'An enduring contribution to historical scholarship.' AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW Seventeen papers with maps and diagrams. Subjects include the portrayal of land settlement in Domesday, continental parallels, numismatics, place and personal names, topography, and the greater Domesday tenants in chief.

Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. “A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.

Domesday: Book of Judgement provides a unique study of the extraordinary eleventh-century survey, the Domesday Book. Sally Harvey depicts the Domesday Book as the written evidence of a potentially insecure conquest successfully transforming itself, by a combination of administrative insight and military might, into a permanent establishment. William I used the Domesday Inquiry to contain the new establishment and consolidate their landholding revolution within a strict fiscal and tenurial framework, with checks and balances to prevent the king's followers from taking more powers and assets than they had been allocated. In this way, the survey served as a conciliatory gesture between the conquerors and the conquered, as William I came to realize that, faced with the threat to his rule from the Danes, he needed England's native populations more than they needed him. Yes, the overlying theme of the Domesday Book is Judgment: every class of society had reason to regard the Survey's methodical and often pitiless proceedings as both a literal and a metaphorical day of account. In this volume, Sally Harvey considers the Anglo-Saxon background and the architects of the Survey: the bishops, royal clerks, sheriffs, jurors, and landholders who contributed to Domesday's content and scope. She also discusses at length the core information in the Survey: coinage, revenues from landholding, fiscal concessions, and taxation, as well as some central tenurial issues. She draws the conclusion that the record, whilst consolidating William's position as king of the English, also laid the foundations for the twelfth-century treasury and exchequer. The volume newly argues that the Domesday survey also became an inquest into individual sheriffs and officials, thereby laying a foundation for reinterpreting the size of towns in England.

Essays into numerous aspects of the Domesday Book, shedding fresh light on its mysteries. Compiled from the records of a survey of the kingdom of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085, Domesday Book is a key source for the history of England. However, there has never been a critical edition of the textand so, despite over 200 years of intense academic study, its evidence has rarely been exploited to the full. The essays in this volume seek to realize the potential of Domesday Book by focussing on the manuscript itself. There are analyses of abbreviations, letter forms, and language; re-assessments of key sources, the role of tenants-in-chief in producing them, and the nature of the Norman settlement that their forms illuminate; a re-evaluation of the data and its referents; and finally, fresh examinations of the afterlife of the Domesday text and how it was subsequently perceived. In identifying new categories of evidence and revisiting old ones, these studies point to a better understanding of the text. There are surprising insights into its sources and developing programme and, intriguingly, a system of encoding hitherto unsuspected. In its turn the import of its data becomes clearer, thereby shedding new light on Anglo-Norman society and governance. It is in these terms that this volume offers a departure in Domesday studies and looks forward to the resolution of long-standing problems that have hitherto bedevilled the interpretation of an iconic text. David Roffe and K.S.B. Keats-Rohan are leading Domesday scholars who have published widely on Domesday Book and related matters. Contributors: Howard B. Clarke, Sally Harvey, K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, Andrew Lowerre, John Palmer, David Roffe, Ian Taylor, Pamela Taylor, Frank Thorn, Ann Williams.

Domesday Book is the most famous English public record, and it is probably the most remarkable statistical document in the history of Europe. It calls itself merely a descriptio and it acquired its name in the following century because its authority seemed comparable to that of the Book by which one day all will be judged (Revelation 20:12). It is not surprising that so many scholars have felt its fascination, and have discussed again and again what it says about economic, social and legal matters. But it also tells us much about the countryside of the eleventh century, and the present volume is the seventh of a series concerned with this geographical information. As the final volume, it seeks to sum up the main features of the Domesday geography of England as a whole, and to reconstruct, as far as the materials allow, the scene which King William's clerks saw as they made their great inquest.

'Feudal England: Historical Studies on the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries' by John Horace Round offers historical studies on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, providing valuable insight into an otherwise obscure period of history. discovery that the assessment of knight-service was based on a five-knights unit, irrespective of area or value, and his theory that the original assessment of land was based on a five-hides unit, not calculated on area or value, are just two of the theories that he presents in this work. Round argues that the feudal element introduced at the Conquest had a greater influence on England's national institutions than historians admit, and reveals that Domesday Book reveals the existence of two separate systems in England, coextensive with two nationalities. For those in search of new light on early medieval history, this book offers a compelling and stimulating read.