The essays presented in this volume in honour of Ann Williams reflect the wide interests of a scholar who has changed our understanding of the society of Anglo- Saxon and Anglo-Norman England. Appropriately enough, Ann began her academic career with a translation and study of the Dorset folios of Domesday Book for the Victoria History of the county. In this way she joined a line of distinguished Domesday scholars which stretched back to J. H. Round and Sir Frank Stenton, the external examiner for her thesis. Thus was inaugurated an engagement with a fundamental source for eleventh-century history that has persisted to the present day. Her contribution to its study has been no less important than her predecessors'. When a state-of-the-art facsimile of Domesday Book was proposed in the early 1980s, along with a new translation and commentary, Ann was a natural choice as editor-in-chief. From 1984 to 2000, with Robert Erskine and then the late Geoffrey Martin as general editors, she oversaw the production of what is now the standard edition of Domesday Book published by Alecto Historical Editions. From the start, Ann imposed a tight editorial structure on the new translation which facilitated a higher degree of consistency than had ever been achieved before. Previous editions had tended to represent personal names as they were presented by scribes who had adopted a programme of Latinization or who simply did not understand what they were reading. Ann, by contrast, insisted on identifying and using their OE and Norman forms wherever possible. Likewise, she oversaw a review of the placename evidence and standardized their representation.