The introduction discusses the history of the county; the assessment system; the administration of the county; the county boundary; the Wapentakes, their reconstruction, rubrication, order, revised name-forms, and composition; small Hundreds; the lordship of Hundreds; Wapentake courts, moot-sites, and later Wapentakes; manorial and ecclesiastical organisation; the state of the manuscript for the county, its layout and content; the structure of entries; writing and correction; duplicate entries; borough, castle and Forest; related and 'satellite' texts; the Leicestershire survey; 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.