AT the April meeting, Ralph Richardson, a former headteacher in Redditch and renowed historian, has spent some years researching place names and life in Worcestershire as recorded in the Domesday Book.

Everyone is familiar with 1066 but not everyone knows that 19 years later, William the Conqueror decided he wanted a description of the lands he had conquered and summoned all landowners to Gloucester in 1085 to provide him under oath with all the facts for "The Great Survey", as it was then called.

Amazingly, by the end of 1086 it was finished, without the help of computers and word processors. To have achieved such a colossal work in just one year is astonishing.

All written out in quill pen on parchment, it was first published in two volumes, with Norfolk, Sussex and Essex in volume 1 and the rest of the country in volume 2.

Having given us this introduction, Mr Richardson then distributed photocopies of an extract he had himself copied out in medieval Latin, listing the eighteen berywicks comprising the desmesne of Bremesgrave, as it was then called, inviting members to identify some of the place names that have survived, among which were the berywick of Warthuil, alias Wythall. A lot of fascinating detail was recorded about the local inhabitants, villeins, reeves, beadles, priests, bordars, slaves and radknights, and the ploughs and water mills that they used.

Finally, Mr Richardson set members some ''homework'', challenging them to calculate the population of the area at the time by extracting references to the number of men recorded and multiplying by 5 to estimate the total of men, women and children. The correct answer has been put into a sealed envelope and will be revealed at the next meeting.

But it will not be a huge number - you could probably have walked from Wythall to Birmingham at the time and have seen nobody.

The next meeting will be on May 28 at Wythall Baptist Church Hall, when Cora Weaver will be presenting a history of Malvern, with slides.