A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE 



thereto by bishop Wulfstan, 'in the presence of king William's magnates 

 [principibus), namely, Remigius bishop of Lincoln, earl Walter Giffard, 

 Henry de Ferrers, and Adam brother of Eudo the King's dapifer, who 

 were appointed by that King to enquire (into) and survey the possessions 

 and customary rights both of the King and of his magnates, in this 

 province and several others, at the time when he caused all England to 

 be surveyed.' Again, in its transcript of the documents relating to the 

 Worcester and Evesham dispute concerning Hampton and Bengeworth, 

 Heming's Cartulary gives us (pp. 75, jj) the names of those 'officers 

 [principibus) of the King who had come to make enquiry concerning the 

 lands of the county,' namely, bishop Remigius, Henry de Ferrers, Walter 

 Giffard, and ' Adam.' These are believed to be the only places in which 

 the names of Domesday commissioners are given, and it should be 

 observed that none of these was a holder of land in Worcestershire. It 

 was doubtless William's plan to select for each district commissioners 

 unconnected with it by tenure of land. 



On the next page of Heming's Cartulary (fo. 1331^) we find an 

 interesting list of ' those who swore on the Bishop's behalf and ' on the 

 prior's behalf as to the Hundred of' Oswaldes Lawe,' together with the 

 witnesses. Sir Henry Ellis, unfortunately, took this to be a list of the 

 jurors at the Domesday Inquest;^ an error in which, naturally enough, 

 he has been followed by others. As a matter of fact, this interesting list 

 dates itself as of the time of bishop John (i i 5 i-i 157),^ and, as is duly 

 noted by Hearne, is entered in another (and a later) hand. The Domes- 

 day documents, in Heming's Cartulary, which I have spoken of above, 

 supply no names of jurors, but the first tells us that the King's com- 

 missioners, having taken the sworn testimony, set the return on record 

 in a cartula, ' which is preserved in the royal treasury with the rest of the 

 survey of England ' {cum totius Anglia descriptionibus) . 



This return, as given in Domesday, has to be compared with the 

 famous charter attributed to king Edgar, ' perhaps the most celebrated 

 of all land-books.'^ The monks of Worcester entered it on their Register* 

 as their title-deed to the Hundred of Oswaldslow, and dated it 964. To 

 Hickes belonged the credit of showing, in his Dissertatio Epistolaris 

 (1703), that what passed for the original charter ° was in truth a 

 document written about 1200, while the date of the copy in the Register 

 is about half a century later. As Professor Maitland has observed, we 

 cannot accept ' the would-be charter as genuine,' or ' even accept it 

 as a true copy of a genuine book,' but he thinks that it ' tells a story 

 that in the main is true.' This he deems ' the easiest answer ' to the 

 question, ' Why was a charter of Edgar produced, perhaps rewritten and 

 revised, perhaps concocted ? ' As the matter is one of considerable im- 



^ Introduction to Domesday, I. 19. 

 ' See Feudal England, p. 169. 

 ^ Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 268. 



* Hale's Registrum Beata Maria Wigorniensis, pp. xxx.-xxxiv., 21^-24*. 

 ^ Harl. MS. 7,513. Hickes gave a facsimile. 

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