Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/79

 12 8. V. MARCH, 1919.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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document. A " duplicate," if a duplicate existed, would indeed have equal validity with the original, or rather would be an original itself, as, for example, in the case of a chirograph of a convention or a indenture. What MB. BADDELEY quotes i only a piinted copy of a manuscript copy but how can a mere copy, or the print of a copy, be " more perfect " than the origina 1 charter ? This " more perfect duplicate ' turns out to be part of a monkish interpola tion in a MS. copy of the ' Gesta ' made probably late in the twelfth century at Gloucester by a Gloucester scribe, for the use of the Gloucester abbey of St. Peter. More hereafter. En attendant I may remark that Dr. Stubbs will have none of it as part oi the genuine text, consigning it to an igno- minious place in minute type at the very end of Liber V. Thus the evidence is not so irrefragable as MB. BADDELEY thinks. It is not finally conclusive for these four reasons :

1. It is found only in a copy.

2. The only original and genuine docu- ment knows nothing about it.

3. There is a suspicious resemblance between the two contending dates the quoted one, MCXXVIL, and the apparently obvious one, MCXXIII. suggesting a pos- sible blunder on the part of a copyist.

4. History seems to agree. I have proved that the charter passed in one of two short intervals February to June, 1123, or Sep- tember, 1126, to August, 1127 and that internal evidence points to a date when the King held a great council of prelates and barons at Winchester. In each of those two brief intervals the King did hold such a council the one at Winchester at Easter, 1123 ; the other, not at Winchester, but at Westminster, Christmas, 1126 ('D.N.B.'). The great ecclesiastical Council of West- minster in May, 1127, is ruled out.

1 MS. By a pardonable lapse of MB. BADDELEY surely had for-

but affuerunt, not^iffluerunt, is the word in the original MS. memory

gotten that he must have written affuerunt (were present) in the copy from the Glouces- ter original which, as he tells us, he made " two or three years back."

MB. G. H. WHITE'S convincing reasoning I hope, with the Editor's kind permission, to refer to in my next.

CHABLES SWYNNEBTON. Stanley St. Leonards Vicarage, Glos.

MB. ST. CLAIB BADDELEY refers to a " variety " of Henry I.'s charter in the ' Gloucester Cartulary,' i. 235 (i.e., no. cxlii.), attested by Roger de Gloucester himself ; but this is evidently an earlier charter granted by the King at Falaise before Roger died of his wound. It is the " Confirmatio " printed by MB. BADDELEY which is a dupli- cate of no. cxlii., with the addition of the missing list of witnesses the only variants (apart from the spelling of proper names)

being horto.

dux " for rex, and " orti " for de (No doubt the same careless scribe

who changed the king into a duke has dis arranged the list of witnesses ; for the bishops should precede the Chancellor, and the Count of Meulan should precede Richard de Reviers.) As Waldric the Chancellor became Bishop of Laon in November, 1106, we can at last fix the date of this charter, within the limits circa July, 1105 November, 1106.

For although MB. BADDELEY assigns the death of Roger to 1106, I think that the "loucester monks (i. 69) and MB. SWYN- NEBTON are rig;ht in giving the date as 1105. doubt William of Malmesbury speaks of ihe event as if it occurred not long before ut he summarizes occurrences in Normandy ery briefly here (ed. Stubbs, pp. 474-5).
 * he battle of Tinchebrai (Sept. 28, 1106),

For these reasons, notwithstanding the Again, Orderic appears to record the cam- rsion of the original which occurs in naicm. whirvh ^^r\ with the abortive

version

the corrupt insertion in William of Malmes- bury, I still am strongly of opinion that the Gloucester charter passed at Easter, 1123 of course aptjd Wintoniam. (See also my argument at 12 S. iv. 149.) On the other hand, the date may be 1127.

MB. BADDELEY chides Mr. W. H. Hart, the editor of the ' Gloucester Cartulary ' "(Rolls Series), for having, as he supposes, misprinted affuerunt in his rendering of the

paign, which ended with the abortive attempt on Falaise, under 1106 ; but I think that M. Le Prevost shows clearly that the year should be 1105 (Ordericus Vitalis, ed. Soc. de 1'Histoire de France, iv. 218-20). Cp. Ramsay, ' Foundations of England,' ii. 252-3.

As this charter (cxlii.) also confirms the grant of land through Walter de Gloucester in exchange for the monks' garden, t is evident that their historian is wrong in

Gloucester charter, instead of affluerunt, assigning this exchange to 1109 (i. 59)
 * and he calls it " a ruinous change." There in the passage which I quoted ante, p. 18.

is, indeed, a poetical flavour about affluerunt, the word in the "more perfect duplicate,"

The true date cannot be later than Novem ber, 1106; but, as the charter mentions it