This is a very good book; in many places it is a brilliant one. Provocative as the general thesis unquestionably is, it will become one of the main points from which discussion of the political and legal aspects of the so-called Norman Conquest will start. Its main premise, argued persuasively and with great learning, is that William the Conqueror's interpretation of his claim to be Edward the Confessor's legitimate successor from the very beginning (which was well before Hastings) meant that the Conquest was, in relation to the book's themes of kingship, tenure and succession, a brutal rupture, a new start which had very long-term implications for England's history because it placed the king and the personal bond of homage at the heart of the English polity. In some respects this rupture owed very little to Normandy before 1066; rather it was the product of minds at work around William and the circumstances of 1066. Yet in others it exported an attitude to succession to England and Normandy which was the cause of chaos. In a short review it is impossible to do justice to either the originality or the subtlety of all the arguments which contribute to a book which feels at times like a marvellously intense tutorial on a twenty-first-century version of ‘Stubbs' charters’. A final verdict requires many hours of the close reading which George Garnett has devoted to his subject. It is a pleasure to see such a thorough exploration of the language of William i's writs and charters and of Domesday Book, and by implication a tribute to the creativity of those who worked on them. The reassessment of the Domesday antecessor from a canon law perspective is thoroughly convincing. The foregrounding of Eadmer in part ii brings new dimensions to a somewhat neglected writer and to our appreciation of Anselm's mastery of the secular world. Garnett then works his way through Henry i's coronation edict, the complexities consequent on the civil war of 1135–54, and much else to end with ‘The problem solved’. What he calls interregna, that is the time before a ruler was crowned, are crucial to the argument because for a short while the normal tenurial ties ceased to exist. An anxiety is that references to the Conquest settlement are not that frequent in the sources Garnett uses; if anyone was parti pris, it was the so-called Battle Chronicler, quoted to powerful effect (p. 351). If the emphasis is shifted towards, for example, concern to negotiate the present, norms and indeed spielregeln, the evolution of ideas and memory and the hazards of childbirth and survival, then the book's core theme may not be as significant as Garnett suggests and the problem may not have been solved at all. On occasion, insufficient credit is given to others for ideas which contribute to, or contradict, the author's argument. But this is a very good book which ends with some very just comments on why 1066 really does matter in English history.