Bøker av Colin Flight

The earliest recorded bridge across the Medway existed in the twelfth century and was abandoned in the fourteenth century. Flight studies the historical accounts of the bridge and some archaeological evidence to reconstruct its history and argue that it was constructed by the Romans, possibly in the 4th century.

The manuscript which eventually came to be called "Domesday Book" is a product of the enterprise originally known as the "Descriptio totius Angliae", the survey carried out in 1086, twenty years after the Norman Conquest, by order of King William I. This manuscript does not stand alone. It is the latest of four successive versions of the written record of the survey. Intrinsically the least valuable, it has gained in value over time, as the earlier versions have dropped out of existence. But they have not disappeared completely. Part of the immediately preceding version survives as the companion volume to "Domesday Book"; part of the version preceding that survives, for some unknown reason, in the library of Exeter Cathedral, even though it was, without any doubt, written in the king's treasury at Winchester. The earliest version of all - the only version in which the data were recorded cadastrally, county by county, hundred by hundred, village by village, manor by manor - has been entirely lost in the original; yet for most of one county a copy survives, in a late twelfth-century manuscript from Ely. This book begins with a sequence of chapters which analyse some aspects of the manuscript evidence, from a new angle, or in closer detail than before, working backwards from the latest version towards the earliest. The last two chapters reassemble the evidence to create a new picture of the conduct of the survey, in both its fieldwork and its post-fieldwork phases.

The description of Kent contained in "Domesday Book" does not stand alone. At the time of the "Survey of the whole of England" - the survey conducted in 1086 by order of king William I - there were four ancient churches existing in Kent: Christ Church and Saint Augustine's in Canterbury, Saint Andrew's in Rochester, Saint Martin's in Dover. From the archives of three of them (all except Dover) copies of documents survive which are more or less closely related to the Survey. The aim of the present book is to bring together all the relevant written evidence, so as to enable a better understanding of it. A few documents are printed here which have not been printed before. For those which have, this book provides a more accurate text than any previous edition. For example, the transcription of the "Domesday Book" text given here includes a few words which have become undecipherable in the original, but which were still legible when a copy was made in the 1760s. That is the same copy used by Edward Hasted, whose "History of Kent" (1778-99) was the first serious attempt to reconnect the written evidence with the actual landscape. For anyone interested in the workings of the Survey, or in the topography of medieval Kent, this book will be indispensable.