Class 4: Awaiting the Sound of a Human Voice

The slides for Class 4: Awaiting the Sound of a Human Voice can be downloaded from here.

Domesday Book

William of Normandy's great survey of England is a fascinating source of evidence for the social, political and economic organisation of late 11th century England.  This complex and much studied documents continues to yield new insights into the landscape and society of Saxo-Norman England.

The National Archives guide to Domesday is a good starting point for study.  There are also several on-line versions of the book (beware those that try to charge you for an extract). The best is domesdaymap.co.uk. Here you can search by place and person, view facsimile images of the original folio volume, read a digest of each entry and generate your own interactive maps. Below for example is the entry for Geoffrey Alselin, Lord of Laxton in 1086.

There is also an interesting report by English Heritage on mapping Domesday data: Lowerre, A. 2008. Mapping Domesday Book using GIS. Research News: Newsletter of the English Heritage Research Department. Number 8, which may be downloaded from here.  And as if that wasn't enough, Darby and Maxwell's classic Domesday Geography of Northern England is available as a free Google E-book from here.

Class 3: Becoming a Land of Villages

Belatedly, here are the slides for this week's class, Becoming a Land of Villages, with in particular, details of the types, uses and evidence that may be gleaned from aerial photography.

Hoskins's England:A Local Historian of Genius

Charles Pythian-Adam's appreciation of Hoskins's life and legacy was published in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society after Hoskins's death in 1992.  You can read the full text here.

Hoskin's published much of his early research in TLAHS.  It makes fascinating reading in its own right and it is possible to see his great themes, expounded in Making of the English Landscape, beginning to emerge.

You can download and read all of Hoskins's early works from the LAHS website, search the pre-War volumes for the majority of his work.

Aerial Views of Laxton

As promised, digital versions of the air-photographs discussed in this week's class.

The Castle from the north-east

The Castle from the north

Fish-ponds south of the church