The Domesday Book has long been used as a source of information about legal and economic matters, but its bearing upon the geography of medieval England has been comparatively neglected. The extraction of geographical information involves problems of interpretation, since it necessitates an analysis into elements and their subsequent reconstruction on a geographical basis. But when this has been done new materials for making a general picture of the relative prosperity of different areas are available, as well as data for the comparative study of varying geographic and economic factors. The whole work, The Domesday Geography of England, will be in six volumes. In them different experts are to be allotted large distinct districts under Professor Darby's editorship. He will himself draw together all the threads, and write the concluding chapters of each volume and the whole of the concluding volume. The book will be fully illustrated by many maps, all specially drawn under the general editor's supervision. The volumes will be separately available, though the first contains some general introductory matter relevant to the whole work.

Analytic survey of the changing face of England, countryside and town, from the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to 1914.

This edition has been considerably revised to take account of further research on this subject and place-name identification. The treatment of statistics for boroughs has been brought into line with the other volumes in this series, a number of maps have been altered, and a short section of 'Vineyards' with one new map has been added to the last chapter.

New light is shed on the motives and objectives for the compiling of the still-mysterious Domesday Book, revolutionising our understanding of the period. The Domesday Book is one of our major sources for a crucial period of English history; yet it remains difficult to interpret. This provocative new book proposes a complete re-assessment, with profound implications for our understanding of the society and economy of medieval England. In particular, it overturns the general assumption that the Domesday inquest was a comprehensive survey of lords and their lands, and so tells us about the economic underpinning of power in the late eleventh century; rather, it suggests that in 1086 matters of taxation and service were at issue and data were collected to illuminate these concerns. What emerges from this is that Domesday Book tells us less about a real economy and those who sustained it than a tributary one, with much of the wealth of England being omitted. The source, then, is not the transparent datum that social and economic historians would like it to be. Inreturn, however, the book offers a richer understanding of late eleventh-century England in its own terms; and elucidates many long-standing conundrums of the Domesday Book itself. DAVID ROFFE is an honorary research fellow at Sheffield University. He has written widely on Domesday Book and edited five volumes of the Alecto County Edition of the text.