antiquarian value. The charters of K. Henry II are with few exceptions undated, and the years in which archdeacons come and go are among the materials which historians must use in order to date them. Hardy's edition of Le Neve's Fasti is the standard book to which they naturally turn: so much of the documentary material which the Somerset Record Society has recently made available was unknown sixty years ago, that it is no discredit to the editor of that great work to say that its tables of Somerset archdeacons in the twelfth century are altogether untrustworthy.[1]
The king's hand soon makes itself felt, as we learn from two letters of Pope Alexander III. From one of these letters we learn that there was a vacancy in the archdeaconry of Bath before the death of Bishop Robert († 31 Aug. 1166). The pope writes to John Cumin, an active agent of the king, requiring him at once to surrender the archdeaconry of Bath, which he had presumed to claim for himself on the ground of a lay appointment, having dared to take it away 'from the bishop of Worcester, in the person of Master Baldwin, to whom we had confirmed it by our formal writ while the bishop of Bath was still alive'. John Cumin is required to surrender it at once to the bishop of Worcester on pain of excommunication. The letter is conjecturally dated in May 1168.[2] We shall deal with the matter more fully elsewhere, and show from the evidence of the Pipe Rolls that John Cumin was holding the archdeaconry from 1166 to 1172.[3] Indeed he attests as archdeacon of Bath c. 1170.[4] He may have got his position regularised by the pope; for it is probable that he did not abandon it until he became archbishop of Dublin in 1182.
We cannot identify Master Baldwin; but as the pope confirmed him in his office we must find him a place in our list c. 1165.
We have next to consider a more perplexing person, Thomas archdeacon of Wells, who is also frequently known as Thomas archdeacon of Bath. We begin his story by turning again to the correspondence of Alexander III. The pope writes to the dean, precentor, and chapter of Wells to the following effect. ' We have learned from Master E. that he was appointed canon with your consent by the late bishop R., who undertook on ordaining him deacon to provide him in the name of a prebend with an annual
- ↑ The same must be said of the table of the deans of Wells for the same period.
- ↑ Jaffé-Wattenbach, Regesta Pontificum (1886), ii, p. 208. The letter is printed in Memorials of Thomas Becket (Rolls Ser.), vi. 422.
- ↑ See below, Appendix C.
- ↑ Delisle, Notes sur les chartes originates de Hen. II, p. 15; cf. p. 30. See also Eyton, Itinerary, 158 n.
