BOOKS.

THE ROLL OF BATTLE ABBEY.*

1if giving to the world these three large and handsome volumes devoted to the descendants of those who fought with William the Norman at Hastings, the Duchess of Cleveland has not been unmindful of the maxim, Noblesse oblige ; and if she has contributed nothing new towards solving any of the many difficult questions which arise in the attempt to identify the companions of the Conquerer, and to trace their descen- dants, she has at least brought together a mass of more or less authentic facts, and more or less interesting fictions bearing upon these matters.

Every one has heard of the Roll of Battle Abbey, and most persons have a vague idea that it was a list of those who fought at Hastings, compiled by direction of the Conqueror, and preserved in the Abbey which he erected near the site of

• The Battle Abbey lion with Some Account of the Norman Lineages. By the Duchess of Cleveland. 3 vols. Loudon: Jolus Murray. 1888.

his victory. There is, however, no evidence that such a document ever existed, and it is certain that no one of the many lists of names referred to as the Roll of Battle Abbey was compiled until several centuries after the event with which they are assumed to be contemporary. We are, indeed, told by Foxe the Martyrologist, writing five hundred years afterwards—and his story is given by the Duchess of Cleveland as a statement of fact, but without citing Foxe or any other authority—that after the battle, William, having called to his presence a clerk who previous to the departure of the army from St. Valery had written down the names of the chief men of the army, caused him to read the Roll, so as to ascertain who had fallen and who had survived ; and we are told by Holinshed that this Roll was preserved in the Abbey of Battle. But though many lists professing to contain the names of those who accompanied the Conqueror to England existed during the Middle Ages, none of those which have come down to our time even purports to be a copy of this Roll, and it was not until 1577 that a catalogue of names was first put forward by Holinshed in his Chronicle) claiming to be taken from the Roll of Battle Abbey. This catalogue, however, had been previously printed by Grafton, but without any suggestion that it had any connection with the Abbey. Grafton only says that he "had it from Mr. Clarencieux," i.e., Cooke, the King-at-Arms. At least nine other independent lists are in existence, of which that preserved by Leland and published in his Collectanea is perhaps the most frequently cited. The late M. A. Lower, in his essay on English surnames, states that "Leland saw and transcribed the original ; and in the notes to his transcript he notices some particular points marked upon the Roll which he also transfers to his copy;" but though Leland had certainly visited the Abbey and copied some of its documents, he says nothing to justify this statement, nor does he indicate whence he derived his list, but merely gives it with this title, "The families whose surnames are here written came over originally with William the Conqueror." This catalogue, with the names arranged in pairs in a sort of rhyme, is the earliest and perhaps the most authentic list of the names of the Norman conquerors which we possess, and was probably compiled about the time of Edward I., more than two centuries after the Conquest.

The Duchess of Cleveland gives us the tradition of the Browne family, that the original Roll continued in the Abbey until its dissolution, and then passed into the possession of Sir Anthony Browne, who in 1538 received a grant of the house ; that in 1717 it was removed with other relics of the monastery to Cowdray, and perished in the great fire of 1793. If this is true, it is certainly strange that in the seven centuries during which it remained in the possession of the Abbey and the descendants of Sir Anthony Browne successively, it was, so far as we know, never seen, and certainly never cited by any one. The existing lists of names have been frequently printed, and all possess features of interest ; but as each includes names of families which we know historically did not become settled in England till long after the Conquest, such, for instance, as Manley and Furnival, most antiquaries and historians will agree with Camden, that "whosoever con- siders well these papers on Battle Abbey, shall find them always to be forged, and those names to be inserted which the time in every age favoured ;" and with Mr. Freeman, that the so-called Roll is "a source of falsehood" and "a transparent fiction."

But the claims to authority of these respective lists, and the evidence existing as to the names inserted therein, well deserve a more serious and exhaustive treatment than they have yet received ; and we regret that the Duchess of Cleveland has not devoted at least a portion of her work to this, instead of merely enumerating ten lists, reprinting four of them, and then taking the names simply as texts on which to hang accounts of the several families either purporting to descend from the companions of the Conqueror, or bearing the same surnames. She dismisseslrather contemptuously, and without even mentioning the author's name, by far the best essay which exists on the subject, the late Rev. Joseph Hunter's paper On the so-called Roll of Battle Abbey," printed in the sixth volume of the Collections of the Sussex Archreological Society. The real authority for the names of those who came over with the Conqueror, or who were settled here at an earlier date, is Domesday Book ; but though this is frequently cited by the Duchess of Cleveland, she does not seem to have consulted any of the recently published editions and fa,c-similes of parts of it, or even the edition of the whole, printed by the old Record Commission (1783-1816), but has contented herself with the references to it in county histories and other secondary sources.

After a brief preface and introduction written with much modesty and good taste, her Grace proceeds to notice seriatim the names occurring in the lists, following in general Holinshed's order, giving us in the first place, where she is able to ascertain it, the locality of the Norman viii or castle from which the name is derived, and then a more or less discursive account of the family, beginning with the earliest known possessor of the name in England, sometimes giving very precise genealogical details, sometimes confining herself to a mere general sketch of the earlier members of the family, sometimes again, when the fancy takes ,her, following the descent to the present time, with gaps extending to one or two centuries. Thus, she brings down the family of the Burdetts to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and that of Russell to Earl Russell and Lord Ampthill.

