The introduction discusses the origin, administrative history, and assessment of the county; the county boundary; the administration of the county; the Wapentakes, their reconstruction, rubrication, order, revised name-forms, and boundaries; small Hundreds; Wapentake courts, their links with royal manors, moot-sites, lordship of the Wapentakes; manorial and ecclesiastical organisation; the state of the manuscript for the county; duplicates; borough, castle and Forest; related or 'satellite' texts; the Burton Cartulary, the Burton survey, and other texts; the identification of places; the editorial history of earlier versions of the notes, and the current state of the revision. The introduction has been written for this edition by Caroline and Frank Thorn.