Doomsday Book is back

No book embodies the very notion of history more forcibly than the Domesday Book (Penguin Classics, £18.99). Compiled in 1086, it paints a picture as vivid as any miniature, offering a meticulous inventory of England two decades after the Norman Conquest, from its pastures and meadows to the livestock that grazed there and the men and women who owned them.

Although its contents were outdated almost as soon as they were set down, the book's size alone lends it a certain unassailability, and it was used to help set levels of taxation and resolve property disputes.

In the intervening centuries, it has become an invaluable source for historians, and was even invoked in a property dispute as recently as 1982. Today, it still makes colourful reading, as fascinating for what it reveals about things that once were (enough woodland for 800 pigs where today there are open fields or concrete) as for those that remain unchanged (local place names barely altered over a millennium).This beautifully produced translation from the Norman French is accessible in both layout and price, and a boon for amateur history buffs across William the Conqueror's land.