A large portion of the book is made up of extracts from Palgrave's Parliamentary Writs, the Liber Niger, Dug- dale's Baronage, Camden, the various works of the soi- disant Sir T. C. Banks, The Norman People, Recherches cur le Domesday, and various county histories, peerages, and other modern compilations. -Unfortunately, except where a para-

graph is a mere transcript from one of these, the Duchess rarely cites her authorities, and even when dealing with matters of genealogy and historical facts, we have no reference to intimate the source from which they are derived. We cannot but regret that in a work which is undoubtedly the result of much labour and much knowledge, the author has not gone to original sources, instead of confining herself to modern compilations, still more that she has not in each case given us her authority. She is certainly right in saying that Dugdale "evolves no fictions from his inner consciousness, but is invariably and scrupulously honest ;" but this in itself does not give authority to Dugdale's statements, where he is speaking of events which took place centuries before his own time, and we cannot now accept a statement respecting persons or things in the eleventh or twelfth century upon the bare authority of any writer, however honest and careful, of the seventeenth. Still less can we do so in the case of more modern books. A citation indeed, from such a work as Eyton's Shropshire or Nichol's Leicestershire raises a presumption that the fact is as stated; but no such presumption arises from a statement taken from Baines's Lancashire or Glover's Derby, meritorious in their way as these works may be. But

the Duchess's book is compiled in the uncritical manner in which our histories of Greece and Rome were composed until M. de Beaufort published his celebrated dissertation in 1738—

that is to say, without any attempt to discriminate between the authority due to one and another writer—and she cites Glover and Baines in exactly the same way, and with apparently the same confidence as Palgrave's Parliamentary Writs or the Liber Niger.

In the genealogical part of the book, her Grace treats very good-naturedly many of the elaborate and astounding pedi- grees, some of them composed as early as the sixteenth century, in which families of undoubted respectability and position have tried to connect themselves either with the companions of the Conqueror, or with Saxon nobles of an earlier date. No art is easier than that of pedigree-making :— " Just insert a letter here and delete a letter there, And fill up with what balderdash you please, 'Bout this bishop and crusader and that viking and invader, And you'll soon have the best of pedigrees.'

But the author's treatment of some of the genealogical fictions enshrined in the pages of Sir Bernard Burke makes us regret that she has not oftener allowed her critical faculties free play, and so rendered her book of greater value. She is unable to accept the pedigree of the "twenty-fourth titular Earl Cox," (who, however, we think, has disappeared from the more recent editions of The Landed Gentry), nor can she believe there could have been a "Clement Cox whose son was created an Earl by Edward the Confessor ;" while as to the genealogy of the respectable Lincolnshire gentleman who in 1835 assumed the name and arms of D'Eyncourt, "in order to com- memorate his descent from the ancient and noble family of D'Eyncourt, Barons D'Eyncourt of Blankney, and his

representation in blood as co-heir of the Earls of Scars- dale, Barons D'Eyncourt of Sutton," she mildly avows herself ‘. unable to comprehend this tortuous and involved pedigree." As to the descent of the Earls of Harewood, again, she ventures to criticise the absolutely baseless statement contained in The Norman People (that broken reed upon which she too frequently relies for her genealogies), that the lineal ancestor of this noble family was the Simon de Lacelles men- tioned in the Liber Niger. She remarks that there is con- siderable doubt and difficulty in determining the descent," and comments on the formidable hiatus of one hundred and twenty- five years between John the son of Simon and John of Hinderskelfe, the first undoubted progenitor of this noble family, whose descendants for seven generations certainly bore the surname of Jackson, though we fail to find this fact or this name in Burke's Peerage.

The largest and perhaps the most interesting part of the book consists of the picturesque old legends that have been so long associated with ancient lineages as to form part of their history. All these the Duchess has retained, and has besides given all the anecdotes she could collect relating to the families and the persons of whom she treats. Under Fitz-Otes we have a long and pleasantly narrated history of Robin Hood and his fictitious pedigree. Darrell, of course, leads to the story of the crime at Littlecote and the bribery of Sir John Popham. With the name of Abbeville the Duchess connects Eustace of Boulogne, and then gives a notice of Anne Boleyn, whose family she thinks it more than likely may be traced back to this stock. Under Pierrepont we have an account of Miss Chudleigh and her trial, though as the House of Lords decided that she was not the wife of the Duke of Kingston, she was connected neither by blood nor marriage with the house of Pierrepon.t. And as all these and innumerable other stories and legends are related in a pleasant and lively style, with extracts from contemporary and recent scandal-mongers, there is no lack of entertaining matter in the book, which will enable even a non-genealogist to while away some agreeable hours.

In a book dealing with so many thousands of persons and facts, some mistakes are inevitable, and the Duchess disarms criticism by the admission of their existence, and the expression of her desire that they should be corrected. We have com- pared the first article in the book, that on the name Aumale, with the notice of the Earls of Albemarle in Mr. Doyle's yery accurate and carefully compiled Official Baronage, and either Mr. Doyle's usual accuracy has here forsaken him, or the Duchess has been occasionally misled by the authorities she has consulted. The second husband of Hawise of Albemarle was William, not Geoffry de Fortibus ; her third husband, Baldwin, died in 1213, not 1211. The arms of William de Fortibus, the son of this lady by her second husband, were not, as stated by her Grace on the authority of Poulson's " Holderness," Bendy of six argent and gules, nor as quoted from " Burke " in a note, argent a chief gules, but, as shown on the impressions still in existence of the seals of him- self and his son, gules a cross vair. Moreover, though in this article she tells us, as is undoubtedly the fact, that Hawise survived her first husband William de Mandeville, in the sub- sequent notice of the Mandeville family she states, without citing any authority, that this William was twice married, first to Hawise, and secondly to Christian, daughter of Robert, Lord Fitz-Walter.

We must not omit a word of praise to the excellent index of more than a hundred pages, which, though it does not include every individual mentioned, yet refers to every inter- marriage, and to nearly all names except those which may be said to occur only accidentally, and thus renders the Duchess of Cleveland's work of real use as a book of reference for details respecting the lives and genealogies of many thousand persons.