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. 246
