BOLDON BOOK 



Place. 



Wolsinghara 



Stanhope . 



Lanchester 

 Whickham 



Ryton 



Name of Tenant. Holding. 



Ralf 6 a. . . 



Adam 6 a. . . 



5 a. . . 



Son of Humphrey ... 6 a. . . 



Three Turners . . . . 173.. . 



Aldred 12 a. ... 



Meldred I toft and croft 



Lambert 30 a. ... 



William Wilde . 



Girard 



Toft and croft, 6 a. 



6 a. plough thraves 

 6 a. plough thraves 

 243. . 



6 a. plough thraves 

 5 a. plough thraves 



Office or Industry. 



Bee-keeper. 



Reeve : 40^. 



Gardener. 



Plough-maker. 



3,100 trenchers ; 4 boon-works ; 

 help in hay-making. 



Finder ; 40 hens ; 400 eggs. 



Smith ; 3/. 



Smith ; \6J. ; 4 boon-works. 



Marmorarius ; pro servitio ; other- 

 wise I besant. 



Reeve ; pro servitio ; otherwise ^s. ; 

 4 boon-works. 



Finder ; 40 hens ; 400 eggs. 



Finder ; 40 hens ; 300 eggs. 



Reeve ; pro servitio ; otherwise 4*. 



Finder ; 60 hens ; 300 eggs. 



Finder ; 30 hens ; 200 eggs. 



APPENDIX H 

 CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT OF BOLDON BOOK 



The original manuscript of Boldon Book has disappeared. Canon Greenwell, who so ably edited 

 the document for the Surtees Society, conjectured that it was lost in a general spoliation of the 

 Chancery of Durham which took place when Wolsey held the see. 1 It seems likely, however, that 

 the loss occurred at a much earlier time, for we know that a new copy was needed for use in the local 

 exchequer at the close of the fourteenth century one of our texts dates from this period and that 

 this, as we shall presently see, was certainly not made from the original. Moreover no new copy of 

 Domesday Book was needed for administrative purposes, and Boldon Book was used at Durham much 

 as Domesday Book was at Westminster. 



Four copies of the survey have survived. The oldest MS. is contained in a volume of thirteenth- 

 century transcripts of Durham records, entitled, ' Liber Irrotulatus Prioratus Dunelmensis.' * This 

 formed part of the Stowe collection, whence it passed into the possession of Lord Ashburnham, but 

 it is now in the British Museum. 3 This copy we may designate A. The next, which may be 

 called B, was made at the close of the fourteenth century for use on the Durham Exchequer, where 

 it is still preserved.* Then the Register of the Dean and Chapter of Durham preserves a copy 

 which was made about the year 1400. This, which is still at Durham Cathedral, we shall call C. 

 Finally, there is a fourth copy in a fifteenth-century hand, to be called D. This once belonged to 

 Bishop Tunstall, but is now preserved at Oxford in the Bodleian Library. 5 Canon Greenwell has 

 no doubt that this is a transcript of the Chapter MS. C. Sir Henry Ellis, who, in 1816, first printed 

 Boldon Book," followed the text of D; and later Sir T. D. Hardy was moved to admiration of it, and 

 even expressed the belief that it might well have been copied directly from the original. 7 



Ellis's text held the field until 1852, when the Surtees Society broke through its rule of printing 

 only inedited documents by commissioning Canon Greenwell to prepare a new edition of Boldon Book. 

 This was done, as the learned editor explains in his preface, partly on account of the cost and 

 inaccessibility of the folio edition, and partly because the first editor had printed from a single MS. 

 ' itself much modernized in names, and unquestionably not so correct a transcript as that from which 

 the present book has been printed.'* Canon Greenwell's text is that of the Exchequer copy B, collated 

 with C and D, and all the alternate readings are carefully and clearly set out in foot-notes. But he 

 was not permitted to collate A, which was then in the possession of Lord Ashburnham. Canon 

 Greenwell's judgment of Ellis's text seems to have found general acceptance, and the Surtees 

 Society's edition of Boldon Book is the one generally made use of and referred to. 



It is naturally with the greatest diffidence that one dissents from the opinion of a scholar so 

 learned and so experienced as Dr. Greenwell, but a study of his text of Boldon Book, collated with A, 

 which he had not seen, has brought me to a conclusion very different from his. To state, and if 

 possible to maintain, that conclusion, is the purpose of the present note. 



1 BoUon Bk. (Surtees Soc.), pref. rii. Hut. MSS. Com. Rep. fill., App. iii. p. 286. 



1 Stowe MS., No. 930. The transcript of Boldon Bk. commence* at fol. 36. 



On all these MSS., see Hardy, Catalogue of Material (Rolls Ser.), ii. 443, and BoUtm Bk. (Surtees Soc.), 

 pref. viii.-ix. The Durham Exchequer MS. is now in the Halmote Court Office. 



MS. Bodl. Laud, 542. Dom. Bk. (Rec. Com.), vol. iv. App. 



7 Hardy, Catalogue of Material, (Rolls Scr.), ii. 443-444. * BoUon Bk. (Surteei Soc.), pref. 



I 321 41 



