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Domesday Book and the Law

Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England

Robin Fleming author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:18th Dec '03

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Domesday Book and the Law cover

A thorough and complete survey of all the legal actions and references in Domesday Book.

Domesday Book contains the most comprehensive, varied, and monumental legal material to survive from England before the rise of the common law. This innovative study argues that it can - and should - be read as a legal text, and offers a thorough and complete survey of all its legal actions and references.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.

"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

ISBN: 9780521528467

Dimensions: 247mm x 189mm x 30mm

Weight: 1010g

572 pages