Ann Williams is first and foremost an historian of Anglo-Saxon England. She is also an expert on Domesday Book; that has come about because the text of Domesday offers us a window of incomparable detail into the world of eleventh-century England. Domesday was an accidental subject for Ann. As an undergraduate, she had studied with R. R. Darlington at Birkbeck and had done his special subject on the Age of Bede. The subject of King Offa attracted her attention for a doctoral thesis, but Darlington thought better of that and persuaded her to do an edition of the Dorset Domesday; her future as an historian of the eleventh century was thus determined. Her training was rigorous: Darlington expected his full-time research students to see him weekly, with work, and woe-betide the student who failed that demanding schedule. In 1964, Francis Wormald and Sir Frank Stenton examined the thesis, and, in 1968, it appeared as a volume in the Victoria County History series under the general editorship of R. B. Pugh.

Appointed to a lectureship at the North Western Polytechnic in 1965, Ann taught a succession of undergraduates in her own inimitable and charismatic style. Ann's teaching was not limited to the lecture hall or the seminar room, however. I arrived at the Polytechnic of North London in the autumn of 1984 in the midst of a dispute over the admittance of a National Front activist to his Philosophy lectures, and a few weeks into our course, the Kentish Town site was occupied and all formal classes ceased for the remainder of the term.