Domesday Book and the Law
The Domesday Book contains a great many things, including the most comprehensive, varied, and monumental legal material to survive from England before the rise of the common law. This book argues that it can - and should - be read as a legal text. When the statistical information present in the great survey is stripped away, there is much material still left, almost all of which stems directly from inquest, testimony given by jurors impanelled in 1086, or from the sworn statements of lords and their men. This information, read in context, can provide a picture of what the law looked like, the ways in which it was changing, and the means whereby the inquest was a central event in the formation of English law. The volume provides translations (with Latin legal terminology included parenthetically) for all of Domesday Book's legal references, each numbered and organised by county, fee, and folio.
- The most important and accomplished new analysis of any major aspect of Domesday Book to be published for several years
- Offers a completely original interpretation of all Domesday Book's thousands of legal references in a heroic task of analysis and editing
- A new standard work in the vast Domesday literature and a starting point for further study
Reviews & endorsements
"Robin Fleming's lively and engaging examination of Domesday Book makes it clear, nonetheless, that the survey, and the thousands of local insights that informed it, still have a great deal to tell us about the early years of the Norman Conquest. Fleming's work will most certainly generate a `clamour' of its own among scholars. But the book will require all who read it to think much more deeply than they have done to date about the ways in which post-Conquest lords depended on the machinery of Anglo-Saxon local government and the rich legacy of Anglo-Saxon law when they undertook the overthrow of the kingdom that William I won from Harold Godwinson in 1066." Cynthia J. neville, Canadian Journal of History
"This is an important and very remarkable book." J.C. Holt, Albion
"This work...provides much of interest to social, economic, legal, political, and even religious historians." Katherine Fischer Drew, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"Fleming's discussion...is sensitive, extremely well-informed, and intelligent." Speculum
Product details
December 2003Paperback
9780521528467
572 pages
247 × 189 × 30 mm
1.01kg
6 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: disputes and the inquest
- Part I. Domesday Book and the Law:
- 1. The inquest and the mechanics of justice
- 2. Living in the shadow of the law
- 3. Disputes and the Edwardian past
- 4. Disputes and the Norman present. Part II. The Texts: Part III. Indices.