Notices of Archaeological Publications

To the literature which has accumulated of late years on the subject of the Domesday survey, Mr. Baring has made a notable and essentially a scholarly addition.It was said by the late Professor Maitland at the close of his great monograph, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), that :--" A century hence the student's materials will not be in the shape in which he finds them now.In the first place, the substance of Domesday Book will have been rearranged.Those villages and hundreds which the Norman clerks tore into shreds will have been reconstituted and pictured in maps, for many men from over all England will have come within king William's spell, will have bowed themselves to him and become that man's men."This passage might well serve as an introduction to the volume before us, for the object of its tables is to re-arrange the contents of Domesday, and to reconstitute the hundreds and the vills of which they were composed, Long before Maitland's day it had been pointed out by that eminent antiquary, Joseph Hunter, to Mr. Airy " that what we want is not translations but analyses of the surveys of the several counties," and the Digest of the Domesday of Bedfordshire was the result.In undertaking for six counties this digest of the Domesday survey, and adopting a uniform system, Mr. Baring has rendered the student a service of extreme utility.For one feature of his work I feel personally grateful.Mr. Eyton, the historian of Shropshire, may be said to have led the way, by publishing for three counties Domesday tables, in which the hundreds and the vills were similarly reconstituted.But, having persuaded himself that he had found the key to Domesday, he had to adapt the figures of the record when they proved refractory to that key.It is important that this should be widely known, for the student would be, otherwise, misled. 1 Mr. Pell, again, in Domesday Studies, attempted to solve, by a key of his own, the mysteries of the great record and had to prove his case by even more 1 See my introduction to Domesday in the Victoria County History of Somerset

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