numbers. There are names of families in them which we know historically did not become settled in England till long after the Conquest. Persons are omitted of whom we have the best evidence that they were in the expedition. In fact, any critical student in that part of history might at this time form a similar list from Domesday Book and the old Norman chroniclers, and one which would be far more worthy of regard than any of these, though still depending for its authority on the credit which we gave to the skill and diligence of the individual compiler.
It was not till so late as the time of Queen Elizabeth that any claim was put forth on behalf of any of these lists to be the Roll of Battle Abbey, or to be in any way connected with the Abbey, except as having had a certain reference to the Conquest and to the influx of strangers from Normandy consequent on that event. Holinshead, in 1577, is the first writer who claims for any of them the title of the Roll of Battle Abbey, and he distinctly states that the roll which he has printed did some time belong to the Abbey. It is a list of surnames only, placed in alphabetical order, 629 in all, and all apparently names of French origin. With the testimony before us of such a writer as Holinshead, I should not pretend to say that he may not have copied the list from some manuscript which may have belonged to the House of Battle; but further than that I could not go, since the list has evident marks of being only one of the many lists of the kind which were prepared; and with Holinshead, Stowe is to be compared, who, a very few years later, published another list differing from Holinshead's, containing indeed, only 407 names, and for this he claims that it is taken "out of a table some time in Battle Abbey;" so that, at the very beginning, when our chroniclers began first to look upon these lists in connection with the Abbey, we have two different lists, the pretensions of each of which may be said to be equal. There is, however, a correspondency between them. Both begin with Aumarle and end with Wyvil, though in different orthographies. The second name in Holinshead's; Aincourt is absent from Stowe's, and yet the Deincourts would hardly defer even to a Battle table which excluded them from the distinction of having come in with the Conqueror. Neither Holinshead nor Stowe affords us any information
