This book celebrates the inquisitions post mortem, a vast and systematic source for late medieval England that has the potential to light up many topics, such as landscape and memory, that are only now being realised. It collects the papers delivered at the second inquisitions post mortem conference held at the University of Winchester in 2014, valuably supplemented by papers by Paul Dryburgh, Stephen Mileson and Jennifer Ward.

This second conference was organised by the university's Professor Michael Hicks as Principal Investigator of the Mapping the Medieval Countryside project (MMC) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This was a collaboration with Paul Spence and his team at the Department for Digital Humanities at King's College London. The project seeks to open access to all the published Calendars of Inquisitions post mortem (CIPMs) to anyone anywhere in the world on British History Online (BHO), to enhance CIPMs xviii–xxi to the standard of the most recent calendars, and to create an interactive database of CIPMs xviii–xxvi that is more easily searched, interrogated and analysed. Despite formidable technical difficulties, several extra CIPMs have been posted on BHO, and interactive versions of CIPMs xxi–xxvi on the project website: the rest should be available by the time of publication of this book. Apart from electronic publication, the project seeks to make IPMs better known as a source to academics and the general public, and to demonstrate how they can be best used through the blogs and featured IPMs on its website and its Twitter account. The 2014 conference and these proceedings are part of this process of dissemination.

Many years of calendaring IPMs have generated much new knowledge that either was lost or has percolated only indirectly into general historical consciousness. It is no accident that the critical publications most cited on IPMs precede the Second World War. Professor Christine Carpenter's introduction to CIPM xxii established a new foundation. The 2010 IPM conference that gave rise to the 2012 Companion sought to bank what had been learnt from the Cambridgedirected calendaring of CIPMs xxii–xxvi, notably in the papers by Carpenter, Holford, Noble and Parkin.