This book, simply put, is one of the most important resources ever put together for the study of 1066, Hastings and the Norman conquest. It is the resource that no one attempting to study that period can afford to be without. It provides every word written about the conflict in the original contemporary and near-contemporary sources, translated into modern English, of course. Most of the documents it includes are available out there in one form or another, but are prohibitively expensive to acquire one at a time, and require a lot of work to find. This book was, and remains, an incredible and unique resource to the 1066 enthusiast, and is a "Must Buy".
There are so many fascinating things to learn from this book that it'd take way, way more than an Amazon review to describe it all. At the highest level, I could summarize what I got out of it thusly: there really was very little written and documented at the time about 1066 (or at least, that made it down to our time). Couple of sentences here, a few pages there. Most of it was written well after Hastings, and by people who weren't eye-witnesses to it. Almost all of the books, movies, and academic analysis done in the following thousand years is based on these sources, and there's just not a lot of source material. Much of it is contradictory, obviously very subjective, and just ... sparse. It makes you realize that we know very, very little about 1066 and have been making gigantic assumptions and guesses about it ever since.
Again: this book is an incredible resource, and should be the first thing that anyone interested in getting beyond pop-history and into serious learning about 1066 should purchase.
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