On the coat tails of the best-selling Domesday Book (No Not That One), someone has let out volume II of William’s Adventures in England. As if one book of this sort of thing wasn't enough... It's history, but not as we know it. England, 1067-ish and the King’s grip is tight. His Earls of Northumbria will keep dying though. Every time he appoints one, someone sticks something in them, or sets light to them. Something is going on and he has a strong suspicion who's behind it. If he's right, it could mean real trouble. In Viking Vinland, the man who would be king awaits rescue - and waits. If no one else is going to do it, he will just have to rescue himself. There's only a bit of sea to cross, he will sail home and take his throne by force. Although he might need a bit of help. And then there are the Danes and the Scots who have their own ideas. If Volume I is anything to go by, this situation is a recipe for disaster. And if you’ve got the recipe, you might as well make a disaster. The text books would have you believe that everything in the past was carefully planned and organised. That the leaders of the time were clear in their aims and decisive in their actions. That the people knew what great events they were living through. No one made mistakes, no one incompetent ever got to be in charge and above all, no one ever had a laugh. All that changed with Howard of Warwick. The 16th book to do things to history that it never asked for, returns to the aftermath of the most famous date ever. 1066. Well, the year after actually, no one ever talks about that - and with good reason, it was chaos. Caution: contains facts. What they said of The Domesday Book (No, Not That One) ‘Had me chuckling the whole way through,’ Discovering Diamonds. 5* ‘Brilliantly humorous,’ 5* ‘A laugh riot,

William of Normandy has just won the battle of Hastings but has lost something precious; so precious no one must even know it is missing. Reluctantly assembling a team of incompetents, he sends them on a mission of recovery. But his secret is out and another band is after the treasure. In a race across a savage land, through a population of confused misfits, against the clock and against one another, two forces hurtle towards a finale of cataclysmic proportions.

Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. “A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.

Corrections by: Carter, F.E.L.;; Unknown function: Greenway, D.E.

Domesday: Book of Judgement provides a unique study of the extraordinary eleventh-century survey, the Domesday Book. Sally Harvey depicts the Domesday Book as the written evidence of a potentially insecure conquest successfully transforming itself, by a combination of administrative insight and military might, into a permanent establishment. William I used the Domesday Inquiry to contain the new establishment and consolidate their landholding revolution within a strict fiscal and tenurial framework, with checks and balances to prevent the king's followers from taking more powers and assets than they had been allocated. In this way, the survey served as a conciliatory gesture between the conquerors and the conquered, as William I came to realize that, faced with the threat to his rule from the Danes, he needed England's native populations more than they needed him. Yes, the overlying theme of the Domesday Book is Judgment: every class of society had reason to regard the Survey's methodical and often pitiless proceedings as both a literal and a metaphorical day of account. In this volume, Sally Harvey considers the Anglo-Saxon background and the architects of the Survey: the bishops, royal clerks, sheriffs, jurors, and landholders who contributed to Domesday's content and scope. She also discusses at length the core information in the Survey: coinage, revenues from landholding, fiscal concessions, and taxation, as well as some central tenurial issues. She draws the conclusion that the record, whilst consolidating William's position as king of the English, also laid the foundations for the twelfth-century treasury and exchequer. The volume newly argues that the Domesday survey also became an inquest into individual sheriffs and officials, thereby laying a foundation for reinterpreting the size of towns in England.

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.

A fundamental part of English heritage, the Domesday Book is unique in medieval history, recording an entire country and its inhabitants town by town, with over 12,500 entries. In this lavishly illustrated book, Elizabeth Hallam and Thomas Hinde examine the background to the nine-hundred-year-old document, setting the events of 1086 into the context of the medieval world. It is a remarkable tribute to English continuity that almost all of the Domesday settlements still exist in some form or another.