The introduction discusses the administrative history of the county; its geography, history and assessment; the county boundary; the Wapentakes and Hundreds, their rubrication, order, and revised name-forms; Wapentake boundaries, lordship, moot-sites, and courts; later Wapentakes; the administration of the shire; manorial and ecclesiastical organisation; the state of the manuscript for the county; writing and revision; the content and layout of entries; duplicate entries; boroughs and castle; the numbering of entries; the editorial history of earlier versions of the notes, and the current state of the revision. Some material in this introduction derives from the original printed edition published by Phillimore (1980) and edited by Frank Thorn.