Page:Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 6.djvu/25

 shall soon see to have been the case, if the monks of Battle had possessed so early and authentic a list, that some of those persons would not have obtained copies of the list and formed their own collections upon it.

I fear then that we are driven to the conclusion, (1) That no Bede-Roll of the army was ever prepared, which Bede-Roll would have been the Battle Abbey Roll, in by far the highest and best sense of the word; (2) That no list of the duke's host was ever prepared for purposes less formal and important than to be used in the devout solemnities of the place; and that if such a roll ever did exist, it has long ago perished, as well as all copies of it or extracts from it.

But while I venture confidently to submit that no list of the army of the Duke of Normandy has come down to us with the authoritative stamp of the Abbey of Battle impressed upon it, I do not deny that there are several lists of persons or families who are said to have come in with the Conqueror, descended to us from times long before the Reformation, though not ascending to near the time of the Conquest: nor would I affirm that one or more of these may not have been the work of some private monk of the monastery, whose position naturally invited him to the consideration of such a question as this. At the same time, while admitting the probability that some private monk of the house may have thus amused himself in his hours of leisure, as many other persons in the middle ages did, there is no possibility of determining which of several lists is the work of a monk of Battle; and that if we could do so, we are not bound to attribute to it that kind of high authority which is yielded by popular opinion to the supposed Battle Abbey Roll. These lists, of which I shall speak in some detail, being ten in number, all differ in many respects from each other. They are evidently but conjectural lists formed according to the opportunities of information which the compilers of them possessed, and so are far from coming to us with any authority worthy of regard. Yet one or two of these lists it is supposed must be meant, when an appeal is made to the Roll of Battle Abbey.

The very diversity of these lists plainly shows that they are the works of different persons whose sources of knowledge were different. The diversity lies in the names and in the