Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/492

484 1852 Mr. Black qualified his statement that the record was a book by a suggestion that it may have consisted of documents bound up together, adding his own view that the record had perished from damp or by being cut up for book covers, which, he says, would have been the more easy supposing it had consisted of a number of consecutive and single documents strung together at the corner.

Mr. George Esdaile, in a paper written in 1886 on 'Lancashire and Cheshire Domesday', believed the lost roll to be 'one of the original county inquisitions made by the Conqueror's order'. He gives a list of thirty-nine references to documents which, he says, 'would go far to make up the lost roll', and the examination of which he thought might lead to the finding of the original, or a copy. As, although he appears to have known of Ormerod's investigations, he entirely misapprehends the nature of the document, it is not surprising to find that only three of his references are clearly relevant to it. The remaining thirty-six are confused references to extracts from, or notes on, Domesday Book proper for Cheshire, inquisitions, pedigrees, &c., which could have little or no bearing on the matter of the roll, however important some of them might be for the elucidation of the great Survey to which Mr. Esdaile, like so many others, mistakenly thought this roll was related.

In 1899 we find Mr. W. H. Bird (who has made considerable research into the records of Cheshire) writing of 'that very mysterious document the Cheshire Domesday', and, in another place, of a statement of the Grosvenor pedigree which is

"reported to be taken from that very mysterious source the Cheshire Domesday, and appears in a very unsatisfactory form. Unfortunately it cannot be verified, being earlier than any of the existing Plea Rolls."

Still further evidence that the roll was not clearly appreciated by some of those who might have been expected to be more critical is provided by the volumes of Domesday Studies issued in 1888 in connexion with the commemoration of Domesday Book. Here Ormerod's Memoir on the Cheshire roll is included by Mr. W. de G. Birch in his paper on 'Materials for Re-editing' the great survey as 'fairly within the scope of the (proposed) Domesday Book Society's work for examination and possibly