Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/605

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 597 1 August, and every day every other week from 1 August to Michaelmas '. There is also some difficulty in accepting the statement on p. viii that the soke of Bolingbroke passed to Kanulf earl of Chester in 1217, He certainly held a court there before 1208.^ A useful selection of illustrative documents and a full and careful index complete our obligations to the editor. The second item in the volume has a pathetic interest as a characteristic piece of research by a much regretted student whose introduction is dated so far back as 1910. Mr. Ballard had the good fortune to unearth in the Public Record Office a document which he was probably right in regarding as one of those copies of the lost original returns of the Domesday Inquest of 1086 which are not likely to have been limited to the well-known Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae and Inquisitio Eliensis. It is true that the Kentish Inquisitio is more eclectic ; it omits all the purely agricultural statistics which its better-known congeners furnish in common with Domesday Book, it gives the place-names in their English forms and not in the Norman spellings of the original returns and of Domesday Book, and there are other divergences. But it seems impossible to explain it as merely an excerpt from Domesday Book with additions by the monks of St. Augustine's, with whose manors it is chiefly concerned. Most fatal to that hypothesis is Mr. Ballard's discovery of the close connexion of this survey of the lands of St. Augustine's with that of the estates of Christ Church, or Holy Trinity as it was then called, which has long been in print in an appendix to Somner's Antiquitates Cantuarienses. Internal evidence shows that both were originally drawn up in 1087, though the former has had a judgement of Henry I's time introduced into one entry ; they have common entries which, despite difEerences, often agree as against the Exchequer Domesday, and they both usually substitute appreciatum est for valet, and agri for acrae. Mr. Ballard is content to explain these features as due to independent copying from the Domesday returns, but it seems obvious that there can only have been one document drawn up in 1087, from which each monastery copied the portion in which it was chiefly interested. If the pedigree of these documents is correctly traced, some further support is lent to the view which Dr. Round deduced from the Inquisitio Eliensis that Domesday Book for East Anglia and Essex was compiled before the present volume i, and that for some time after the inquest nothing but the original returns existed for the rest of England. The text of the inquisition of St. Augustine's is here and there apparently incorrect, possibly in the course of copying from the original of 1087. An index ought to have been provided. James Tait. Calendar of Charter Rolls. Vol. v, 1341-1417. Edited by C. G. Crump, H. Jenkinson, and A. E. Stamp, with indexes by A. St. J. Story- Maskelyne. (London : Stationery Office, 1916.) Since the first of these calendars appeared in 1903, medieval students have learnt not only that the series contains important historical material, but > CharUiiary of Chester Abbey (Chetham Soc, N.S.), Ixziz. 244.