Domesday Book is a massive collection of statistics in two million words and has been described as “the most comprehensive array of social and economic data… possibly from the planet”, a unique and never-again-repeated achievement of world-heritage status and, though not as large as the pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, unique to England. In spite of two centuries (and more) of scholarly speculations and diligent translations it has never actually been read – no-one can make sense of the statistics it contains and some have claimed it was a waste of time! There are just twenty words, in two places, which provide the key to opening-up the translation and, up to now, they have gone unremarked. Why? Well that is part of the detective story. Here is the key to reading it, for the first time in 900 years!  

Though Raising the Dead contains a serious archaeological discovery, it nevertheless reads like a novel, like a search for a lost tomb and a buried treasure. At the heart of this search is a hidden clue: just twenty words in two million will unlock the tomb and from there, it is a matter of code-breaking in order to search out the treasure. The step-by-step logic makes this the ideal book for the classroom and also for non-specialist readers, making light of the logic and statistics required to detect this secret repository.