Publisher's Synopsis
An exposure of the biggest hoax and deception in English history, maybe in historiography. Unlike the Piltdown hoax, the Domesday hide has actually influenced our knowledge of agriculture and socio-economics for a century. It is a detective story involving real people and tax fraud. Hoax! demonstrates that anyone can do what the leading authorities on the Domesday Book deem impossible, simply by replacing their indemonstrable hypothesis with one that is arithmetically sound. It then goes further to explore what this discovery means to our 'state of knowledge', what we think we know. It is the first history book to reconstruct the ancient landscapes and human thought patterns of 1,000 years ago, and it suggests why historians and academics have been happy to promote such deceptions for the last 100 years. If you want some sort of answer as to how we began our present economic and ecological mess, this is it. It is also a detective story involving deduction and determination with 30 years (and more) of suppression. It is a book that opens the door onto lost worlds, a travel book into the last frontier (which is not 'space' but 'time'), into landscapes and societies as yet unseen by travellers. It opens the door to sustainability and permaculture. It also suggests that there actually was a very large population in the England of 1086, together with the inception of a surveillance culture detecting the frauds of the wealthy. If you want to know more, read it. If you don't want to believe what it says, then disprove the arithmetic (if you can). If you don't read it you will probably never understand.
