The estates of Glastonbury Abbey have always figured very prominently among the manorial specimens of the twelfth century familiar to historians. The late twelfth-century survey of Henry de Soliaco published by the Roxburgh Society in 1877 has provided historians with a document at least as full and as reliable as the other well-known surveys of twelfth-century estates, i.e. those of the Bishop of Durham, of the abbey of Peterborough, of Bruton Priory and of the canons of Saint Paul's. And until recently this small group of sources formed the backbone of the economic historiography of the twelfth century. It was much used by Vinogradov and his contemporaries and has also been greatly relied on in some more recent studies.

What made the Henry de Soliaco survey specially attractive was the geographical location of the estates. For, unlike the estates of the Bishop of Durham or those of Bruton Priory, the estates of Glastonbury were situated in parts of the country which happened to be fully covered in the Domesday survey (i.e. in Somerset, Wilts, Dorset, Berkshire), and were at the same time sufficiently manorialised in 1086 to be capable of relevant comparison with similar surveys of later date. More recently its value to historians has been further enhanced by Dom Aelred Watkins's edition of the Great Chartulary of Glastonbury. It is now possible to add to its value still more by making public the contents of a most valuable, even though very brief and somewhat fragmentary, collection of surveys of Glastonbury estates in the Hearne MSS.