Page:St. Oswald and the Church of Worcester.djvu/11

 an examination of the Worcester charters down to the time of Oswald has convinced me that there was no church of St Mary, and that there was no community of monks at Worcester before the days of the great reform in the latter part of the tenth century. The diligent labours of the monk Heming have preserved to us a mass of information regarding the bishop's familia, as his cathedral chapter in old days was called, such as is not available for any other church in England. Here at least we are not left in such darkness as should compel us to fall back on conjecture to reconstruct the history of the past. It is true that not all the charters Heming copied are trustworthy documents. We have good reason to think him an honest man, but Worcester in the days gone by was no exception to the general run of ecclesiastical foundations which had thought it necessary to supplement their genuine deeds with others modelled on them, in order to secure their title to properties the charters of which had perished by fire or perhaps had never existed at all. The period of national decline under King Ethelred, which marks the close of the tenth century as an age of decadence and disaster following an age of intellectual progress and unbroken peace, would seem also to have been a period in which churchmen were in constant danger of being robbed of their inheritance and were driven to resort to methods of self-protection which our modern conscience condemns as pious frauds. Later ages were yet more prolific in the manufacture of documentary evidence; but Worcester has not in this respect the evil record of Winchester and Abingdon and Sherborne and other great foundations, thanks no doubt to the very fact that Heming's work had preserved so much that without it would have perished. But Heming, honest as he was, could only work with his materials; the charters lay before him, and he had no means of appraising their authenticity: the science of criticism was not yet, and only a very glaring forgery could be detected at the time he wrote. We need not, therefore, be surprised if a considerable number of his charters fail to satisfy the tests to which the modern student must submit them.

These strictures do not affect the general history of the bishop's familia at Worcester, as it may be read in Heming's chartulary. For the charters which the members of the familia attest as witnesses are not charters of gifts to themselves, but grants which the bishop makes with their consent. They are usually grants for two or three lives with a clause of reversion to the church−a kind of extended