This MS. engaged the attention of Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, who has printed it amongst the additaments to his edition of the Liber Niger Scaccarii; but Hearne was one of those industrious but uncritical antiquaries who had no conception of the duties of an editor of the importance of accuracy.
Knowing the high opinion entertained of Mr Waters' works,[6] I accepted his translation in all good faith as 'from the Cotton MS.' and was, I confess, not a little startled to discover from Mr Greenstreet's facsimiles that it was made not from the Cotton MS., but from that inaccurate edition by Hearne, which Mr Waters had mentioned only to denounce. On fo. 4b a whole line, containing three entries, was accidentally omitted by Hearne, and is, consequently, absent also from Mr Waters' version. On collating the two, however, I found, to my great surprise, that matters were even worse than this, and that Hearne's text was far less inaccurate than Mr Waters' own, the erroneous figures found in the latter being almost always correctly given by the 'uncritical' Hearne. As for the version given by Mr Waters, even in the very first Wapentake, there are three serious errors, five carucates being given as three, nine as seven, and eleven as two! And for Bradley Wapentake (p. 27), his figures are so erroneous that, according to him, 'Radulf Meschin alone had 42 cars. 6 bovs. in this Wapentake', though his real holding was only fifteen cars. three bovs. With another class of resultant errors I shall have to deal below.
To the enterprise of Mr Greenstreet scholars were indebted for an édition de luxe of the record in facsimile, which made its appearance shortly after the treatise of Mr Waters. Unfortunately, no attempt was made in the appended literal translation to identify the names of places or persons, while such a word as '[ap]pendiciis', which occasionally appears in the survey, is mistaken for a place-name 'Pendicus'. The book enjoys, however, the great advantage of an index.
The identification of places and of persons in Mr Waters' treatise shows extraordinary knowledge; but both Mr Eyton and Mr Waters had the provoking habit of making important assertions without giving their authority. I expressed a wish in the Academy, at the time, that Mr Waters would give us some clue as to his sources of information, but as he did not think fit to do so, we have to test his statements as best we can for ourselves. Now we learn from him on p. 36 that 'Walter fitz William', a tenant at South Willingham, was 'brother of Simon mentioned above', namely of 'Simon fitz William (ancestor to the Lords Kyme)'. This is impressive until we discover that the actual words in the survey (as indeed in Hearne's text) are 'Walt[erius] fil[ius] Walt[eri]i' (fo. 11 b).[7] To an expert such a test as this will prove significant enough. But to turn from an actual misreading of the text to cases in which are incorporated interlineations, not part of the original text, but written in later times, we find Mr Waters—like other antiquaries who had followed Hearne's text—stating that 'Ranulf [Meschin] is twice styled in the Roll Earl of Lincoln, but there is no record of his creation, and no other authority for possession of the earldom' (p. 8). The difficulty vanishes when we discover that this supposed style was a mere interlineation made by a much later hand.[8] So again we read on p. 30:
Richard, Earl [of Chester], has 6 cars. in Barnetby-le-Wold, where [William], the constable of Chester, is his tenant [as his father was Earl Hugh's in Domesday].
But on turning to Mr Greenstreet's facsimiles, we find that the survey had nothing about 'the constable of Chester', the words 'constabularia [sic] Cestrie' being only a faint interlineation by a later hand.
And even where a reference to the true text does not at once dispose of the matter, these statements of Mr Waters are, on other grounds, open at times to question. He assumes, for instance, that Hugh fitz Ranulf, who occurs as a landowner in the survey, was a younger son of Ranulf Meschin, afterwards Earl of Chester (p. 12). No such son would seem to be known; and this assumption, moreover, does violence to chronology. For the pedigree it involves is this:
Now William de Roumare was not old enough to claim his inheritance from the King till 1122, and his half-brother, Ranulf, was some years younger than he was, as the words of Orderic imply in 1140. Consequently Hugh, the youngest brother, can have been only a boy in 1122. How then could he, as Mr Waters alleges, have held a fief in right of his wife so early as 1115 or thereabouts?