Domesday Book and Beyond

At midwinter in 1085, William the Conqueror held “deep speech” at Gloucester. Soon his commissioners were questioning England, shire by shire, to learn what could be taxed.

In the England remade by the Norman Conquest, the answers went into Domesday Book: not a register of every right to land, but a record shaped above all by the king’s need to levy geld. Writing in the late nineteenth century, historian Frederic William Maitland follows the clues in this vast survey and its related documents to ask what they reveal about land, law and the people who held it—before and after William’s arrival. The details are abundant, but the legal world behind them is anything but plain. What can a tax book tell us about a country’s law?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.