Paul Harvey established his credentials as an historian of the English medieval manor in 1965 when he published a book about Cuxham in Oxfordshire, followed by a meticulous edition of the accounts relating to that manor, and other documents in 1976. Since 1973 he has become well known among social and economic historians for a series of carefully researched articles and essays on the inflation around 1200, estate management, manorial accounts, the land market and peasant seals. These writings were all connected, because the inflation caused a revolution in the exploitation of manorial demesnes, the land market was stimulated by the commercial orientation of rural society, and the seals were used to authenticate transfers of land among peasants. In particular he has become the leading expert on the manorial accounts which provide so much of the evidence for English medieval agriculture. He knows how and why they were compiled, has classified them into their various types, and has traced their development over time. To some extent, he views rural society from the perspective of the estate administrators, but this does not prevent him from appreciating the attitudes of peasants, or recognising that they could take initiatives, as when many of them developed skills as artisans in the twelfth century.

At the same time, in a parallel career, Harvey was pursuing the history of cartography, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He traces the increasing numbers of local maps, of which more than a thousand are known for the sixteenth century, and developments in technique, such as the widespread adoption of maps drawn to scale. This specialism has some links with Harvey's medieval concerns, as the maps that most interest him are those depicting manors and fields, and they contributed to a new phase of intense estate management in the period after 1500. This book brings together both strands in his writings, with essays about manorial economy and maps. They are interspersed with more reflective articles, which are not based on a foray into the archives, but allow him to explore such themes as the planning of villages, or the value of documents for those working on landscape history.

A problem to which Harvey constantly returns is the agrarian history of the pre-Conquest period, and more specifically whether we can apply the relatively abundant evidence for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to throw light on the problems of the period before 1000 when documents are sparse. The pre-Conquest document known as the Rectitudines depicts a manorial world of demesne and tenants, with labour services and customary obligations and rights, which is immediately recognisable to anyone who works on thirteenth-century manorial surveys. Those who believed that the Anglo-Saxons were freemen until the eve of the Norman Conquest were embarrassed by the Rectitudines, and dated it as late as possible, after 1042. The downgrading of this important document still persists. Harvey shows that it belongs firmly in the pre-Conquest period, having been revised and rewritten in the early eleventh century, but is based on an original going back to the tenth century or even earlier. In other essays he shows that although there were manors in the Anglo-Saxon period, they differed significantly from their successors, and evolved continuously. For example, the role of the reeve shifted from a village headman to an official primarily responsible to the lord. In the pre-Conquest period, lords gained income from the land by receiving food rents organised by the reeve, and the demesne only emerged gradually as a specific piece of land. Similarly peasant holdings, which had originally consisted of a share in the fields, gained territorial precision in the twelfth century and became a collection of defined parcels. This process of territorial definition and the drawing of firm boundaries was also going on at a much higher social level, as on big church estates the distinction between a bishop's lands and those assigned to the cathedral clergy came about slowly, culminating in a clear separation in the twelfth century.

Harvey has an acute critical mind, which becomes especially apparent in his analysis both of medieval accounting procedures and in his discovery that a map is copying an earlier original, and therefore misrepresents the place at the time when the later map was drawn. He is always courteous and moderate, and when he points out a series of weaknesses in an edition of Walter of Henley, his comments are couched in the midst of warm praise for ‘a most important and valuable book’. Harvey is a deservedly influential figure in his twin fields, and this book brings together important essays which demonstrate his formidable learning with deftness and clarity.