £2 per page to download copies of the text.

Domesday is pretty much unique. It records the ownership of almost every acre of land in England in 1066 and 1086 – a feat not repeated in modern times. It records almost every household. It records the industrial resources of an entire nation, from castles to mills to oxen.

(via Opening up the Domesday Book – blog.okfn.org)