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

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Frederick William Maitland was the father of English legal history. He was much admired in his own day and since. The late C.P.Wormald, author of 'The Making of English Law' (Blackwell, 1999) thought that his mastery of the subject was unmatched.

No-one can question Maitland's scholarship, though his style of writing is somewhat discursive and academic for the modern taste; but the main criticism of this book has to be that it is not about Domesday Book, despite the title. It is about Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman society, as revealed by Domesday Book. If you want to know about lords and villeins, boors and slaves, manors and boroughs, in great detail, this is the book for you; but if you want to know how and why Domesday was made, it is not.

There has been a long-running controversy about the Book. Was it a 'geld-book', as J.H. Round originally proposed, and as J.O.Prestwich argued in the 1960s? Or was a feudal register, as V.H. Galbraith first proposed in the 1940s? Or was it all a big mistake, little used for either purpose, as M. T. Clanchy argued in 'From Memory to Written Record'? There is now a voluminous literature on the subject; but Maitland was not really concerned with that. He was concerned with the message rather than the medium.

Stephen Cooper