This book is a team effort. One of the authors is interested in the history of English towns; another in the history of the Cambridge region; a third in the history of religious institutions and their royal patrons; and the fourth in the use of statistical methods in economic history. They were colleagues and friends before they began working on this book.

One of the team noticed a pair of handsome leather-bound books on the shelves beside them when studying in the Bodleian Library one day about four years ago. They had found the Rotuli Hundredorum: 1,800 pages of statistical information relating to property rents. These rolls, better known as the Hundred Rolls, were prepared c.1279 for King Edward I. A printed edition was published by the Record Commission in 1818, using the original medieval Latin, in a special typeface designed to replicate the abbreviated script of medieval scribes. It is this edition, shelved in the Bodleian, that has formed the basis for most (though not all) subsequent research on property holding at that time.

The Hundred Rolls are well known and often cited. Their place in the development of royal administration has been thoroughly examined. They have been used to analyse manorial organisation, feudal landholding, population and family structure, and to inform local and family histories. But their numerous statistics of property rents have rarely been analysed in a systematic way. The distinguished legal historian Frederic Maitland pioneered statistical analysis of the Hundred Rolls in the appendix to his book Township and Borough, published in 1898. This book focused on the early history of towns and the fields that surrounded them. At the time he wrote, however, correlation analysis was in its infancy, and he was therefore unable to discover all the fascinating patterns hidden within this data.

Maitland chose to study Cambridge. The obvious explanation is that he was a Cambridge graduate and a professor there. There is another possible reason for his choice, however. The geographical coverage of the rolls is incomplete, and Cambridge has better coverage than almost all other towns of similar size in England. Good coverage, combined with the opportunity to build on Maitland's work, made Cambridge the obvious choice for this study of medieval property.