Domesday Book: Its place in administrative history.

XXVIII+193 pp. With fold. facs. Sel. bibliogr.,index. Hardcover. Or. cloth, in dustj. Fold-out illustration from Domesday Book as frontispiece. Between the battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest in 1066 and the Domesday Inquest twenty years later (1086) the aristocratic English land-owning class was expropriated in favour of a French-speaking, fedual society which for more than two centuries substituted Latin for Anglo-Saxon as the language of archives, and French for English as the spoken language. It is this catastrophic revolution which was reduced to writing in Domesday Book, and at once became the "blue print" of the new order, and its title deeds. It was thus a forward-looking document whose importance in medieval royal administration has been gravely underestimated by nineteenth-century historians whose chief interest lay in the light it shed upon the Anglo-Saxon past. This reappraisal of the PURPOSE of Domesday Book was a new sound and this is what makes this book important. Vivian Galbraith (1889-1976) was a historian and HE was born in Sheffield (GBR).