Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/311

 THE ANCESTOR appeared the interesting return for the same great fief of which I have ah*eady spoken.^ It is assigned to the reign of John, but Mr. Eyton, rightly or wrongly, believed that its real date was about 1230. In this return the manors are arranged under their counties more carefully than in the documents of 1309. Under Herefordshire we note ' Pullesdone ' and 'Wile.' In the 'Testa de Nevill (p. 66) these places appear next one another, under the Hundred of Wolphy, as held of this fief. Therefore they are quite certainly Puddlestone and its neighbour The Whyle. And yet the official editor definitely identifies * Wile ' as Willey. In Shropshire he identifies Wooferton Wolferton ') as Wollerton, but there is worse to come. Of the three Gloucestershire manors spoken of above, ' Neutone ' (Naunton) is asserted to be Newington, ' Luctone ' (Littleton) to be Lucton, and ' Olintone ' omitted altogether from the index where it ought to be identified. The Oxfordshire manor of the fief is ' Codintone ' (Nether Kiddington), which is carefully identified by the editor as Cuddington, although the places of that name are all in other counties. Finally there is the Somerset holding, which, as we have seen, was in Yeovil. The Red Book enters it as one knight's fee in ' Siville ', held by Richard de ' Sey ' ; and its editor confidently pronounces this place to be Swell. Now, Swell was a manor held by the L'Ortis, with which the Says had nothing to do, while at Yeovil the Says are proved by the Close Rolls to have held lands in the time of John, and the fact of their tenure bears on the date of this return. ' Siville ' therefore was simply Yeovil — the Ifle, Ivle, or Givele of Domesday — and indeed the Red Book itself shows us on another page (p. 545) Gilbert de Say holding there this knight's fee. It is needful, unfortunately, to warn the reader, especially if he is working for the great Victoria History^ against this un- fortunate edition of the Red Book of the Exchequer, And the reason is this : its editor has gone out of his way to give the student confidence in the identifications he propounds by dwelling on the care with which they have been made, and insisting that ' the place-names in this index have in fact been subjected in turn to a threefold scrutiny ' (p. ccclxxix.). The ' genealogical test,' we read, ' proved to be unspeakably laborious, but its results were highly important and instruc- ^ Red Book of the Exchequer (1896), pp. 603-5.