book
Domesday England
Darby, H. C. Domesday England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Why this matters here
H. C. Darby’s Domesday England maps how the 1086 survey recorded landholding, stock, and dues across shires in a form later generations treated as authoritative geography. Before Certainty Arrives reads the Domesday Book as fixing names, boundaries, and obligations so they could outlast local memory and dispute. Darby’s historical geography is the evidence base; the book’s question is how written obligation becomes the argument that displaces what a tenant remembers.
