Page:St. Oswald and the Church of Worcester.djvu/12

 lease such as we presently find in great numbers under Oswald's own administration. There was no particular temptation to forge a domestic charter of this nature, though it might suffer in the copying through scribal errors and through the embodiment of later notes as if they were part of the original document.

Our first sight of the familia at Worcester comes to us in a small group of charters of the time of Bishop Denebert, whose episcopate of twenty-four years (798-822) nearly coincided with the reign of Coenuulf (796-821), the successor after a brief interval of the great Offa, king of Mercia. One of these (B. C. S. 283) is the charter of a certain Abbot Headda, making a disposition of his properties. It bears no date, but as it closes with a grant intended to secure the prayers of the Worcester familia for his kinsman, Bishop Heathored, it is perhaps reasonable to place it shortly after that bishop's death in 798. It opens with a prologue, which we shall meet again, concerning the fleeting course of time and the need of following the example of the Greeks, who committed their transactions to writing lest they should fall out of memory. 'Wherefore I, Headda, presbyter and abbot, with the testimony of all the venerable familia at Worcester, bequeath my own proper inheritance; making this condition, that my heirs in the line of my family of the male sex and in holy orders shall receive it, so long as in my kindred there can be found a wise and prudent man who can exercise ecclesiastical rule in due and monastic fashion; and that never shall it be subjected to the authority of laymen. But after that, if in our family such churchmen shall be wanting, and they shall be unworthy and unskilled, not knowing how to rule and govern it aright, I order that without any obstacle it be rendered to the episcopal see at Worcester—that is to say, the lands at Dogedeswell and Tyreltun. Besides these I also add an estate of my possession which is known by the dwellers around it as Onnandun; for the remedy of my soul and of the soul of my kinsman, Bishop Heathored, and for the good of all the souls of our kindred; because I am an alumnus of that familia, and was educated and brought up at the threshold of the church.'

We do not know what abbey Headda held, perhaps a small abbey at Dowdeswell in Gloucestershire, the first property which he names. It was common in those days for such houses to descend by inheritance, and too often they fell into lay hands, a danger against which Abbot Headda here seeks to provide. It is unfortunate that no names of witnesses have been preserved, so that we must wait for the next charter to give us the earliest list of the Worcester familia. Meanwhile it is something to have caught a glimpse of the familia, as the