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The suitability of Domesday Book for cliometric analysis

1987; Wiley; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1468-0289.1987.tb00429.x

1468-0289

John McDonald, Graeme Donald Snooks,

Environmental and Agricultural Sciences

T he comment by Hamshere on our Domesday tax assessment article raises a number of methodological and historical issues concerning the suitability of Domesday Book for cliometric analysis.2 Hamshere's main methodological point is that the nature of the Domesday data imposes many limitations upon the use of statistical techniques and that the resulting conclusions, particularly those derived from multiple regression techniques, must be treated with great caution. Surprisingly he advocates that it is more effective to break down the study of general relationships into simpler linear relationships between [all] pairs of statistics.3 On the contrary, we argue in section I that this view of the data problems in Domesday Book is not correct, and that simple linear regression analysis is not appropriate. Also in section II we respond to his comments upon our interpretation of Domesday tax assessments, and provide additional evidence from Wiltshire and Cambridgeshire.