Cadastre (a French word from the Late Latin capitastrum, a register of the poll-tax) is a register of the real property of a country, with details of the area, the owners and the value. Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire until those dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early Romance languages — a distinction usually assigned to about the ninth century. ...

A cadastral survey is properly, therefore, one which gives such information as the Domesday Book, but the term is sometimes used loosely of the Ordnance Survey of the United Kingdom (I = 2500), which is on sufficiently large a scale to give the area of every field or piece of ground. Domesday Book (also known as Domesday, or Book of Winchester), was the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086, executed for William the Conqueror, that was like a census by the government today. ...

This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain. The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), contend supporters, in many ways represents the sum of knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...