As you can see, this website began as an outreach service for Essex schools, filling a gap in museum provision. Now it is being reused as a vehicle for -

a) My Books
b) My Craftwork
c) Contact Details

So, whichever is your interest welcome

A) MY BOOKS

August 2009 - “The Domesday Hide” published by Matador

ASK THE AUTHOR

Hi there, I hope I can tell you a little about this book in the form of questions you might want to ask, so here goes.

“Ok, what was this hoax?”

Well, having spent some years recording buildings, reading muniments, talking to people, researching and mounting exhibitions and with four buildings to run, I became fascinated (in the mid-1970s) by the incredible detail of Domesday Book. Lots of people experience this ‘discovery’ and we then realise that the ‘experts’ can’t actually tell us what it all means! In effect they tell us that this unique achievement (one we can’t even replicate today – it has been tried) was a waste of time and effort because it actually meant nothing.

I am sorry, for this is not only nonsense it is stupid, for a start the resources committed to this survey mean that it had to be justified. No, no, said the clever people, the arithmetic just won’t add up and we have an indemonstrable hypothesis to prove this (if you are intelligent enough to understand it). Well I wasn’t, so I sat down to solve the puzzle and I discovered that 19th century scholars had actually managed to encapsulate the problem: succinctly they asked ‘what was the area of the hide’, because if you know that the rest actually falls into place. In less than 2 years I had an answer in the form of a demonstrable hypothesis validated by arithmetic. So the hoax is the indemonstrable hypothesis which says that there never was a hide (unit) with a fixed value.

"So, what difference will this make (at the present time)"

“Give me some examples”

Economics is based on what we believe was the position a long time ago, so that we can chart the evolution of economic theories and politics up to today. Economists start from a foundation of assumptions and say, ‘this is how it all happened and how everything works’, only it doesn’t. In fact it didn’t happen as we have always assumed, but it is only now, when we can read what Domesday Book says, that we can put some facts to this foundation document of Medieval economics.
Sociology is also based on a starting point of historic assumptions concerning politics, power, ethnicities, hierarchies, human needs and perceptions, the distribution of essentials and wealth and concepts such as liberty, loyalty and consensus. Well, the 1086 picture of all these things is now very different from anything we have been led to believe.
Demography is often presented in simplistic terms of population growth and its relationship to economics. Well, both the economics and the old estimates of population growth seem to be badly wrong, so where was the factual foundation on which to build?
Agriculture relies on assumptions made about ‘primitive’ (usually sustainable) practises back at some foundation level. The trouble is that, up to now, we have had no facts and figures by which to calibrate what clever people told us about the need to treat our environment in particular ways, so how do they know that there isn’t an alternative to modern agriculture if we are to feed our nation? In 1086 they don’t appear to have been destroying eco-systems but they certainly were producing a lot of food.