Page:St. Oswald and the Church of Worcester.djvu/40

 as the charter itself is no longer extant, we may well doubt whether our copy faithfully represents it. We seem to see the same hand at work as in the earlier charter of 969. Again we must say that the evidence is not such as will bear any great stress.

It is strange that Worcester leases should be wanting for these seven years (970-6), with the two exceptions that we have mentioned. It may be that a batch of charters of this period was found by Heming in a state of almost irrecoverable collapse through damp or other misfortune. As soon as we reach the year 977 we have no less than seven charters (K. C. D. 596, 1012-17), all of which show us Wynsige in the first place, and Wulfric in the second, at the head of the Worcester 'familia'. The main body of the 'familia' remains as we saw it in 969; but six new men now appear with Wynsige for the first time, and three of them we presently find described as monks; no doubt they were the brethren from 'the choir of Ramsey', whom Oswald, as we are told, brought to Worcester with Wynsige.

Here, then, for the first time, we are on firm ground. We can say with confidence that in the year 977 Wynsige and a few other Ramsey monks had become established in the 'familia' at Worcester. They may have come in before this date, but we cannot prove it.

In order to check the date 969, we need to know when the first settlement took place at Ramsey. For the early Life of Oswald tells us that Wynsige received his training in that monastery.

Oswald met the alderman Ethelwine at the funeral of a knight who died at the time of a great Easter Council, of which neither the place nor the year is mentioned by the early biographer. A few days after this Oswald visited Ramsey, and on his return to Worcester at once dispatched Eadnoth to make preparations for an immediate settlement, which took place on August 29 of the same year. Everything was necessarily constructed on the smallest scale; but the next year saw the beginning of a stone church.

Now the historian of Ramsey (p. 30), writing at the end of the twelfth century, adds to this information that the funeral of the knight took place at Glastonbury. It is quite possible that this reached him by a trustworthy tradition. And we note with interest that a charter, in which King Edgar confirmed to Bishop Ethelwold the liberties of Taunton, is said to have been granted at an Easter Council held at Cheddar in 968 (B. C. S. 1219).