Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England.(Review)(Brief Article)

Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England. By Robin Fleming (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 548 pp. $95.00

This volume is a follow-up to Fleming's Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991). In that volume, Fleming was primarily interested in the policies followed by Cnut in the early eleventh century that created several large landholding families who dominated large areas of England at the expense of the Crown, compared with the policies of William I in the second half of the eleventh century that led to the virtual annihilation of the former Anglo-Saxon landholding class in favor of a new Norman …