Domesday Book. A Complete Set of 35 Volumes

Nine hundred years ago--in 1086--William the Conqueror launched the great Domesday Survey of England to ascertain the extent and value of his newly acquired lands. Commissioners were sent to every county to discover the names of landowners and their tenants, as well as those who had owned land in the time of Edward the Confessor (d. 1066), the extent of the cultivated territory, and the value of land, plows, and livestock. The returns from the various counties were collected, corrected and abridged, and fair-copied by one writer. Since this was accepted as the final authoritative register of rightful possession, people called it Domesday Book, by analogy with the Day of Judgment. This is considered to be one of the most important books ever written. The full Latin text was printed once, in 1783, but in 900 years there has never been a complete English translation! To set this situation to rights, the late Dr. John Morris undertook the task of translating and annotating the text in its entirety. After fifteen years, when the last of the thirty-five volumes came off the press, this mammoth project was completed by Phillimore & Co. of England--in time for the Ninth Centenary of the Domesday Survey in 1986. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this work or to overstate its achievement. Now the general public has access to the work that codified the structure of English society. To students of local history and genealogy, to scholars who want to reexamine the evidence on which modern scholarship rests, or to explore areas of social and administrative structure which have received less attention, this work is absolutely basic. To preserve the original arrangement of Domesday Book this edition is arranged by counties, one county per numbered volume. It also corrects the few errors in the 18th-century Latin text while providing a parallel, modern English translation. Detailed notes on the text and translation are one of the features of this work, which also includes biographical sketches of some of the principal figures named in the Survey, translations of related contemporary documents, statistical summaries, descriptions of local places, maps, indexes of names and places, and an explanation of technical terms. [9455-G].…