Domesday (1,000 Miles On Foot Through The England Of The Norman Conquest)

By (author) Adams Max
Short description/annotation:
A fascinating journey through the landscapes and communities of the Domesday Book from the author of King in the North
Description:

The Domesday Book describes the furniture of a culture and its economy – the legacy of Anglo-Saxon England.

When King William I sent his agents to survey every shire in England, he asked them to list his holdings and calculate what was owed to him. The manuscript record of the resulting ‘Great Survey’ is not just a tax record, but a unique window onto the structure of English administration and economy before and immediately after the Norman Conquest: its shires and hundreds, acres, hides and townships.

In Domesday, Max Adams retreads the path taken in 1085 by King William I’s agents, taking us on foot through the very sites covered by one of the most iconic documents of English history. In this fascinating new history, Adams explores this unique portrait of a land and its people, bringing the past into intimate contact with the present.

Adams brings us face to face with this legacy in his wanderings through Domesday’s landscape, evoking eleventh-century England through contemporary eyes with the original account as his guide. Bringing together archaeology, contemporary chronicles and historical geography, Adams fleshes out the landscapes of a thousand years ago, peopling them with real actors: lords, thegns, villeins, cottars and slaves; with the millers, turners, priests and burgesses who yielded their taxes and labour to new, Norman lords. In meeting their modern counterparts – shopkeepers, farmers, craftspeople and local officials – Max casts reflective light on Englishness and the English landscape; on our ongoing relations with tax, law and authority; and with the past.

Review quote:
A beautiful book that evokes the English landscape, past and present, and the history of its people.
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A masterful reimagining of a familiar source that helps us to understand the England of today as much as the turbulent eleventh century.
Biographical note:
Max Adams is a writer, archaeologist and woodsman whose work explores themes of landscape, knowledge and human connectedness with the earth. He is the author of The Mercian Chronicles, the bestselling The King in the North, In the Land of Giants and The First Kingdom. He has lived and worked in the North East of England since 1993.
Promotional headline:
A fascinating journey through the landscapes and communities of the Domesday Book from the author of King in the North
Feature:
Publication to coincide with the opening of the British Museum''s blockbuster Bayeux tapestry exhibition (Sep 2026 - Jul 2027)
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Combines a personal and accessible narrative style with rigorous scholarship, crafting a unique history at ‘ground level’.
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The latest in the author’s much-admired sequence of Early Medieval histories.
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Gap in the market: the last trade non-fiction on the Domesday Book and its implications for English cultural life was Michael Wood''s (still well regarded but over two decades old) DOMESDAY QUEST