DOMESDAY: A Search For The Roots Of England

brown hardcover ~ 2º (folio) 4to ~ 4º (quarto ~ 8"x10"). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. couple of ink spots on 1/2 title pg (old inscription erased), otherwise contents free of markings. price clipped dustwrapper in near fine cond. spine missing little piece at top, tiny chips along the rear top. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (#1 in # line). decorative endpapers. 224p. 16 pages of glossy full color plates. b&w photos, maps & illustrations throughout. glossary. bibliography. photo credits. index. medieval history. history of england. norman conquest. medieval literature. domesday book. ~ As most of us dimly remember from our knowledge of English history, the Domesday Book was a detailed survey of the population landownership, class structure and economy of 9th~century England, executed at the behest of William the Conqueror, the Norman duke who triumphed over Engbnd In 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. Commissioned and compiled in 1086 and written the following year, the Domesday Book is, as Michael Wood puts it in his Preface, "the nearest thing to a photograph of the ordinary people of [England] we could hope for." In Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England, Wood uses this extraordinary document as a jumping~off point for a wide~ranging exploration of England's past. What constitutes "Englishness"? When did it begin? How did it evolve from the time of the Domesday Book? Wood answers these questions through what he terms a "series of close~ups" of historic English locales, institutions, customs and people. His quest takes him from Roman Britain through the Viking Settlement, the richly sophisticated Anglo~Saxon period, the Norman Conquest and up to the 15th cemury, when the world chronicled by the Domesday Book entered a period of major transition. With his best~selling book and highly popular television series In Search of the Trojan War, Michael Wood made a name for himself as a writer and "presenter" who could bring the past superbly to life. Like his previous books, Trojan War and In Search of the Dark Ages (Facts On File, 1987 ), Domesday grew out of a BBC television series and is richly illustrated with both color and black~and~white photographs. Written in a warm, almost conversational tone, Domesday: A Searcli for the Roots of England takes readers on a richly imagined and always gripping journey into the past. …