Domesday Book and Beyond
Three Essays in the Early History of England

That Maitland's hypotheses and conclusions should still be central to such a debate is not the least remarkable feature of this extraordinary book.

F. W. Maitland (Author)

9780521349185, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 January 1988

560 pages
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.9 cm, 0.78 kg

'Why still read it? Why should scholars consult it and undergraduates study it? The plan answer is that still after ninety years remains the greatest single book on English medieval history': thus J. C. Holt in his foreword to this new impression of one of the classic historical texts in any language. In three extended essays Maitland exploits the information in Domesday to analyse and reconstruct the society, law, government, economy and even something of the mental and imaginative world of early medieval England. Essay I examines the nature of English society in 1066 and how, by 1086, this had changed. The second essay explores pre-Conquest England, stretching back through the Anglo-Saxon law codes and land-books to the English settlement, its social structure and administrative geography. Essay III uses an exhaustive discussion of the hide (that 'dreary old question') to look again at methods of assessment and measurement, and their relationship to the wealth and resources of England; in this Maitland displays, in addition to his customary lucidity, subtlety and enormous powers of historical insight, very considerable statistical competence, of an order hitherto foreign to English historical writing. In his foreword Professor Holt looks afresh at this monument of medieval scholarship, assessing its place both within the wider context of historical study, and also, more specifically, its continued contribution to that debate on the nature of Domesday Book with which scholars have been preoccupied for nearly one hundred years. That Maitland's hypotheses and conclusions should still be central to such a debate is not the least remarkable feature of this extraordinary book.

Foreword
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Essay I. Domesday Book: 1. Plan of the survey
2. The Serfs
3. The Villeins
4. The Sokemen
5. Sake and Soke
6. The manor
7. Manor and vill
8. The feudal superstructure
9. The boroughs
Essay II. England Before the Conquest: 10. Book-land and the land-book
11. Book-land and folk-land
12. Sake and Soke
13. Book-land and loan-land
14. The growth of seignorial power
15. The village community
Essay III. The Hide: 16. Measures and fields
17. Domesday statistics
18. Beyond domesday.

Subject Areas: Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], British & Irish history [HBJD1]