diff --git a/docs/manual/src/docbook/authorization-common.xml b/docs/manual/src/docbook/authorization-common.xml
index 60b327eebb..eecc4d0f52 100644
--- a/docs/manual/src/docbook/authorization-common.xml
+++ b/docs/manual/src/docbook/authorization-common.xml
@@ -294,75 +294,50 @@ boolean supports(Class clazz);
AfterInvocationProviders.
-->
-
+
+ Hierarchical Roles
+
+ It is a common requirement that a particular role in an application should automatically
+ include other roles. For example, in an application which has the concept of
+ an admin and a user role, you may want an admin to be able to
+ do everything a normal user can. To achieve this, you can either make sure that all admin users
+ are also assigned the user role. Alternatively, you can modify every access constraint
+ which requires the user role to also include the admin role.
+ This can get quite complicated if you have a lot of different roles in your application.
+
+
+ The use of a role-hierarchy allows you to configure which roles (or authorities) should include others.
+ An extended version of Spring Security's RoleVoter,
+ RoleHierarchyVoter, is configured with a RoleHierarchy,
+ from which it obtains all the reachable authorities which the user is assigned.
+ A typical configuration might look like this:
+
+
+
+
+
+ ROLE_ADMIN > ROLE_STAFF
+ ROLE_STAFF > ROLE_USER
+ ROLE_USER > ROLE_GUEST
+
+]]>
+
+ Here we have four roles in a hierarchy ROLE_ADMIN => ROLE_STAFF => ROLE_USER => ROLE_GUEST.
+ A user who is authenticated with ROLE_ADMIN, will behave as if they have all four roles when
+ security contraints are evaluated against an AccessDecisionManager cconfigured
+ with the above RoleHierarchyVoter. The > symbol can be thought of
+ as meaning includes.
+
+
+ Role hierarchies offer a convenient means of simplifying the access-control configuration data for your
+ application and/or reducing the number of authorities which you need to assign to a user. For more
+ complex requirements you may wish to define a logical mapping between the specific access-rights your
+ application requires and the roles that are assigned to users, translating between the two when loading
+ the user information.
+
+
+
+