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. This volume on the northern counties of England contains chapters on Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and the Northern Counties.

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.

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

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.

The Landscape of Britain has a uniquely rich historical diversity. In this book explains the processes at work in the evolution of the landscape, pointing out examples of surviving evidence from the past. The landscape of late twentieth-century Britain is the end product of some ten thousand years of human effort directed not only towards satisfying basic physical needs for food and shelter, but also towards expressing profound spiritual and intellectual aspirations, whether by means of burial mounds or churches, schools or monasteries. The author shows how each generation makes its own individual contribution without being able entirely to erase those of its predecessors, however remote or distant in time.

The Archaeology of the 11th Century explores this formative period of English history and in particular the impact of the Conquest of England by the Normans. The volume examines how the Normans contributed to local culture, religion and society through a range of topics including food culture, funerary practices, the development of castles and their impact, and how both urban and rural life evolved during the eleventh century. Through its nuanced approach to the complex relationships and regional identities which characterized the period, this collection stimulates renewed debate and challenges some of the long-standing myths surrounding the Conquest.

'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.